Dear Tech Industry, Can You Please Stop Trying To Strap Stuff To Our Faces?

Jul 13, 2023

The Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed in a showroom on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif., at ... [+] the company's annual developers conference, Monday, June 5, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

With the reveal of Apple's new Vision Pro augmented reality headset, it does beg the perpetually unanswered question of what will anyone actually use this for?

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have been around for a while now and neither have been overly useful.

Admittedly, AR is more practical, and may end up being the next stage of smartphones, but not like this.

In that, having a bulky headset that makes you look like some kind of socially awkward astronaut is not going to catch on.

We already have evidence of this with the repeated failures of VR and AR to enter the mainstream marketplace. The whole Metaverse died, as it always would, in part because people don't want to strap stuff to their faces.

I still feel Ernest Kline has a lot to answer for here. The whole worldview and setup in Ready Player One missed out the whole interface setup for this technology, but that hasn't stopped hysterical investors from barrel rolling into it anyway.

At least the iPhone it offered multiple things that people needed in one device. VR and AR don't offer anything useful in a broad cultural sense.

Yes, there are specific uses for VR and AR, but outside of medicine, the military and maybe architecture, the technology has always been pretty whimsical and a rather ephemeral diversion.

VR still hasn't broken into the mainstream with gaming and likely never will, so trying to make that same technology be used for broader everyday tasks without a specific functional hook is just daft.

Maybe I am just being an old man shouting at clouds, but I want my technology to be useful and to have some kind of discernible purpose, and this endless VR/AR rabbit hole still has nothing to offer.

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