Will Apple's Vision Pro Be the Next iPhone?

 

Back in June of 2023, Apple announced its Vision Pro, which the Wikipedia article about it calls a "mixed reality" headset.  This week, in some parts of the world you can now buy your own Vision Pro—for $3,500.  While this will not be an obstacle for wealthy early adopters, the rest of us will probably wait until the beta-version bugs are worked out and the price comes down.  In the meantime, we can think about what this means for the future of humanity.

 

That sounds either presumptuous or silly, but there is no question that the advent of the smartphone has changed the course of world history, especially cultural, social, and political history.  Combined with the AI-fueled algorithms that maximize profits for Facebook, X, and their ilk at the expense of rational political discourse, we have seen the smartphone severely damage democracy in the U. S. and other places.  Yes, there are advantages to smartphones as well, but a serious debate over whether having them is a net gain or loss to society is one that we will probably never have, because they are here to stay. 

 

That is not yet the case for the Vision Pro, so let's spend a little thought on imagining what life would be like if Vision Pro headsets or their upgraded equivalents become as common as smartphones.  My speculations are aided by my watching an 8-minute video made by Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, who went to a cabin at a ski resort with some video producers and wore a Vision Pro for most of 24 hours.

 

When you wear a Vision Pro, your entire visual field is mediated, in a literal sense.  You can't see anything directly.  All you see is a projection of two high-resolution video screens that go directly to your eyeballs.  In order to see anything, including the ordinary world around you, you have to use the multiple cameras mounted on the Vision Pro.  Everything you see goes into the cameras, through Apple's proprietary software and some of the 600 apps now available for the device, and only then do you get to see anything.

 

And it works the other way too.  Physically, the Vision Pro looks like a pair of unusually bulky ski goggles, with a headstrap to keep it on and a fanny-mounted battery pack that has to be recharged every two or three hours.  The outer surface of the goggles is also a video screen, and in order to present something other than a blank shiny surface to someone the wearer is talking with in person, the screen presents video images of the wearer's eyes.  This is after the wearer has taken a photograph of her or his entire face, so the system knows how to present a somewhat reasonable facsimile of the wearer's visage.

 

Videoconferencing is one of the big intended uses of Vision Pro, but you can't just point a camera at a roomful of people wearing bulky headsets that cover their faces.  Apple to the rescue—the 3-D photos of the wearer stored in the system are used to create "avatar" faces to present to the other people in the videoconference.

 

From all the reactions to Stern's avatar that she accumulated in her video calls using the Vision Pro, there was one unanimous opinion:  her avatar looked terrible.  Even Apple has not yet overcome the "uncanny valley" effect in trying to use computing to simulate the human visage.  According to the uncanny valley hypothesis, unless a human simulation is extremely authentic (the good side of the valley), people will sense that something is off and have a negative reaction to it.  At the other side of the valley, a cruder image is seen as merely cartoonish and not uncanny.  Maybe Apple should have gone that route, as most people would prefer to see an obviously artistic caricature of a friend, rather than an image that is like something that an undertaker might manage to do with a corpse.

 

That was probably the worst experience Stern had with the device.  Although Apple doesn't recommend cooking while wearing the Vision Pro, Stern went right ahead and chopped onions, and was delighted to find that the airtight seal around her eyes prevented her eyes from watering.  (Chopping onions in a pan of water, I am told, is just as effective, and $3,500 cheaper.)  And the 3-D movies available from some (not all) streaming services were impressive. 

 

You can record your own 3-D videos with either the Vision Pro or the latest iPhone (15, I believe), and Stern tried this feature out while skiing, another activity that Apple doesn't recommend for Vision Pro wearers.  But nothing bad happened on her bunny-run venture down the slopes, and the overall impression Stern left with her viewers is that this is still a prototype, but if they work out some bugs and get the battery life up and the power consumption down, along with the price, Apple may have finally found what Google tried to find with Google Glass and failed to do back in 2015:  a mass market for what most people still call virtual-reality or augmented-reality headsets.

 

Apple avoids both of those terms and insists that what the Vision Pro allows is something they call "spatial computing."  To my ears, this is a singularly unfortunate phrase, because it implies that the computer uses space somehow to calculate things.  Well, every computer that takes up space does that, so it's just going to be a label for the 3-D techniques that the Vision Pro allows you to use for setting up your workspace. 

 

Wearing a Vision Pro really cuts you off from ordinary reality in a much more radical way than using a smartphone does.  Everything that you see passes first through the guts of the machine, rendering your entire visual field subject to the whims of the Vision Pro designers.  Perhaps that sounds benign now.  But put this device in the hands of criminals, or even well-intentioned entertainers who simply want to thrill people, and it may open entirely new fields of horrors.  It's too early to tell, but there will be downsides, especially if the Vision Pro proves as popular as Apple hopes.  Let's just hope the downsides aren't too low.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article on the commercial introduction of the Vision Pro at https://apnews.com/article/apple-vision-pro-spatial-computing-augmented-reality-7ec545a42403cf12e799200864e47d94, Joanna Stern's video report on it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xI10SFgzQ8, and the Wikipedia article "Apple Vision Pro."

