As The Apple Vision Pro Takes To The Streets, Experts Warn The VR Headset ‘May Rewire Our Brains In Unexpected Ways’

Earlier this month the highly touted Apple Vision Pro virtual reality headsets became available for purchase, coming in at a pricey $3,499.

Though tech companies such as Apple, or Meta’s equivalent of it in the form of the Meta Quest 3, assure the masses this is the wave of the future and will become an everyday part of life, some red flags were still raised. The WinePress highlighted some of these concerns in October, with one writer for The Verge says Apple’s headset will cheapen and ruin, adding that it “looks lonely as hell.”

“You’re supposed to be able to walk around your home, grab a drink from the fridge, and interact with your spouse while you wear it,” the author wrote at the time, adding, “In fact, Apple’s promotional video portrays it almost exclusively as something you wear at home alone.”

Nevertheless the wave of staring into a screen began earlier this month, as the Apple Vision Pro became available to customers around the world. Some in the media were giddy to highlight its awesome features:

Very popular tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee provided an ever deeper dive into the features the headset provides.

Other tech YouTubers dismantled one to showcase the quality of the build. Spoiler: it’s mostly just cheap plastic.

Since its launch a number of people have been seen walking around with this on their heads in public, performing all kinds of daily tasks with it. One guy was even caught driving his car while wearing it. Another was filmed flying a plane while using the VR headset. Others were out eating a meal together while both wearing them.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7XEBkBzZGpY

However, it has not taken long for reported health risks to emerge. Last week Insider reported, “Beware: The Apple Vision Pro may rewire our brains in unexpected ways.” The publication noted the following:

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Researchers have found that widespread, long-term immersion in VR headsets could literally change the way we perceive the world — and each other. “We now have companies who are advocating that you spend many hours each day in them,” says Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. “You’ve got many, many people, and they’re wearing it for many, many hours. And everything magnifies at scale.” 

Meaning: Our brains are about to undergo a massive, society-wide experiment that could rewire our sense of the world around us, and make it even harder to agree on what constitutes reality.

But wear perception-shifting glasses for days at a time — as Bailenson’s team of researchers did — and the problems get worse. Way worse.

The team wore Vision Pros and Quests around college campuses for a couple of weeks, trying to do all the things they would have done without them (with a minder nearby in case they tripped or walked into a wall). They experienced “simulator sickness” — nausea, headaches, dizziness. That was weird, given how experienced they all were with headsets of all kinds. And they felt all the distance and distortion effects: thinking elevator buttons were farther from their fingers, or experiencing difficulty bringing food to their mouths. But as any of us would, they adapted — their brains and muscles learned to compensate for their new view of the world.

And that’s not all. “These headsets can not only add things to the real world, they can also delete them,” Bailenson says. He first realized VR’s strange editing function while he was playing a game on the Quest 3 that “knocked out” portions of the real walls around him and replaced them with a virtual scene. “I’ve been doing VR and AR for a while,” he says, “and I had never in my life seen deletion work so well.”

At first that seems pretty great. Stuck on a crowded bus? Delete everyone and replace them with the first-class cabin of a jumbo jet. Hate intrusive billboards? Replace all the commercial images with soothing vistas of your choosing.

But what happens when the technology gets good enough to delete, say, homeless people? Or Pride flags? You can see where I’m going here — literal erasure. When the sci-fi writer William Gibson came up with the concept of cyberspace, he described it as a “consensual hallucination.” This is the exact opposite — billions of discrete, unshared hallucinations, each one snowflake-special. Bailenson says:

What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears. People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.

The world’s going to be just fine. People adapt to media. These headsets are incredible. But philosophically, I do not believe we need to be wearing these headsets for hours every day.

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AUTHOR COMMENTARY

No, the world is not “going to be just fine.” Don’t you always get a kick out of these types of people, who point out all the problems and dangers of something, but turn around and say, ‘Don’t panic everyone?’

We saw what happened when smart phones were introduced, and how in just a short span of time everyone became addicted and fixated to their magical idol. Give this technology some more time for people to accept, and this will eventually become the ‘new normal’ for a time.

[21] My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change: [22] For their calamity shall rise suddenly; and who knoweth the ruin of them both?

Proverbs 24:21-22

As I talked about in October, Jack Dorsey, the former owner of Twitter, now called X, had warned that this push for VR and the metaverse will just turn everybody into blobs as seen in the Disney Pixar film Wall-E; and already in a matter of weeks we are starting to see that materialize, something I had actually predicted nearly three years ago to date.

But this is just the start: these big-tech madmen have said that by 2030 smartphones will be integrated into people.

SEE: Nokia CEO Says 6G Will Render Smartphones Obsolete By 2030 And Will Be Integrated Into Your Body Instead

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[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).

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