Take a dip or surf the web? An American influencer decided not to choose. The latter recently filmed herself in her swimming pool, shoulders above water and eyes covered by the Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset sold since February 2 by Apple in the United States. A pinch in the air then allows him to open his Internet browser, with his chlorinated reality as a wallpaper. “I don’t recommend doing what I did, it’s not waterproof,” she explains about the device acquired for the modest sum of $3,500. The viewer that we are comes away from the short clip published on X with a thought: “So it’s Thatthe future ?”
Since the appearance of the Vision Pro, presented by Apple as its biggest bet since the iPhone, social networks have been flooded with images – not always authentic – of heavily masked people in all circumstances: by caron skateboard, in the subway, in a crowded street… Most of them stand out for their futility, like the swimming pool video. Many of these are attempts at “buzz” or parodies emphasizing the “futuristic” aspect of the device. Some examples: a man presented as a Londoner walking his “robot dog” eyes glued to the Vision Pro, or else this stranger who energetically gets out of his Cybertruck Tesla, waving his hands haphazardly. Even more serious test videos aren’t always convincing. Inflict on his retina four TikTok streams simultaneously, watching a basketball game with a bunch of statistics scrolling down the sides, or displaying a stopwatch on your pans of pasta cooking… Honestly, what’s the point? Especially at this price.
And yet. The current sequence is very positive for Apple. No headset manufacturer had generated such hype, including Meta with its Quest, which started early in the mixed reality race and sold seven times cheaper than the Vision Pro. The Apple brand could be the driving force of this new branch of consumer electronics, as it had already been for phones, watches, tablets and even wireless headphones. We would be careful not to predict the opposite.
The democratization of mixed reality headsets is now plausible
“But what is so extraordinary about it?”, asked The Express when the iPhone was released in 2007. So here we are, 17 years later, stuck on it for an average of 4 hours a day, “swiping” on social networks and answering video calls sometimes in the middle of the street. What about the iPad, neither computer nor smartphone, and very criticized when it was released? “I’m upset that I spent $600 on a device that did nothing to improve my quality of life. A salad spinner would have been a wiser investment, and I don’t eat that much salad,” wrote to his delivery an American journalist in Slate. On the apparent emptiness of connected watches: why read your text messages on your watch when you already have them in your pocket? From the bizarre appearance of AirPods without the traditional wires…
Let’s be honest: every one of these gadgets has since been copied. And even if they tend to cut us off from the rest of the world, they have found their place in the daily lives of the greatest number of people. By developing a headset that isolates the wearer less from their real environment, Apple has removed one of the main obstacles to the adoption of this new type of hardware. The democratization of mixed reality headsets is now plausible. The next generations will undoubtedly be thinner, more elegant, and above all more useful thanks to the appearance of applications designed specifically for the device. When ? Hard to say. One thing’s for sure: the future always looks a little ridiculous. That’s even how we recognize him.