A Vision of the Future

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

A pledge broken

I ended my very first piece for this site with the promise -

Welcome to my SubStack world… and don’t worry, it shan’t be composed entirely of stories about computers and technology.

Now, here I am two weeks later, posting an offering on the subject of Apple’s new Vision Pro, a $3,499 headset that looks likely to be their most important creation since 2007’s iPhone. I hope you’ll forgive me for going back on my word so precipitately, but I was lucky enough to take possession of one of these devices last Friday, the day they were launched in the USA, and I felt the need to share my experience. I happened to be in Los Angeles; the Apple Store put it by for me, and I raced home with a bursting excitement in my chest that I hadn’t felt for some years. I should tell you that Apple didn’t give me the device; I paid for it fair and square, just like everyone else. I add this because I know from previous experience that there are cynicky-boots out there who are all too quick to cry “endorsement”, “freebie”, and “shill”.¹

The Buzz

There has been a deal of hoo and plenty of ha surrounding this launch. Mr Musk has already pronounced, and plenty of crazed enthusiasts have taken to the streets, subways, eateries and parks of America, risking anything from braying scorn to opportunistic mugging and even the J. G. Ballard excitements of a car wreck. This kind of thing is not new. The first time I went out in public wearing AirPods, I felt something of a prune – oh, the titters from passers-by if a pod slipped from the ear; the first generation didn’t have secure silicon tips, you’ll remember. In time, tube trains and coffee shops showed evidence of more and more citizens with that glossy white tubelet depending from their lobes, and the initial embarrassment melted away. Much as it did with the earlier generation of Bluetooth earpieces and before that – you’re too young – the boombox, the conveyance of which along the streets required something of the strength and balance of a builder carrying a hod full of bricks.

But will we be comfortable being stared at while we inhabit a private virtual environment? Will we feel safe? Will we be tolerated in cafés, clubs and restaurants, closing ourselves off from “the real world” even more completely than we do when immersed in our phones, tablets and laptops? Old people are already sniffing with prim disapproval at the very idea.² Doubters are doubting; mockers are mocking; skeptics are … skepting. A whole new etiquette will have to be established in schools, libraries and other institutions if this new kind of digital companion is as fully adopted as many – myself included – believe it will be.

I’ve tried in the past to get along with headsets from Oculus Rift, Magic Leap and Sony.³ The experience has been rather like sex if truth be told — gaspingly exciting for the first few minutes but always ending with exhaustion, chafing discomfort and sweaty disappointment. Can Apple put that right and bring us to a happier ending?

The Cupertino Corp. is known for its skill in bringing to market beautifully refined devices that it may not have pioneered, invented or dreamt up ab initio but which it has managed to bring to an irresistible pitch of usability through attention to detail in design, form, function and finesse. Not to mention the emphasis on privacy and security. But Mr Musk is right; Product 1.0 from Apple has tended historically to be strictly for early adopters (for which read ‘suckers’) like me.

Opening up

Anyway, there I was in LA, hurtling home from the Apple Store. I didn’t ask my husband Elliott to film me unboxing the Vision Pro. I fear I am old enough these days to consider such a procedure a trifle infra dig if the phrase means anything to you. Having said which, the manner in which I tackled the operation was far from dignified. I went at it, in Ogden Nash’s excellent phrase, like a lioness opening up an antelope. A cyclonic blizzard of flying white cardboard and paper cable ties later, I had snatched the prize from its snug citadel of white cardboard, like Humphrey Bogart tearing the Maltese Falcon from its packaging. The question was, after trying the thing out, would I be, like Peter Lorre in that film, screaming, “It’s a fake, it’s a fake!”?

Apple’s self-conscious but wholly admirable drive to be good about sustainability, recycling and so forth has lately given us charging cables sheathed in some kind of textile fabric rather than plastic and whose feel is delicious. They coil and loop up better for travel and make a pleasant fizzing sound when you pull them through your fingers. Now, with the Vision Pro, they have produced a headband of stretchy braided material that is presumably kinder to the environment, too, while being comfortable when fitted around the skull. A power supply built into the headpiece itself would have made the whole thing unusably heavy, so Apple has had to settle for a separate power block in a silvery metal that looks as if it could have been borrowed from Klaatu’s spaceship in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Its sleek candy bar format allows it to slip into your pocket out of the way and, fully charged, is good for an hour or so.

