Apple Vision Pro Evokes Deep Ambivalence

Article Comments
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When I was watching the WWDC presentation and they started talking about the Vision Pro, one of the presenters (maybe Tim Cook?) was wearing glasses. I half expected him to reach up, tap his glasses, have the lenses opaque and the presentation switch to the “what he was seeing” view.

As for overlays, Garmin had the Varia Vision (not exactly an overlay), now discontinued and unsupported, that put stats in your field of view. I’ve seen somewhere that there are swim goggles that do the same. I’m personally not that interested in such data for cycling, which can be immediately seen anyway just by looking at a device in front of me on a mount (and apparently a lot of people were uninterested, since the Varia Vision is no more). I can sort of see the case for swimming, or cross country skiing where the watch on my wrist is invisible unless I stop poling and raise my wrist.

For me, the Vision Pro falls into the “too expensive for what I’d use it for”, especially since I can already do (view video, even 360 video) what I’d use it for. Maybe when the Vision Air comes out…

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I was just reading this interesting article on Harvard Business Review that explores that idea in comparison to Vision Pro:

The authors are critical of that form of AR as distracting:

This perspective highlights why many previous AR and VR purported use cases have been of low value. VR meetings with avatars in pretty rooms do not provide information that is obviously more useful to those in the meetings that might arise from a Zoom call. AR glasses that provide text notifications as you walk around are increasing your cognitive load rather than decreasing it. Our framework suggests that the best use cases will be in contexts where it is normally expensive or dangerous to get information, highlighting the value of VR, or where the environment is so complex that the value of digital overlays to clarify it via AR is high — or both. Think applications like prototyping the design of a new aircraft or building, or assisting in remote medical procedures.

They are essentially pointing out what’s different about Apple’s approach and why it’s better. Their suggestions are niche markets, but still important and useful, and I bet Vision Pro will be successful in a variety of ways, but not mainstream in the way the iPhone has been.

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Another behavior that can cause myopia is reading at too close a distance. Apple’s new Screen Distance feature works to increase the distance at which people view things like devices and books. It’s great to see Apple focusing on improving health in these ways, but doesn’t the Vision Pro, by encouraging prolonged indoor use and placing screens directly in front of the eyes, directly counter these efforts?

No. The thing that causes myopia is focusing on something in the near distance for hours on end (or, rather, not focusing on things in the distance for at least a few hours a day). The AVP will cause your eyes to focus at varying distances. Now, unless you load up a 3d vista of an outdoors scene, it won’t be better than just being inside, but it won’t be worse, either. https://youtu.be/LAkFtka3UFw

On another note, the comparisons to the dystopian world of Ready, Player One are really irritating. The VR world was the deeply desirable escape from the horrible dystopian world, not the cause of it.

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I enjoyed Adam’s insights. But I must admit, I only have very shallow ambivalence for this. And that is somewhat astonishing as technology regularly stirs my moral outrage. I conclude, as Adam does, that this is the evolution of the screen. As such, it is the evolution of the iPad - the device you need the least, but like the most. Content consumption will be the main use. When released, there will be those who find novel ways to create content with it - but that will be a niche market. It could also be huge in education. And I think that is already a large iPad market. So then we get to the negative implications. Quite frankly, software is much more nefarious than hardware. I save my outrage for that - automation surprises, alert fatigue, over-complexity, built-in productivity metrics and more. Social media is a software menace, it is designed to be device independent. So why am I ambivalent - I think the visual and audio interfaces will require excellent native hearing and vision to meet expectations for the experience. I think a lot of folks won’t adapt that well.

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A truly brilliant article, one of the best ever in terms of style but most of all analysis. Well done, Sir, well done!!!

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Reading the title of his comment, I was surprised that Adam would be such a Luddite. Then I read what he wrote, and I, who consider myself to be no Luddite at all, wholly agree with him. The Vision Pro’s effect on social interaction is quite upsetting. As Adam points out, AirPods (and even Smartphones) have already done this, but the VP will be a quantum leap, especially as the technology gets better, the price goes down, and the apps and uses, many of which aren’t even imagined yet, multiply. Some of this will be good, of course, BUT …

Immersed in their own world, people will interact with one another less and less in the flesh. Social interaction of all kinds - conversation, touching, eye contact - is fundamentally important not only for individual mental health and the conduct of relationships, it’s the basis of a successful society (“social”, “society”, from the Latin noun “socius”, meaning "comrade, friend, ally). How can this continue if so many people are so immersed in their own individual isolated worlds at work and play. And how much worse the effect on child and adolescent development, the period of identity development when we learn both about ourselves and others so that we can become functional and gratified adults. I fear a future world composed of a multitude of individual hermits, perhaps living cheek by jowl together, but never knowing anybody, never having a comrade, friend, or ally, and “community” will be a bygone concept. Will we even procreate - all masturbation, no sex?

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57

Hopefully it won’t be the instant disaster that the Touch Bar was.

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58

That’s not how I read the article, and more completely, their paper on which it’s based.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.16872.pdf

What they’re saying is that AR and VR have different economic values based on the context and environment. AR is valuable in understanding complex contexts, whereas VR is valuable in providing access to distant, risky, or expensive environments. The examples I gave of turn-by-turn directions, names of unfamiliar people, measurements of objects or distances, and in-context translations all fall squarely into their “complex context” category.

Most of the AR examples in their paper would not be feasible with the Vision Pro because it’s too limited in the environments in which it can be worn.

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My point in the article is that escapism leads to a lack of involvement. In other words, it’s not the cause; it’s what gets in the way of being part of the solution. It’s the personal, technological form of bread and circuses.

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I don’t feel that pessimistic about VR and metaverse technoloogy, either broadly or specifically. First from a broad perspective, humans are resilient and adaptable. Just as other changes in communication, such as writing, moveable type, the telegraph, the telephone, and email, surely caused consternation and angst at first, VR may seem malevolent right now. But I am confident that if few popular uses emerge for VR, it will remain on the fringes of most people’s lives and will become just another some-do-it-even-though-it’s-unhealthy activity.

Specifically, the failure of Google Glass, the irrelevance of Second Life despite the sustained hype it received, and the inability of Meta to make it’s VR products and services mainstream–or even attractive to its massive user bases–all point to a minimal societal or generational threat. Apple Vision Pro, especially given its high price, isn’t going to break this pattern, in my opinion. And even if it did, I think there are a lot more pressing and immediate threats to people’s well-being, safety, and health currently than using a legless avatar in a deserted “town plaza” to order a pizza.

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“By then, we’ll also have a sense of how Apple has addressed social and societal concerns to keep the Vision Pro from playing a role in a Ready Player One-like dystopia.” The impression I got from that book is that OASIS played a positive role in that dystopian world, and the bad guys were trying to ruin/hypercommercialize OASIS. In other words, we should want the Vision Pro to play a role in a Ready Player One-like dystopia, should one arise.

I know this is a very minor point, but this is a comparison I have seen several times, and I think it’s inapt. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Total Recall(/“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”).

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I think that the Vision Pro will make all these things (well, except “touching”) better, not worse. Maybe not with this first iteration, but before long, we will have a world where you can interact closely, including conversation, body language, and eye contact, with—anyone, wherever they are. And, if everyone in your living room is wearing a Vision, they can all be watching the same movie, and look at each other, and just see—faces. The Vision will literally disappear, and you will just see them, as they normally are. And you can have that exact experience, as if they were sitting on your couch (and you sitting on theirs) with anyone in the world. Phone calls and group chats will feel just exactly as if the other person/people is/are in the room with you. Etc.

Obviously this version can’t do all that. But in a couple of years, it will. And it will be amazing.

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I don’t want the world to get to the point where a virtual reality is preferable, so I’m not in favor of anything that makes it easy for people to opt out of trying to make the world a better place.

As the Wikipedia entry for the book notes:

In the 2040s, the world has been gripped by an energy crisis from the depletion of fossil fuels and the consequences of pollution, global warming and overpopulation, causing widespread social problems, poverty, and economic stagnation. To escape the decline their world is facing, people turn to the OASIS,[a] a virtual reality simulator accessible by players using visors and haptic technology such as gloves.

I enjoyed the book and found the movie visually impressive, but once you step back from the “Ooo, shiny!” aspect of the technology, the real world those characters inhabit is horribly depressing, and the virtual world is an escape, not a tool for addressing those issues.

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Here’s another take that’s more on the critical end.

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To quote from that piece:

Twenty years―or however long it takes―when the technology has evolved to the point that a device can deliver on that promise without incurring the physical restriction that Vision Pro does, that will be truly amazing.

In other words, the concept is great, he just doesn’t like the fact that we have to wear goggles on our face to experience it.

But what’s the alternative? Do nothing? Wait 20 years for the tech to catch up? If Apple did that, wouldn’t they be allowing someone else – the tasteless tastemakers of Meta, Microsoft, or Google – to define this new form of computing and dooming the world to decades more of a primitive Windows-like experience?

If naysayers had said when the original iPhone was ready to be introduced, “Oh no, we have to wait, because this device has so many limitations and problems. The battery life is terrible, the screen’s too small, there’s no copy and paste, and the camera is worse than digital cameras from 10 years ago, it’s too expensive, and the cellular service is crap. We’ve got to wait until there’s LTE cellular, 12 megapixel cameras, FaceID, GPS, etc.”

(The irony, of course, is few of those other technologies would have been developed as fast or at all, without the iPhone to push them.)

I have no issues if Adam, this Wayne G, or any other individual doesn’t like or want Vision Pro. But their take doesn’t seem to be “This isn’t for me” but “This isn’t for anyone.” I question that. What’s the point? Is it just exercising caution? Venting? A shrug?

I don’t mind criticism or even appropriate negativity. If when I try Vision Pro I find problems with it or don’t like it, I’ll be first to point that out. I currently have many questions about this tech and I’m not even sure if it’ll work for me or not. But I’m willing to give it a chance. I don’t see doom and gloom about the tech or the future.

