Harvard Professor Steven Pinker on Apple Vision Pro

so I tried the Vision Pro part of the my interest came from being interested in Vision including stereo Vision I'm an amateur stereo Vision photographer so I take pictures uh with sometimes with two cameras sometimes by um shifting a camera sometimes by doing what what uh photographers call the chaa method you put your weight on one foot take a picture you put your weight on another uh foot take a picture the two shots are taken at approxim the distance between the eyes and then if you figure out a way of showing the two photographs one to each eye overcoming our tendency to either Converge on pictures in which case we see double or look off into the distance in which case each image is fuzzy uh the various glasses and uh stereo techniques like what you wear in an IMAX theater are basically ways of delivering one image to each eye in which case it pops out in depth but knowing something about the history of stereophotography I realiz there's always so much that people are really willing to pay or how much inconvenience they'll endure to see something in stereoscopic depth photography originally was stereo Photography in the 19th century that's how people saw pictures they would hold out a wooden stereoscope viewer invented by the way by Oliver Wendel Holmes senior a polymath and one of the things that he did was invent the stereo viewer and there'd be side by side photos of pyramids the Eiffel Tower and Niagara Falls and that's how people s photography but it it uh didn't last people weren't willing to put up with the the wooden stereoscope and um photography went mono again with the uh with 35 MIM with Kodak cameras and every once in a while there's an attempt to revive stereoscopic uh Imaging and it always Fizzles so in the 1950s there was a a number of analog cameras my parents wedding photos were taken in Stereo in 1953 and I had to go to eBay to get a a viewer to see them pop out in depth it was kind of it's always seen as kind of a gimmick and then it Fizzles out and then most recently but uh 10 15 years ago there was the idea that stereo TVs 3D TVs were going to be the thing and families have to sit and all wear the glasses to see the TV pop out in depth now they don't sell stereo TVs anymore so even though there's a vivid and I think fascinating impression of depth that comes from two-eyed Vision um we have enough other redundant cues to depth from motion as I just kind of move around things closer to me move back and forth across my retina more than things that are distant called uh motion parallax we have the classic cues of perspective known since the Renaissance converging lines we have interposition going that is when one object takes a bite out of of the other we assume that it's in front and including part of it that goes back to chrom manual cave paintings so even though binocular vision does give us an extra Vivid sense of depth it's often dispensable and the Technologies uh if they're at all cumbersome people are happy to deal with with flat images now the Apple Vision Pro goes beyond just stereo Vision because it also has a pretty wild wide field of view it mixes uh a a pretty pretty good image of your actual surroundings with the virtual displays like a um a set of icons where you can uh do the equivalent of pressing an icon by uh fixating on it with your eyes and then um touching your thumb to your forefinger that's the equivalent of uh clicking and moving a mouse respectively uh the um as you move your head the uh image of the world stays put as it should people differ in terms of how nauseating they find the experience is and and one of the classic problems with any kind of virtual reality is um as as one early article put it the most barog genic invention since the tilto world uh but uh for at least for many people The Vision Pro overcomes that partly because motion sickness uh comes from usually a discrepancy between what you see and what your vestibular and kinesthetic senses tell you so usually you know we we see the world we also sense our emotion because of the organs in the inner ear we also have um Sensation from our joints tension in our muscles when they all deliver the same worlds to the brain it's fine when they fall out of sink we get nauseated no one knows exactly why but we often do if there's a lag because there's a a CPU and a GPU that is giving you a virtual image uh at the same time as your head is moving your body is moving that makes you sick because the sheer processing power in The Vision Pro is so um awesome the lag is reduced to pretty much zero and for a lot of people that gets rid of the um the the the motion sickness Q There is though a pound and a half half head gear uh on you and that's um The Bridge of my nose started to hurt after a while for the demo you're not seeing everything you're seeing a pretty wild field field of view but not like what you see in uh reality other people are not seeing the top half of your face so not only the eyes but the you know kind of crinkling of the muscles and the forehead and around the eyes that we use to convey expression I did not see uh one of the creepier features of the Vision Pro which is that it actually does a kind of deep fake of you and it shows it on the outer surface of the visor so other people it's as if they're looking at you expressing emotions but what they're looking at is actually a a simulation of you um and and that can fall into that uncanny valley of creepy rather than either cartoonish or lifelike it's also there is a real question of uh uh why what you use it for um the uh you know TVs are pretty good now flat big flat screen TVs they're they're pretty affordable um the getting work done struck me at least during this demo as not a big Advantage now granted like a lot of people I like a lot of screen real estate so I have a couple of big monitors on my desk at at home uh and with this you could put you know one virtual monitor on the floor and one at the ceiling and one here and one there and one there and all of them are are suspended in space and you could look at them as you want although you still got to remember what's what's where there is an advantage is it taps our spatial memory so instead of say scrolling through screens or minimizing one and expanding another where you've got to expend some mental effort remembering which document or which window is open where if you can just put them in different places then our the part of the brain that keeps track of space can remember what is where that's a that's one advantage a disadvantage is that the virtual keyboard hovering in space you got to kind of go back to the the hunting PEC and you don't get any tactile feedback uh so it's very very slow typing although you could plug in an auxiliary physical keyboard kind of defeats the purpose what the real uh if there was a a killer app it would be the immersive video so you can be brought into circumstances that most of us would not get a chance to or even choose to be in like you know rock climbing on El Capitan and looking down and it really looks like you're looking down thousands of of feet um in exotic rainforests deserts and there is a lifelike feel because you have stereoscopic depth you've got wild wide field of vision and as you move the objects in the uh field of view move at the right with the right parallx and there is certainly an emotional feeling that you get in being immersed in a breathtaking environment that you don't get when you're looking at a um a TV uh the question though given the history of stereophotography that is that that added psychological benefit of depth I really dig it and that's one of my hobbies but history tells us that people aren't willing to endure a lot of discomfort or expense just to get the third dimension through binocular vision as opposed to all the other ways we get the third dimension

Channel: Harvard Magazine

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Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024