My life is presided over by beams of light shining through sheets of toughened glass. I’m hardly unique in this respect. Screens, whether perched on stands, surface-mounted, on our laps or in our hands, inform, entertain and orient us, facilitating our work, our creativity, our social lives.
Many of us have fretted over their growing allure, and from time to time tech firms have addressed these anxieties with time-management tools to remind us of life beyond the LCD and the OLED: Your Time on Facebook, Time Spent on Instagram, Google’s Digital Wellbeing, Apple’s Screen Time. They provide some acknowledgment, however cursory, that we might want to look away.
The alternative, of course, is for us to lean in — literally — and accept that, whether by historical accident or fiendish design, we’ve developed a dependence on screens. Maybe we should embrace them, even become as one with them, with information popping up in our field of vision whenever and wherever we wish.
Apple’s Vision Pro is the most impressive realisation of this idea yet. It’s a headset worn over the eyes, but ingenious camera and display technology beams your surroundings back at you with exceptional clarity while overlaying it with digital content: icons, menus, apps and as many screens as you want, all easily moveable and resizable. Perhaps its most remarkable quality is the understated realism of that synthesis, with virtual objects casting subtle shadows and reflecting light as if they were really in the room.
“We wanted to make sure that you felt like you were where you were,” says Richard Howarth, Apple’s vice-president of industrial design. “So we put an awful lot of effort into the clarity — of the glass, the optics, the whole system — to make sure you didn’t feel separated from it.” This is full digital immersion, but you don’t feel imprisoned by it — indeed, Alan Dye, Apple’s vice-president of human interface design, contrasts the “freedom” of the Vision Pro with the way you’re “locked in” to a standard screen. “Tim [Cook, Apple’s CEO] often talks about how it’s the first [Apple] product you look through, and not at,” he says. “I think that’s a lovely sentiment.”
The form has a chequered history. The first consumer VR headsets, the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, started shipping back in 2016, but the target market (boundary-pushing gamers) was relatively niche and has arguably remained so. VR is about transporting you to otherworldly realms and its problems are well documented: there are the practical difficulties of effectively being blindfolded (eg, making sure you don’t knock over drinks or stumble into furniture) and some people experience headaches and motion sickness. VR has felt a little like 3D: a technology marketed enthusiastically but falling short of mass adoption.
Then came “passthrough” functionality, which finally gave headset wearers a view of their surroundings. It was a revelation when it came to the mass market with the Meta Quest (the successor to Oculus Rift) but the monochrome graininess of the image was more a proof of concept. The Meta Quest 3, launched in October 2023, upped the passthrough quality to a point where Meta could reasonably bill it as a mixed-reality device, merging the real world and the digital for less than £500.
Apple avoids using the terms mixed reality and augmented reality. “The Mac brought us personal computing, the iPhone mobile computing, the Vision Pro spatial computing,” says Howarth. “This isn’t a single-purpose gaming device — it’s designed to be a broad platform. Just open your imagination and figure out what you want to use it for. This is the beginning of a long journey. We wanted to create something that will be as consequential, over time, as the Mac or the iPhone.”
Confronted with it for the first time, I had no idea what I wanted to use this spatial computer for, if anything. My VR experiences had taught me that I have limited interest in thrashing about wildly in an empty room to battle a marauding foe. But the Vision Pro is an enticing object that makes you want to give it a go at least — the aerospace-like visor contrasting beautifully with the band that secures it to your head. Once it’s on it feels strange — how could it not? — but the speed with which you start to feel comfortable is a testament to Apple’s engineering.
When I realised I could highlight an icon or menu item simply by looking at it, I laughed out loud. Selecting that item — effectively clicking it — didn’t require me to reach out and push it; I just had to tap my thumb and forefinger together while my hand rested naturally in my lap. “Oh, you’re kidding me,” I muttered as I quickly got the hang of scrolling, just by holding my thumb and forefinger together and slightly moving it left or right, up and down: subtle movements, almost imperceptible to anyone else in the room.
These quiet interactions are in stark contrast to the all-encompassing nature of the Vision Pro’s display. If you want to feel transported, apps like “Encounter Dinosaurs” are a great example of interactive VR, while the Apple TV app showcases immersive productions such as Adventure, featuring 360º footage of highwire walker Faith Dickey suspended between two craggy Norwegian peaks.
