The Apple Vision Pro announcement intrigues me. When you look at the launch video, it looks excitingly like all those heads-up display things we’ve been seeing in the new Star Trek series.
But then you realise that you’re watching those Star Trek shows while looking at a flat screen telly with someone sitting next to you on the sofa watching the same telly. And the Star Trek displays manifest in the room without other viewing technology. Whereas the Vision Pro wraps your head in a just-for-you headset display.
And it’s eyewateringly expensive. Though this Mashable article is an interesting bit of speculation about entry-level price points.
For all the chat about it, I’ve yet to see compelling examples of use cases for this new tech. The examples are about step changes in user interactions with existing interactions or activities: “operate all these familiar apps, but with your eyes!” and “read web pages and play your existing videos and games on a huge screen of any size!”
Most strangely of all, the Apple video celebrates what appears to be a dad taking 3D images of his playing children while he has his head in the device, thus experiencing the moment at not-quite-first-hand. It’s even worse than being totally absorbed, hidden behind your iPhone screen as you take landscape photos; lift your head up and you could instead enjoy the beauty of the scene with your own eyes. Or, in this case, look at your kids with your own eyes.
The advertising and press hype seems to be about the number of patents and the cleverness of the hardware, rather than examples of how it transforms or replaces things in everyday life or business or introduces completely new things. But perhaps I’m reading the wrong articles.
Most of all, though, this “new era of spacial computing” reverts to the individual experience, rather than the shared or collaborative one. This “profound new way to be together” advocates telepresence at the expense of literal presence.
Because you are enclosed and immersed in the device, it has to play back to you a version of the world beyond, via its cameras. And it also has to play back a version of you to others beyond it, whether it’s your eyes displayed to someone in the same room as you, or an uncanny valley avatar of you to the people with whom you’re on a Facetime call. The ingenuity of creating a scanned replica of you springs specifically from a new inhibitor that the device itself introduces, which is that your head is encased and obscured by the device.
I look forward to seeing a rather more compelling use case for it. Making it available to a development ecosystem, and priming the channel with access to existing apps, may mean that the “killer app” or use case will appear, and someone will make it so. For the moment, it looks to me like my Star Trek world will have to wait a bit longer before I decide to engage.
The Red Lines Page 