Vision like a Pro

Apple VR, Spatial Computing, Seeing and Truth

In the midst of the ChatGPT AI storm that has taken over much of the technology discussion this year and even made its way to Congress with talks of the existential risk to humanity posed by AI, Apple released its first new product since the Apple Watch in 2014. The new release is a VR headset called the VisionPro. With the release of the headset, Apple announced,

“Welcome to the era of spatial computing.”

You can watch the full promotional video of the VisionPro headset here.

While Chat GPT is a pure text based platform, the Apple VisionPro seeks to extend the act of seeing and interacting with one’s environment by creating a platform in which all the apps you would find on a laptop or iPhone are now in your visual sphere. Instead of a keyboard or touchscreen interface, you can control the applications with the movement of your eye or finger.

To make the product a more integrated part of your environment, Apple is calling it an augmented reality headset instead of a pure virtual reality because you will still see the outside “world” around you, furniture, people, walls, and not be enclosed inside some virtual world of avatars and digital settings. With this one move, the Vision Pro leaped past the enclosures of the “Metaverse” which many have said is already dead.

“Apple VisionPro seamlessly blends digital content with your physical space.”

It’s hard to say at this point if the VR headset will be revolutionary like the iPhone or travel the same road to oblivion as the Google glass. My guess is somewhere in between. Early tech reviews are favorable but the underlying question is “what will it be used for?” Apple has called it the first step toward “spatial computing” and hinted that the headset could one day replace the MacBook for many applications. Time will tell but Apple has had a successful history of creating new products that define a generation of technological tools that work within its own “ecosystem”.

Before Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs’ death, he hinted that a home entertainment system was the next direction for Apple. For years, consumers waited for a revolutionary AppleTV but instead got a watch which disappointed many of the Apple enthusiasts. Perhaps this Headset is the realization of that initial vision for the next generation of home entertainment, introduced at a time when virtual reality is becoming more available to consumers at home but not yet a household product.

“An immersive way to experience entertainment.”

Thinking about this long term, one wonders whether this product will announce the next leap towards some sort of transhumanist future where human and technology become further merged together. It does seem more closer to some sci-fi reality than a text based chatbot. The other technofuture scenario out there is being on worked on by the company Nueralink who are trying to create a similar digital/physical hybrid reality through chip implants in the brain. That may sound crazy but it just received FDA approval for human trials and has some big time investors behind it, including Elon Musk who is its cofounder, as well as a cofounder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

That said, if we are on the cusp of some new technological epoch, creating products that impact our vision seems like a much more viable way to do it than chip implants in one’s neurons.

Apple’s product has a compelling name, Vision. If we take a step back, the unique mystery of our own vision takes us back to the archaic roots of our own human story. One way to approach this primordial ability is to look back at the language of thinkers at the dawn of biological science before the discovery of the genetic code, back at a time when biologists and naturalists studied the mobility of creatures, their physiognomy and senses, and their interactions with environments.

I recently had the opportunity to read one such work, Oswald Spengler’s Man and Technics, an early 20th century work that meditates on the relationship of the human, nature, and “technics”. He had an interesting point on how our sense of vision developed as predators and how this instinctual looking formed the way we see our environment.

He states,

In itself every being lives in Nature, in an environment, irrespective of whether it notices this environment, or is noticeable in it, or neither. But it is the relation - mysterious, inexplicable by any human reasoning - that is established between animal and environment by touching, ordering, and understanding, which creates out of mere environment a world-around.¹

This idea of creating a world of sense and meaning was adopted from the biologist Jacob von Uexkull, a German naturalist and biologist, largely forgotten but credited as one of the first scientists to study the environment, the umwelt. His work would be formative of later 20th century philosophers like Martin Heidegger and his concept of being in the world.

Further on Spengler states,

The higher herbivores are ruled by the ear, but above all by scent; the higher carnivores on the other hand rule with the eye. Scent is the characteristically defensive sense…. But the eye of the preying animal gives a target.²

This fixating on the prey as a target is a feature of predators, including us humans, who have two eyes that look straight forward as apposed to herbivores whose eyes are on the side of their head to look for danger. By “binding” the prey in their fixated gaze, carnivores create a world in which they are in command. “The world-picture is the environment as commanded by the eyes.” In other words, the ordering and dominating of the world is first made possible by the way we look at the world as predators.³

If we move from the basic instincts of looking and hunting, to the art of thinking in philosophy and the sciences, we can see that vision is a central feature of the language of the western tradition. Vision is connected to discovering the truth. We can see this in Plato’s allegory of the cave where the sun enables one to see the true “ideas” and down even into Heidegger’s philosophy where he uses the Greek word Aletheia, meaning “unconcealment”, to approach the truth of being.

Both the religious/mystical tradition, with the “vision of the blessed”, and the scientific tradition with the ideas of “Enlightenment” and “flashing on the lightbulb”, are rooted in a language of vision as understanding.

Seeing is believing.

If we keep this trajectory of human vision in mind, then the next stage of technological development through an enhancement of vision doesn’t seem so farfetched and the introduction of the VisionPro could be another watershed moment. The idea of wearing a headset isnt too outlandish since we have had glasses in use for a while. In fact our own modern myths, via the comics and sci fi, already have a few super heroes who wear headsets all the time, the X-man Cyclops and Geordi La Forge from Star Trek, are two that come to mind.

What we should be kept in mind is what we may loose from our vision if this technology does take off and becomes ubiquitous like the mobile phone. The VR headset is translucent, it lets the light of the outside world reach us so we are not fully enclosed but in that regards creates a blurring of reality. Unlike the Matrix which created a duality of being inside or outside the matrix, with the headset digital and physical world come together. But the effect may be more detrimental because the physical world would be more and more mediated by a digital overlay with the applications and filters to augment one’s world around giving the impression that this is the way world really is. Our vision of the world would become completely mediated by technology, whether we know it or not.

This maybe the next natural step in what Heidegger called the complete enframing of the world by technology. Everyone in their little bubble with its dashboard of applications to help navigate through an interconnected world, similar to driving a car where physical and digital become integrated in a shared immersive experience.

“Nature loves to hide” the saying goes. Perhaps this new cloak of technology is its latest hiding place. One day younger generations may ask us what it was like seeing before headsets, the same way kids ask adults how they made plans or hung out before cell phones. For now at least, I recommend going outside, free of headset or any screen, and just looking around during a casual walk. If you have access to paints and a canvas, bring them along as well and see what happens. Like books from an earlier era, these paintings may be the remnants of human vision before it was mutated by digital screens.

1. Spengler, Oswald, Man and Technics, p. 24

2. Ibid.

3. The work will go on to discuss the hand and tool and the development of “technics” which will splinter us humans from animals.