Apple VR Continues Trend in Isolation Tech

One of the ads that Apple showed off for its new VR goggles has a man involved in some sort of meeting or virtual event standing in his home. A little boy kicks a soccer ball to him and the man is able to kick the ball back without taking off his VR rig. See, Apple seems to be saying, you can lose yourself in a virtual world and still not be an anti-social creep who loses the love and affection of small children! Except I am not so sure you can.

The history of modern technology seems more and more to be a history of isolation. Movies isolated actors from their audiences. Radios and televisions isolated audiences from each other. Phones and tablets isolated people from their soundings, including other people. Social media isolated people from those who the algorithms didn't think would drive their engagement. And now VR promises to isolate a person from literally everything but their own special world.

I am not claiming that these technologies were without benefits. You can pry my radio from my cold dead hands, movies are amazing, and I am comforted knowing that if my kids need help, they have a minor miracle in their pockets that can summon it from almost anywhere they would find themselves. But with all of those technologies, I am not cut off from my surroundings and thus not cut off from other people. Radio can be listened to by any number of people at once (as my neighbor is occasionally determined to demonstrate to the town at large). Phones can be put in my pocket. Watching a movie is still a communal experience. Even a Zoom call lets me smile at my wife as she walks by.

Apple's decision to attempt to make their VR googles appear different (my understanding is that most devices alert you when people are nearby, though I don't know for sure. I tried one VR device, it made me nauseous, and my googling has failed me on this point.) is that they seem to recognize this potential drawback. And it is a drawback. Virtual reality, unlike other technologies, can be completely isolating. You are enveloped in your own reality, largely isolated from the world around you. It seems to be large enough difference in degree to constitute a difference of kind. I cannot smile at my wife in a VR meeting as she walks by because I largely won't notice her walking by. Maybe Apple's goggles solve this problem, but even if their world is more enmeshed with the real world, the googles are still isolating. You are still seeing things other cannot. I can't share something on my screen with people in the room, because there is no screen to share.

Obviously, there is no original point to be made here. I am not the first nor will I be the last to point out that wearing ski googles and staring at pretend reality is not exactly conductive to interpersonal relationships. But it probably bears a little bit of repeating. At some point, differences of degree can turn into differences of kind, and I think that VR might be that point. Loneliness is already considered an epidemic by some health experts, and it can literally shorten your life. At least some experts think our political problems are exacerbated by the lack of social interaction and common purpose in Amercian life. VR isn't to blame for that, of course. But it's not going to help.

Life is obviously more complicated than any one variable, and tech companies have obviously decided that the next golden growth goose is either AI or VR. I just hope that they are wrong, because a world where you cannot even look up from your screen to take in the unfiltered environment around you is not a world in which I think humans will thrive.