GoKawiilMeta — the same company that declared in 2021 that by now you’d be living in the “metaverse” — sold a few million camera glasses for pervs and, all of a sudden, the next future envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg’s unhinged mind is one where we all walk around wearing camera glasses powered by “artificial intelligence.”
Yes, Silicon Valley CEOs believe the best way to curb screen addiction at 20 cm from your face is to strap screens 20 mm from your eyes.
Silicon Valley operates like an insular small town where trends spread fast and nobody wants to be left behind. The difference is that there, any “trend” means incinerating billions of dollars and threats to humanity drawn from dystopian futures that five or six unimaginative guys read about as kids, misunderstood, and never bothered to revisit.
Many of these misguided ideas crash against cultural reality. Even when the technical challenges are solved by the best engineers alive, the hard part is convincing ordinary people to spend hours every day with a virtual reality headset strapped to their faces, for example.
For some reason, Apple — which usually waits until last to enter new markets — jumped on this one. It was probably the last, since the Vision Pro’s launch coincided with the modest success of the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which redefined the race for humanity’s next computing interface. Here we go again…?
Setting aside utility (which is questionable in its own right), I’d like to make a fashion/cultural argument that the “smart glasses” trend is also a dead-end.
This is simply a handful of tacky men with no original ideas who decided to start thinking again — which is always dangerous.
Before we get to the glasses, I think it’s worth noting the (perhaps only?) photo of Apple CEO Tim Cook wearing the ridiculous Vision Pro for a profile in Vanity Fair :
You can search for other photos of Cook wearing the Vision Pro in Apple’s promotional materials, including the device’s announcement video. There aren’t any. I wonder why.
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