Adam seems to find “escapism” a problem, but we’ve had that for centuries in all sorts of ways: nature, books, music, movies, amusement parks, etc. It’s human nature to want to escape our humdrum world. To me taking off a headset is little different from looking up from a screen, tearing my head out of a book, or being forced to come in from playing ball because it’s getting dark out. We’ll adapt to this new headset method.

I honestly can’t wait to revisit this article and these comments in exactly one year and see how everything stands up after having Vision Pro on the market for a few months. (Note I don’t expect full vindication on either side of the debate. I imagine it will be a mixed bag, like most things, with some arguments hitting home and some looking hilariously wrong. And that will happen again at the two-year, five-year, and ten-year marks. Just go back and look at early iPhone reviews.)

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I don’t think it’s a question of naysayers or yeasayers, but rather a problem of unintended consequences. And it’s often not even a question of one outweighing the other. Like countless other achievements, most of which were invented for good reasons and provided improvements, many also had unintended consequences, wholly unforeseen initially, usually only becoming apparent or developing after some time has passed. You can’t stop progress, because it’s necessary, and somebody will always, sooner or later, contribute to it. But once you have it, once it’s done - whatever it is, a thing, a medicine, a technology - you’ve got the whole ball of wax, you can no longer undo it, you’ve got and must accept and somehow deal with the bad along with the good. Like the song said “you can’t have one without the other”. Nuclear fission and AI are good modern examples - in fact, digital technology and the internet itself.

Aside from perverted use by bad actors, some things just change the way we live and conduct our lives, individually and as a society. For instance, many inventions have made physical work much easier, often eliminating it entirely. However, we now have to do something extra to keep fit and healthy. Since many don’t do that, and because we now have all sorts of fast foods and such, we’re facing an obesity epidemic and a shocking rise in, among other things, diabetes.

Such it is with the Vision Pro and it’s future iterations and uses. There’s no question that they’ll provide all kinds of benefits. I’m just concerned with one of the possible - which I believe is likely and unavoidable - downsides, as I wrote above: the detrimental effects of less in-the-flesh, full-attention social interaction. Of course, even predicted downsides don’t always happen, or not the way we foresaw, so I may be wrong. But TMO, and YMMV.

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67

Beats me how people can have strong opinions on products that they haven’t even seen. I’m entitled to an opinion because I am effectively blind in my right eye so the Vision Pro is not for me. I also use a monocular in place of a binocular. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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It’s probably because Vision Pro will not be available for sales for sometimes next year. Apple most probably debuted this product way in advance to gin up demand in advance, for consumers, developers as well as potential retailers. I’m assuming that it would make a whole lot of sense for Apple to have a cellular model sometime in the near future, if not with the release next year, then two or three years after. Apple Stores will be good for Vision Pro trials and sales, and adding adding select retailers in the US around the globe would greatly increase sales. It’s kind of how iPod and Apple Music debuted.

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I think that all of the social/societal issues that Adam highlights are worth our concern for the very reason that our smart phones have caused similar issues, even though they are less isolating physically than AVP which is less isolating than VR headsets.

However, as a long time educator who embraced computers and programming decades ago, I have to say that I think that the educational and research opportunities presented by the AVP are beyond extraordinary. I am a field scientist (a geologist) and the AVP could do a lot to bring the immersive, 3D environment of the field into the classroom to students who do not have the opportunity, for reasons of physical disability, lack of resources or time, to go to the field themselves or for any student to experience a field setting which is too remote or dangerous to experience in person. I do field work in some of the remotest places in the Andes where total cost of the expedition is many times the cost of the AVP (even before the inevitable price drops). With the AVP I could bring some facsimile of that experience to students for a fraction of the price. In my field, data “caves” – 3D/4D data volumes represented in a room via 3D projectors – were a thing. You could literally walk through your data volume and visualize it from the inside out. These never became popular because they were breathtakingly expensive for institutions to build and few of them did. Although Apple did not demo such an application, I can easily image that the technology that they have developed could be adapted to such an application. $3500 is probably too expensive for the consumer, but to a scientist who wants or needs that sort of functionality, it is incredibly cheap. Heck, when a mass spectrometer costs many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars, $3500 is a drop in the bucket.

All technology comes with upsides and downsides. Smartphones are isolating and it drives me nuts to see students glued to their screens. And yet, I write smartphone apps to collect field data because they are way more efficient than the old fashioned notebook, pencil, analog compass, dedicated GPS receiver, etc. When data collection is faster, you can collect more of it increasing your signal to noise ratio.

I expect AVP to present the same dichotomy but in ways that we cannot yet imagine. My two cents…

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Yes I can see many fields of work in which AVP will be innovative and expanding options.

All of my concerns lie in the familial and social spheres.

Holding fire until I get to try one but inclined to think that the future will resemble a pair of glasses but you have to get there through here.

The ideas behind a 3D camera is for me the most intriguing. There was a post recently about how using digital zoom is now better on the iPhone than using the lens and enhancing in Photoshop. That computational photography had advanced to that point where the three lenses on an iPhone Pro can be used to provide a much better digital zoom beyond the capabilities of the individual lens.

I’m curious to see if computational, multi lens cameras emerge beyond this instance of the AVP, multi lens needed for 3D of course.

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