Apple’s new virtual reality headset, a precision engineered slip-on resembling a pair of space-age ski goggles, screams of The Future! From the special aluminum-alloy frame and “3D-printed knitted headband” to the glass front that shows a projected simulation of your eyes so your friends can “see you” while you’re surfing in cyberspace, the whole vibe is Sci-Fi.
“Thousands of individual innovations” have gone into making the Vision Pro possible Apple tells us; and from the lavish launch video it looks indeed to be a quantum leap forward in VR and 3-D viewing technology. Not that Apple ever utters the phrase ‘virtual reality,’ or even ‘augmented reality.’ Those are terms they seem committed to avoiding, along with ‘the metaverse,’ a terminology now so associated with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta it’s no wonder Apple shuns it.[1]
No, the makers of the i-Everything offer us something far more revolutionary than Zuck has imagined – a whole new way of interfacing with, talking about, and even conceiving of our interactions with technology, what they are calling “spatial computing.”
It’s a savvy term calibrated to evoke a novel way of thinking about human-computer interfaces in which the very software we use is represented as objects floating in space. “Apps have dimension,” the promo video enthuses, they “live right there in front of you!” Put on the Vision Pro headset, link it to your laptop or smart phone, and the the apps and items on your desktop appear to hover before you arrayed in the space of your room. As Apple puts it, this literally vision-ary technology “seamlessly blends digital content with physical space.”
If you want to open an application in Vision Pro, you simply look at it and tap your fingers together, for the headset tracks hand and eye movements giving users the ability to navigate software via bodily gestures. The whole experience is controlled by Vision OS, which Apple is calling the “first ever spatial operating system.”
There’s more. If you want to watch a movie, it can be projected onto a virtual screen also hovering in space and scaled to whatever size you like, potentially filling your field of view so “it feels like it’s 100 feet wide!”
The screen can be made solid for an utterly there experience; or it can appear transparent so you can watch the movie while also “seeing through” it to the surrounding room and to anyone else who might be there with you. The same applies to video games, which, again, can be all-encompassing or co-present with the room. In effect, you can be operating in two spaces at once: one virtual, the other physical.
With Vision Pro “You can do things in ways never possible before,” the promo effuses. “It’s like magic!” I have to agree – this is indeed a form of conjuring; but what interests me is how Apple’s cyber-tech harks back to an imaginative vision conceived 700 years ago – the technique of perspectival representation which began to emerge in European painting in the early fourteenth century.
Like the designers of Vision Pro, practitioners of perspectival representation also wanted to give audiences an experience of feeling as if they were present in a virtual space existing beyond the image plane – in this case, behind the wall of a fresco or the surface of a painting. Starting with Giotto, artists of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries were also interested in drawing viewers into imagined virtual worlds while they were simultaneously present in a physical room.
Giotto’s Arena Chapel can be seen as a kind of medieval virtual reality.
Apple tells us that the “spatial experiences” Vision Pro offers “look, sound and feel as if they are physically there,” which is also what Giotto wanted visitors to believe when they entered into the Arena Chapel in Padua, which, in the early 1300’s, he filled with scenes documenting the life of Christ.
Giotto’s Arena Chapel can be seen as a kind of medieval virtual reality wherein viewers were supposed to feel as if they were being propelled into the events of the Christian savior.[2.1] In 27 approximately-life-size scenes[2.2] Giotto rendered incidents from Christ’s time on Earth according to the new style of ‘geometric figuring’ then coming into fashion, what can now be recognized as the precursor to full-blown Renaissance perspective.
This radical style was premised on an emergent idea that the God of Christianity had created the world according to geometric principles, so if artists wanted to represent reality as it truly was then they should adopt geometry as the foundation of their practice. Here we witness a rupture from earlier modes of representation which had focused on iconic rather than ‘realistic’ imagery.
Previous Christian painters had aimed to represent a spiritual rather than a material order – thus, Christ would be painted as the largest figure in a painting, with angels and saints the next largest, followed by ordinary humans.[3]
Giotto’s Arena Chapel “Christ Cycle” eschewed this spiritual hierarchy by presenting Christ, angels, and mortals at the same scale. Moreover, his figures inhabit actual landscapes with mountains and trees and animals likewise rendered to look ‘real.’ True, there are still disparities of scale and positioning – yet we recognize the beginnings of the perspective style that culminated 200 years later. [4]
The transformation on show in the Arena Chapel was also driven by an ideological current. Just a few decades before Giotto started his work the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon, an early champion of mathematical science, sent a treatise to Pope Clement IV arguing that the Catholic church should encourage painters to adopt ‘geometric figuring’ (a term he coined) because by doing so they could generate images of such ‘verisimiltude’ they’d have the power to convert heathens to Christianity and re-invigorate the faithful with a new sense of religious purpose.
As a proponent of the-then-novel idea that God had created the world according to mathematical laws, Bacon claimed that if painters emulated the Lord’s handiwork by using geometric techniques, they could compel viewers to feel they were there with Christ. It was much the same psychology as underlies today’s virtual reality games, and this was the dawn of the same techniques used by VR modelers now.