I need reading glasses for anything close up, and of course, whatever you see through the Vision Pro is, despite appearances, very close up, an inch or so from the eyeballs. Two Zeiss lenses of my required magnification, therefore, were sold to me along with the main unit; they snap magnetically into the inside of the lenses with the greatest of ease.

On she goes

With the unit fitted, a little windy knob somewhere to the back and right allows you to tighten your headband; you’re plunged into darkness now, but soon the familiar Apple logo, white on black, appears in front of you. Before long, you’ll be at the pleasure of the installation process. The device needs to get acquainted with your eyes; it needs to model a version of your head and face, and it needs information about your hands. Look left, look right, look up, look down, tap your thumb against your forefinger, shift the headset to the left and up a bit and … the biometric business is done. And now the real world floods into view.

Here’s the thing: are you looking through the Vision Pro when you see the real world, or do its cameras and sensors look out and around and then feed the image back to you? It’s the latter. The process is called video passthrough, and presenting the world as it does in real time (or, to put it another way, with close to zero latency or lag), this is the feature that allows those foolhardy souls we talked about earlier to drive and walk about, or the average user to check their phone (which will appear, as all reality does when the headpiece is on, in a rather ghostly form), and get up and walk about without crashing into the furniture (one of the more notable, noisy and annoying nuisances afflicting alternative headsets).

You can jeeeeyust see the eyes …

Spatial needs

Crucially, placing you in the real world allows the device to offer AR experiences as well as VR: in other words, Augmented Reality, as well as the Virtual kind. A virtual experience encloses you in its own created world – the environment and all the objects and “people” you see will be digitally created. In Augmented Reality, digital elements are overlaid, incorporated, into the real world. A giant human heart beating in the air above your sofa, an F1 motor car throbbing and purring on your coffee table, and so on. Mixed Reality combines both V and A into one environment. The Vision Pro allows the user to go smoothly between the virtual and the real by twisting a little crown above the visor: turn one way and reality disappears; the other way and it bleeds back into view. Having said all this, Apple themselves are very clear that they want to move away from the designations AR, VR, MR (and XR, the combination of the previous three). They issued stern guidelines to developers:

Refer to your app as a spatial computing app. [my italics] Don’t describe your app experience as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), extended reality (XR), or mixed reality (MR).

‘Spatial’ is the word they want, and I’m sure we’ll all get used to it. Certainly saves time and confusion. There was an era I remember well when the software that performed tasks on computers went under the name ‘programming’ and ‘programs’, but Apple led the way in getting us to change it to ‘applications’ and now ‘apps’. So it will doubtless be with this field, too.

The Experience

You gaze excitedly and spatially about you as if seeing your room through a digitally vaseline-smeared lens is the most wonderful experience of your life so far. But soon your attention is taken up by a pane hanging in mid-air in front of you. It displays the familiar icons of the Apple ecosystem: Safari, TV, Mail, App Store, Stocks, Freeform, etc., in exquisitely high resolution: each display panel pixel is apparently the size of a red blood cell – 7.5µm or thereabouts. You can fit 54 of them onto one pixel on the latest iPhone. Such boggling statistics go some way towards explaining the hefty price tag.

It is a great testament to the User Interface developers behind the ergonomics of this system that it takes almost no time at all to get used to bringing those icons to attention simply by looking at them and then activating them with a quick press of forefinger to thumb, or swiping through pages like Tom Cruise in Minority Report (but without the cybergloves). It is an even greater testament to the evolved plasticity of the human mind and body that we can learn an entirely new set of skills like this with such ease. Even the more mature citizen, such as you faithful correspoindent.

Watching films on a gigantic screen in a virtual movie theatre (you can choose to sit in the front, middle or back row) is almost worth the asking price alone. But you can create content as well as consume it. A button by your left eyebrow selects the onboard camera. To record video, a more than ordinarily brightly lit room is required, but one of the biggest Wows you will utter on introduction to the Vision Pro will be when watching one of your videos back. Having filmed, you select the clip and click on a panoramic icon that causes it to fill your field of view. The 3-D (or ‘spatial’ as Apple would have it) footage is pretty much mindblowing. It is particularly wonderful if you walk around a room filming and then, later, at a completely different location, you watch your video back in that full spatial mode. You are in that first room again. Completely in it. Your mind cannot quite believe that you are not back there. Freaky, but fun.

