i wouldn’t normally be concerned since any company releasing a VR product with this price tag is obviously going to fail… but it’s apple and somehow through exquisite branding and sleek design they have managed to create something that resonated with “tech reviewers” and rich folk who can afford it.
what’s really concerning is that it’s not marketed as a new VR headset, it’s marketed by apple and these “tech reviewers” as the new iphone, something you take with you everywhere and do your daily tasks in, consume content in etc…
and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.
this is why i think all these tech giants (google meta apple etc) were/are interested in the “metaverse”. it holds both your vision and your hearing hostage, you cannot do anything else when using it but to just use the thing. a 100% efficiency attention machine, completely blocking you from the outside world.
i’m not concerned about this iteration as much as people are not hyped about this iteration. just like how people are hyped about the next apple vision, i’m more worried about the next iterations with somewhat lower price tag and better software availability. i hope it flops and i know it probably won’t achieve any sort of mainstream adoption even if it’s deemed a success because it probably can’t get less bulky and look less dorky, but the possibility is still worrying. what are your thoughts?
I have so much to say about this, I hardly know where to start. A few brief points:
Yes, this product direction is problematic in many many ways. There is a reason why science fiction has been speculating about these types of devices for decades and nearly always portraying the technology as an escape mechanism for a horrifying dystopian reality.
We’ve experienced several really big technology revolutions in just a few decades (pc, internet, social, mobile). All have brought wonderful improvements to life, but all have had profound, and unanticipated side effects. In all instances, we would have benefited as a society by interrogating consequences more completely at the beginning, rather than just letting market forces alone to drive them into mass adoption.
The good news is that none of this is really new. This appears to be a pretty good implementation of a UI model that consumers have been largely rejecting for over 30 years. There are absolutely very useful, very good uses for these UIs, but these are niche markets overall all.
In many ways, XR (a catch all term for both VR and AR) is a retro futuristic idea. This is a vision of the future as seen 40 years ago. Really innovative human computer interfacing doesn’t look like this anymore. Actually useful innovation involves things like agents, voice ui’s and so on (think Jarvis from the MCU).
The question is, can Apple’s marketing prowess and effectively infinite budget push a largely unpleasant, unneeded, and expensive product into mass adoption? I am hopeful that they can’t. I am hopeful that reality isn’t sci-fi dystopian enough to create a wide market for this. If they can, it may say more about how dystopian our real reality has become. That’s the really worrisome part to me.
Excuse me but ‘voice UI’ is a hell of a lot more retro futuristic than XR. That shit has been around in sci-fi for 60+ years easy and in real life for decades at this point and is still absolutely horrible to use for just about anything more complex than setting a timer and adding things to a list.
Let me clarify. My complaint about the retro-futuristic nature of XR is not the age of the idea. The problem is that this approach has been speculated about and productized in various ways for decades. Through all of that, it has never amounted to more than niche applications, has been rejected by wider markets repeatedly, and failed to inspire much more imagined usefulness beyond being an escape vehicle from some kind of real-world hellscape. Despite all of that, entities like apple insist on trying again, and again, and again. I am convinced that Tim Cook sees this as the future because of the residue of his childhood musing about the future. I know for a fact that Zuckerberg is motivated by exactly that.
Now let’s compare that to audio UIs. These have also been around for a long time. In that time, they have only become more pervasive, useful and inspirational (see again my reference to Jarvis). Additionally, I’m not just talking about the audio part of that interface. I’m talking about the agents that can act independently, and spontaneously to help humans do what the want to do. We are making tremendous progress on that front, but Apple is (in terms of this product line) mired in the past.