Yesterday, we looked at what the world looked like inside Apple Vision Pro. As I had anticipated in my book [Un]Intentional: How Screens Secretly Shape Your Desires, and How You Can Break Free (Credo House 2021), it offered me a private world, not the one I share with others.

Tech writer Adam Rogers doesn’t see a problem: “The world’s going to be just fine,” he says. “People adapt to media. These headsets are incredible. But philosophically, I do not believe we need to be wearing these headsets for hours every day.”

The contradiction here is obvious. The headsets are made to wear for hours every day. So how will the world be “just fine” (unless it’s like that meme where the dog is drinking coffee in the house fire)? People will wear it hours a day, even to their hurt, just like they use their phones for hours a day, to their hurt.

What happens if the “elite” who buy Vision Pro experience a different reality from those who are not using it?

The reality experienced by regular Vision Pro users will be different from that of non-users. It has to be. I felt this after a 20-minute demo. The premium price probably forces a division along economic lines.

Vision Pro elites will experience — and therefore live in — a different world from everyone else

Might the things Vision Pro teaches us to expect and “know” about our world cause us to completely lose touch with people who live 24-7 in the real world? Rogers responds: “Bailenson describes the feeling as one of social absence. Other people just aren’t fully there. He doesn’t put it this way, but I’ll wave the warning flag: Long-term use of passthrough headsets could make it easier to think of other people as unhumans — non-player characters in a gamified, uncanny valley.”

Many dystopian stories describe what happens when an elite few view the rest of the world as “unhumans.” We’re quick to see people different than us as “those other people.” They just “don’t get it.” We’re enlightened. They’re not.

Will Devices Like Vision Pro Expand This “Uncanny Valley” Chasm Even More?

The immersive nature of Vision Pro seems formative in a different way than computers or phones. While the hours we consume entertainment media on normal screens can erode virtues like patience, temperance, and chastity, using a remote control doesn’t change our entire view of reality.

But after hours of using our own limbs to control our immersive virtual world, might we grow so accustomed to controlling things that we believe we are in control, and should be?

Likewise, if we can dim the real world with the twist of a knob and put our own background on it — complete with immersive sound — will we become less able to deal with reality as it is?

It sure seems that way to me. How many ways do we need to escape? And what happens if all the people who can afford Vision Pro spend so much time escaping? Will real-world problems lack solutions that could be offered by some of the world’s most capable problem-solvers?

Will the Vision Pro mediated “theme park ride” experience deaden my sense of the divine in the real world? After spending hours, days, weeks, and more within the mediated reality of Vision Pro, all of the senses become attuned to interacting constantly with its UI/UX. We are retrained how to use our eyes, ears, arms, and hands, and how to think and react in this new environment.

Awe-inspiring visuals mingle with our daily work as a regular part of life. Then we take off the headset…

The colors of our home aren’t nearly as bright. The sunset out the window is duller than the 3D panoramas. Our kids’ sticky faces don’t glow as they did in those immersive videos.

What Happened When Researchers Tried It

Rogers describes the adaptations required by the researchers who wore passthrough headsets like Vision Pro for hours a day: “[T]hey felt all the distance and distortion effects: thinking elevator buttons were farther from their fingers, or experiencing difficulty bringing food to their mouths. But as any of us would, they adapted — their brains and muscles learned to compensate for their new view of the world.”

That seems like a solution, but it ain’t. When people adapt to a perceptual change for long enough, the real world starts to look wrong. If you wore glasses that turned your vision upside down, for example, you’d have to adapt again when the glasses came off. The longer you’re inside a funhouse world, the longer the weird perceptual aftereffects last.”

The ”perceptual aftereffects” are as yet unknown. But they are certainly powerful. And Apple already claims to offer spiritual experiences within their “funhouse” with their Mindfulness app.

After all this time in unreality, will the heavens still declare the glory of God? Or will the “still small voice” become too small after we’re tuned in to the artificial spatially enhanced voices?

When any inconvenience in the Vision Pro world can be obliterated with a dial or a wave of the hand, how will we be trained to cope with stubborn real-world annoyances, delays, and boredom?

Might This Turn Into “Whole Life Porn?”

Just as some people who use sexual pornography are no longer able to experience real intimacy, might Vision Pro deaden us to the rest of life? The real ocean won’t move us anymore? The real baseball game is no longer thrilling? The real birthday party isn’t real to us?

Will the virtual “sacred” things make us unable to experience the real thing? As you can see, I still have the same concerns about Vision Pro I shared in my article last October.

The false sense of vision, connection, control, and spirituality remain, and are even more evident as people are starting to use and study the device’s impact.

And it’s so early. Smartphones were unleashed in 2007, and they have overwhelmed the globe with changes that few people anticipated.

The idea that someone with a disability like my dad’s might be helped by this tech is personal and intriguing to me. But I’m more concerned about how physically healthy people might be handicapped in their perception of reality and engagement with God and each other after regular use.

These days, tech companies are so busy pushing what they can do, they rarely ask if they should. So we have to ask that question for ourselves.

I think Neil Postman (1931–2003) would still say this today:

Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology… it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who could have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities?

But it is much later in the game now, and ignorance of the score is inexcusable. To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985 p. 157).

Vision Pro is equipped for social change, backed by one of the most powerful corporations the world has ever known. It is not neutral.

May we ask, “Should we?” if only for those closest to us, and not just “Can we?”

Here’s Part 1: How my world looked inside Apple Vision Pro. I felt everything the script intended for me to feel. But I left with a lot of questions. What happens when people perceive reality differently? Will our painfully divided culture will be even more fractured?

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