Into the Hyperreal:
The Apple Vision Pro

Photography David Brandon Geeting 
Published in Capsule Magazine

The computer, until now, has generally been an inherently modernist object: monolithically concerned with the revolutionary aspects opened up by the new technology it embodies, the new ways of being that it can bring into existence. Like modernism itself, there’s now a prosaic intimacy that marks out our relationship with the power and innovation of computers: we’re familiar with using our phones to listen to music as well make calls; our watches relay health data to us as well as the time; we use our laptops to write novels as if they were typewriters and also watch films on them as if they were TVs. Computers revolutionized everything from architecture to techno music, newspapers to clothes design.  

The just released Apple Vision Pro might be the first postmodern computer: both fragmentary and connective, its futuristically curved glass surface contains within it both the world around us and many other worlds. It is a mutation in space: a lemniscate curve that loops reality and technology around each other, or it could be the glass of the skyscraper whose reflective surface mirrors the world around it and obscures the world within. In this, the Vision Pro promises to be just as revolutionary an object as the first home computer, in the way it enlarges the formal aspects of our cultural experiences, the way we work, and how we experience and interact with almost everything.

As a design object, it is beautiful, but, as a piece of technology, it is also transcendent. It shifts the relationship between the user and their space, forms a new way of experiencing the decentered communicative networks within which we mostly live these days.   

So you put on the Vision Pro and realise it contains within it: A photo of a family picnic that bursts to life in immersive, high-definition, anti-Proustian clarity. A wall parts in two, revealing a prehistoric scene: a dinosaur inquiringly pokes its snout towards you. You are a DJ on the moon. You watch a Star Wars film immersed in the deserts of Tatooine. Around you windows open into Instagram or Gmail or InDesign. A turn of a dial transports you to Joshua Tree or Iceland. Stressed out by the endless stream of notifications, you immerse yourself in the Mindfulness app: a dahlia-like flower gently opens and closes, implores you to relax and breathe. You are front row at the opera or the football World Cup; you are on stage watching a band, surfing the web, making phone calls, listening to music, watching TV, cooking dinner. You are there and not there, disembodied and everywhere.  

These are some of the innovations, tricks, and novelties hinted at by this device, which was released in February in the United States and is set to roll out globally in the near future. And at its most superlative, it represents the first steps into a new frontier in the relationship between people and technology. Hyperreal in the Baudrillian sense, both a copy and a truth, life and a facsimile of it, it is spatially and chronologically condensed in that it offers connection even while apart, the chance to relive events, memories, step inside photographs. It shrinks the world, enlarges its possibilities. You put the headset on, and the world disappears and reappears in a more connected form.  

Something of this aspiration was refracted through the memeable quality that defined early interactions with the Vision Pro after it was released to the public—performatively exiting a Tesla Cybertruck or wearing it while flying down the highway while the car drives itself—that heightened the novel aspects of the product, lent into the superficially dystopian, alienated aura that surrounds much new technology. It is common, and probably useful, to fret about how much of ourselves we give to the technology we use, but also there’s a utopian optimism to it—life gets easier, more streamlined.  

But there’s actually a familiarity to using the product that isn’t revealed by those short videos. It is controlled by your eyes, voice, and subtle hand gestures. It blends into your already well-connected life; it does many things we are already familiar with technology allowing us to do. The term Apple uses to describe it is “spatial computing.” It is not too different from using a MacBook or an iPhone, while also being an incredibly different and more immersive experience. You look into it, rather than simply at it—there’s an element of reciprocity to it.  

“Throughout our journey at Apple, we've been driven to design products and experiences that remove the barriers between a user and technology,” Alan Dye, Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design explains during a video interview between himself and Richard Howarth, Vice President of Industrial Design. These two led the project, and their respective teams represent the hardware and software sides of the company. “You've seen the evolution, starting with the graphical user interface on the first Macs, the click wheel on iPod, and the touchscreen on iPhone. With Vision Pro, we knew there was a profound opportunity to remove all the boundaries between a person and their digital content.”



So the Vision Pro stands as the latest revolution in Apple’s long-revolutionary approach to the relationship between technology and everyday life, and the design of the technology we use every day as part of our working and personal lives. In these two areas, they have carved out incredibly successfully—Apple is by most metrics the wealthiest company to have ever existed—a space exists between familiarity, functionality, and futurism, something exemplified by the Vision Pro.  

“It's often through necessity that innovation happens,” Richard says, “It's like designing an airplane—they're beautiful because of the necessary function of their design. So, for Vision Pro, we didn't just go out and select some nice materials. The materials we chose are there because they're absolutely necessary. The aluminium frame is strong, and we finish it in a way that's naturally really beautiful, and the glass was necessary to deliver the optical clarity the device requires for the display, cameras, and sensors. There's a really lovely relationship between the hard precision of the front module and the soft textile elements of Vision Pro. And we think that combination is really interesting. It's almost like a piece of apparel.

