Vision
Seeing Tomorrow as best we can
I wrote a short story about the Future.
My brain is vibrating.
Honestly, it’s been vibrating all day.
We’re at about 24 hours of vibration at this point.
And it’s vibrating because of Tim Apple
If you haven’t watched the Apple Vision Pro reveal video yet, take 10 minutes and watch it.
…Ready?
For context,
I’m a solarpunk techno-optimist and I’m generally excited about the future.
I’m also deeply critical of the Tech’s current and (inevitable) future failings.
I tend to criticize things I care about not because I get joy from tearing things down, but because I want them to get better - and I try to focus especially hard on the things that can get better right now.
This is the perspective that I try to write from.
So take what I’m about to say with some relativistically weighted grains of salt.
I genuinely think the Vision Pro Launch is up there with the Internet and the Moon Landing in terms of potentially shifting how us humans think about our place in the world.
Melding immersive computation with physical space is one of the hardest challenges we’re facing in technology today and if Apple delivers on even half of what they promise in their demo video I think we’re seeing a genuine category being created before our very eyes.
Work, Life, and Content will never be the same after this.
Naturally, my Final Judgment is reserved until I can actually use the dang thing, but basically everyone I respect in tech that’s touched it loves it.
And it’s only the V1.
So I’m hopeful.
I spent today trying to translate my full bodied hopefulness into words and managed to catch one of my vivid mind threads describing where I think this whole thing goes.
“Goes” as in “what’s the steady state?”
As in, “what happens when its been here for a while?”
Enjoy 🫡
Stephanie yawned and stumbled slightly on her carpet as she rolled out of bed.
The thin line of sunlight resting across her pillow marked starkly where her closed eyes had been resting just moments before. She checked her watch screen as the haptic feedback let her know it had recorded her awakening.
8:43 means she overslept.
Frowning, Stephanie glanced at the headset on her nightstand. She coughed slightly and clumsily mumbled "Set reminder to update morning alarms".
A pleasant, disembodied voice replied clearly, "I can use your calendar to define an optimal wake up time for your morning schedule if you'd like" and Stephanie replied "No, I'll do it myself - thanks". A shaggy and amber-tinged, black cat nuzzled Stephanie's leg - Bisque was wondering if he'd missed breakfast.
8 minutes later Stephanie was out the door - headset in her bag, tucked in alongside her laptop and lunch.
She called a car to save some time in the hope she'd make it into the office by 9:30.
She passed the ride by sketching out on her notepad her talking points for a new client meeting happening tomorrow. The lines were clumsy, but readable. She wondered if the small product doodle she made next to the talking points might make her "professional friends" groupchat laugh.
Walking briskly once inside, Stephanie passed by her skip-level manager Fred seated on a plush bench by the entrance. His laughter boomed as he responded to an unheard joke. The headset visor glowed dreamily, beset with cloudy wisps, as he waved his arms fairly aggressively - Stephanie remembered from her first Quarterly Review Meeting that his headset had adapted its inputs to how he tended to try to wipe the collaborative screens in conference calls.
Fred had never really gotten the hang of the finger gestures.
She made it through the lobby and into the side elevators. Stephanie liked to take the less trafficked side ones so she could have the 22 story, 21 second elevator ride to herself. Soon she had made it all the way to her to desk without anyone noticing her slightly late arrival.
Jessie, her deskmate and college barely-acquaintance, didn't look out from her headset.
Jessie hated working from the office, but needed to access on-premise files for most of her work. She protested by staying locked in most of the time... even for sync meetings. She'd come to the actual room if they made her, but would still keep the headset on.
Nobody really pushed the issue because of the high quality of her code, but nobody particularly enjoyed having her on their transient nano-team's either.
Settling into her seat, Stephanie slipped on her own headset.
The roar of Victoria Falls startled her for a fraction of a second before the headset auto-reduced the volume - it had loaded the geo-cached environment, but quickly sensed the mismatch against the stored ambient noise level. She'd forgotten that she'd locked herself in yesterday to get some work done during the Company Happy Hour happening in the kitchen space right by her desk.
