Apple's VR Headset: A Harbinger Of The Future Or A Dystopian Caricature Of It?
The Vision Pro virtual reality headset is designed by a small cohort of like-minded technologists based on their perceptions of the wants and needs of tomorrow's society. Here's hoping they're wrong.
Apple recently unveiled its much anticipated virtual reality (VR) headset to the market, with the typical fanfare and style made famous by the company’s co-founder, Steve Jobs. Of course, the product was immediately met with equal parts naive wonderment and derision.
Chief among the points raised by detractors of the headset is its retail price of $3,500, as well as the general sentiment that most human adults remotely interested in finding a partner, friend, or acquaintance don’t typically seek out awkward and heavy objects to put over their face. Proponents of the Vision Pro, for their part, pointed to its classically sleek “Apple look,” as well as its unparalleled display relative to competing products and the need to use only your fingers to control the headset.
But the current back and forth over the Vision Pro misses the point.
It’s not about whether Apple’s headset will fail to launch in the same way Google’s glasses and Meta’s various generations of its own headset did, or whether it will be another wildly successful Apple wearable product akin to AirPods or the Apple Watch (Apple’s wearables business alone did $41 billion in revenue last year, which is about the same as the Coca-Cola Company’s entire revenue for the same year). Apple’s devout, early-adopter customer base, in tandem with the Vision Pro’s user-friendly design and broad use-cases (geared toward mass consumption rather than the niche community of gamers), will result in the first generation version getting at least some traction.
And sure, the first generation is pricey, but that cost will undoubtedly come down as Apple iterates on the product. (In fact, not only will Apple iterate on its headset in subsequent generations, it will almost certainly tweak this generation before it is actually put out for sale at some point next year. Apple is notorious for using precise (and, at times, deliberately imprecise) language in its demos and marketing. Avoiding the terms “VR” and “AR” (augmented reality) entirely when discussing this product suggests that Apple is trying to set this product up in a league of its own in an effort to avoid falling short on expectations around VR and AR.)
Rather, what hasn’t been discussed is just how perfectly the Vision Pro—by all accounts, the best VR (or, more aptly, AR) headset presented to the market to-date—encapsulates what Big Tech gets wrong about the future. To understand what I mean, let’s break down the major positive and negative features into two broad categories:
Features of the Vision Pro that have been resoundingly praised
Easily navigate through the interface by simply moving your hands, fingers, and eyes
Highly interactive interface, perfect for someone wanting a fresh way to play games and other apps
Immersive experience for new level of content consumption, namely movies and TV within the Apple/Disney content universe (particularly while traveling on long distance public transportaion)
Features of the Vision Pro that have been widely criticized
Peer-to-peer communication on this is impersonal, to say the least. See, if you’re wearing something on your face, you can’t actually really “FaceTime.” Rather, you’ll have to scan your face, and others will see an avatar of you while you speak to them. This means, of course, that if everyone has Vision Pros, then everyone will just be video chatting with each other’s avatars. Cool…
The external facing side of the headset is constantly showing a depiction of what your eyes currently look like on the inside of the headset. It’s, well, super weird, and the mental image of a dark plane full of people watching movies on their Vision Pros conjures up images of those masses of robots in the internationally acclaimed sci-fi movie starring Will Smith, I, Robot.
The camera makes for an awkward dynamic where you’re supposed to simply look at something with the headset on in order to capture a picture. Even the way this feature was used in Apple’s own demo video, where a dad is watching his kids play and celebrate a birthday through the headset, looks bizarre (not to mention, it’s surely something that will make kids less embarrassed of their parents). Of course, it doesn’t take much to think of all the creepy and unwanted derivations of this capability when someone wears the headset around other people, almost all of whom don’t typically like having strangers take pictures of them.
Finally, people have generally demonstrated an aversion to wearing weighty, bulky stuff on their faces and/or heads while surrounded by others. Call it insecurity, vanity, or just a good old fashion primal need to be aware of one’s surroundings, we simply don’t like it. It’s why kids in school get called “four-eyes” and why your daughter’s boyfriend that you hate doesn’t wear a helmet on his motorcycle.
So, what’s the overarching difference between the items in bucket 1 and those in bucket 2? Well, each and every one of the most exciting capabilities of the Vision Pro relate to the solo use of the product, while all of the features that the headset falls short on relate to peer-to-peer or public use-cases.
As consumers, we often factor in the people behind the products we consume. When we pick up a book, our first thought is often to look at the back to learn about the author. When we read or watch the news, we are all acutely aware of the source. You can even catch the most novice of car enthusiasts remarking on how a German-made car differs from an American-made one, or overhear a helicopter mom in Trader Joe’s scoff at the “Made in Mexico” label on her avocado. No matter how distant the product’s origin, how mechanized the supply chain, or how impersonal the end result, we recognize at some level that all of the things we consume ultimately originate with other people.
That is, except for when it comes to technology.
Rarely do we consider the impact that a certain, incredibly small cohort of Silicon Valley like-minded men have on the products we use most. Even less frequently do we consider how the particular characteristics of those technologists shape their world views and perspectives on what the future should look like. But those world views and perspectives, in turn, fundamentally shape the end product—just as the author, news outlet, German manufacturer, and Mexican farmer each shape their respective end products. From this vantage point, it’s no surprise that the Vision Pro excels on all of the solitary functions and falls short (often in cringe-worthy fashion) on the interpersonal features—a carbon copy of the preference stack maintained by the very creators of the headset themselves.
The question, then, is whether the product designers and engineers in Cupertino, California will turn out to be right. Will the not-so-distant future be one where everyone dons $3,500 computerized headgear in order to consume the already endless supply of content out there in a format that comes closer than ever before to looking like reality? Or will most of us see the Vision Pro for what it is: just the latest in an endless series of marginally better gadgets that might make watching movies more enjoyable, but that will ultimately never be able to replicate or replace the thing we already have for free all around us (even in Cupertino)—real life. Here’s hoping it’s the latter, but, given Apple’s track record of success, the outlook doesn’t look great.
So well said!