Apple’s Black Mirror

I couldn’t resist jotting down some initial thoughts about the Vision Pro, Apple’s new ‘spatial computer’ announced yesterday at WWDC.

I’m slightly reluctant to write about it, given this is pretty much all we’ll read about in the technology press until it launches early next year. But when the world’s biggest and most successful technology company launches a new platform, it’s worth paying attention.

What they announced isn’t revolutionary – although Apple’s executives found no shortage of other adjectives to use, of course.

Just ask Facebook Meta, who’ve been fumbling around in virtual reality since they acquired Oculus in 2014. They chose to pre-announce the next iteration of their Quest headset a few days prior to Apple’s keynote. Sure, this was pitifully desperate and breathtakingly stupid, but these are the people who tied to make ‘metaverse’ a thing, remember.

Beautifully creepy

Meta’s timing was especially embarrassing as, like with the iPod and iPhone before it, competing products often appear painfully clumsy once Apple enters the market.

The Vision Pro borrows heavily from the design language of the Apple Watch, featuring the same Digital Crown (used here to adjust how immersed a user is within their virtual environment), while the headband shares its DNA with the design of their wrist straps.

Objectively, this is a sophisticated product, yet one with several trade-offs needed to make an unsettling and unwieldy form factor workable.

That it covers a large part of the wearer’s face is the most challenging aspect that required a compelling solution; projecting the user’s face onto an outward-facing screen is creepy as hell, but it is such an answer. I suspect this is something we’ll soon grow comfortable with.

The tethered battery is another trade-off. Is it perfect? No, but better than the alternative for a device designed to be worn for long periods of time. Again, this is a problem that will disappear given enough time and innovations in battery technology.

For all these trade-offs, there are no hand controllers. Instead, outward facing sensors track your hand movements. For keyboard input, Apple believes the best way to achieve this is to… use a physical keyboard.

Unlike Meta, they’ve not tried to recreate the entire world in a virtual reality space (complete with disembodied avatars) but rather allow users to choose a level of immersion suitable for a given task.

Unsurprisingly, Apple have flexed their design chops and employed a degree of emotional intelligence to create something that can resonate with an audience beyond gamers – or at least once the price is more hospitable.

Deception, disinformation and despair

This announcement comes in a year in which an already fast-paced technology industry has pushed down hard on the accelerator. I’m still wrapping my head around large language and image diffusion models, and the impact they may have.

Honestly, I’m uncomfortably close to feeling old and irrelevant. My thoughts turn to my nieces – the eldest only 12 years old – and the technology landscape they’re inheriting. It’s a far cry from computer rooms filled with IBM 386s, that’s for sure.

Computing was once exciting, the Internet captivating and yet, today, I’m concerned about the future networked computing is leading us towards. Is it one of personal (if not entirely intelligent) assistants, helping us generate ideas and perform routine tasks. Or are they stealing our work and making us unemployable?

This brave new world of machine learning arrives just as the sun sets on a previous era of technical wonderment and realignment with social media.

We thought social networks would help us better connect and communicate, be that sharing what we had for breakfast or overturning authoritarian regimes. A decade later, they’ve sown discord and disinformation, empowered populists and enabled genocide and white supremacy.

Augmented reality is another magical form of deception.

Technologists, not content with having designed software that makes stuff up, and networks to distribute untruths, now demonstrate hardware which can pipe distortions directly into our eyeballs.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

I’m left questioning the purpose of spatial computing.

I’m not sure Apple gave much of an answer, at least not during this keynote. Beyond a limited set of industrial and educational applications, how does spatial computing improve people’s lives or make us more productive?

Clearly it’s not much help when designing a Formula 1 car – I snorted when they mentioned the Vision Pro being used to develop Alfa Romeo’s car, with the team languishing near the bottom of the constructors’ championship.

You could make the case that a single device that replaces many can reduce electronic waste over time; they mentioned the Vision Pro providing a better experience than a big screen television, surround sound speakers and a computer combined. This promise never delivers; technology only ever accumulates.

So really, what problem does this solve? I think the answer arrived when Disney’s CEO Bob Iger strode on stage to talk-up the possibilities it offers his entertainment conglomerate. You could almost sense the collective orgasm emanating from Hollywood. Just think, endless opportunities for repackaging franchises for this new spatial format and perhaps, finally, finding an audience for 3D.

That is, I think, the problem this device solves. Companies want our undivided attention, and this device can provide it. Netflix’s CEO Reid Hoffman once said that their biggest competitor is sleep; do tech billionaires dream of spatially augmented sheep?

A dystopian vision

When demonstrating visionOS, I was excited by the new UI paradigms and the possibilities working in an immersive environment may offer. Yet whenever the film cut to a person alone in their home, reality resurfaced with a discordant thud.

Parts of the presentation wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of Black Mirror, which isn’t a great look. As Daniel Jalkut said, even Apple can’t humanise the dystopian hell scape we’re evolving into.

Fundamentally, this is a device founded on the premise that reality needs improvement – and only Apple can do this.

With a war raging in Europe and the climate on the brink of irreparable damage, who wouldn’t want an escape. But is withdrawal from the real world the answer?

Apple believes it is. Are they right? Or have its teams in Cupertino misread the room; an occupational hazard when you’ve got an oversized Apple Watch strapped to your face.