Certain Tesla fans, over the years, have performed questionable acts, like sleeping in cars with Autopilot enabled. That’s led to horrified reactions from the broader community, that just seem to inspire worse behavior in future. Naturally, if anyone was going to be seen driving with an Apple Vision headset, it was almost certainly going to happen in a Tesla. And I’m sorry to tell you, it did.
Before we go any further, it bears noting that it’s quite possible, likely even, that these videos were produced for the sole purpose of engagement farming. The Apple Vision Pro is the hottest new product on the Internet this week, and it makes sense that content creators are all vying for a piece of the action.
The Apple Vision Pro launched on February 2. A couple of days later, Twitter user @blakestonks posted a video showing a driver in a Tesla Cybertruck using an Apple Vision Pro on the highway. The driver can be seen with both hands off the wheel gesticulating in thin air, as the headset is set up with hand tracking for gesture-based control. Another video posted by CryptoTea shows the driver of a Model 3 using an Apple Vision Pro behind the wheel. It then cuts to the car, stopped in a parking lot, surrounded by police cruisers with lights flashing. Oh, and then there’s the guy that’s doing a whole Dr. Strange bit because, hey, gotta get on that trending feed, right?
We’re so fucked. pic.twitter.com/3Zz9QydLzm
— blake (@blakestonks) February 4, 2024
When you’re driving but need to buy a new meme coin pic.twitter.com/GraugcQ8FI
— Crypto Tea (@CryptoTea_) February 3, 2024
These videos are so embarrassing. They're more embarrassing than people actually using them in public. I don't even think anyone is actually using these in public other than guys making content. Its one thing to be an honest dork, this is worse https://t.co/8VvlsXvlbp
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) February 5, 2024
There’s a reason it’s always a Tesla in these videos. It’s all about opposition as an identity. The Tesla stans that make outrageous, dangerous videos are validated by the negative response from the outgroup who “don’t get it.” In turn, members of the outgroup find commonality and community in opposing the ridiculous stunts of the Tesla stans. It gives everybody something to do and something to believe in, and winds out the LIKE counters on everybody’s social media posts. Social media only amplifies this cycle, wherein commenting on the latest infuriating video only spreads the content further, inspiring others to create more.
The Apple Vision Pro is capable of blending digital imagery with a real-world view. The “mixed reality” headset uses cameras to capture vision of the outside world, which it then displays on screens inside the headset. The Vision Pro can then overlay windows and other digital content on the screens for the user. It has an incredibly low latency of around 12 milliseconds—from the cameras capturing an image to it being displayed on the screen inside the goggles.
So, you’re safe to drive while using it, right? Well, not really. Apple specifically recommends against this.
Never use Apple Vision Pro while operating a moving vehicle, bicycle, heavy machinery, or in any other situations requiring attention to safety.
There are reasons behind bans on texting while driving and the like. It’s because driving a vehicle is a high-attention task. Drivers need to be able to respond to changing situations quickly. If you’re responding to emails with Netflix and Safari open at the same time, you’re a lot more likely to rear-end someone at the next traffic light—no matter how fancy your little headset is. Using Tesla’s driver assists is no excuse, either—as the driver is expected to remain attentive at all times, with hands on the wheel.
Furthermore, the Vision Pro actually has some limitations in this regard. Users must enable a special “travel mode” when using it in a vehicle in motion, such as a plane or a train. YouTuber Casey Neitstat demonstrates this well. In a video where he takes up space at a Krispy Kreme and blocks a stairwell to answer a text message, he also tries to use the device on a subway train. At around 2:50, he opens a window on the device, only to see it slide away as the headset gets confused by the motion of the train pulling away.
The Vision Pro’s Travel Mode seems to allow the device to work in a moving frame of reference, but it has trouble properly placing windows and content in the display when looking through windows. The idea of using a Vision Pro while driving and looking out through a windscreen is utterly ridiculous. Beyond the technical limitations, you shouldn’t be trying to use a computer or smartphone while driving. You should have your eyes on the road, and the road only!
The fact that people would make videos like this is sad, and a little frightening. As drivers, we owe it to everybody to drive safely and with due care. Sticking a headset on your face for a few likes on the ‘gram is just dumb, and besmirches what is otherwise a very cool piece of technology.
These goofballs need to do better, and stop acting up for attention. It’s cheap and dull and I’d say we’re all pretty sick of it. I can’t believe it’s 2024 and we have to tell real grown adults to “please pay attention while driving.”
