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."

Is Nowhere Going Somewhere?

 

Back in August, I blogged on the reportedly poor esthetics of Meta's metaverse, the enterprise that Mark Zuckerberg has poured billions into.  Unlike most of my blogs, it attracted the attention of several people, including one Katie Rosin, who works as a publicist for an alternative metaverse company called Nowhere.  She offered me a chance to try out their platform, so last week I spent half an hour Nowhere in particular—literally. 

 

According to Rosin, Nowhere began when the event developer firm Windmill Factory faced a crisis caused by COVID-19.  "Event developer" is my phrase for describing an organization that, in their words, "manufactures sublime experiences."  For a younger generation that values experiences over objects, that's probably a good business to be in going forward.  Judging by the list of experiences on their website, they specialize in getting people together in a defined space to do something cool—hear a concert, maybe, or experience some sort of light-show-assisted event.  Without actually attending one of their events, I can't say what it's like, but I assume they don't use the word "sublime" lightly. 

 

Anyway, the Windmill people were planning their next big effort for April 2020 when you-know-what happened, and they faced the problem of doing events without people.  Thus was born the idea that ultimately became Nowhere.

 

The goal of Nowhere is to create interpersonal connections in a safe space.  Regarding safety, everybody who enters Nowhere has to be identifiable at least by a legitimate email and a password.  And your real name is available to anybody who happens to meet you in Nowhere. 

 

What does it take to get into Nowhere—special VR goggles?  No.  My middle-aged Macbook Pro running Chrome and a pair of headphones was all it took.  That's a big plus in my book already.

 

What do you see when you get there?  First there's a black screen with moving stars on it, sort of like the old Star Wars titles.  This is a screensaver to give the software time to boot up.  Then one of the stars gets bigger and you enter one of their many spaces. 

 

The first one I got to wasn't that impressive.  It was totally black except for things around a square perimeter that looked like electronic billboards.  I could move my point of view around with some simple key commands or mouse movements. 

 

When Katie showed up, she took the form of a "nonagram" (nine-sided roundish screen) inside of which I had a view like you would see on Zoom, just a real video of her seated at a desk.  But the way she entered the space reminded me of how Glinda the Good Witch arrives in Oz to rescue Dorothy—her nonagram zoomed in from a tiny spot and showed up in front of me.  What took MGM thousands of dollars of optical-printer equipment and hours of time can now be yours for free. 

 

A nonagram viewed from the side is shaped like a thin slice of a sphere, as if you cut the end off a tomato.  The flat part holds the screen and the back is just a black surface.  It floats above the—ground—or whatever is beneath it, and its position (in technical terms, four degrees of freedom—x, y, z, and yaw) are under the control of whoever's nonagram it is. 

 

One thing I wish they'd install is a mirror, so you could see your own nonagram.  Maybe there is one, but I didn't get to it.

 

Katie took me to a couple of spaces that were a lot nicer than the black one with the billboards.  One had what looked like a grassy hill with a giant apple on it, surrounded by blue skies.  She informed me it was supposed to be a cherry, not an apple.  Then we went to a forest (there was a selection of about six or eight such places on a pop-up panel at the bottom of the screen), which had a sort of wooden platform that she guided me on to.  The background there was very peaceful—trees in a fog, and bird sounds.

 

What that place reminded me of was the old video game Myst, which is somewhat legendary among persons of a certain age (it came out around 1993).  Myst consisted almost entirely of static scenes that the user could move through in a limited way—but what scenes!  The whole thing was a work of art that portrayed a kind of heightened reality that was the product of much study of how the real world really looks and sounds. 

 

To the extent that Nowhere's developers have followed that principle, they have my vote.  It's rather exciting being in on the early stages of yet another medium, if metaverses can be called that.  Zuckerberg obviously wants to dominate the new medium, but we may see a kind of PC-versus-Mac thing happen, in that the old, existing dominant platform may not be agile enough to come up with innovative approaches that lots of people prefer. 

 

I would much rather show up to other people as a kind of videoscreen on a tomato slice than as some crude animated caricature of myself.  And I'd also like to know who it is I'm talking with—really—rather than taking my chances on some wacko pretending to be a CEO or what have you. 

 

It's vitally important to get certain things right when an enterprise is small and starting out, and doesn't yet have a ton of legacy issues to deal with.  In principle, I suppose, we could redesign the Internet so that everybody on it could be tracked down instantly.  But such a redesign is a practical impossibility, now that the huge infrastructure is in place that allows anonymity at such a large scale. 

 

I wish the developers of Nowhere well, and hope that their good ideas about beauty, if not their actual platform, will positively influence whatever the metaverse becomes for most people most of the time.  Beauty is one of the three transcendentals, the other two being truth and goodness.  Anyone who ignores it in making something that could be beautiful is going against the design of the universe, and will face the consequences. 

 

Sources:  The website of Nowhere is urnowhere.com, and the looping video on that site gives you a good idea of what it's all about.  I also referred to the website of the Windmill Factory at https://www.thewindmillfactory.com/.