Premise

If you're here just for tech content, I suggest finding another post to read. I am a human and I feel and I scream internally and from time to time I want to discuss social and philosophical opinions, not just technology. I feel the urge to write down some thoughts I have been having for a while on the Vision Pro so this is it: somebody on the internet vomiting opinions.

Motivation

I don't own the AVP, but I tried it for a long enough session (perks of working at the Fruit Company?). That experience didn't really generate any strong emotional reaction in me, nor prompted me to write this post here. I mean - it has great screens and a remarkable UX for interacting with a new kind of OS, sure, but that is nothing to write home about nor has that demo changed my life in any way.

It wasn't even the review by Marques Brownlee, nor the other hundreds that have popped up on my YouTube feed. Those are always as deep as sliced anchovies on a Margherita prepared in Rome. What really prompted me to write is seeing good old Casey Neistat going through New York wearing a ducking headset and casually talking about spatial computing while entering a Dunking Donuts in Times Square.

In fact, it's not the "oh yeah I can watch 4k HDR movies in my bed and be completely immersed" part of the Vision Pro that really generates any deep reactions in me. I mean that's cool, at that price you could probably get a much better HDR TV and Hi-Fi setup today but eventually prices will catch up and the experience offered by AVP will probably be hard to beat, together with the golden cage ecosystem surrounding it. Nothing new here really.

Speaking of watching content, I was watching again Stalker the other day and the level of engagement I had towards the movie was given from the narrative, context, dialogues, actors and peculiar grading; only one of these qualities could improve radically when wearing a Vision Pro, but I imagine that once it will become a new medium there might be interesting avenues to try narratively too.

So far so good. Then there's the "do your work in VR" part of the device, which currently is also non-existent for me: thank you for offering, but no thanks, a monitor and a computer fused in one big entity that has the repairability drawbacks of a smartphone but pretends to be a PC is not something I'm looking for now. I have stopped justifying it on laptops too.

But you know, I'm a geek and I'd rather build a portable CyberDeck-like laptop with brown switches than hunt and peck on a 3500 dollars machine, I know I'm not the target audience.

So maybe, again with a lot of time, this will change too and, if it gets to a reasonable price, AVP might appeal to those that have simple digital needs (email/web apps/etc.) that can be carried by an all-in-one; so it will provide an iPad-like experience while boasting a much better display.

Personally I'd still prefer if the device became just a very sophisticated display that I can carry around (and plug to my iPad, if needed be), instead of trying to also be a full fledged computer.

Ⅰ. Casey

That being said, the technological part is interesting but I don't want to waste too much space on that, which is why we get to Casey Neistat.

The thing is that when Casey talks about something I know he does it in a geeky fashion, for sure, but also in a way that is "average" and relatable. It's not just the tech reviews of VR and AR nerds, it's just a normal dude (money and popularity aside) that records a video. It's not necessarily a classic "product review", which is why Casey is just Casey. And after watching that video I had a visceral reaction to the world that he imagines, a place where it will be increasingly expected to experience our lives through headsets (be it glasses or visors) that might eventually replace smartphones.

See, that's the bit that left me wondering a bit about where the hell we want to go as a digital society. I don't want to just write based on gut and knee jerk reactions, but I think those are very important in a world where everything is always distilled and diluted to the point that nothing strong or meaningful is ever said.

Going back to the future of our digital society, I feel like we're moving towards a solipsistic direction where what really matters is just your point of view - everybody more and more immersed in their version of reality to the extent to which people might even question whether a shared understanding of reality is even a possibility, and what does reality mean anyway ("geniuses" like Musk already think the world is just a computation, 'cause of course we're living in the computers age so your philosophical view is as narrow as the current technological advancements). But before I go forward picturing dystopian scenarios without any explanation, let me clarify how I feel about some dark potentials of this new era of "spatial computing".

Right now you can go out there in central London or New York and see plenty of people fully immersed in their smartphones, you know, either typing furiously or absorbed in boredom while watching yet another viral video. And while they will probably ignore whatever you're doing unless you start interacting with them directly, there's still a subtle understanding that both you and them are there inhabiting the same space. They are temporarily finding refuge in an Instagram reel, a Linkedin post, a TikTok or a corporate email, but they are there with you. While if I try to picture a world where we go around wrapped in Vision Pros or Meta's RayBans, I think that we effectively stop sharing a 'place' completely. Just like nowadays the act of removing your headphones means fully concentrating on somebody's interaction request, tomorrow you'll have to remove your headset to deal with somebody wanting to engage with you here and now.

Ⅱ. Duality

The current (first) iteration of AVP is still just Virtual Reality with a lot of marketing, let's say this clearly. The "passthrough" is just a digital representation of what its digital cameras see, sold as your own point of view.

This makes for an important (existential!) difference between how we interact with the world currently.

