Apple Vision Pro looks amazing, but… I don’t want to live my life in a headset
By ForGeeks The cat is out of the bag. We finally know the name of Apple’s long-awaited VR headset, and it’s called the Vision Pro. At WWDC 2023, Apple unveiled its most ambitious product ever: a virtual and augmented reality headset that lets you live surrounded by beautiful landscapes, favorite media files and the perfect desktop without getting off the couch.
It looks like the future. It looks incredible…but I don’t want to live in what I think is moving toward a dystopia where we communicate through headsets. Will I have a choice?”
Vision Pro: More than Ever
Apple calls the Vision Pro its first “spatial computer.” It’s a revolutionary product that “merges digital content with the physical world, allowing users to stay connected to other people.” But I can’t shake the feeling that another step toward a world where we live in a headset happened yesterday.
In a key presentation Apple used a lot of video footage of parents communicating with their children through Vision Pro eyes, and it filled my heart with sadness. Are we really moving toward a world where kids communicate with images of their parents’ eyes through an expensive headset? Apple really wants that to be the case.
No matter how amazing the concept of working in a spatial operating system, managing windows, and choosing to work from the beach in the Bahamas seems, I don’t want to live my life in a headset for 12 hours a day. Not only does this sound incredibly uncomfortable, but it goes against Apple’s desire to be more conscious of its technology with features like Screen Time, as well as the recently introduced Journal app and mental health features in iOS 17.
I don’t want to live on my headset for 12 hours a day.
I can imagine the Journal app on iOS becoming a record of days spent at home, barely moving, because the chief invention of the 21st century means no one needs to leave the house anymore. It’s awful, and while I want to see the Vision Pro, and I’d probably like to have one if it didn’t cost $3500, I just can’t imagine a world in which I sit on the couch next to my partner all evening, unplugged from an ultra-high-resolution display system that contains 23 million pixels across two displays. Sounds like some episode of Black Mirror, to be honest.
Sci-Fi horror
Obviously I’m exaggerating, but at the Vision Pro presentation I really felt like I was in a sci-fi movie, and even more — like a sci-fi horror when the human eyes appeared on the headset’s glass frame. It wasn’t reassuring-it was creepy, and the presentation of Digital Persona-approximate images of Vision Pro users as avatars-disturbed me profoundly.
The introduction of Digital Persona, a close-up of VisionOS users as avatars, made me deeply uneasy.
I’m very interested to see how the Vision Pro will be received and whether it can bring virtual reality to the mainstream. If Apple thinks everyone wants to live in a headset, they may have misjudged how much people want to disconnect from technology these days. Going from the latest behemoth product, the Apple Watch, which allows you to live more, to a product that actively removes you from reality is depressing, and I don’t know if I would ever want to live in a world where everyone exists only as perfect avatars and eyes in a headset.
