Mr. Smith tries some electric ski goggles

I recalled an anecdote about the sculptor Tony Smith I read or heard in undergraduate school.

I did some interneting and found this description:

One dark night in 1951, Smith found himself in a car with three students from the Cooper Union riding down the not-yet-opened New Jersey Turnpike. They made the illicit trip from the Meadowlands (Exit 16) to New Brunswick (Exit 9), with no street lamps, lane markers or guard rails, relying only on their headlights and the industrial glow of North Jersey.

Smith described the experience of barreling down an unfinished expressway in the dark as revelatory. The unfinished but completely human-made landscape unrolled in the car’s headlights as if it were a vast sculpture.

Not long after that drive, Smith took a break from architecture, spending two years painting in Germany, where he visited abandoned airstrips and other World War II ruins, “surrealist landscapes, something that had nothing to do with any function, created worlds without tradition.”

I like to think that Smith saw the world with fresh eyes, and saw that something had changed, something was new, and he could not go back.

This anecdote bubbled up for me a day or so after I tried the Apple Vision Pro.

I had a quiet afternoon at work one Friday. I had been curious about the device. I scheduled a demonstration at the Apple Store in Pioneer Square, in downtown Portland. A nice young man whose name I will never remember sat me down on some curvy blonde wood benches and he went to fetch the device.

When I signed up online, I provided my prescription. They explained to me that they didn’t have my exact prescription, but the lenses they had were close. He removed the device from a cloth bag and pulled out some inner shielding, and popped in two magnetically mounted lenses.

I hung my glasses on my shirt front and we tried on the device for fit. The Vision Pro went through an adjustment cycle, having me look at a UI while it calibrated to my wonky eyeballs. At first everything was way too dark. My handler apologized, fetched some help, and they readjusted something so that everything was bright. One of the employees had been noodling with the settings.

Now with the lenses calibrated, the brightness adjusted, I had a slightly heavy pair of electric ski goggles on my noggin. Not uncomfortable, but not unnoticeable either. A dialog box appeared before me. A little to my left. It appeared to me as a sheet of frosted glass hanging stubbornly in the air. It cast a shadow. I could see people through the frosted glass, milling about the store, fading behind the frosted glass. Their silhouette blurry and indistinct until the emerged from behind the dialog box.

I had the opportunity to sit with this UI element for a long while. The young man working with me had to go fetch a special iPad to run my demo, so I just sat and looked at this magical glass hanging in the air.

My brain did cartwheels as I tried to reconcile the very real fake thing floating in the air before me. My Apple friend returned, and it was time for a demo.

He guided me through the basics of navigating the device. If you’ve seen a commercial, you know that you can just look at icons and UI elements to activate them. It’s hard to describe how uncanny that feels. One very weird aspect of this interface paradigm is instinctively and accidentally knowing how it works - you look at a thing, it glimmers, you tap two fingers together, and it does something - and then you become self-conscious of the mechanics and you try too hard. Instead of letting your eyes drift over the UI, you try too hard to focus, which paradoxically makes it hard to use. Take a breath, relax, and suddenly you’re zooming through the virtual world again.

Over the course of the demo we tried out photos and the web browser. I clumsily “typed” my website into the search bar. My website appeared. I stretched it out as big as a billboard and hung it in the air across the room. My handler coached me into watching a few standard movie clips. This was nice. A private theater experience, albeit one strapped to your head.

They cleverly keep the most immersive and jaw-dropping experiences for the end of the demo. Instead of watching some Hollywood movies, they had me watch some “spatial videos.” These were various clips of scenes and activities which were chosen to highlight the immersive and three-dimensional quality of the experience.

A train approached me on a snow-covered mountain pass. I found myself in the basket beneath a hot-air balloon. Baby rhinos approached me, eating greens and grass just beyond a fence. I tried to pet the rhino. The rhino was not there. A mountain climber perched on a peak, I gripped my seat as my heart jumped out of my chest. I’m no good with heights, not even virtual ones.

The demo was over and I removed the space helmet, disappointed to find I was still on earth. I actually don’t remember how I got home from the Apple Store. I think I drove? Maybe. That night I had strange VR dreams.

The Apple Vision Pro is not one-of-a-kind. Sony and Meta both have VR sets, but I have never taken an interest in these devices. They are centered around gaming, and I find the culture of video games to rancid. But I am on board with petting baby rhinos.

I was profoundly moved by this tech demo. I had to muster incredible restraint to not buy one on the spot. These devices are still quite costly, and I can’t describe what I would do with this thing. But this felt like the future in a way that makes me ache. I think this might be my Tony-Smith-Turnpike experience.