Leaving the now quieter environment settings untouched, she pulled up her 6 core screens with a subtle thump of her chest with her closed fist.
The screens, roughly 2x3 foot in size, hung completely motionless in the air before her. They were slightly translucent and ready to catch her up on her metrics.
They had assumed the rough color palette of the rainforest falls still thundering quietly in the background. 6 screens quickly became 12, most of them waiting patiently behind her shoulder as she worked, and 12 screens became 1 as she zero-ed in on the designs for the new product launch. She double tapped with a combination of her eyeline and fingers to highlight the new launch's user onboarding process flow.
Really, it was an old product launch.
Stephanie was tasked with turning a recently acquired company's legacy mobile application into a full-fledged headset app. She remembered using the app when she had first started college, but it had been a few years since she'd fired it up, especially on a phone.
It was just too limited to really be useful to her now.
She pulled from deep storage the historical performance data on human-headset app interfaces, gestured to focus on the search bar, and began to type on the ethereal keyboard floating mildly in front of her fingertips. She preferred the voice input, but wasn't ready to engage with Jessie yet today. Stephanie asked for summaries of key lessons from onboarding users of mobile apps to headset apps.
"In general, users seem to prefer apps natively built for the headset. This is not a comment on the quality of applications outside of the headset ecosystem. Based on user tests and interviews, it is likely that products designed for older platforms are difficult to fully port to the headset for technical reasons, are designed to solve problems that may not be as relevant or common anymore, and often fail to fully utilize the new capabilities enabled by the headset."
Stephanie then asked for a checklist of items to go through when migrating a mobile application to the headset ecosystem, a list of the 5 most popular mobile app to headset ports with their respective download links, and a summary of the history of the biggest missteps while porting mobile apps to headsets.
After an hour or so of pair research, Stephanie added a few items to the checklist she had generated, noticed a gentle blue light pulsating from her wrist, and got up to get some water.
After a while, she returned and took off her headset.
Feeling nostalgic, she reached for her laptop, relishing for a second the familiar, plastic feel of the keys beneath her fingers.
As the laptop screen lit up, she found her same checklist, but with a few items ticked off. Jessie had already shipped some of the finger gesture boilerplate accessibility functions that Stephanie had highlighted to their team as a result of her pair research. Stephanie glanced up at Jessie's feet propped on her half of the desk.
As Stephanie looked, her watch gently buzzed and briefly flashed a small yellow light - a reliable precursor to an impending health related suggested change of scenery.
"The terrace should have some pleasant sun right now." - the message flashed on the outside screen of her headset that sat on the table facing her.
Obliging with mild relief at the excuse to leave her desk, she put her laptop and headset back in her bag and went to the terrace.
The sun was nice.
Yet the laptop screen on the table struggled to shine bright enough to show Stephanie the next thing to do. After a few minutes of attempting to type, she got out her notepad again and started scribbling. Then, with a start, she remembered that she was supposed to send Fred her plan for the new client meeting before... about 10 minutes from now.
Stephanie put on her headset and glanced down at the notepad. Her notes from both the car and the afternoon quickly appeared on her screen in a new, otherwise blank page. She looked at the small doodle she'd drawn in the car, her intent eye movement organically selecting it, and she flicked it into the groupchat (without a caption) as she deleted it from the original page. She then did a few mild edits of her notes before letting the headset transform them using a design template, checked them once more, and sent them off to Fred.
A single thumbs-up emoji appeared in the center of her eyeline and slowly faded from view.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of hearts and a myriad of other emojis and replies flitted off to the side somewhere near her right ear.
Stephanie spent the rest of the day on the terrace.
Then, at the end of the day, Stephanie got on the train.
She had left the headset on as she left the office, wearing it fully transparent, and continued to check emails as she sat down. A few stops later, however, the train filled up with other passengers. Slightly annoyed, she turned up the immersion until her headset was moderately opaque, leaving only the hint of ghostly figures in a windy scene of the vast Great Plains that she had always wanted to visit.