“It was important to us that it didn’t feel like you’re wearing a tech appliance or strapping into a piece of technology. Those material considerations included the precise engineering of the Solo Knit Band—a 3D-knitted head band with a unique ribbed structure that provides cushioning, breathability, and stretch—even down to the feel and sound of the fit dial on the Solo Knit Band. There's a lot of thought and care that goes into every detail.”

The most successful Apple products are those in which technology, industrial design, and human use overlap in natural motions—everyone uses an iPhone, because it is so easy to use. But Apple products are also successful in branding this relationship, the design of the products creating an element of desirability and necessity unknown before in the technology space, which used to be more focused on the utilitarian than the beautiful. And so, it wouldn’t be too difficult to argue that, in the popular imagination, computers are now dominated by Apple’s branding and ethos, which is both sleek and friendly, novel and innovative, positioning Apple as the creators of things you didn’t know you needed until you couldn’t live without them, while extolling the future—quasi-Marinettis for the Computer Age.

The iMac, released in 1999, was the first product released by Steve Jobs when he returned to the company and began working with a then 29-year-old Jony Ive. With its translucent, colorful case and the integration of monitor and computer into one unit, it hinted at a future that was both beautiful and useful, more user-friendly than the PCs that had dominated this space until then, and infinitely more desirable—it slotted neatly into the future-facing turn of the millennium home with its Philipp Starck Ghost Chair and Marc Newson Dish Doctor.

Around this time, the company changed its name from Apple Computers to simply Apple, hinting at a renewed, expansive focus that would encapsulate first the iPod, then the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, a lineage now stretching to the Vision Pro. There’s an object familiarity with these other products: revolutionary in one way, but also a watch is a watch, a phone is a phone, even in its most encyclopaedic forms enabled by smaller and more powerful microchips, technological advances, and improved industrial design—the iPhone 15 is a prototype for the iPhone 16, but also quite recognizably somehow still not too different from a 1920s GPO (in the way that both Cy Twombly and Leonardo Da Vinci both applied oil paint to canvas).

The Vision Pro has less antecedents, even if its function harks back to something we do also know in part. “There was a general landscape of products that were attempting to do something in the three-dimensional world, but they seemed very isolating,” Richard says. “We wanted to create a connection in a way that we weren't able to do with our existing products, where you could actually feel like you were present with someone else. We realized that, if we were able to do that, we could create something quite magical that the world hadn't seen before or experienced.”

One of the most fundamentally technologically exciting aspects of the Vision Pro is how seamless the transition is from where you were before you put it on to the space you inhabit once it is on. It is not at all similar to entering the metaverse or virtual reality. The process is quite simple in one sense: cameras mounted all around the glass front send a live feed of the world around you to screens on the inside. You feel like you are where you just were. Which is a very postmodern state of existence. You are both in a digital environment and in your own environment. It is not really designed to be used while moving, but it is also not static. The long process of creation that led to this point necessitated incredible innovation.   

“It's often through necessity that innovation happens. It's like designing an airplane—they're beautiful because of the necessary function of their design.”

“In visionOS, apps are truly dimensional and appear in panes of glass that reflect the world around them. Content appears light when the room is light, and dark when it’s dark. To create this glass-like interface took years of development, and was actually seen as impossible when we started. And this is because we wanted this to work in real time. So, as you move the glass around, it reacts to the world it’s a part of, just like real, actual objects in your space,” Alan says. “And so, this simple idea alone—the idea of being able to see through digital content on glass panes, all with zero latency, and to be able to reflect the lighting and the optics in your room—was really a first of its kind. And, on top of that, we knew that if we wanted these panes to blend seamlessly in your space, they needed to cast super realistic shadows to have a sense of physicality, depth, and height. This collection of highly detailed and crafted materials keeps people present in their physical world. Despite the simplicity of the idea, there was so much technical invention necessary to make all of this feel as if there's no other way it could have been done.”

“The theme of glass runs through Vision Pro, because, from the start, we were clear that Vision Pro is about light, both coming into and out of the device,” Richard continues, “and a lot of what enables that is the singular piece of three-dimensionally formed laminated glass that acts as an optical surface for the cameras and sensors that view the world. We needed the entire front of the product to be entirely glass because we needed the optical clarity. We compressed all of the necessary displays, lenses, and sensors, plus a powerful computer together through a complex game of three-dimensional Tetris, all densely packed into an incredibly compact soft, organic form. Three-dimensionally formed glass isn't easy to make, especially at these kinds of tolerances. It needed to fit perfectly with the aluminum housing. And so, to be able to do that in mass production is really, really difficult.”

A Rams-ian design principle guided past Apple products, navigating between use and aesthetics, innovation and honesty, always in tune to the opportunities offered by improved technology. We’ve lived with these forms for so long now that they mainly feel like second nature, long enough that the iMac has transcended from out-of-date technology to iconic design object, held in the collections of the V&A in London and MoMA in New York.



