The Vision Pro, The Built Environment, and the Big Questions
Will we continue to build beauty when we can so realistically simulate it?
Fifth Wall’s Brendan Wallace posed an interesting question last night on X, pondering the implications the Apple Vision Pro will have on real estate.
It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few weeks. In some ways, this is a bit of a Part 2 to last week’s newsletter about the built environment and our societal addiction to tech and social media.
I don’t think the Vision Pro (and technologies like it) has any very immediate implications for our built environment, primarily because the price point is still too prohibitive to see mass adoption.
But as the price point drops and the head gear because less clunky, the implications on real estate and the broader world of shaping the built environment could be far more drastic.
If you’ve not already seen clips of what it’s like to use the Vision Pro (or tried it yourself), take a quick scan through the video above. One of the most noticeable parts about wearing it is your ability to put screens everywhere. The technology is already so immersive even in its infant stages, so what happens as it improves?
Consider the image in Brendan’s tweet. The user is standing in the kind of beautiful industrial brick loft I could only imagine being able to afford as an office or studio space. But will future Vision Pro users be willing to pay for such a space when they can simply use immersive rendering apps to simulate beautiful surroundings?
With access to well-designed home and office space so limited and costly to most, why not prioritize function over form, pocket some serious savings, and enjoy a similar aesthetic experience for far less?
The technological advancements that will be berthed out of the immersive digital technology in the Vision Pro pose some existential questions for the urbanism movement:
Should the real built environment still matter in a world where we can rendering-app our way to a simulated experience with roughly the same aesthetic?
If so, it it simply an issue of equity of access? Or does a proper built environment/“real world” matter even if everyone has access to simulated beauty?
If it does still matter, why?
I don’t ask these questions rhetorically, and am certainly not suggesting the answer is to say the built environment shouldn’t matter. In fact, it will matter more than ever.
But in a world where conveying these ideas is already such an uphill battle, these are the kinds of questions the next generation of urbanists will have to answer. And not only answer, but answer in ways that make a vision for a vibrant and flourishing “real world” accessible and compelling to the masses.