Image credits: Via screenshot
What a fucking asshat. I am so tired of distracted driving. I know two families that have lost kids because some entitled stupid fuck was was so self absorbed they had to text while driving. I will keep bitching to the powers that be until texting while driving is treated as the equal to drunk driving. they are one in the same. With todays tech real time phone record can confirm Becky was texting Karen about this wonderful dress she found at Ross as she plowed into your kids broadside going 60mph because she wasn’t looking up and missed the red light driving her 6000 pound SUV. I will not rest until texting at the wheel is no different than drunk driving and has the same punishments if found guilty. Drive drunk? you are an incredibly selfish fuck. Text while your driving? You are a doubly self absorbed selfish fuck. If the next kid killed from distracted driving is yours, texting and or drunk driver, don’t come crying to me. Karma is a bitch.
This should go without saying, but do not take investment advice from someone who has this poor a grasp of risk management.
On the plus side, Apple Vision is going to make it immediately obvious which people you do not want to interact with, so maybe this could still end up being a net positive for society?
We officially now live in a world of god damned idiots. WTF?
If I ever encounter one of these d bags it will be an oppourtunity to perfect my PIT skills. And it will be enjoyed…
AR technology right now is not safe for driving, or for any other tasks that require our full attention.
However, I could see in 5-10 years a set of AR glasses that could help with driving. Imagine a pair of glasses that give us a HUD with speed, vehicle info, and directions. Hell, imagine a track tool that gave you the optimal line ala Gran Turismo? The technology will some day become part of driving, but for now it’s just dumb to even attempt.
The technology already exists, but it’s a full helmet, costs $257 grand, and you have to be the US military (or an approved ally) to buy it. The F-35 has an even fancier one that basically turns you into a cyborg with a plane body (full 360 degree view in visual and infrared), but it’s allegedly $500k, and requires you are strapped into an F-35 to use it.
But that also reveals one of the big challenges- I’ve heard 2nd hand from some of the people who were involved in these projects, and even with fighter pilots who are about the most disciplined user base that exists there are still lots of issues with unintended commands, to the point the full functionality is intentionally cut back in favor of manual controls, since the muscle reflex for tactile input is much easier to reliably train than occular imput.
All these fanatic fools need to be drug out in the street and beat to a pulp
Depending on the city, that’s likely to happen sooner rather than later.
If they’re walking, there’s a very good chance they would not see that you’re sticking a foot in front of them. With any luck, they land on the device. That would be expensive and painful. You would have plausible deniability if you’re careful.
I also think a well-aimed laser might blind someone as well as pulling the power cable, and could be done at an inopportune time. And, of course, coming at them from the side works if you do just want to sucker punch them.
But, hey, I’m not advocating any of this. I’m just saying I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with anyone exploiting the weaknesses of the product to ensure those weaknesses are made public.
If it wasn’t for the fact that there are other drivers on the road who might end up as innocent victims of these losers’ vapid fanboi-ism, I’d say, just ignore and let Darwin handle it.
Special roads for Tesla drivers? We can let them think it is because they are elite, but really it is to isolate the contagion. 😉
At least the Apple Vision headset makes you properly look like an idiot as a heads-up to everyone on the road.
Besides the obvious, I got two other takeaways from the Cybertruck video:
1) The fingerprints on the door. Oh my!
2) The tire-shredding hubcaps have already been removed. Surprisingly, I also think this maybe looks better?
There is a lot of stupid in these videos, but I would like to specifically call out the stupidity of the passenger in the second video. The driver in this video is an idiot, but in the even of an accident he will be blissfully unaware of his fate until the moment of impact with an oncoming semi. The passenger, however, will be fully aware of his impending demise. His death will occur after experiencing mortal terror, yet he can do nothing to prevent it.
Worse yet, the passenger did not appear on camera and therefore remains anonymous. In the event this stunt doesn’t end poorly, he won’t even get credit for his participation and the risk he took filming this jackass. The passenger’s only chance at fame is if this ends in a fiery crash and his obituary goes viral on Tiktac. If you are going to be stupid, you may as well be stupid in a way that benefits you. The internet appears to prove that adage that “any publicity is good publicity,” so it seems asinine to engage in dangerous attention-seeking stunts in a way that precludes you from getting any attention.
“please pay attention while driving.”
