Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
When I was a child playing too many videogames, I was told not to sit too close to the curved glass of the cathode-ray-tube TV lest it destroy my eyesight. In the 21st century, however, all the cool tech folk are literally strapping TVs to their faces, the twin LED glare pumping maximum nits into their glazed eyeballs from a distance of mere millimetres. That’s progress.
The strangest thing about Apple’s Vision Pro, however, is that it claims to be an augmented-reality device without actually being one. AR, as already found in fighter-jet cockpits and heads-up displays on some cars, overlays information on the user’s natural vision of the world around her. But in an Apple Vision Pro you don’t look at the world around you; you are watching a camera feed from the outside world displayed on TVs right in front of your eyes. It is a fully enclosed sensory-replacement device. In other words, a VR headset that wants to be an AR headset but isn’t. It’s this lack of optical passthrough that necessitates the outwardfacing display, showing a weird and uncanny approximation of the user’s eyes, which somehow maximises the creepiness of the whole thing while attempting to lessen it.
Still, who cares about this when you can cook a whole meal wearing your Apple Vision Pro, which enables you to cause two different virtual kitchen timers to hover over two separate pans on your hob? This was one of the demos that got social-media experts excited about the device, even though I have a dual kitchen timer that sticks magnetically to my oven and I don’t have to risk chopping my fingers off when dicing onions because I’m only watching the onions and my knife on a dark TV feed.
Users of Google’s ill-fated Glass headset were quickly shunned by normal humans and dubbed ‘Glassholes’. What should we call people who choose to go around wearing a full-face VR helmet in everyday life? To be fair, people have always complained about
Surely everyone would like their own otoscope to beam images of their own earwax into their fatigued retinas
those citizens who wish to screen themselves off from the world. From its inception in 1979, the Sony Walkman and subsequent elaborations of the belt-worn ‘personal stereo’ with their dinky foam-covered on-ear headphones led some to criticise the kind of people who would voluntarily cocoon themselves inside an aural world of Prince or Bon Jovi, as it might be, while walking around the city’s mean streets, rather than engaging in improving political discussion with their fellow urbanites. It never did me any harm.
Such long-offered critiques are, in a sense, not so far from modern arguments about the wearing of niqabs or hoodies: why, the conservative rabble-rouser asks, will people not show themselves in full to visual surveillance or be prepared to act on aural instructions at any moment? What have they got to hide? Apple’s Vision Pro hardware, excitingly, is perhaps the first example of either clothing or wearable technology that makes such complaints seem quite reasonable. Anyone walking down the street or sitting on a subway train with one of these on might as well be wearing a hessian sack on their head. And you just know they’re probably watching porn.
According to a recent report from Bloomberg, however, strapping miniature TVs to your face is only the start of Apple’s ambitions for its ‘wearables’ division: the company is allegedly also pondering whether to make a version of Airpods that have visual sensors – ie, cameras that go in your ears. Not exactly specified is whether they are meant to face outwards or inwards, though surely everyone would like to wear their own personal otoscope to beam images of their own earwax into their fatigued retinas all day.
As of this writing, however, reports are also coming in of people returning their Vision Pro headsets because of nausea or even, allegedly, burst blood vessels in their poor, abused eyes. Much as I once myself marvelled at the spectacular novelty of piloting an X-Wing through battle space in PSVR, but soon left the headset to gather dust because the motion sickness got too much. A flat screen out there in the world, whether on the wall or in your hands, is after all a very convenient and comparatively healthy device for consuming videogame visuals, and one that doesn’t risk you walking into a wall if the power fails. Could it be that VR will eventually turn out to be the new 3D TV, an impressive technological innovation that not enough people actually wanted? Watch this (virtual) space.