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."

Watch Where You're Pokémon Go-ing

The Japanese megacorporation Nintendo was founded way back in 1889 to sell playing cards, and when I hear the word "Pokémon" I think of the collection of cards one of my nephews accumulated when he was about eight years old.  They showed bizarre-looking fantasy creatures that had complicated made-up genealogies and quirks that he committed to memory.  I figured Pokémon was one of those things that kids go through like a phase, and while it seemed important to him at the time, I couldn't imagine him, or anyone else, taking such things seriously as an adult.

Well, I was wrong, and not for the first time.  On July 6, Nintendo released a smart-app aspect of their Pokémon universe called Pokémon Go.  From what I can tell from Wikipedia and other sources, the idea is this.  You pick an avatar to represent you, and show up on a map of your vicinity, courtesy of the GPS function of your phone.  Then if you choose the augmented-reality mode, you can scan around certain special places shown on the map where the Pokémon critters typically hang out.  Spotting one, you can throw a (digital) Poké Ball at it, and if you hit it, you get points or go to bed happy or something good happens in the game, I'm not sure quite what.  There are good things and not so good things about this game, which has proved to be one of the instant hits of the smart-phone app world, allegedly being loaded onto 5% of all Android devices within two days of its release.

The nice thing I like about this game is that it encourages people to get off the couch and outside the house.  Nintendo is using the GPS database of another game company called Niantic, whose augmented-reality game Ingress did other things with the long list of physical sites that somebody had to compile manually.  There are apparently enough special spots in Pokémon Go to keep most players happy, at least in larger cities.  I'm not sure how many Pokémon Go enthusiasts live in Wyoming, for example, or Alaska.  But a number of national parks are included, as well as museums, city parks, lakes, and other publicly accessible sites, including the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is reportedly not amused at the crowds of people with cellphones around their entrance shooting imaginary balls at imaginary beings. 

Anyway, that aspect of the game looks like an improvement over the usual zone-out-into-cyberspace effect that happens to millions of kids (and adults) when they play the usual type of electronic game. 

Now for the bad news.  Not everyone who plays Pokémon Go exercises good judgment in the old-fashioned real world that we all live in by default.  Maybe the most spectacular example of this problem came when two twenty-something guys near San Diego, California (one of whom might have been drinking) chased a Pokémon that appeared to be on the other side of a fence between them and the unstable edge of a cliff.  They climbed the fence anyway and fell off the cliff, landing 50 feet and 90 feet below.  Both survived, but with injuries.  Other reports include that of a girl who chased a Pokémon critter into busy traffic and got hit by a car, fortunately suffering only minor injuries, and numerous people walking into trees, driving into trees, or even driving into a police car while chasing a Pokémon in a parking lot.  Driving while chasing an augmented-reality Pokémon is bad judgment, but that apparently doesn't stop some people, until hitting something hard and unyielding in old-fashioned real reality does.

People have played games ever since there were people, and it's not for me to say how much time any individual should spend working versus burning calories and gasoline on chasing down fictional digital animals.  It's a little troubling that so many accidents have been reported in less than two weeks since the game's release.  Maybe it's just a startup glitch, and as those who haven't got the sense to put down their Pokémon Go games at appropriate times either wise up or possibly eliminate themselves from the gene pool, we will hear less about such accidents.  Something similar happened when the first smart phones came out, folks walking into swimming pools while watching the Weather Channel and so on, and we've somehow adapted to those hazards. 

I do expect that Nintendo is under a lot of pressure to make Pokémon beings show up at places that would like more people traffic, which is namely every retail business with walk-in outlets in the world.  So far, you mainly hunt the critters at parks, memorials, and other non-profit places.  If Nintendo caves to this temptation , you'll be finding Pokémon gyms at the nearest shopping mall, McDonald's, or Home Depot.  There would be nothing wrong with that, I suppose, as long as the game players know that certain Pokémon hangouts are "sponsored," I guess you'd call it.

What is of more concern is the accident aspect.  I'm not that coordinated, so I'm not sure what would happen if I was looking at a smart phone screen and trying to track some animated whatever-it-is and throw a digital ball at it.  The whole operation requires a kind of interaction with reality that is really a novel thing for most people, which is why it's so popular.  But it can be dangerous to the user and people nearby, too.  Maybe some fairly minor changes in the way the augmented-reality feature works will minimize the chance that you'll walk into a tree or a manhole or something while in hot pursuit of your extra ten points in the game. 

All in all, it seems like Nintendo has scored a hit with their latest variation on Pokémon.  If it gives millions an excuse to get outside among other people, that's a good thing, and if they can work out a way to minimize the occasional safety problems, that's even better.  While you won't be seeing yours truly watching a smart phone and following an imaginary critter around (first I'd have to buy a smart phone), I will understand what's going on if I see people glued to their phones while crowding around certain locales from now on.  But I'll also know to stay out of their way.

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia articles on Pokémon Go and Nintendo, and news reports from the following sources:  Slashgear.com at http://www.slashgear.com/five-pokemon-go-accidents-that-stress-the-importance-of-paying-attention-15448441/, USA Today at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2016/07/14/pokmon-go-playercrashes-his-car-into-tree/87074762/, and NBC News San Diego at http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Two-Men-Fall-Down-Cliff-While-Playing-Pokemon-Go-386743551.html.