The change triggered by Apple's Vision Pro

Here we go.?

Apple has finally introduced its Augmented Reality headset, called Vision Pro, that resembles a diving mask and costs $3,499.?

Many laud it for its technical features, the 5,000 patents it has generated, the immediate availability of services as soon as it becomes available, and for its biometric authentication.?

Many others criticize it for its aesthetics, price, poor battery life, and the sense of isolation and separation from reality that it could induce in users.

Unfortunately, too often, and this case is no exception, we tend to confuse the device with the change that it is potentially able to enable. What Apple has introduced is not a device, it's an epochal change that will soon occur in people's habits and in the ways of realizing and marketing applications, content, and services.

I know that, on closer inspection, it's a product that doesn't live up to Apple's standards, clumsy, a bit ugly, with a power cable so horrible that Jony Ive, the long-time head of Apple's design, probably was left speechless for hours after seeing it. But you must understand that what was presented is not the first version, but version zero. A prototype pulled out of the research labs and made "presentable" against the opinion of the engineers who considered it not yet ready.

I would have wanted it different, I recently wrote about it here, but it's still early, too early.?

Do you remember the presentation of the first iPhone at Macworld 2007? Well, it was all fake. That device did not work, it was a prototype in which a specific operating sequence had been inserted, and everything held up only if you followed that sequence perfectly. In that case, too, the engineers were against the presentation, the iPhone was not yet ready, but for Steve Jobs, it was time to present it. We're talking about a device so limping that its first commercial version didn't even have copy and paste and the App Store.?

Yet we all know how it went: $200 billion in revenues generated by iPhone alone in 2022 and, what matters most, a radical change introduced into people's habits. The rest is history.

What Steve Jobs presented in 2007 was not a product, it was the hub of a nascent ecosystem of applications, content, and services, an enabler of innovation so powerful that today there are 7 billion smartphones in the world that are either iPhones or devices inspired by the iPhone in form, functionality, operating system aesthetics, or business model.

I know what many of you are thinking: "Apple has also been inspired by others in its history, starting with the mouse that was an invention of Xerox!"

Very true, but the truth is that creativity and innovation are also based on being inspired by the ideas of others and giving them new abilities to generate value. It's normal, and everyone does it. Oh, by the way, the mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1964.

Today, sixteen years later, we consider the first version of the iPhone a mediocre device that, despite its features, managed to radically transform the lives of most people.

Tomorrow we will look at Vision Pro with the same feelings that we have today for the first version of the iPhone and we will wonder how it was possible, in the past, not to have smart glasses capable of providing us with applications, content, and services directly in our field of vision and acting as a personal assistant in many activities of our lives.

We will always have in front of our eyes all the information we need to shop, work, play, chat with friends, and we can immerse ourselves in a video game, a movie or a TV series simply by requesting our content from the smart glasses with our voice or by looking in the right direction inside our glasses.

The main actor of this change, from the device's point of view, could be Apple, but it could also be others, what matters, as I wrote at the beginning, is not the device itself, but the change it is capable of enabling.

This change will be so radical that in my latest book "Augmented Lives", I included it among the major directions that will lead humanity to be "augmented" thanks to the use of future technologies.?

Lives simplified by machines capable of performing many of the tasks that we consider tedious or unpleasant. Healthier and longer lives thanks to the enormous availability of health data and artificial intelligence algorithms capable of enabling predictive medicine. Augmented lives thanks to the enormous potential offered by augmented reality and virtual reality and thanks to devices like Apple's Vision Pro and its evolutions.

As human beings, we will soon begin to enjoy the new services that will be made available to us, legislators will have to work immediately to intercept potential abuses that someone will surely try to carry out, while companies will have to immediately gear up to bring all their applications and all their services within this new great ecosystem. Because if today it is unthinkable not to be present on users' smartphones, tomorrow it will be unthinkable not to be present within their smart glasses, and from the software and human machine interaction point of view, everything is still to be invented.

My latest book!???

The future is full of transformative changes in the way we work, travel, consume information, maintain our health, shop, and interact with others.

My latest book, "Augmented Lives" explores innovation and emerging technologies and their impact on our lives. Available in all editions and formats on augmentedlives.com, and on all Amazon stores, starting from here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTRTDGK5