Apple’s pitch? This may be virtual reality, but it’s anything but the metaverse. This is brand new technology for you, the consumer, to be enjoyed inside Apple’s famous walled garden. Its demo was all about watching huge virtual movie screens in your living room and disappearing in beautiful simulated natural environments. It’s a high-tech home theater for your face. Unlike other headsets, there are no handheld controllers — you navigate the digital world by looking at the objects of interest and pinching your fingers. You are immersed, you are entertained, and you are very much alone.
That these kinds of immersive digital worlds, whether closed or open, would rise to prominence was always a dystopian idea, one that originated in cyberpunk fiction, premised on the notion that conditions in the real world were so bad that users had to abandon their actual lives completely and escape into a more poorly rendered simulacrum.
This is precisely why Karpf thinks that
computers-on-your-facemight have a future after all.If the world keeps getting worse, he says,this will eventually have a lot of appeal.If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.
Brian Merchant
This article gets to the core of the issue of Apple’s recently announced mixed-reality headset, an issue it shares with a whole category of VR goggles: these devices are ultimately designed to be used in isolation, with few or preferably no other people around. I’m not convinced it’s an impact of the recent pandemic and the associated social distancing; Big Tech has always been in the business of creating tools to disintermediate and monetize human interactions, and the Apple Vision Pro represents a pinnacle of that evolution.