Deeper Into Movies
Apple Vision Pro fulfills the dream of living inside an iPhone
Casey Neistat recently tested the Apple Vision Pro’s suitability for the streets of New York by roaming around the city wearing the headset, narrating the experience and chatting with amused strangers. Neistat passes through a full range of encounters, with people who dap him up, knowingly ask him what using the device is like, or think he’s immersed in full VR without realizing he can even see them. There are also people who are just pumped to meet Casey Neistat. He waits on the subway platform watching a Mr Beast video (YouTube within YouTube!), which hovers in front of him as an ethereal glowing rectangle. He gets error messages that also hover ethereally in front of him. He sits on a bench in Times Square and sets up a makeshift “office” around himself in the form of three more hovering virtual rectangles: a keyboard, an Apple TV screen, and a Safari browser—which is showing another Mr Beast video.
Depicting the Apple Vision Pro as a device that lets you watch Mr Beast videos in novel public settings, unencumbered by physical hardware (other than the massive headset strapped to your face, of course) is uncharitable, perhaps, although Neistat clearly doesn’t intend to portray the device negatively. His concluding summary is quite positive, if trite: “This is the future interface for all computing.”
Neistat makes a more interesting assessment halfway through the video, however. In Times Square, with his three rectangles hovering around him, headset on, he declares that this application of the Vision Pro wouldn’t make sense in his actual office, where he already has a comfortable multi-screen setup. It makes sense in places like the middle of Times Square! At this moment, I glimpse a grim vision of a near future in which all public space is transformed into a vast outdoor coffee shop, with VisionBros occupying every available roost, shouting on holographic Zoom calls or otherwise engaged in invisible, dubious productivity sessions: the WeWorkification of the city.