MAY 11, SATURDAY

PASS THROUGH VIDEO

The Apple Vision Pro Goggles, like the Meta Quest goggles cover your eyes completely and shut out the everyday world. Within the goggles there is a large flat screen suspended four feet in front of you that surrounds you. It can surround you partly because it is so close. It gives you a huge screen on which you can play video games or watch movies or watch sports. But this creates a problem. You are shut off from the everyday world and immersed in a magical new world that feels completely real.

But to avoid giving you the feeling of being completely shut off from the everyday world, in a separate world, and blinding you so that you could stand up and run into something and knock yourself flat there is a Pass Through capability which allows you to look around the side of the virtual screen in front of you and which, if you remove the virtual screen will allow you to see the room you are in just as it is. Things that are on the table in front of you, you can reach out and touch, you can see everyone in the room just as they are.

But of course you can‘t really see any of these things. What you see within your goggles are a video made by multiple cameras of what is in the room. You feel that you are seeing the actual room, your eyes tell you so, but you are not, you are seeing a video of the room, really a virtual room that looks just like the room that you are sitting in.

When this happens it seems completely normal, what instead seems magical is what you see on the large screen suspended in front of you in the middle of virtual room where a suspended screen can‘t possibly be.

There is another mode that is somewhat similar. It is called in Apple language an immervive environment. When you twist a little button at the top of the goggles you are suddenly in Yosemite National Park. There is snow on the ground extending right to your feet and a forest in front of you and rising out of that forest a huge rock face stretching high above you. If you turn to your left the forest continues and behind you is more of the park. Above you is the sky and below you snow. The scene is crystal clear. You are totally immersed in Yosemite Park.

Then if you click back, navigating with the icons you look at and and click on, you can suddenly be in a crater on the moon with the moon all around you, under your feet, behind you and in front of you with the earth shining brightly high in the sky.

Both of these sensations of being in a virtual simulation of a very real room or sitting on the moon are what virtual reality is all about. Virtual reality and actual reality feel exactly the same. You can override the feeling and know you aren‘t on the moon but you can‘t over ride the virtual room. The virtual room and the actual room are just the same but if you aren‘t careful you can step into what feels absolutely to be the actual room and discover that the actual room isn‘t there any more, it has suddenly been whisked away, leaving you in a virtual room, but actually in a new actual actual space where you can hurt yourself by dropping into oblivion. You know you aren‘t on the moon, but then you will take your goggles off and you will be in a crater on the moon with no way to get back to earth.

What I am saying is that in this new world virtual reality and actual reality can be totally confusing. Virtual reality seems transitory, but when you take off your goggles you suddenly feel as if you are continuing to live in virtual reality, that your whole life is a virtual dream, that through some sort of magic you have been dropped in this odd place on earth at this odd time which seems to be real, but like sitting on the moon, is not real at all.

And it is this feeling which, at least for me, makes me start to wonder what is real and what is not real, what is virtual. If you are smart you won‘t buy the Vision Pro and lose your sense of reality. Take my word for it.