Opinion

Sep 01, 2023

Steve Jobs wasn't sold on the iPad. What was it good for, he wondered, besides surfing the web in the bathroom? Now, Apple wants us to someday be able to surf the web while surfing.

This is the vision animating the company's unveiling of the Vision Pro "mixed-reality" headset: a future in which humanity lives simultaneously in the digital world and the physical world — the two planes of 21st-century society "seamlessly" integrated at last. Today, however, seamless isn't exactly the word.

What chief executive Tim Cook reportedly once envisioned as a sleek pair of eyeglasses so unobtrusive they could be worn day in and night out has transformed into a pair of ski goggles connected by cable to an external battery pack. The disconnect might doom Apple's hoped-for next big thing, for now. But as we plod toward the day when always-online capabilities can be wired onto our very retinas, the headset's clunkiness is revealing.

Mixed reality, sci-fi as it sounds, simply means a combination of virtual reality and augmented reality. Virtual reality lets us put ourselves in a digital world; augmented reality lets us put digital things in the physical world. Apple's idea here is to merge the two, allowing wearers to fade between them via a sort of reality dial. This way, a gamer can envelop themselves in a fantasy-scape from their couch, and architects can put a rendering of a model opera house right on their desks.

Apple unveils Vision Pro, its $3,499 augmented-reality headset

The quality of the experience appears to be unparalleled. But Apple can't turn its tool from novelty plaything to mass-market essential until it convinces the public that Vision Pro is suitable for everyday use — which, today, it isn't.

One trouble is, any would-be reality dialers will need to spend $3,499 for the privilege. The greater trouble is, for anyone who wants to wear these things in public, the illusion of integration has to be convincing. With a giant pair of goggles on your head, a wire running down your torso and a battery in your pocket, your chances of fooling friends and family are far lower than your chances of looking foolish.

The desire to achieve this illusion probably explains Vision Pro's approach to users’ facial features. "Your eyes are a critical indicator of connection and emotion," an Apple employee explains in an introductory film. So the designers have installed the ability to project these windows to the soul onto the goggles’ screen. "It's incredible!" That's one word for it.

Yet the aspects of Vision Pro that may be bad for Apple's bottom line are good for humanity. The goggles, in their clunkiness and their creepiness, capture the type of existence an always-on portal to the internet would invite — one in which it seems as though users are connecting with one another when really they’re more cut off than ever.

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These goggles extend a path that Apple has always been moving humanity along. Logging on while sitting at a desktop computer wasn't convenient enough, so along came Apple's laptops, which let us take the internet with us. That wasn't convenient enough either, so along came the iPhone, which let us put the internet in our pocket. That didn't quite do the trick, either, because we had to take the internet out of our pocket anytime we wanted to use it, and sometimes that seemed rude. So we got the Apple Watch, which put the internet on our wrist.

Vision Pro and whatever evolves from it will shove the internet right in front of our eyes, so that we can engage constantly with an ecosystem of pings and push notifications, whenever and wherever we want. Put the phone away at dinner, please, makes some sense. Remove the smart-contacts? No need.

Finally, evangelists for this technology say, we’ll be able to look up from our screens. Except that what we’ll be looking up at is, well, our screens. We’ll still be toggling among iMessage and Instagram and "Candy Crush." We will be able to be not present while also being present — to fail to pay full attention to what's around us without technically having to look away from it. Welcome to the future.

While the most worrying result for Apple might be that this product never takes off (though its skeptics have been wrong before), the most worrying result for the rest of us may be that, eventually, it will: that we will one day possess tools that keep us plugged in all the time, yet trick us into believing we’re not. The beauty of these ugly goggles is that they show what's really going on.