Police in San Diego are issuing a safety warning to the public to “cross streets the old-fashioned way” after a video went viral showing a man walking on the road while wearing an Apple Vision Pro headset.
The video shows a man wearing a white puffer coat and green shorts gesturing in the air while wearing the US$3,499 augmented reality goggles. He walks past San Diego police officers, who appear to be making an arrest at the corner of the intersection, and crosses the street on a green light.
At the very least, the video appears to show the man looking both ways as he crossed. The Apple Vision Pro has a see-through function that can allow wearers to take in the real world, with the option of having augmented reality elements superimposed onto their field of vision.
The viral video of the distracted pedestrian was reposted by the San Diego Police Department to its Instagram account. The department said the incident had “us pausing in bewilderment.”
“A video making its rounds online shows our patrol team in Central Division ‘face-to-face’ with the future — a pedestrian donning the latest Apple Vision Pro headset while walking in the street downtown,” police wrote.
“While we’re all for exploring new dimensions and technology, let’s remember the importance of pedestrian safety. Keep those virtual experiences on the sidewalk, folks, and let’s cross streets the old-fashioned way — with our eyes wide open to the real world, unobstructed and without distractions!”
A video posted by Instagram account San Diego Humor purports to show the man’s point of view through the Vision Pro as he crossed the street. The video shows the man changing a song on an Apple Music window that hovers in the top third of his field of view.
A more extreme example of Vision-Pro-users being in the news came early this month when a video went viral showing a man driving his Tesla on autopilot with the headset on. Apple warns users to never use the device while operating vehicles. Dante Lentini, the 21-year-old computer science student in the video, claims he pulled the stunt as part of a skit.
According to Samuel Axon, a senior editor at Ars Technica who took the Vision Pro for a test walk around his neighbourhood in Chicago, the see-through function on the goggles is “more than enough to walk around while using it safely.”
“No, it’s not anything close to the same as seeing the world with your own eyes, but you have all the fidelity and depth perception you need (and just barely enough field of view) to make it comfortable. Seeing what I was doing and navigating safely on foot was not a problem,” he wrote in an article last week.
That being said, “wearing the Vision Pro while driving is unsafe and downright stupid,” Axon notes.
During the test walk, issues arose for Axon when he tried to interact with the augmented reality aspects of the device while on the move.
The Vision Pro allows you to open up windows for music streaming, browsing the internet and checking social media like how one would on a computer, except these pages are mapped to a specific space in your surroundings. That’s fine in a home or confined space — for instance, one can open up a recipe near the stove, then walk back to their chopping board and the recipe will still be there near the stove when they come back to it.
Users can run into major problems when they’re operating in public outside. Axon notes that he opened up his Music app to change songs while walking down his street. It worked, but the window stayed stationary in his neighbour’s yard. It was still there, hovering on the lawn, when he got back from his walk.
“visionOS windows don’t stick to you; they stay in place. You can pinch to carry one as you go, but it gets a bit jittery, and you’re bound to lose it a couple of times,” he wrote.
The video of the Vision-Pro-wearing pedestrian appears to show him pinching a window as he crossed the street. The video allegedly from the man’s perspective shows an Apple Music window following him as he crosses the street.
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