Of Apples and Metaverses
“Our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways,” he said. “Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself.”
Active and closer. Huh. That's an odd argument for him to make considering what we've seen from Meta. In Zuckerberg's vision we spend most our days in a virtual office, with virtual coworkers; we go to virtual concerts with avatars of our friends, buy NFT clothes and merchandise to display in our virtual homes; we even play tennis remotely—how fun!
But we're still at home, still alone, and wearing big goggles, right? Just cheaper, much much much lower tech goggles. When we logout for lunch, there’s no one around. And how exactly are we "active"? Are we walking on a treadmill? Crashing blindly into furniture as we're "doing things"? If we go wild at a Metaverse concert aren't we really jumping up and down with excitement on a couch, or in the middle of a bedroom, singing our lungs off...by ourselves? And more importantly: do our neighbors call the police at any point?
Look, it's perfectly legitimate for Mark Zuckerberg to defend his platform, but I can't see anything "fundamentally social", or connected there. Worse: everything Meta has shown us revolves around replacing real world activities and interactions with cartoonish virtual equivalents. If anything, that's potentially more isolating.
So in this context, Apple's wording feels very deliberate: they chose to call their mixed reality approach Spatial Computing. Not Planet X, or eWorld, or iDimensions. Not a peep about a Metaverse either. They're introducing an interaction model, not a destination—which is why it was compared to the mouse and multi-touch as opposed to...Narnia.
In the videos, we see people using Vision Pro as a new way to display and control content, doing various activities which already exist, and that are all mostly solitary to begin with. I can totally picture myself sitting at my desk one day and grabbing a Vision Pro to work on images, or text, or music, instead of staring at a 27 inch display. It's not that far of a displacement. I can imagine removing outside distractions to immerse myself in a project, or to meditate for 15 minutes, or to watch a late-night movie when everyone's gone to bed—because I already do all of these activities with AirPods and noise cancellation.
There were certainly missteps in the presentation that muddied the waters [1], but overall I think Apple has a pretty clear grasp of the model they're proposing (certainly clearer than the one they had when they launched Apple Watch).
So Zuckerberg hits the nail on the head when he speaks of different visions for the future. Problem is, there's only one of these I relate with—or look forward to.
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Most dad scenes. Although we can debate about the cringe factor of the dad filming his kids: is this really different from using an iPhone, a camera, or one of those VHS monstrosities back in the day?
