PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
When I was a child playing too many videogames, I was told not to sit too close to the curved glass of the cathode-ray-tube TV lest it destroy my eyesight. In the 21st century, however, all the cool tech folk are literally strapping TVs to their faces, the twin LED glare pumping maximum nits into their glazed eyeballs from a distance of mere millimetres. That’s progress.
The strangest thing about Apple’s Vision Pro, however, is that it claims to be an augmented-reality device without actually being one. AR, as already found in fighter-jet cockpits and heads-up displays on some cars, overlays information on the user’s natural vision of the world around her. But in an Apple Vision Pro you don’t look at the world around you; you are watching a camera feed from the outside world displayed on TVs right in front of your eyes. It is a fully enclosed sensory-replacement device. In other words, a VR headset that wants to be an AR headset but isn’t. It’s this lack of optical passthrough that necessitates the outwardfacing display, showing a weird and uncanny approximation of the user’s eyes, which somehow maximises the creepiness of the whole thing while attempting to lessen it.