Technology
A little more than an hour into Apple’s slick Monday announcement, the company unveiled new features to help track users’ mental health and vision health. Myopia, or near-sightedness, now afflicts 30% of the global population, said the corporate presenter, a number that’s projected to rise to 50% by 2050. So the new operating system on the Apple Watch and other devices will encourage people — especially young people — to be outside in sunlight more often and to sit further back from their screens, both of which help fend off myopia.
No sooner did that section of the presentation end, about an hour and 20 minutes in, that Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the tech giant’s marquee breakthrough product, the $3,499 Apple Vision Pro, a full-powered computer you wear like goggles over your eyes. Is there an app for irony?
The Vision Pro makes virtual screens appear in actual space in 2D or 3D — that’s called augmented reality — and also can treat the user to an enveloping full-screen virtual reality experience. You can see directly through the front if you want, but given how beautiful the VR images are, users won’t want to, so captivated will they be by what’s being offered to them by the computer and entertainment system sitting on their noses inches from their eyes.
As creepy as it looks in this early adopter iteration, there are plenty of potentially compelling uses for this kind of technology, both in the business world and education and our personal lives. And it’s nice that there’s a window into the real world, unlike with Meta’s Oculus VR goggles, which blind users to the outside world.
But little to date is known about the impact on eye health (or mental health) of people spending extended periods of time looking through wearable computers at virtual screens and objects. If it turns out to be problematic, will Apple urge its customers to remove their Vision Pros on regular intervals for their own wellbeing?