MATT BOLTON thinks that the Vision Pro launch is in an awkward space between the past and the future
CURRENT RUMORS SUGGEST that the Vision Pro’s virtual keyboard is borderline unusable. Supposedly, people who’ve had access say that you can only really peck at letters like it’s your first time interacting with the concept of “buttons”. Of course, the Vision Pro works with Bluetooth keyboards, so there’s a workaround when you’re in mixed reality mode, but this won’t be such a great fix if you’re fully immersed in its VR mode.
The absurdity of a floating virtual keyboard that you need to type on by hitting air got me thinking, though. With speech recognition improvements, part of the idea is probably that you never need to type anything in the future. All your logins would be managed, and you can just say anything else you want.
THE FUTURE AND PRESENT ARE TOTA LLY AT ODDS WITH EACH OTHER
Then I thought, “Well, sure, that’s the future, but what about now? We’re only halfway towards that world, and the pitch is being able to do Mac stuff too, otherwise it’s not that much of a useful tool.” Which then means that I thought, “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t launch the future of computing without connecting to the present of computing, and in this case the two are totally at odds with each other.”
When the iPad launched, it was introduced with a keyboard dock and iWork apps as a big feature. The future of the iPad as a productive device would then involve a larger rethinking of interfaces for touch; GarageBand’s virtual instruments led the way in this a year after the iPad’s launch. But, back at that first showing, Apple was happy to connect the past to the future simply by showing magazine browsing on the sofa, and a traditional screen–and– keyboard mode for work.
We’re seeing the same kind of thing with Vision Pro —a screen and virtual keyboard to provide a broader concept of productivity than seeing 3D environments or objects alone —but the problem is the virtuality. The iPad had an actual keyboard that worked