More like, “please pay attention to me while driving.”
Bingo!!
I think “goofballs” is too benign. These people appear to be jackasses.
Still far too kind.
This is the song playing in my head while reading this.
Every time I read stuff like that I hear the refrain from Banditos by the Refreshments.
ohh no, yep, here it comes. “Everybody knows………….
Funny, I thought clicking on your link was going to take me to this song.
I really thought this was going to be “Yakity Sax” (the Bennie Hill theme).
Beyond what’s mentioned here, there’s one really obvious problem that makes me dislike the use of the Apple Vision for augmented reality in general (and especially for driving). A failure state leaves you blind. Dead battery? Black screen. Camera stops communicating? No visual from the camera. Fly lands on the camera?
Say what you will about Google Glass and others, at least they weren’t an opaque contraption in front of your eyes. Still wouldn’t be good to drive while using them, but at least their failure wouldn’t necessitate removing them to see.
People have seen the OS crash and it continues showing the pass-through view. https://twitter.com/sdw/status/1753609643396628877
> for augmented reality in general
I used to work on these kinds of systems. I’m not sure we’ll ever get see-through AR systems good enough for general / every where use. The problem is that see-through can’t draw black over the world, all it can do is add light to what you see from the environment. You’ll be unable to preview a black couch against a while wall or see the UI at all when driving toward the sun.
OS crash is only one mode of failure. Power loss, screen failure, camera failure, and other system glitches could cause loss of external vision.
You are right that there are certainly use cases for an augmented reality setup like this, but driving is certainly not one of them. Any task that requires a combination of uninhibited vision and quick reaction time for safety should not have the potential to fail dark. A setup that would be difficult to create, but safer and more useful, would be one that acts similarly to this, but with a glass front that darkens for use and fails clear (or close to clear–I think a certain level of tint would be acceptable). I don’t know that we have the capability to make that at this point, but it would be worth trying if we want to use these sorts of devices in broad ranges of applications.
I also don’t think the loss of peripheral vision is acceptable while driving, even if this didn’t have the potential to fail dark or the distracting elements, but that’s much harder for me to justify, since people with glasses drive with limited peripheral vision. Admittedly, it’s also something that future versions of these headsets could solve, and probably even for people who wear glasses.
You’re right. I wouldn’t recommend any type of AR system for driving or the classic drug warning, “do not operate heavy machinery”. Yeah… I got more into the generic point than the specific. Hello ADHD my old friend.
This is a topic I know much better than vehicles and I think it’s interesting so I’ll stick with the topic for a bit. So uh, nothing directly Autopian relevant below:
> but with a glass front that darkens for use and fails clear (or close to clear–I think a certain level of tint would be acceptable) I don’t know that we have the capability to make that at this point
Yup doable. Look at the active shutter glasses that came with 3D TVs; clear until used. We built some early see-through prototypes behind a hacked version of these.
> that’s much harder for me to justify, since people with glasses drive with limited peripheral vision.
I’d actually give you this argument. I wear glasses and even with my massive nearsightedness I can see enough movement around the side of the lens that I still have situational awareness.
We built some systems for the military, these are people who are using heavy machinery. These were kind of like a rear view mirror. An opaque display up in the corner of your vision that you can choose look at and focus on, but otherwise out of the way.
One other thing that people might find surprising is how big see-through optics are. They’re often larger than equivalent direct view optics. You have all the same display and lens hardware and then additional lenses to put the display into your field of view. Then, see-through generally has to be brighter (at the display) because the optics are inefficient, you only get about 1/2 the light to your eyes, any you have to overpower ambient light. Being brighter requires more energy so then the battery and heatsinks have to get larger.
An example, the Vuzix Blade is pretty state of the art for see-through AR systems. It trades a smaller display to be able to fit into a glasses like form factor. It’s got a 480×480 pixel display with an (estimated) 19° field of view in only one eye. Check out how big it is for that small or a display
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0581/1208/2086/files/Vuzix-Blade-Upgraded-Smart-Glasses-d08_c0ba4eb2-d609-41d1-8e36-28703d63ab43.pdf
I find that sort of system more useful for a lot of use cases, and it’s a pretty good solution for a lot of specific problems.