These kind of “wow” moments are almost expected from a flagship device like this. But the idea of spatial computing really clicked when I realised I could bring my Mac’s screen into the Vision Pro and plonk it anywhere in my field of vision alongside other content. I’ve been wanting a standing desk and a bigger screen for a while, and now I effectively had both, in any room in my house, or my garden, or even (thanks to the Vision Pro’s “Environments”, which are like desktop wallpapers writ large) Haleakalā National Park in Hawaii.
The other significant surprise was that I wasn’t desperate to take it off, and when I did, there wasn’t a sigh of relief. In fact, I looked forward to putting it back on again. I realised I could do a working day in this thing.
Comfortable spatial computing comes with its niggles, however, not least the price: Vision Pro’s state-of-the-art technology starts at £3,499, seven times that of a Meta Quest 3. As the FT reported in July, that price point means that sales have started comparatively slowly — market tracker Omdia predicts it will sell 350,000 units this year, as against the iPad, which sold nearly 20mn units in its first year. But it also predicts that uptake will grow quickly, increasing to 750,000 in 2025, then 1.7mn in 2026.
Another niggle is the external battery pack (to keep the weight of the headset down) that attaches via a power cable trailing down from around your left temple. “That was a trade-off we made, because we think it’s the right thing to do,” says Howarth. “If you could take apart a Vision Pro and look inside it, you’d understand that it really is as powerful, light and efficient as we could make it.”
Some other pain points stop the Vision Pro becoming an automatic alternative to traditional screen time. One is typing: anything more than a few words demands an external Bluetooth keyboard, which feels antithetical to the all-in-one spirit of the device. The other is social. I was happy to wear the Vision Pro when alone, less keen when people were around. Those people will also have had views on whether they wanted to hang out with someone wearing a visor, passthrough or no passthrough.
Apple has tried to ameliorate these concerns and give the Vision Pro a socially acceptable sheen. Set-up involves the creation of a 3D likeness of your face that is displayed during FaceTime video calls, along with uncanny reconstructions of your facial movements. Your “Persona” is also used for a feature called EyeSight, where a likeness of your eyes (again, complete with movements) is displayed on the exterior of the Vision Pro while you’re wearing it.
“We were mindful of the fact that [the device] could easily disconnect you from those around you,” says Dye. “Eyes are so important for connection, and EyeSight was the result of a lot of invention across design and engineering.” Howarth describes it as an idea that initially seemed impossible. “We had to invent technology that, in real time, could understand where the eyes are, take that data and create eyes on the outside of the product that would seem like they were part of the face.”
That Personas and EyeSight work at all is extraordinary, but it’s not altogether surprising that they were deemed “weird” and “spooky” by my friends and family. Dye’s wish for the Vision Pro to be a device people “enjoy wearing around others” isn’t likely to be fulfilled in the short term.
The problem is the tension, as technology currently stands, between the social acceptability of devices worn over the eyes and their actual capabilities. Bluntly, the bigger they are, the more they do and the better they do it. There’s not much difference between a pair of Ray-Bans and the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, because the Smart ones are very lightly equipped (camera, speaker and microphone, but no display.) Devices like the XReal Air2 Pro and Viture Pro XR resemble chunky shades, and do have a display, but are optimised for watching videos or gaming. The G1, a new pair of smart glasses made by Even Realities, could be mistaken for a standard pair of specs — a real achievement — but in-vision content is restricted to subtle notifications in green text. Miniaturisation is happening apace, though. A research team at Stanford University recently published a paper in Nature describing prototype specs (“compact, wearable”) that display sophisticated holographic 3D imagery, while a UAE-based firm, XPANCEO, showcased smart contact lenses at the recent MWC show in Barcelona, and two weeks ago Mark Zuckerberg revealed the prototype for Meta’s Orion, a pair of 100g augmented reality glasses — which, while cable-free, have to be used in conjunction with an external wristband and smartphone-sized “compute puck”, and no launch date is set.
Apple’s Vision Pro doesn’t aim to hit the sweet spot of convenience and functionality. It’s simply the most sophisticated glimpse into the future of the screen that consumers could be expected to shell out for. But it makes no bones about its ambitions for omnipresence. After a week or so of using it, I checked its Screen Time settings. Unlike the Mac, iPad or iPhone, the option to “limit usage” isn’t present on the Vision Pro. The idea of “looking away” is outdated, it seems. Life is a screen. You just decide what appears on it.
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