MKBHD’s review of Apple Vision Pro matches my experience perfectly, from preferring the dual loop band to thinking about it as an expensive but oh so very fun toy. Like him, I mostly plan to use mine for travel — though if Sony ever releases the AVP version of PS Remote Play I may use it at home for some PS5 time without occupying anyone else’s screen.

As for people wearing the headsets while driving, walking down the street or sitting at a caffe with their similarly headset-equipped buddies, well, there are idiots everywhere. Someone using their electric toothbrush while riding the subway doesn’t mean electric toothbrushes are inherently bad.

Or should I say “our new toy” — as I’m writing this, the tween is poking and swiping her way through visionOS like she’s been doing it her whole life, while I am on the laptop. Not that I mind, since the only way to post to micro.blog on day 1 of Apple Vision Pro is through the online interface. It looks like none of my preferred writing tools — IA Writer, Ulysses, or even the micro.blog app itself — have even checked the box to allow unmodified porting of their iPad app, let alone made a native one.

The lists of essential-to-me software that’s Apple Vision Pro doesn’t yet have is long: OmniFocus and Asana for task management, NetNewWire and Reeder for RSS feeds, WhatsApp for keeping in touch with family in Europe. I am not a watches-videos-on-the-tablet-by-himself type of person, so missing Netflix and YouTube apps was not a big deal even though people seem to have made much of it. Having the almost-complete Microsoft Office 365 suite natively was a pleasant surprise, even though Word kept crashing and Teams kept defaulting to the useless Activity tab.

Note that I am taking the hardware tradeoffs and the “spatial computing” working environment for granted. This alone is a huge accomplishment: yes, yes, I can get from a grainy image of my apartment to the top of Haleakalā with a twist of a knob, now let me do stuff. And the doing of the stuff will be essential in dingy hotel rooms during business trips — of which there will be many this year — so I may as well start figuring out how to make the best of it. But until then, it is a toy.

So with that in mind, here is a list of first impressions:

• The dual loop band felt more comfortable on my head than the cooler-looking solo band, mostly because it stopped the entirety of the headset from resting on my nose.
• Setting up the screens was much less finicky than I thought it would be, and slipping them off an on quickly to, let’s say, use Face ID on the phone was seamless.
• No eye strain that I’ve noticed, but I haven’t used the toy for longer than 30–45 minutes at a time. I also don’t wear glasses and knock-on-wood never had problems with eyesight.
• The pass-through video is a marvel in that it didn’t cause any motion sickness, but it is so grainy and the motion blur from any head movement so obvious that I never felt like I was looking through glass, even thick glass of fogged up ski goggles.
• To walk back what I wrote above: pass-through video shines when it is the backdrop for the crisp app windows that can feel the walls around them and position themselves accordingly. In those moments, when your surroundings are in the peripheral vision, it does feel like those windows are actually floating in your actual room.
• But that doesn’t matter when the most common use case will be, I suspect, completely obliterating your real environment and doing work in a near-photo realistic 3D rendering of a national park. Or watching equally breathtaking immersive 3D scenes from Apple TV’s latest documentary.
• “Immersive 3D” is distinct from 3D movies, more like actually being there than looking at a diorama through a rectangular screen. I suspect it will change filmmaking forever, but then people have said that Segway would change the world so what do I know?
• Personas are as uncanny as you can imagine. If you ever wondered what you would look like as an NPC in GTA or a player in NBA2K, well, for less than four thousand dollars you can find out yourself.
• People who know that I had AVP when I called on FaceTime acted grossed out, those who didn’t ranged from slightly confused (a new haircut? a filter?) to unfazed (oh, you’re using an avatar… whatever for?)
• At the bottom of the uncanny valley the only way to go is up. Which is scary and deserves a post or two of its own.
• It’s the way of the future, for better or worse.

🍿 Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the best live-action movie I have seen in years, and it wasn’t even close. In the topsy-turvy Monsterverse version Godzilla is a misunderstood hero. In Minus One things are as they should be: the reptile is a force of nature, the humans want to stop it, but the real battle is with the government inertia.

Caveats: it was the black and white version in a “4DX” theater which I thought meant a bigger screen but in fact involved motorized seats, strobe lights and gusts of wind blowing in my face. It was an unusual combination: the colorless, grainy images á la Kurosawa made into a theme park attraction. What would Scorcese have said?

I don’t care! The very first movie was also a thrill ride.

A sentence to ponder:

Like a disease, pregnancy is caused by a pathogen, an external organism invading the host’s body.

Can you guess if it comes from a dystopian science fiction novel or a peer-reviewed research article?

🌎 The Washington Post: “Watch the Earth breathe for one year”. No, seriously, watch it. One of the best works of data art I’ve seen, beautiful and scary.

So if in 2007 everyone used their digital camera to take photos of the original iPhone, and in 2024 everyone used their iPhone to take photos of Apple Vision Pro, am I to infer that in 2040 we will all be taking photos with our headsets? Probably just naive empiricism, but I had to ask.

Nilay Patel at The Verge gave Apple Vision Pro a 7, the same score Meta Quest 3 got from David Pierce just 3 months earlier. And if you read their scoring guidelines it makes sense, a 7 is “very good; a solid product with some flaws”, 10 being “the best of the best”. But then of course a 7 is the best headsets can be right now, given the tech’s limitations, right?

Well, no. Oculus Quest 2 scored an 8 — “Excellent. A superb product with minor or very few flaws.” — so now I am confused. Why give out numeric scores at all if you will be so slapdash about it?

Adam Mastroianni writes about the declining trust in scientific institutions:

I, too, would like to beat the charlatans and the terrorists, which is why I want to do better than, “Don’t trust those guys—they lack the proper accreditation!” If that’s all you got, people shouldn’t trust you. Instead of arguing from expertise, you should use your expertise to make better arguments.

As much as I would like to proclaim that this was my thinking all along, and that institutional decay was why I went for medical residency before completing a PhD, well, I can’t — it was a wholly different set of reasons. But it seems to have been a good decision, so I’ll allow myself a pat on the back.