The Passing of Google Glass

Most people who are even slightly technology-aware have heard of Google Glass, the wearable head-mounted display device that Google introduced almost two years ago amid a blizzard of publicity.  Priced at $1500, Google Glass was never intended to be a mass-market product.  As of tomorrow, Google Glasses will become collector's items, because the company announced last week that the product will no longer be available.  According to Will Oremus at Slate.com, the press release announcing the news tried to put a positive spin on the situation with phrases like "moving even more from concept to reality."  So the idea of a wearable camera/monitor isn't dead—just the particular embodiment of it in Google Glass.

I could have told them this was coming, because about a month ago, I finally got to try out a pair.  A student of mine had borrowed some from a friend of his in Austin, and was walking around campus letting all and sundry try them on.  I wear ordinary glasses, so the fit was somewhat of a problem.  But I managed to see the little display, and then the battery ran down, so my experience was very limited.  Nevertheless, it was enough for the Stephan Kiss of Technological Death to take place. 

More times than I can count, I have tried out a new technology just before it's about to disappear.  We bought a VHS player right after DVDs came out.  We got a DVD player about the time BluRay came out.  I bought a cellphone with a color screen about the time the iPhone came out.  Well, you get the idea.  In any market, there are early adopters, then the great mass of people who buy a thing after the early adopters have worked the bugs out, and then late adopters like me who come along after everybody else has dropped a product for the next hot item. 

Why wasn't Google Glass more successful?  From a late-adopter point of view, I can tell you one reason:  it didn't promise to do anything for me that was worth $1500 of my money.  From the start, I got the sense that a lot of the people buying them were doing it for the same reason that they bought Rolex watches.  A Rolex doesn't keep time any better than a Timex.  But a Rolex tells other people you are the kind of person who can afford a Rolex.  So Google Glass became a fashion brand for the folks who just couldn't wait to show up at the office wearing another expensive personal item.  I'm a little surprised that nobody came up with an imitation knockoff Google Glass that looked the same as the real thing but wasn't functional, priced at $99.99.  Only it would have been embarrassing for people to come up to you and ask to try them out, and you'd have to tell them sorry, the battery just ran down.

Probably the most useful feature of Google Glass was also the most controversial:  the little camera that could record your environment without anyone knowing for sure whether you're recording or not.  Spy cameras have been around for some time, but if they're designed and placed right, nobody knows about them except for the operator.  You see a Google Glass on someone and right away, you knew they could be recording you.  It was a little bit like walking around with a 35-mm camera in front of your face all the time.  No wonder some people got annoyed.  Nevertheless, Oremus reports that the most serious business customers of the technology used the camera feature to capture things like pictures of sides of beef for FDA inspectors, and whether Dr. Whozis left any forceps inside his last gall-bladder-surgery patient.  So it's likely that face-mounted cameras in some form will show up in places where the product or service is pricey enough to justify the expense of whatever comes after Google Glass.

No one can currently beat Google at what they do best, but designing hardware for personal use is very different from the massive Internet-based data crunching that got Google where it is today.  Technology geeks in particular tend to be blind to some issues that the general public care about deeply.  When Henry Ford first marketed his Model T, he later recalled that he said in 1909, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."  And for many years, Ford beat his competition on price and performance with all-black cars.  But as automobiles became more of a commodity, other makers found that they could attract customers away from Ford by offering a variety of paint colors, and Ford eventually had to follow suit. 

Engineer and author Henry Petroski likes to say that failure is often more instructive than success.  By failure, he usually means things like collapsing bridges, but the failure of a new technology to meet its sales target is still a failure, though of a different and less hazardous kind than the failure of a bridge or a building.  In a free market, market failures are inevitable, and it's not like everybody at Google is now out on the street because they can't sell any more glasses.  In general, wearable technology seems to be the wave of the future in some form, and it's just a question of what form it will take. 

I think Google took on a major challenge by messing around with a person's face.  The face, and particularly the eyes, are where we look first when we meet another person.  We have had a few hundred years to get used to the idea of people wearing ordinary glasses.  They started out as expensive specialty items too.  A graphic on the Fashionisto website says that in the U. S. of the 1700s, a pair of eyeglasses could set you back about $200, which is like about $6,000 today.  So regardless of who comes up with the next version of Google Glass technology, they face an uphill battle in getting us used to the idea of having some active technology in the line of sight between soul and soul. 

Sources:  The article "Google Glass Is Finally Dead.  Ish." by Will Oremus appeared on Slate's website at http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/01/15/google_glass_dead_or_alive_nest_s_tony_fadell_takes_over.html .  The Fashionisto spectacle graphic can be found at http://www.thefashionisto.com/history-eyeglasses-timeline/.  I referred to the Wikipedia articles on Google Glass, and the Henry Ford quote can be found at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Ford.