last night i fell asleep under the stars, the chirping of crickets mixes with the hiss of the old radiator in the distance. I just finished an episode of Justified: City Primeval on the big screen. It was a constant 68 degrees, but I climbed into the duvet anyway. For tonight, I'm thinking of the surface of the moon, or perhaps the edge of a Hawaiian volcano.
By most analyses, the average American spends about seven hours a day in front of screens. The Center for Disease Control recommends something like two hours. But despite the increased attention paid to sleep hygiene and the harmful effects of staring at screens all day, it seems society is quickly moving in the opposite direction.
When we refer to “screen time,” we're mostly referring to phones, computers, TVs, that sort of thing. Meanwhile, a completely different paradigm has been emerging on the horizon for some years now. In the case of the Vision Pro, we're talking about two screens, one per eye, with 23 million pixels combined.
These screens are, of course, significantly smaller than the other examples, but they're there in front of your eyes, like a $3,500 pair of glasses. This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit during my first 48 hours with the Vision Pro.
In 2018, Apple introduced Screen Time as part of iOS 12. The feature is designed to alert users about their and their children's device usage. The idea is that when presented with such stark numbers at the end of each week, people will begin to rethink the way they interact with the world around them. Tomorrow, Apple will finally release the Vision Pro. The device is another effort to get people to rethink the way they interact with the world, albeit in the complete opposite direction.
Image credits: Cory Green/Yahoo
I've spent much of the last two years trying to break some of my worst pandemic habits. At the top of the list are all those nights I fell asleep watching some bad horror movie on my iPad. I've been better at this. I'm reading more and embracing the silence. That is, until this week. The moment the Vision Pro arrived, everything went out the window.
Now, to some extent much of this can be dismissed as part of my testing process. To review a product, you need to live with it as much as possible. In the case of Vision Pro, that means living my life through the product as much as possible. I accept work calls and use it to send emails and Slack messages. I listen to music through the audio modules and, as mentioned above, I use it to view my stories.
Even my morning meditation practice has moved to headphones. It's that classic irony of using technology to help counter some of the problems it introduced into our lives in the first place.
While my job requires me to use Vision Pro as much as humanly possible while I have it, I have to assume that my experience won't be completely different than most users. Again, you'll want to get the most out of the $3,500 device as you can, which invariably translates to using it as much as you can.
When I wrote yesterday on the first day of this magazine, I warned users to delve into the world of Vision Pro. In a very real way, I wish I had followed my own advice. At the end of my first 24 hours, nausea started to hit me hard. Of course, your results will vary. I am also prone to getting sick in the car and in the sea. That patch you see behind my right ear in some of the Vision Pro photos is for the first one. (It's probably a placebo, but sometimes fooling yourself is the best medicine.)
Virtual reality motion sickness and car sickness actually work similarly. They are caused by a mismatch between what the eyes and the inner ear perceive. Indeed, your brain receives contradictory signals that you are having trouble reconciling.
In a way, this phenomenon gets to the heart of something fundamental about mixed reality. Even in the world of passing AR, there is a disconnect between what you see and what your body feels. The Vision Pro's transfer is the best I've experienced on a consumer device. Cameras capture your surroundings and transmit it to your eyes as quickly as possible. With this technology, the headset can overlay computer graphics over the real world, a phenomenon Apple refers to as “spatial computing.”
Image credits: Cory Green/Yahoo
This gets to something important about this brave new world. Extended reality is not reality. It is the world filtered through a computer screen. Now, we get into an existential argument pretty quickly here.
This week I was reminded of what ai-photo-editing-on-galaxy-s24″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>said a Samsung executive When faced with the fact that the company is “faking” the moon with its premium smartphones, “there is no real picture. As soon as you have sensors to capture something, you reproduce (what you are seeing) and it means nothing. There is no real image. You can try to define a real image by saying, “I took that photo,” but if you used ai to optimize the zoom, autofocus, and scene, is it real? Or are they all filters? There is no real image, period.”
I'm sorry, but I need to be a lot more high to have that specific conversation. For now, though, the Vision Pro makes me wonder how comfortable I am in a future where “screen time” largely involves having them strapped to my face. The effect is undeniably intriguing and points to some incredibly innovative applications in the near future (I'm sure we'll see several of them among the initial 600 applications).
Perhaps preparing for the future is a combination of embracing cutting-edge technologies and knowing when it's time to hit the grass. That 2.5-hour battery life may not be the worst thing after all.
