Apple Vision Pro — My Thoughts
Mixed reality has excited futurists for a while now. Be it wearing a headset and traversing virtual worlds or glasses that make the world around you go from static and boring to covered with breathtaking visuals. Yet we see very little of it in real life. It’s not for the lack of trying. Companies have formed and collapsed over the idea of traversing various realities from the comfort of your couch. The latest iteration of this attempt was the metaverse, an alternate reality where you could live and interact with people in a virtual 3D environment. Facebook bet on it so much that it changed its name to Meta. The weight of the entire crypto community and Billions of dollars later what remains is a collection of sad uninspiring product demos. It is not all gloom though. VR games are cool as hell and AR has become an essential part of the social media experience. But XR is still not part of the everyday lives of people.
Enter Apple Vision Pro, a $3500 product that promises all the above and more. This is Apple’s first attempt at a device dedicated entirely to mixed reality. As a futurist and a technologist, this product has spiked my interest. Apple doing something almost certainly leads to the industry following it, regardless of its actual merits. One can expect a massive wave of XR product releases over the next few years. So I thought of sharing my views on the Vision Pro before it hits the market.
Things I am excited about
Apple had initially put its bet on AR, which it delivered through phones and tablets. So it wasn’t a surprise to see most of the product demos featured augmented experiences. This I think is the right move. AR is far less alienating and disorienting than VR. AR facilitates interaction with people and spaces, something which current technologies lack.
The main mode of interaction shown in the demo was a combination of eye tracking, hand gestures, and speech for text inputs. If the eye tracking works, as well as people say it does, it will make navigating the XR world so much more delightful. The artist in me can already imagine how this can be employed to make insane experiences and installations. Eye tracking can also be a fantastic research tool. It can potentially create real-time UX heat maps, enabling designers to deliver superior content to the users.
Coming to gestures, sticking to hand tracking as the primary interaction is another welcome decision. If done well, this could mean the difference between a device that is used frequently and one that gathers dust on a shelf. Developer notes also mention full skeletal hand tracking. This opens huge creative possibilities. I am reminded of art installations that use VR and hand-tracking using a Vive headset with a LeapMotion stuck on it. The Vision Pro definitely is a more elegant solution. One can expect a myriad of experiences that make use of this.
It is also important to mention the product build quality. Apple is known for great quality and Vision Pro is no exception. This sets the benchmark for all mixed-reality products pretty high and the world would be better for it.
Things I am not so excited about
My first thought after being psyched about eye tracking was how this would instantly be used to deliver ads you can’t look away from. XR apps are already expensive to develop and greedy devs can plaster your field of view with ads to recoup that cost.
Apple is marketing the Vison Pro as a pro device, i.e. one to be used by professionals. Apart from some slim use cases, most professionals would prefer a monitor. The main reason is fatigue from long periods of use. The second reason in my opinion is the interaction. While eye-tracking, hand gestures, and voice commands combo works well for media consumption, it is the equivalent of using your toes when it comes to professional work. After all, pros are more dextrous than they are articulate. Unless Apple can come up with a really fast input device, I feel most of the Pro audience will stick to their mice and keyboards.
Another concern with Vision Pro is its position within the device ecosystem. Devices like phones and laptops have their fixed space. Users know what they want out of them and when to use them. Other devices like tablets exist in a hazy space. Take the iPad, it is a well-liked product and has a lot of functionality. However, users don’t have a higher goal for it. It exists mostly as a device that is slightly bigger than phones to watch Netflix. Even pro users have been confounded with the iPad. It has great hardware but limited apps to take advantage of it. This hazy space is where I fear the Vision Pro might find itself.
The final issue that haunts the Vision Pro is one inherent to the current generation of XR products. The user needs intentionality to use a headset unlike a phone which is in your hands before you even realize you need your daily dose of doom scrolling. This instant access is what makes phones our central device. A headset would always be something you think twice before using.
The Black Mirror Situation
Ever since the launch of Vision Pro, I see people throw around dystopian thoughts on how this will lead to Ready Player One, Wall E, or everyone’s favorite, Black Mirror. I tend to disagree with majority of them. Most of the aforementioned media depict an unhealthy absorption into a virtual world to the detriment of society. While movies and shows portray this absorption through immersive devices like AR and VR, I argue that immersion is not a necessary criterion. We find ourselves already quite over-absorbed with the current set of non-immersive devices. I believe that better XR devices like the Vision Pro won’t necessarily accelerate this. Instead, we might find new avenues for losing ourselves.
A few features on the Vision Pro definitely feed into the dystopian narrative. The ones that stand out to me are the 3D photo/video capture and Eyesight(fake eyes on the outer screen of the headset). The 3D photo feature was demoed with a father wearing the headset taking pictures of his kids to relive it later in greater depth than a usual photo. I highly doubt many will use this. The ridiculousness lies in the fact that the person who chooses to capture moments this way will be cursed with wearing the headset while actually living it. Fake eyes on the outside screen of the headset, while the user is in AR mode, may sound like a good solution to some. The creepy uncanny valley eyes will be more repulsive than welcoming. It would also be the first thing to go in a more affordable version of the Vision. This feature lives more in the gimmick realm than in the scary Black Mirror one. Also, the FaceTime 3D avatar is just dumb.
Problems arise not because of technology but our relationship with it and other people. I wish to look at new technology as a vehicle for human creativity. Mixed Reality to that extent is a great way to expand creative possibilities and products like the Vision Pro are welcome steps toward that future. If this catches on, I am positive that we can see our own reality with a new sense of awe and wonder.