The Vision Pro is less obviously monumental in design: a shimmering single piece of glass, elegantly curved into a headset, owing much to the fluid architectural forms of architects like Zaha Hadid; cameras on the front bear the world to screens inside; a strap around your head keeps it in place. The glass glows blue when you are fully immersed, and glimmers to reveal the eyes beneath when not, allowing you to be both separate from and part of your surroundings, and for those around you to know how immersed you are.  

In the same way the first iPhone was revolutionary—even as initially its potential was somewhat clouded by high costs and unfamiliarity with its innovation (it sold poorly in Europe)—and it only slowly became the ubiquitous format for a mobile phone, the same potential is contained within the Vision Pro: you can feel it pushing decades into the future once it becomes smaller, lighter, more familiar, more widely used and applied to the world around it.  

One of the real successes in the design of the Vision Pro is how seamless it already feels—not just an immersive, interactive computer screen, but a computer connecting you with the world you inhabit. Sensorially, it is not jarring—it feels more like looking through the device than looking at it. When it is on the device essentially disappears. This was only possible by hardware and software teams working incredibly closely together.

“You can't create hardware and try and fit the software into it and, conversely, you can't design the software and then retrofit hardware around it if you want the final product to be absolutely incredible. It really needs to be a seamless process of the hardware, software, and engineering teams all working together. The design studio is the center of all this intense creative energy, where we bring together a wide range of expertise across every discipline to nurture and shepherd our ideas into Apple products,” Richard explains.

“One great example of that process is when we talk about this new interface that's just driven by your hands and eyes,” Alan says. “It's something we're proud of. We had these goals around not having to have your hands in front of your face. We had these goals around really precise tracking of what exactly you're looking at. And so, to do that, to be able to say, ‘I want to be able to have my arm on the couch and still be able to control it or down in my lap’—that has huge implications on the hardware. That's why working side-by-side is so important, because we had huge shared ambitions, and it takes that back-and-forth and that real intimate relationship to be able to pull something like this off.”

“I remember this one moment, years ago: we were sitting in a meeting and we put a couple of big ideas on the table and we said, ‘We won’t compromise on these.’ One of the ideas was that it needed to be a mobile device. And the other was using the most natural and intuitive inputs possible,” Alan continues.

“We wanted Vision Pro to be driven purely by a user’s eyes, hands, and voice. So, you can imagine us sitting there looking at this huge computer driving this big rig with all these displays, and then saying, ‘You know what? We don’t have an Apple product if it’s a tethered device to a super powerful computer; it needs to be self-contained. And oh, by the way, we’ve got to figure out a way where the entire interaction model is built around just where you're looking, your voice, and your hands.’ At every moment of profound inspiration, there was another huge set of challenges in front of us.”

The Vision Pro is a qualified success, although it will almost certainly grow into something very successful—using it feels like using the first iteration of something very important. But also, excitingly, it contains a creative potential that feels incredibly fruitful. The success of this piece of technological, industrial design is that it feels creatively pregnant and full of possibility, containing new possible forms. There are obvious uses to be explored in the worlds of cinema, music, art, architecture.  

Technological revolution brings cultural revolution, from the electric guitar to Logic, Technicolor to the Red Digital Camera. The immersion offered by the Vision Pro can potentially offer the same dynamic upheaval of what is possible. You can be sitting front row at the theatre and actually feel like you are there, or you can use it to create a new form of theatre entirely. All art is a kind of perception, and the Vision Pro most excitingly offers a new kind of perception. It exists as an imperative to find new ways of utilizing it, new artistic languages, as well as new ways of streamlining creativity.  

“When I first put on Apple Vision Pro,” actor and filmmaker Benny Safdie explained to us over email, “the idea that struck me as the most revolutionary was that I didn’t feel uncomfortable or isolated from my work or home environment, or even being in the room with other people. The ease and clarity of the video passthrough is such that you forget that you’re wearing it. I immediately began to think of the possibilities of editing with this device.”

Soon after the Vision Pro’s release, Benny posted to Instagram an image of him on his sofa wearing a Janus Films T-shirt, immersed in the device, travelling back in time to 1978, watching Bruce Springsteen playing “Because the Night.” Janus is the two-faced Roman god said to live at the limits of Earth and at the extremity of Heaven (pretty much where we find ourselves with the Vision Pro).

“This is a totally new form of computing with ideas and concepts we don’t even know yet,” Benny continues. “I don’t know of any other company, let alone one of this size, putting so much trust into people to figure it out, taking risks with philosophical ideas and possibilities. I get the feeling that Vision Pro is a new way of getting work done or experiencing something. The fact that sometimes they don’t have the answer is what makes this whole moment so unique.”