The reviews are in, and the tech press is lauding the Apple Vision Pro headset for delivering on the company’s promises. It’s well-designed, the video and sound are startlingly precise, the “Minority Report”-style gestural interface is future-tastic. Nobody’s exactly sure what it’s for, or whether even the Readiest Players One will spend $3,500 on it, but hey — that’s gadgets for you.
Still, this is a new gadget frontier. The Vision Pro, like the similarly kitted-out Quest 3 and Quest Pro headsets from Meta, uses what’s known as “passthrough” video — cameras and other sensors that capture imagery of the outside world and reproduce it inside the device. They feed you a synthetic environment made to look like the real one, with Apple apps and other non-real elements floating in front of it. Apple and Meta are hoping that this virtual world will be so compelling that you won’t just visit. They’re hoping you’ll live there.
That, unfortunately, could have some very weird and very messy consequences for the human brain. Researchers have found that widespread, long-term immersion in VR headsets could literally change the way we perceive the world — and each other. “We now have companies who are advocating that you spend many hours each day in them,” says Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. “You’ve got many, many people, and they’re wearing it for many, many hours. And everything magnifies at scale.”