As far as adults are concerned the Apple Vision Pro seems to have landed with the cultural impact of an anime: That is to say it is SUPER interesting to a specific group of people (tech geeks and early adopters in this instance) while the rest of the population have yet to come into contact, let alone digested the $3,500 price tag. We are, after all, early. My suspicion now is that adults are largely impervious to the siren song of virtual reality. Our understanding of reality crystallised long ago and the augmenting thereof holds limited appeal beyond a 20 minute blast at Beat Saber before we run out of breath and need to sit down for a cup of tea.
I'm an early adopter of VR headsets, I was day one for both the PSVR1 and Quest 2 headsets, and I have been enthusiastic about the medium, but even I concede that once the novelty wears off it just isn't something I want to do very often. Strapping a computer to my face is just... Not the one. To get an adult to strap a computer and a screen to their face you need to be delivering astonishing amounts of value and that simply isn't happening today, even with the Vision Pro if reviews are to be believed.
But thats just, like, my opinion man, and I'm thirty nine which means my brain was fully cooked a while ago. Kids however? Who knows what they'll make of this. This is a prospect that scares me. We already have a lot of cultural discourse about "iPad Kids": A generation of children raised on iPads and iPhones who have only known a world in which the exact stimuli they want is available at all times creating scary unmeetable expectations around instant gratification for an entire generation.
About a year ago I read an article about Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome, it seemed a not-insignificant number of people were watching James Cameron's Avatar movies and then getting depressed because the real world couldn't compete with the beautiful vibrant world of Pandora (the setting of the films).
Honestly, as someone who currently lives in Croydon I get it. It do be looking grey out there. PADS is not a medically recognised condition, but it does seem to be a real phenomenon with real people experiencing real feelings of depression. I even found myself wanting to re-watch The Way of Water a week after my first viewing and I couldn't really articulate why. I guess it was all the blue sky!
What happens to a young, still forming mind (Apple Vision Pro is for 13 years and up) if it is introduced early to the concept of looking at the world through a head-mounted display? What if Apple (or Meta or Snap or whoever) decided that they wanted to increase the contrast and increase the saturation on the display just enough that the real world looked just a little brighter, a little bit more vibrant, when viewed through their headset?
Have you ever had a pair of sunglasses that tinted your vision and made the world pop a little more, and then you take them off and you're reminded the world doesn't look like that? Imagine that effect but your perception of colour, contrast and vibrancy is controlled by a mega-cap and then add the ability to display virtual screens, videos, games and gifs anywhere and everywhere you look. Again, I don't think most adults will care to live in that world, we're already acclimatised to horrible stupid reality, but the kids that are already trained killers at Call of Duty by the age of three? Who knows what these kids are capable of acclimatising to. And when they take the headset off and the colours go away... How will the real world look to them? Croydon is, after all, an acquired taste.
Maybe I'm clutching my pearls and worrying about the kids the same way previous generations worried about the influence of video games and rock and roll. I'm definitely approaching the age! And its definitely too early to panic, but It does bear considering. The only thing I know for sure is that this three year old is the reason I don't login to Call of Duty anymore. My ego can't take it.
(First published on LinkedIn)
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