Last night, I fell Sleeping under the stars, the chirping of crickets mingling with the beeping of an old heater in the distance. I just finished an episode of Justified: City Primeval on the big screen. The temperature was a steady 68 degrees, but I tucked myself into the comforter nonetheless. Tonight, I’m thinking about the surface of the moon, or maybe the rim of a volcano in Hawaii.
By most analyses, the average American spends about seven hours a day in front of screens. The CDC recommends something in the range of two hours. But despite the increasing focus on sleep hygiene and the harmful effects of staring at screens all day, society seems to be quickly moving in the opposite direction.
When we refer to “screen time,” we’re largely talking about phones, computers, TVs — that sort of thing. Meanwhile, a completely different model has been on the horizon for several years. In the case of the Vision Pro, we’re talking about two displays – one for each eye – with a total of 23 million pixels.
These screens, of course, are much smaller than 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 a lot during my first 48 hours with the Vision Pro.
In 2018, Apple introduced Screen Time as part of iOS 12. This feature is designed to alert users to their and their children’s device usage. The thinking goes that when such stark numbers are presented every weekend, people will begin to rethink the way they interact with the world around them. Tomorrow, Apple will finally launch the Vision Pro. This device is another effort to make people rethink the way they interact with the world, albeit in quite the opposite direction.
I’ve spent most of the past two years trying to break some of my worst pandemic habits. At the top of the list are all those nights you fell asleep watching some bad horror movie on your iPad. I’ve been better about this. I am reading more and embracing silence. That is, until this week. The moment the Vision Pro arrived, all that went out the window.
Now, there’s a certain point where a lot of this can be crossed out as part of my testing process. To review a product, you have to live with it as much as possible. In the case of Vision Pro, this means living my life through the product as much as possible. I take work calls on it, and use it to send emails and Slack messages. I listen to music through audio pods and use them – as mentioned above – to watch my stories.
Even my morning meditation practice has moved to headphones. It’s the classic paradox of using technology to help address some of the problems it introduced into our lives in the first place.
Although my job requires me to use the Vision Pro as much as possible while using it, I have to assume that my experience won’t be very different from that of most users. Again, you’ll want to get the most out of your $3,500 device as much as you can, which almost always translates into using it as much as you can.
When I wrote the first day of this magazine yesterday, I warned users about how easy it is to enter the world of Vision Pro. In a very real way, I wish I had listened to my own advice better. By the end of my first 24 hours, the nausea was starting to hit me hard. Your results, of course, will vary. I myself am prone to car and seasickness. That patch you see behind my right ear in some Vision Pro photos is for the former. (It’s probably a placebo, but sometimes fooling yourself is the best medicine.)
In fact, VR sickness and car sickness work in similar ways. They are caused by a mismatch between what your eyes and your inner ear perceive. Effectively, your brain is receiving conflicting signals that it is having trouble reconciling.
In some ways, this phenomenon gets to the core of something fundamental about mixed reality. Even in the world of augmented reality, there is a disconnect between what you see and what your body feels. The Vision Pro crossover is the best I’ve tried in a consumer device. Cameras capture your environment and transmit it to your eyes as quickly as possible. Using this technology, the headset can overlay computer graphics onto the real world — a phenomenon Apple refers to as “spatial computing.”
This leads to something important about this brave new world. Extended reality is not reality. It’s the world filtered through the computer screen. Now, we’re getting into an existential debate very quickly here.
This week I was reminded of what… One Samsung executive said When confronted with the fact that the company is “fakeing” the moon with its premium smartphones,[T]Here there is nothing like the real picture. Once you have sensors to capture something, you can reproduce it [what you’re seeing]This doesn’t mean anything. There is no real picture. You can try to identify a real photo by saying, “I took that photo,” but if you use AI to optimize the zoom, autofocus, and scene — is it real? Or is it all filters? There is no real picture, full stop.
Sorry, but I need to be more manly to have that specific conversation. However, for now, the Vision Pro makes me wonder how comfortable I will be in the future where my “screen time” largely involves attaching it to my face. The effect is undoubtedly interesting, suggesting some incredibly innovative applications in the near future (I’m sure we’ll see a number of these among the initial 600).
Preparing yourself for the future may be a combination of embracing cutting-edge technologies while knowing when to touch the grass. A 2.5-hour battery pack might not be the worst of all.