The Vision Pro has only been out for a few days and already the Macalope is afraid of having to put his shoe down. Please don’t wear the Vision Pro in public again, at least until we can figure out what’s going on.
This should only take around ten years.
The Macalope won’t link to them, but so far we’ve seen people eating a meal at a restaurant wearing the Vision Pro, people crossing the street with the Vision Pro, and people driving on the highway wearing the Vision Pro.
Not surprisingly, some of them turned out to be the same. It’s a strange coincidence, isn’t it?
There’s definitely a lot of performative behavior going on here. If you’re wearing a Vision Pro on the highway in a Cybertruck in automatic driving and performing gestures that don’t do anything in visionOS, then you’re performing well. Some of these people later admitted to making up fake scenarios with the device to attract social media attention.
People do things to attention? GOOD. Now the Macalope has seen it all.
Are they deliberately trying to make you hate the Vision Pro? It’s possible, but it’s probably less so than if they’re just trying to promote themselves.
How should we deal with these Vision Pro misjudgments? After spending years bashing Google Glass, the Macalope can’t very well suddenly say it’s OK to go out and wear a Vision Pro.
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Wait, right? No, it seems like that would be lazy.
The one thing he’ll say about laziness, though, is that it’s really easy. But no, he won’t do that.
There are of course big differences between Glass and Vision Pro. Glass was an aggressive social device (Macalope is trying not to use “in your face” here but it’s really difficult) that included facial recognition technology. Vision Pro is, at least currently, more focused on media consumption and productivity. It is of course still capable of capturing video, but it is also much more intrusive, certainly at a distance. No one will secretly record you entering this store that was canceled due to the owner’s obnoxious opinions on Taylor Swift and Chad McFootball (I think that’s his name). You can see people wearing Vision Pro coming from a mile away. And then cross the street safely to avoid them. Less because the Vision Pro is such a threat to you and more because anyone wearing one for a walk is probably not someone you want to try to strike up a conversation with. All they want to talk about is their Vision Pro.
Casey Neistat had a somewhat charming experience with the Vision Pro on the streets of New York. Toward the end of his video, Neistat notes that the Vision Pro, in its current form, is a glimpse into the future, a future that will feature a much smaller headset. And when that happens, you can expect to see more and more Vision Pros (and similar devices) in the wild. It’s a future that some actively oppose.
To be fair, the Macalope is also wary of it and is quite opposed to it in public. Want to use the Vision Pro in the privacy of your own home? Knock yourself out. Spatial computing currently appears to have some rough edges, but it is an interesting new interaction model. Do you want to watch a movie or take a ride on a plane? Yeah OK. Being stuck in a tin can launched into the sky with 150 strangers is an acceptable time to check out.
But you want to be in a headset and interact with the excited person on the street? Difficult pass. Unless we talk a little specifically about the Vision Pro. But these 15 minutes will be everything.
The slippery slope to total aspiration in a digital world has turned into a greased water channel in an off-brand theme park, fast and dangerous. There is a time and a place for everything. The Vision Pro is in camera.
