Vision Pro can capture your reality too, with 3D cameras that can record, say, your daughter’s birthday party. To film it, you’d need to wear them throughout the key moments – but when your relationship with your daughter is ruined because you wore your silly goggles during every important day in her life, you can obsessively relive all that you’ve lost in 3D, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
But Apple’s most brilliantly chilling feature is Personas, where the goggles scan your face, generating a synthetic 3D version of you for video chats. That way the person you’re FaceTiming can see your goggle-free head – except it’s not your head, it’s a slightly off digital simulation that moves with yours, in real time. You can age, cut your hair, get pimples, but your virtual face will look the same. Perhaps you can use someone else’s Persona? Imagine the possibilities for Catfishing Pro!
Real deal or very deep fake?Credit: iStock
To stop the goggles disconnecting their users from those around them, Apple invented EyeSight, which makes anyone who walks in front of you appear on the screen, allowing children to interrupt their parents’ work like never before.
But if we buy kids their own Vision Pros, they’ll be too busy with virtual screens to bother us. Perhaps someday our AI-powered personas can handle conversations with our kids’ personas, saying what we would have said if either of us stopped looking at your screen? The AI could red-flag feedback like, “Daddy never spends time with me”.
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Then your digital persona could take your kid to the park. If they kept the goggles on, it’d be like you were right there with them, without the inconvenience of you needing to be.
Only Apple would have the tech nous to invent sophisticated virtual reality goggles, while also having the aesthetic insight to realise they look terrible, and then invent a way to make it look like we’re not wearing them.
I don’t want to experience a disconnected world where everyone just wears goggles all day. But if I put on the Vision Pro, this begoggled dystopia will disappear, and I’ll be out in fake nature, talking to real people’s digitally-approximated faces. It’s a brave new world that, via clever software, looks almost like the old one.
Dom Knight is a writer, broadcaster and co-host of the Chaser Report podcast.