Here we are.
Apple has finally presented its Augmented Reality viewer, it’s called Vision Pro, it looks like a diving mask and costs $3,499.
Many they praise it for its technical characteristicsfor the 5,000 patents it has generated, for the immediate availability of services as soon as they become available and for biometric authentication.
Many others they criticize it for the aesthetics, the price, the low autonomy, the sense of isolation and separation from reality that it could induce in users.
Unfortunately too often, and this case is no exception, we tend to confuse the device with the change that this is potentially capable of enabling.
What Apple presented is not a device, it is an epochal change that will soon take place in habits of people and in the ways of creating and marketing applications, contents and services.
I know that looking closely it is a product not up to Apple standards: awkward, ugly, with a power cord so awful that Jony Ive, Apple’s former head of design for years, will probably be speechless for hours after seeing it; but it must be understood that what has been presented is not the first version, but the zero version. A prototype taken out of the research laboratories and made “presentable” against the opinion of the engineers who judged it not yet ready.
Exclusive preview
We used and wore Vision Pro, Apple’s headset for virtual and augmented reality
by our correspondent Bruno Ruffilli
I would have liked it differently, I recently wrote about it here, but it is still early, too soon.
Do you remember it there presentation of the first iPhone at Macworld 2007? Well, it was all fake. That device didn’t work, it was a prototype in which a particular operating sequence had been inserted and the whole thing stood up only if that sequence was followed perfectly, even in that case the engineers were against the presentation, iPhone was not ready yet, but for Steve Jobs it was time to introduce him. We are talking about a device so lame that in its first commercial version it didn’t even have copy and paste and the App Store. Yet we all know how it went: 200 billion dollars in revenues generated by the iPhone in 2022 alone and, more importantly, a radical change introduced in the habits of the population. The rest is history.
What Steve Jobs presented in 2007 was not a product, it was the hub of a nascent ecosystem of applications, content and services, an enabler of innovation so powerful that today there are 7 billion smartphones in the world that are either iPhones or inspired devices. to iPhone in terms of form, functionality, aesthetics of the operating system or business model.
I know what many of you are thinking: “Apple has also been inspired by others in its history, starting with the mouse which was a Xerox invention!” Very true, but the truth is that creativity and innovation are also based on being inspired by the ideas of others by giving them new capabilities to generate value. It’s normal and everyone does it. Oh, by the way, the mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964.
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by our correspondent Bruno Ruffilli
Today, sixteen years later, we consider the first version of the iPhone to be a poor device that, despite its characteristics, has managed to radically transform the lives of the majority of the population.
Tomorrow we will look at Vision Pro with the same feelings we feel today for the first version of the iPhone and we will wonder how it was possible, in the past, not to have smart glasses capable of providing us with applications, contents and services directly in our field of vision and as a personal assistant in most of our life’s activities.
We will always have before our eyes all the information we need to go shopping, to work, to play, to chat with friends, and we will be able to immerse ourselves in a video game, film or TV series simply by requesting our content from smart phones. glasses with voice or looking in the right direction inside our glasses.
The main actor of this change, from the point of view of the devices, could be Apple, but they could also be others, what matters, as I wrote at the beginning, is not the device itself, but the change it is able to enable .
This change will be so radical that in my last book Lives Increased I have included it among the great guidelines that will lead humanity to be “increased” thanks to the use of future technologies. Lives made easier thanks to machines capable of doing many of the tasks we find tiring or unpleasant for us. Healthier and longer lives thanks to the huge availability of health data and artificial intelligence algorithms capable of enabling predictive medicine. Lives increased thanks to the enormous potential offered by augmented reality and virtual reality and thanks to devices such as Apple’s Vision Pro and its evolutions.
As human beings we will soon be able to start enjoying the new services that will be made available to us, instead, lawmakers will have to work immediately to intercept potential abuses which surely someone will try to implement while companies will have to immediately equip themselves to bring all their applications and all their services within this new large ecosystem because if today it is unthinkable not to be present on end users’ smartphones, tomorrow it will be unthinkable not to be present inside their smart glasses, and from the point of view of the software, everything has yet to be invented.