Augmenting Reality
Over the past few days, I’ve been playing around with the Vision Pro, Apple’s new mixed reality headset. Of the many uses and potential workflows I’ve been building, the ability for the device to create an immersive entertainment experience is unparalleled and beyond even my lofty expectations. (I did pay $4k+ for the thing; expectations were high).
As I sat in my living room, transformed for a moment into a lakeside outdoor movie theatre with a 100 foot screen, I realized something else.
In my previous home, I had set up the full suite of smart devices: speakers, door lock, thermostats, etc. Most importantly and impactful on a daily basis: lights. I could turn any light in the house on or off from a device or by calling out to one of the Siri orbs I had in each room.
Since moving last autumn, I’ve missed the lights the most. It’s less the “tremendous effort of needing to get up and press a light switch” and more that a subtle shift had to happen in how I thought. Remembering to turn the lights off downstairs, getting up to “set” the room up for a movie, etc.
That thing I realized while demoing the Vision Pro’s movie capabilities: I hadn’t turned off the lights. My living room was as brightly lit as it had been when I was preparing dinner a few hours previously.
And it didn’t matter, because the device had transported me to a darkened movie theatre.
It’s not just the pure VR experiences, too. When viewing photos or focusing on things in certain apps, the device automatically “darkens” the space around you. It’s as if you dimmed the lights in your room, except you didn’t touch them.
Augmented reality is leapfrogging our need to control physical spaces.
I’ve already seen examples online of people placing a “TV” on an empty wall using the device, or hanging “art” around their workspace. I recall school dorm rooms when students, disinterested in purchasing full sized posters (let alone having anything framed) would simply print out art they liked on the library’s colored printers and tape the images to the wall. We’ve reached the next step.
As the technology we’re talking about here gets better, I believe it will fundamentally change the way we think about physical spaces. Same way that the modern personal computer completely amended communication, data management, filing, etc. (I was recently at an art museum that featured a desk from the 1700s. The sheer amount of storage space for “documents” one would need on a daily basis was staggering. All obsolete now.”
It is not out of the question that this will have a fundamental and real impact on almost every aspect of life just as computers, and just as mobile devices have already had.
I believe, as more people experienced this, more people will begin to understand quite how much things are about to change. I understand why Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are pushing so hard on this technology. (I also think that Zuckerberg has access to prototypes in Meta labs that are way, way better than what they are shipping right now).
Truly a remarkable frontier. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.