When the outside world is just an image feed served via screens, yes you will see people, but your experience is separated even more from theirs. It's not like a lot of people are not shielded anyway when looking at a smartphones, but the VP is a step in the direction of having even more freedom to ignore other people's experience of a space, because all that matters is how you feel in that space. And you can influence that in any moment by opening a new window and placing it in front of people you don't like (I jokingly did that exact thing when trying the device for the first time).

Yes, you can always rotate the virtual crown and be back to see the space around you, but you have to make an active decision to remove that filter. It's not like there's not a filter by default and you consciously pick one, for example by reading a book or reading the news on your phone. We have seen that with smartphones we tend to isolate ourselves from what's happening, and many times we choose to record an event instead of helping people around us while that event happens (for example, when the Banksy traffic sign was stolen in Peckham, nobody was quick enough to act but we do have several recordings of the event). We always have the camera in front of us, and we can see both the camera feed and the world as two separate entities.

Choosing not to help somebody is still much apparent because of this duality (you as a subject/the world as an object), because you choose to care more about the "social media reality happening later once I'll share this" than about the "reality out there happening now", so you are somewhat still conscious of that crisis happening within you (in the original Greek meaning coming from Κρινώ ). You might be removed from even feeling the remorse of not acting (if the recording is more valuable than your personal non-recorded memory), but you cannot ignore the fact that you choose not to act.

With the VP, this sense of duality gets stronger and the world becomes even more of an object than a collective experience, there's no difference between filming the world and witnessing the world, they're all just a single camera feed anyway.

Ⅲ. Questions

This raises some questions for me.

If all you see is overlaid on top of the real world, and both software and people are rendered in the same space, how easy it is to build empathy for people "out there", and not "in here" with you? How easy is it to feel other people as subjects in a shared world, instead of just objects in your view of the world ? How easy is it then to become fully detached from what's out there ?

Thinking about how for Sartre the Gaze is what permits the subject to realize that the Other is also a subject, can you really feel other people's gaze from inside the Vision Pro ? Just looking at the video from Casey, where he asks the camera operator following him in NYC if he "looks weird or not", I'd say it's very hard to have that awareness. For me it follows easily that everything and everyone will be just an object. I don't think we need to be necessarily dystopian about how the world is gonna evolve once devices like the VP start becoming cheaper and affordable "for the masses". Or at least, for the middle class without the deep pockets of the enthusiasts working in tech buying first gen devices. But we can be realistic and look at the past 20 years of fast paced technological innovations, and see how things have gone from a pre-smartphone era to a post-smartphone one and try to understand what turned out brilliant (Wikipedia!) and what went horribly (my Instagram feed). I really can't talk for the world, and I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion, but there's a few things I don't like about Instagram or Twitter, and a few things I miss from the era of Blogspot. Not everything is bad, of course, but I feel we have enough to fix already without adding to the pile.

Instead, the fact that we keep making technology that can be experienced mostly on a "individual" level is definitely a sign of something. And as an Italian living in the US for the first time, I can tell you that this country feels like a very individualistic place, so I'm not surprised that the companies that live within this social texture tend to create individualistic products. Heck, here you're considered a communist if you want public health-care.. So with this in mind, will I be able to view a movie together with my wife with the VP ? For sure - if we spend 7000$ on two devices, and even there, we will be knocking our clunky glass heads trying to squeeze together in a hug on the couch, but I guess that part will become normal over time. But for the individual? The individual doesn't have that problem - only the couple has. And the same applies for friends. You can watch the World Cup only if everybody brings their own visor, no more sharing a single TV. Of course, that makes a lot of sense if you're a seller, because you get to sell way more devices now.

On top of those very real and practical social issues that I see with going our merry ways wearing virtual reality headsets left and right, there's a couple more non-social but still practical problems I see just with the Vision Pro itself. First, it's one more chapter in the constant "dumbification" of products for the sake of sophistication: no more customization, nothing is easily replaceable: that device is a concentration of high tech that nobody but Apple will probably be able to touch for a while. Storage, RAM, etc. If you've seen the iFixit video on the Vision Pro you know what I mean - that thing is effectively inscrutable for the hands of the normal consumer.

I genuinely can't wait for people to start hacking together homegrown alternatives that you can build or at least assemble at home, just like I was able to do with my own components of the computer I'm typing from. If this type of technology is destined to be part of our digital future, let's ensure we will be able to produce the equivalent of a Rasperry Pi at some point. I have tried devices like the Viture's Pro glasses and, as rough as still isolating as they are, I feel it's a better take on the idea of displays fixed to your eyes.

But yeah - the AVP has more pixels than a 4K TV per eye and their eye tracking is amazing, not to mention that the hand gesture recognition feels like magic, so that's enough to buy one and just enjoy the hell out of it.

Or is it?