JUNE 13, WEDNESDAY

DIGITAL INTERFERENCE

Wednesday night I went over to my son Tom’s house to look at the 3rd game in the NBA finals. It was a close game and held our interest. We saw it on his huge and very clear flat screen tv. His favorite team, the Boston Celtics, won and pretty much clinched the championship.

But a large reason that I wanted to see the game with him was to convince him that watching a televised game on my much larger and much closer virtual screen on my Vision Pro goggles was a great experience.

In this I failed. And for me the evening fell flat and I went home at 11:30 disappointed.

From the moment in Sri Lanka that I discovered that I could make spatial videos and spatial photographs on my iPhone Pro Max, I began to make spatial videos. These could only be seen on the Vision Pro, which was not yet even available. So for the next couple of months I could only imagine what my spatial videos would look like. I could see them as flat screen videos and they looked good but I couldn’t see them as spatial videos. Finally, when I got back I dug deep into my savings to buy the Vision Pro goggles that would allow me to see spatial movies. I tried first to avoid this by trying the $10 Google Cardboard goggles and another $200 device and even the Meta Quest.

When I finally broke down and bought the Vision Pro I discovered in some of the videos the shift from flat screen to spatial was amazing. The effect of the spatial videos was mesmerizing. I also discovered that a number were not very good. I either covered part of one lens with a finger, or I panned too quickly or low light made the videos fuzzy.

But since the minority of good photos were so mesmerizing I wanted to share them. And that led me to discover that Apple had made sharing the Vision Pro into a complicated process for which other people had little patience. So I have been left with something that I am very excited about which I can’t convince people enough for them to have the patience to learn how to see it.

Last night the problem was that the game was on ABC and neither Tom nor Kathy knew the sign in name and password for Spectrum TV, so after setting up the Vision Pro I couldn’t connect.

For an old man like me each successive failure frustrates me and irritates me. And I realize that this frustration has been with me again and again and again whenever I try to connect digitally and to share digitally. I hear it from friends when their computers for mysterious reasons won’t perform well, I run into it every time I try to connect with a doctor’s office or even to do something simple like printing out an Allegiant airline ticket, or when I try to find out why my Internet connection doesn’t work.

This isn’t just an old person’s problem, everyone deals with this frustration. But it is made worse when you are older. Maybe we have gone through this too many times in our life and have simply lost patience. Maybe it is because as we get older it is harder and harder to figure out these different forms of digital blocking. Maybe we are just unable to learn one more thing because our neural pathways are getting clogged. Whatever it is my excitement about spatial videos and my eagerness to share with others is tempered by one digital roadblock after another. I am almost ready to stop bugging people to look at my videos and to wait for them to beg me to be able to see them. But I’m afraid it will be a long wait.