Pat Kane: The problems and promises of Apple’s Vision Pro

I’m writing this in the back of a touring van between gigs; we’re currently thundering around the edges of the Yorkshire Dales. Through my round-cornered, black-rubbered window, the rolling hills are themselves framed and scored by enclosure: raggedy trees demarcate the working pastures.

Sure, the blue sky is forcing its way through operatic clouds, hinting at the planet we’re on, and the universe it’s in. It might be good to stop and run out to a hill, connect the realms with cries and outstretched arms.

But we’re on a schedule and must maintain our velocity. So all of these vistas are scenes taken from a transit-van-shaped helmet. I might as well have a computer lashed to my face, constructing my reality for me.

I mention all that as a way of turning down the dial on the negativity and handwringing around Apple’s latest device – the virtual reality headset known as Vision Pro.

Here’s a newsflash: human animals have always liked it when plausible or entrancing visions appear in their everyday vision.

READ MORE: Everything you need to know about Saturday's Gaza demo

Shamen led their nomadic communities in fiery, costumed and often drug-fuelled collective ecstasies. Plato warned against our propensity to take the flickering shadows on the cave wall for reality. We’ve been subjecting ourselves to the sensory immersion of movies in “dream palaces” for nearly a century and a half.

So it’s not exactly revolutionary when some new “engineer of the soul” (to quote Stalin’s lightsome words) figures out how to make us delight, once more, in plausible simulations of possible worlds. But there are, and have always been, questions of power involved when we virtualise our reality.

Whose envisioning are we submitting to? How easily can we disengage from it, let alone shape or amend it? Does this mind-tech – whether feathers on a carved stick, or a computer on your face – give us more or less agency in our own lives?

So yes, I do compare the Apple Vision Pro to a ceremonial mask or head-dress. But I am also partial to those who declare VR devices the most monstrous of self-oppressions. The mighty straps that go behind, and sometimes across the head, like the headrest of a medieval torture chair…

There’s a hilarious new video where mega-mogul Mark Zuckerberg claims that his own Quest 3 VR device is not only “way cheaper, but way better” than Apple’s. He flips back to show his friend, Kenny, filming the boss through his Quest device he’s wearing. Kenny looks like an assimilated, three-eyed Borg-beast.

What Zuckerberg dismisses as mere “design decisions” from Apple are the whole point. Zuckerberg doesn’t mind that his VR headgear makes its users look like bad Doctor Who aliens.

Apple minds so much that it sets up an internal array of cameras to capture your eyes and features, so it can project a version of them to the outside, non-goggled world.

That the Apple product even tries to be like normal-wear – you could mistake them for jumbo-sized ski-glasses, at a pinch – indicates the company’s trajectory. These are eventually meant to be as easy as large sunglasses to wear, regularly and ubiquitously.

(They’re good at this kind of refinement. Think of the passage from the original iPod slab, through its miniaturisations, to its current status as an icon of an app.) The deepest bit of Vision Pro’s tech achievement – which Zuckerberg’s Quest 3 also features – is what they call “passthrough” technology (as if through a veil… The language remains, even if they don’t realise it, spiritual in tone).

READ MORE: Sir Chris Hoy diagnosed with cancer

What you seem to see in the device is everyday reality, overlaid by apps and screens and animations. What’s actually happening is that cameras on the device’s outside are mapping and then simulating your environs, into which they mix their infernal chunks of software (this is all beamed deep into your retina).

So “passthrough” tech controls your whole visual experience in these goggles. It’s not just an entirely imagined world, but a “mixed reality” brimming with icons and experiential options. If you’re wearing them to record family fun, you can even replay the data-file as a 3D experience.

The dearest of memories as a reality simulation. Should we let an information mega-corp into these spaces?

Many reviews of the Vision Pro have reported the most immersive experiences in photography and film – there’s even a crown-dial on the device which allows you to raise or lower the overlay of an alternative world.

No doubt, as it heads to sunglasses-status, Apple will want its device to become the default gear for your evening’s audio-visual entertainment.

But even entertainment is about to undergo its own revolution. And in doing so, it will reforge that old shamanic link between desire and visualisation.

The AI wizards OpenAI launched a text-to-video software called Sora this week. We’re all used to the credible textual responses to a textual prompt you can get from ChatGPT. Text-to-image is also well-served by the likes of Midjourney or Dall-E.

READ MORE: Inside the Scottish Labour conference

However, if you’ve seen recent text-to-video services (like Runway), they’re often goofy, even Dali-esque renditions of the request. Adverts in the recent SuperBowl break parodied their weirdness (like BodyArmor’s “Field of Fake”).

But Sora takes text-to-video to a new level. Request “a cat waking its owner up in bed, in the morning”, or “a glamorous Japanese woman walking down neon-lit city streets”, and you get extremely plausible and non-distorted film-like renditions of these prompts.

So now, anyone’s a movie-maker. Anything that’s describable, is visualisable.

Combine this with the expected evolution of Vision Pro (and “spatial computing” in general), and you may end up with the most gratifying – and addictive – form of culture ever created.

How lost could you become, sending commands to your “imagineering” (the old Disney term comes back to life here) to render your intimately desired world, entirely as you wish? In full resolution and surround-sound?

It’s time to remember the original scenario of Ready Player One, rendered adequately in the Spielberg movie. The virtual worlds that the body-suited protagonist disappears into are an escape from a shanty-town-like experience, social failure in brute reality. (Just to remind you, the game-world they plug into is called Oasis – standing for Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation).

After much clashing and battling between interests, the protagonist and his pals end up running the virtual world. But they “close the Oasis twice a week for people to spend more time in the real world” (Wikipedia). That’s not much of an exit from this dystopia. But it’s something that humans can do.

Again, if you want a moral crusade, the call would seem to be clear. The “polycrisis” of the times – our upheavals in climate, migration, automation – requires us to face reality squarely, keeping our eyes and ears open, strengthening our vital relationships. And guess who comes along to commodify, isolate and enclose our very experience, like the face-hugger in Alien, just in the nick of time?

I have to say: that’s not my take, entirely. These are the best of times and the worst of times, technologically. The smartphone that has taken over our lives is certainly a vector for addiction and distraction. It is also, potentially, the most democratic and deliberative instrument that humans could have devised.

How civic and progressive these technologies are is often a question of regulation and legislation, possible under national and continental jurisdictions (and mandates). Out of the many justifications you might make for the attainment of full Scottish nation-state independence, the ability to experiment with what the University of Edinburgh’s Futures Institute calls “techno-moral futures” is one of them.

So as I complete this piece – in a Travelodge pub, which about as much a simulation of reality as anything physical could be – I am thinking of Emerson’s phrase, “things are in the saddle and ride [human] kind”.

That’s a good caution. Let’s come back to this in five or 10 years. And let’s take our glimmering mirrorshades off, when we finally talk to each other.