It was Wednesday and she was tired so Stephanie decided stay in.
She pulled a recipe up on her screen as she walked off the train and the oven was preheated by the time she took her shoes off. Bisque greeted her cheerfully, albeit briefly, as she walked in before he ambled off to a distant corner of the apartment. The house was quiet while Stephanie cooked dinner.
After plating the meal, she let the headset log the food, and set both the headset and the plate on the table.
As she ate, she picked up her book. After a few moments, she started reading. She felt the page that she was reading between her thumb and her pointer finger.
Finishing quickly, she loaded the plate into the dishwasher and sat down on the couch to continue reading.
After a time, she heard her upstairs neighbors get home and turn on their television. Stephanie glanced up at the headset she had left on the table. She knew the explosions and/or cheers from upstairs wouldn't stop anytime soon.
With a slight groan, Stephanie got up and grabbed her headset.
Slipping it on, she quickly flicked her hand - "Silence all notifications" - deftly glanced at the menu in front of her (pulling the timer into focus), and flicked her hand again to select "For 10 hours".
Her field of vision exploded outward into a vast nothingness as she became the single point of substance in an infinitely expanding black space.
Breathing deeply to herself, she pulled up her favorited environments...
...and found the Wanaka Tree.
She had wanted to watch the sunset over the lake there with her sisters when they traveled to visit New Zealand three years ago, but the "slightly too large to be comfortable" crowd of other tourists wanting to do the same had killed the vibe.
So they had grabbed an early dinner in town instead.
Smiling at the memory, Stephanie set the environment to just before sunset. Dialing to not-quite-full immersion, she glanced down at the book in her lap. It, her arms, and body were fully visible as the couch melted into the pebbles and color of the shoreline.
After a few minutes of peaceful reading, Stephanie felt a nudge on her elbow.
Bisque wanted to snuggle.
Smiling again, Stephanie turned the dial so her couch and cat could fade back into view.
Settling in himself, Bisque started a purr that blended pleasantly with the steady, burbling rhythm of the waves from the lake.
About an hour later, the vivid sun had fully set and the book in Stephanie's lap was lit by a warm glow. Almost like a campfire, but steady and purposeful. It seemed to be shining at just the right angle to illuminate her page.
Stephanie gasped.
A flash at the top of her vision startled her.
Eyes flicking upward, the same night sky charted by the Māori a millennium ago suddenly erupted with a thousand mismatched, cosmic trails of wandering stardust.
A meteor shower.
Stephanie relaxed and chuckled as she remembered the "stochastic weather" settings she had been playing with last week and sat rapt as the impossible astronomical phenomenon eventually faded from view.
Behind the headset, she scrunched her eyes quizzically as she wondered if it might've been the "Magical Evenings" option she selected?
On cue, a settings menu appeared off to her right side in response to the self-directed question. She flicked her hand down and the menu disappeared.
She flicked again and the time appeared.
She made one more motion and summoned her Daily Progression Bar, transparent but still brilliantly backlit against the humbly stunning sky.
The pleasant voice narrated the words in the image.
"30 Minutes until 'Winding Down'"
"Tasks Remaining"
"1. Mindfulness Meditation"
"2. Sleep Hygiene"
"3. Get in Bed"
Stephanie took off her headset and closed her eyes for a while.
"Log 5 minutes of Mindfulness," she eventually said.
"Of course. Any particular intention?"
"Just self-reflection today"
"Sounds good. If you want, tomorrow I can suggest an intention and we can find environment that facilitates that intention together?"
Stephanie paused a moment.
"That's okay. Thanks."
"No problem."
"I appreciate it."
"Do you still want to review your alarms for the morning?"
Another pause.
Then Stephanie sighed.
"No. When should I wake up?"
"We should start rising at about 7:08, but I'd like to adjust that based on the weather and light forecast in the morning"
"Okay."
"I've dimmed the lights for you."
"Thank you."
"Have a good night."
"You too."I hope this added value to your day.
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