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The Apple Vision Pro Is Spectacular and Sad
A dispatch from the gypsum dunes of cyberspace
www.theatlantic.com
I tried to keep my struggles (and my nausea) in perspective. These may be nothing more than growing pains for this new paradigm for computing. The original Macintosh was only marginally useful, and the first iPhone didn’t do that much. So I settled back into Word in space, tapping out a portion of this article while the experience was fresh. A reality-affirming rocky shore with proud trees filled my peripheral vision. Eventually, I heard the sounds of my wife and daughter coming back into the house. When I dialed back into reality, or the rendered version of the world around me, I found my wife was just steps away from my head, pointing her phone camera to record me, the computer man.
It had become dark outside since I’d pulled Mount Hood over my head. I tried to scratch my brow but a face computer stood in the way. I was more off-kilter than expected. Augmented reality is supposed to increase your sense of place compared with VR, but I’ve tried the older, lower-resolution options—the Meta Quest, the HTC Vive—and the Apple Vision Pro made me feel even more decoupled from the world.
I removed the goggles and tried to recombobulate. Inexplicably starving, I walked toward the kitchen, headset-free, past the place where, in the Apple Vision Pro dimension, I’d left my document. I began devouring Tostitos, as if to reaffirm my corporeal existence. My wife tried to tell me about her day, our daughter’s fiddle lesson, the dog she’d nearly hit with the car. But I couldn’t listen. I felt agitated. She had no idea what had just happened to me. If someone had just come back from outer space or a deep-sea submarine, you wouldn’t expect them to make small talk.
For a time, at what may have been the height of the internet’s thrall, it became popular to pretend that the digital and material worlds were continuous—that the “real” one had no special meaning, because cyberspace had become a part of it. That turned out to be wrong. We live in cars and on couches and, separately, we also live on phones. Apple believes it can resolve this conflict—that the digital and material worlds can be merged together—but it has only put the conflict into higher resolution. A headset is a pair of spectacles, but a headset is also a blindfold.
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