There are several things I would like to see improve with the Vision Pro (and VR hardware in general), but it’s recently hit me that the main issue I have with using it is that despite all of the video passthrough and digital eyes on the outside of the screen, I always feel profoundly isolated when wearing the headset.

And I don’t just mean around other people, even as I write this right now on my iPad, I’m in my living room, I’m sitting on my couch, the world around me is very tangible, I can eat breakfast and drink my morning coffee as I write, and I just feel connected to the world around me. When I put the Vision Pro on, I immediately feel like I’m in a different space. The video passthrough is the best in any headset I’ve seen, but I feel as though I’m in a world that looks like my home, but it’s very much not, it’s a digital representation of a home I’m no longer in.

As I write this, I know it sounds strange, but it’s how I feel in the headset. I feel like I’m jacking into the Matrix and everything looks mostly right, but everything is also just a little bit off (“this is not my beautiful house, my god, what have I done?!”).

Similarly, I was watching the premier episode of Agatha All Along on Disney+ with my wife last night, and I really enjoyed the experience of watching the show together and reacting to things at the same time. Sure, we had our phones and spent some time looking at them during the episode, but it felt like a communal experience we were having together and I valued the time much more because of it. This experience simply isn’t possible in the Vision Pro today, and even if we could use SharePlay or something to sync up the video on both of our headsets, I’m just not convinced it would feel the same. I know some people will go, “people said that about smartphones too,” and I just find that to be an insane false equivalency. Maybe with much more advanced and miniaturized hardware this will become less of an issue, but for the next decade I just can’t see myself spending any amount of time around my wife with a headset on.

The two best experiences I had with the Vision Pro that made me feel less alone were when I played some board games with a friend with spatial personas, and when I watched the spatial video stream of The Talk Show live at WWDC. The spatial personas hang out with my friend was cool in that while I did feel like we were in a not-quite-correct version of my home, we were in it together and that made it feel less isolating. Now, if he didn’t live across the country and we could be in the same space, we’d never choose personas over actually being in the same room, but it was a very cool experience. Meanwhile, The Talk Show experience was great in that it leaned into transporting me somewhere else. I wasn’t in my office watching a livestream, I was in the audience watching people on a stage that looked surprisingly real.

I bring up those experiences because I do think there are times where the, ahem, vision of the Vision Pro reveals itself and I feel engaged with the possibility this platform represents. I also recognize that not everyone has a significant other to spend time with on a daily basis, and that others may feel less isolated when in the headset. For them, this post may not resonate at all, and that’s fine. I don’t write this blog to share what I think are universal truths about technology, I write it to share my personal feelings, and right now this is how I’m feeling about the Vision Pro.