Taken up and developed by masters such as Piero della Francesca, Durer and Raphael, perspective was sometimes described as a technique for “seeing through” the picture plane into a space apparently existing beyond the wall. Or in Alberti’s famous phrase, perspective enabled artists to portray a scene as if “though a window.” Here again are resonances with the Vision Pro which also invites us to “see through” our screens and imagine ourselves propelled into a space on the other side of the laptop plane.
But to what ends does Apple direct us?
Bacon had had a specific goal: For him, the new imagistic style would serve as a propaganda tool to revitalize Catholic faith in order to launch another crusade to the Holy Land. In his eyes, geometric rendering techniques were a means to serve the Lord. Apple’s goal seems to be to get us to use more apps and stream more movies. This giant step-down in vision reminds me of Peter Thiel’s wry critique of futuristic technology as incarnated by Twitter: “We were promised flying cars, we got 140 characters.”
I’m certainly not in favor of another crusade. But it does seem as if with the Vision Pro we are being offered an astonishing technology with rather little pay-off. Do people want to open apps with their eyes? Do we really want to further isolate ourselves with headsets and virtualized screens? “Seeing through” a virtual screen into the surrounding room is not the same as being able to look away from the screen to gaze out a real window or admire a cat sleeping on the couch.
I’d rather see people as themselves with bad hair and poor lighting in glitchy Zoom video than experience them through the uncanny valley of Apple’s high-end software.
I’m a huge fan of VR and AR experiences and have been following this technology since the 1990’s. Used well, both can be immensely entertaining[5] and they also have serious uses in scientific and industrial research.[6] Yet I think I speak for many when I say I’d like to be less screen-bound, not more.
One aspect of Vision Pro strikes me as downright creepy: the “EyeSight” feature which projects a simulated image of your eyes onto the front of the goggles so friends and family can see your peepers while you’re immersed in virtual space. Yuck! And I agree with The New York Times writer Brian X. Chen that the ‘opportunity’ to have yourself represented as a quasi-realistic-but-not-quite simulated avatar when you’re in ‘virtual conference’ mode feels like a dystopian episode of Black Mirror.[7]
I’d rather see people as themselves with bad hair and poor lighting in glitchy Zoom video than experience them through the uncanny valley of Apple’s high-end software. While I very much look forward to entertainment experiences in Vision Pro’s super-high-res format I’m equally sure I don’t want to dwell in this tech for 8 hours a day.
Giotto, Uccello, Mantegna, Raphael and other perspectival painters created virtual worlds whose aesthetic enchantments still draw in millions of viewers a year – more than half a millennium after they were made. I wonder if the Vision Pro will prove anything more than an expensive niche product.
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–For more about the remarkable history of perspective and its influence on the development of modern science see my book “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet.”
[1] I recently wrote about why I dislike ‘the metaverse’ as a term, and why I think ‘cyberspace’ is a more apposite and fruitful word, in the May edition of The Critics Page at The Brooklyn Rail.
[2.1] I am indebted for this insight to art historian Samuel Y. Edgerton and his important book The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution.
[2.2]In the Arena Chapel there are 3 layers of images depicting Christ’s life, each with 9 individual scenes – 3x3x3, constituting a trinity of trinities.
[3] In pre-Renaissance depictions of Heaven and Hell, humans destined for Heaven would often be portrayed larger than those in Hell, with the sinners’ puny spiritual status signified by their impoverished visual scale. Giotto also ‘reverts’ to this older iconic tradition is his own monumental fresco of the The Last Judgement on the back wall of the Arena Chapel.
[4] For a fuller account of the transformation wrought by perspectival painting and the role it played in setting up the conditions for the scientific revolution, see my book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, W.W. Norton, 1997.
[5] Two examples of visually astonishing VR worlds are those created by Canadian pioneer Char Davies in the 1990’s and the contemporary work of the French artist Dominique Gonzalez Forster, whose work was exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).
[6] See for instance work being conducted at the AlloSphere research facility at University of California, Santa Barbara.
[7] EyeSight also raises serious data-privacy issues since the sim-version of you will be graphically generated from video footage taken by a camera in the headset that’s constantly filming your face. Not only creepy, but reeking of Big Brother.
Excellent essay. A number of people over the years have pointed out that aspects of the medieval worldview are returning. The Internet of Things bewtiches everyday objects, making them "smart," so they can talk and listen to us. We speak like wizards into the air to make our invisible lackeys do things. And, as you say, Apple's project is to make us see no division between matter and spirit, the physical and the mental -- which is how medieval peasants saw their universe.
The theologian Marika Rose proposed some years ago that the medieval picture of the universe, in which God's love flows except where impeded by sin, has returned with "surplus value" taking the place of love, and impediments to the free flow of capital taking the place of sin.
Btw I too am creeped out by the phony-eye thing. I wonder if in some future decade everyone will have a screen they project of themselves. If so I suppose the witty interplay of your "real" self and your projected self will become part of fashion.
I love this essay. It's not only a wicked review of the latest gadget with which Big Tech seeks to manipulate us. It's also a profound work of cultural history, which links this gadget to the religious origins of modern science and art. Holy cow. You set the bar too high for the rest of us, Margaret!