The ghost in the machine

An area I have not really looked at much is one of great importance for the future of the system: work collaboration. Microsoft has already brought out Vision Pro savvy MS 365 software, Zoom has its version ready too. I had to join a podcast by Zoom yesterday and thought I’d use the Vision Pro for it. The other side was treated to my spectral avatar, and it rather freaked them out. So much so that I had to give it up and revert to trad style: the visual element of the podcast was for broadcast and on a very serious subject, so the silliness of the image would have been more than a little disturbing. The lips of the avatar move in time to one’s speech, but a great deal of our visual cortex is given over to interpreting the human face, and the slightly off nature of these avatars, close to real time as the lip-synch is, does not go unnoticed by our brains which respond, as they always do to such distortions of the reality field, with either fear, revulsion or laughter.

The spectral avatar of the one they call Stephen Fry

Despite the very specific and tailored installation process, there is a “guest mode” that allows friends and family to put on the headset and try the experience for themselves. It is best to cast everything to an Airplay screen so you can see what your guests are seeing and advise them on the gestures required at each stage. Oh, and take out your special lenses first, or they’ll see everything in a blur.

The hardware is truly impressive. It’s expensive, it’s just light enough not to be overly cumbersome and annoying to wear, and the 8K and 4K visuals are jaw-droppingly good. The problem, of course, is that one is the early adopting sucker heretofore referenced and - just as happened when I had my first Mac and my first iPhone - I have found myself playing increasingly forlornly with mostly pre-installed software designed to highlight the “spatial” and “immersive” experiences the Vision Pro is capable of delivering, while all the time wishing that Netflix, iPlayer and Death Stranding were available, and regretting that my favourite apps, games and utilities did not shine at their best here. Yes, you can run anything on a Vision Pro that runs on an iPad, but the look-and-pinch that works so well on the specially adapted apps tends to be frustratingly flaky with iPad-only software. You look at a close-box but you can’t activate it, you try and log into a service and it’s a bit of a nightmare entering your email and password.

Visiting Herr Benz – Not The Messiah

But we have to picture ourselves as gathered together in Karl Benz’s Mannheim workshop in 1886, looking at the world’s very first automobile. He is forty years away from teaming up with Gottlieb Daimler and adding the name ‘Mercedes’ to his company. A few of you will snort derisively and say that this prototype machine of his is useless and that your horse is quicker, more reliable and cheaper to run. Where’s the infrastructure of gasoline filling stations that can compete with the millions of existing water troughs and livery stables? It’ll never happen, they chortle. Others of you will look at the machine and congratulate Benz on a clever invention that might well have a promising hobbyist future. But which of us will blithely predict interstate highways, parking structures, motels, commuter lifestyles, motorway service stations and a radical modification in work and leisure for just about the whole human race? And we would be right not to predict it because the evidence of our eyes, ears, and nose does not come close to indicating that this stuttering, belching, smoking contraption could ever develop into so transformative an agent of human change as the modern motor car. Technology is a verb, not a noun; a process, not a fixture. The source of a river is no pointer to its future greatness. That little spurting, bubbling spring in the Cotswolds gives no hint as to what the mighty Thames will become as it progresses so proudly through London. The Apple Vision Pro 1.0 is an indication, a foreshadowing, it is not the Messiah, but John the Baptist preparing the way.

Developers will begin to provide apps and uses that Apple themselves, let alone you and me, could never conceive or guess at. Haitz’s Law and the ineluctable current of technological advance will guarantee that each new iteration of Vision Pro will be lighter, more comfortable, more powerful, more usable, and more feature-rich than its predecessor. This magical and marvellous object that I currently play with evaluate for hours every day will soon enough be found only in museums, where it will be mocked for its clunky mass much as we snicker at those giant mobile brick phones of the 80s. But its light, nimble children will be as available and as familiar to us, and as constant in companionship, as mobile phones are today.

There. Now this time I really do promise not to inflict you for a good while with any more on the subject of Apple, digital technology, gadgets, gizmos and groovy gear.

Actually, now that I think of it, wasn’t it Sydney Greenstreet who pulled the Maltese Falcon out of its wrapping, not Humphrey Bogart?

Until our next merry meeting … goodbye.

1. My favourite firm of lawyers: “You’re through to Endorsement, Freebie and Shill, how may I help you?”

2. Doubtless forgetting how their parents ticked them off for watching television all day, and how their parents were tutted at by their parents for burying their noses in books.

3. Mr Z’s Meta leads the market currently with their Meta Quest range, which I have to confess I have not tried out.