Asklemmy

Looking away in a headset doesn't make sense, no. But you can always close your eyes. Why wouldn't you be able to mute though? That would be insane, even by Apple in my opinion.

I'm not too worried. Only rich fools [meant to type "folks" but I'll let it stand] can afford it, and they can let themselves be brainwashed, I'm not too bothered.

I have so much to say about this, I hardly know where to start. A few brief points:

Yes, this product direction is problematic in many many ways. There is a reason why science fiction has been speculating about these types of devices for decades and nearly always portraying the technology as an escape mechanism for a horrifying dystopian reality.

We’ve experienced several really big technology revolutions in just a few decades (pc, internet, social, mobile). All have brought wonderful improvements to life, but all have had profound, and unanticipated side effects. In all instances, we would have benefited as a society by interrogating consequences more completely at the beginning, rather than just letting market forces alone to drive them into mass adoption.

The good news is that none of this is really new. This appears to be a pretty good implementation of a UI model that consumers have been largely rejecting for over 30 years. There are absolutely very useful, very good uses for these UIs, but these are niche markets overall all.

In many ways, XR (a catch all term for both VR and AR) is a retro futuristic idea. This is a vision of the future as seen 40 years ago. Really innovative human computer interfacing doesn’t look like this anymore. Actually useful innovation involves things like agents, voice ui’s and so on (think Jarvis from the MCU).

The question is, can Apple’s marketing prowess and effectively infinite budget push a largely unpleasant, unneeded, and expensive product into mass adoption? I am hopeful that they can’t. I am hopeful that reality isn’t sci-fi dystopian enough to create a wide market for this. If they can, it may say more about how dystopian our real reality has become. That’s the really worrisome part to me.

I think for me this thing is a symbol of where we are and where we're heading in terms of not being able to look away from ads

I worry about how consumerism and capitalism will kill us all but I don't give a shit about this in particular. If I saw one in the wild the first thing I would do is give the owner and endless stream of shit for buying such a stupid waste of money.

If anything weird happens some hacker man would probably put up a tutorial on how to disable the eye tracker.

The attention economy already has people hostage and blocked off from the outside world. No goggles required.

To play devil's advocate: If we're gonna have a tech-centric society, I can see where being able to make eye contact with people nearby and keep your hands free could make for a more wholesome experience than staring down at your phone for 80% of your waking life. And for people who are remote, being able to feel like you're occupying the same space and breathing and laughing together could be a solution for our extreme isolation.

But on the other hand, these are all problems that capitalism and big tech created in the first place, so...

I just don't understand how Apple, a company known for their sleek, elegant design aesthetics above all else, put their name on something that looks so dorky

giant companies try stupid marketing techniques like this all the time. when they're moronic and nobody can afford them, they fail.

I don't think I've seen a single normal tech reviewer that didn't talk about serious drawbacks to the platform. the only people who are sucking apple's dick are those frou-frou amalgamated tech click harvesters that always suck the big corporations' dicks. like the Verge

and it’s dystopian. imagine you are watching youtube on this thing and when an ad shows up, you can’t look away, even if you try to they can track your eye movement and just move the window, you can’t mute it, you certainly cannot install adblock on it, you are forced to watch the ad until it satisfies apple or you just give up and take out the headset.

I don't see any difference to an iPhone there. If they wanted to, they could already track whether you're looking at the ad (using the camera) or whether you muted it. You can turn off an iPhone, you can take off a Vision Pro. Apple hasn't exactly been known for intrusive ads either.