Building H #96: Brave New Face Redux
credit: Jonah Rothman
In case you missed it, Apple’s new Vision Pro went on sale earlier this month and our feeds are now awash in hot takes about what it is, what it does, and how much it matters. When it was first announced in June, we wrote about it with some curiosity, a bit of awe and no small amount of apprehension (see Building H #84: Brave New Face).
The Vision Pro is a computer that sits on your face and lets you immerse yourself in 3D entertainment and also do regular old computer things, like email and web surfing, with windows that float superimposed on your field of vision. There are plenty of debates about its true purpose and which use cases will catch on. The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims sees its value in classic workplace productivity – who knew Excel could be so cool? – while the New York Times’s Kevin Roose extolls its ability to capture and play back life-like memories. The Journal’s Joanna Stern offers a very practical review of how it fits into daily life, down to the virtual timers that hover above the pots on your stove. And there’s no denying its entertainment potential – as a demo at your local Apple Store will show you, seeing an Alicia Keys performance, a soccer match or hi-res CGI dinosaurs in 3D immersion, seemingly a few feet from your face, is something altogether different than watching even the best flat screen TV. The question of where people will use the Vision Pro is very much open, as are the attendant social norms that will evolve. Early adopters, captured in the wild, offer some clues.
Other takes delved more into the effect that it could have on us. Adam Clark Estes, writing in Vox, digs into the science of what living through these kind of passthrough video interfaces do to our brains (one quirk of the Vision Pro is that when you look through the goggles to see the “world” around you, you’re actually seeing a live video feed of what your eyes would see, rather than the world as seen through your actual eyes). Nilay Patel, in his exhaustive review for The Verge, hits upon a key concern:
“And the biggest tradeoff of all is that using the Vision Pro is such a lonely experience, regardless of the weird ghost eyes on the front. You’re in there, having experiences all by yourself that no one else can take part in. After using the Vision Pro for a while, I’ve come to agree with what Tim Cook has been saying for so long: headsets are inherently isolating. That’s fine for traditional VR headsets, which have basically turned into single-use game consoles over the past decade, but it’s a lot weirder for a primary computing device.”
It’s not yet clear whether the Vision Pro changes everything. It’s physically hard to keep it on your face for more than an hour or two at a time and it could wind up playing only niche roles. But it does feel significant. One of us (Steve), took in a demo and came away feeling much like what Kevin Roose described:
“...there were several moments while wearing the Vision Pro when I felt genuine wonder, and a feeling of being present for what could turn out to be a major shift in computing.”
The experience was reminiscent of what Farhad Manjoo lamented in a column after taking a family road trip in a Cadillac Escalade with partial self-driving features – that even he, a committed believer in the need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, would be sucked into driving more. The consumer experience was simply way too good. We might all believe that we should get out more, be more social, be more active and feel the sun on our shoulders, but the draw of magical 3D virtual worlds, or reliving our greatest memories, as if we were there, might just be too alluring.
Along these lines, Nick Bilton shares this unsettling concern in his review for Vanity Fair:
“When I take it off, every other device feels flat and boring: My 75-inch OLED TV feels like a CRT from the ’90s; my iPhone feels like a flip phone from yesteryear, and even the real world around me feels surprisingly flat. And this is the problem. In the same way that I can’t imagine driving a car without a stereo, in the same way I can’t imagine not having a phone to communicate with people or take pictures of my children, in the same way I can’t imagine trying to work without a computer, I can see a day when we all can’t imagine living without an augmented reality. When we’re enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver.”
The Vision Pro is a triumph of engineering, a marvel of design and a miracle of manufacturing. From a technical perspective, it represents the pinnacle of what humans are capable of producing with our technology. And yet.
Just sticking to entertainment for a moment, we have seen a long progression from stories shared around a campfire to the modern public venues of theaters, concert halls and cinemas, to the private entertainment of television and video games. Gradually, as screens have gotten bigger and sharper, and speakers more powerful, the sensory quality of those private experiences has gotten better and better, though arguably still less than what one finds in public. With the Vision Pro, we cross that line – there will be no more “realistic” experience than that experienced within the privacy – not even of one’s home, but of one’s eyes. It’s utterly magical, and yet, as Patel notes, so lonely.
The same goes for memories. Replaying a 3D immersive, life-size reproduction of an important memory is powerful, and of far greater fidelity than looking at a 4x6 photo, or even watching a 2D video on a screen. But there’s something about the emotion of sitting side by side with one’s child, a photo album (or even an iPad) on one’s lap, fielding the questions and telling the stories behind the photos that such magnificent fidelity, experienced alone, can't replace.
What do you think? Comments are open below.
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