Very valid hurdles. I do think that it is probably prohibitively expensive/heavy to create something that is Apple Vision with the capability I think it should have for broader use. And it’s still a heck of a gamble to offer it up primarily as a consumer device (but Apple has the cultural sway for it). I’d be looking at industrial applications first, doing things like overlays that show where/how to install parts, scanning for potential issues and flagging them for human inspection, etc.
As to the Vuzix Blade, it’s pretty impressive they’ve done that well in that form factor. I hope they continue to develop that and release more impressive versions.
Thanks for sharing your expertise! Really cool to get a perspective from someone working with this sort of tech regularly!
> I’d be looking at industrial applications first, doing things like overlays that show where/how to install parts, scanning for potential issues and flagging them for human inspection, etc.
I agree, that industrial is the best place for these things at this time. In addition to your list above…
Part-picking in a warehouse: walking directions to the shelf like a GPS display, highlight the bin on the shelf, scan the barcode and to confirm as it’s being picked up. It doesn’t need to draw over bright sunlight, a small field of view isn’t a problem, and it’s a work site / private space so there’s no social stigma.
Remote review and commentary. An expert at the home office who can see through your eyes and draw in your vision. This is basically your “like overlays that show where/how” but is easier to pull off today because no one needs to teach the computer to recognize all the bits about the thing you’re working on.
The opaque HMD’s are great any time you need both hands free like using a borescope or as the viewfinder for a camera in a tight space.
> Thanks for sharing your expertise! Really cool to get a perspective from someone working with this sort of tech regularly!
No problem, this gives me a chance to infodump in a socially acceptable way. 🙂
One last point, I haven’t used the Apple headset yet but from reading reviews the things that impress me are some of the simple asides in coverage. The big one is that more than one reviewer has talked about taking notes on their phone while wearing the headset.
To pull that off Apple had to get a bunch of things really really right.
Captured the phone screen and displayed it well enough to read. If you’ve take digital pictures of a digital display you may have seen how easy that goes wrong with pixelation, anti-aliasing of fonts, and moiré patternsAlignment of the display to the worldLow latency. Are you annoyed when the screen lags behind you finger when scrolling, imagine if your finger lagged behind your finger while scrolling.
You can’t use LCD to block light?
You can block light across the full field of view. This is something like “Switchable Window Film” that can make windows opaque, or active 3D shutter glasses. These are effectively a single large pixel that can be turned on to block light or actively controlled to provide controllable dimming.
This acts more like sunglasses, it darkens the entire world so that you can see the image. That doesn’t work a lot of use cases and like dark sunglasses you can’t where them every where.
What you can’t do is block in a specific area or pattern. This would be something like like making black bar that goes behind closed captions. Or more a detailed version like selectively blocking pixels to draw a black couch over a white wall. You basically want some “pixels” that you can make opaque.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work. The problem is that an LCD you’d put behind the image is out of focus and won’t block light with sharp outline. This is also the reason you can take a picture through a window screen or chain link fence.
You can see this yourself. Look at something in the distance, close one eye and put the tip of a pen in front of your eye at about the distance of glasses. Even with just one eye you’ll find that the pen doesn’t actually block anything, it just makes the image blurry.
You actually have to get to a pretty thick part of that pen before it blocks something. And when it does block something you make the entire field of view blurry.
Ah. I guess we’ll have to wait for those optical nerve taps then. Or bionic eyes, whichever comes first.
There are layers upon layers of stupidity here. I’ll fully admit that I’m not really a tech person. Outside of the basics like having a nice TV, Bluetooth headphones, and upgrading my iPhone every few years when it becomes cheap to do so I’ve just never really understood the obsession with obtaining the latest and greatest techno wizardry. Tablets are kind of redundant to me. I have less that 0 interest in augmented/virtual/etc. reality. The metaverse is literally the dumbest shit ever.
So I’m hardly the target audience for stuff like the Vision Pro, and while I really am working hard to be less of a curmudgeon and let people enjoy things (it’s hard), when your hobby puts other people at risk then fuck your hobby. I also think that social media is a blight on society that brings out the absolute worst in humanity.
And of course it’s goddamn Tesla stans. It’s always goddamn Tesla stans. They’re like moths to flames when it comes to antisocial behavior, and I’ve said a few times that the vast majority of them are very different from car enthusiasts. They’re tech and attention enthusiasts. My friends have been joking lately than Teslas are the new BMWs when it comes to reckless driving and at least in our area they seem to be correct.
But there’s so much more! This is merely the top of a rabbit hole of these cretins doing absurd shit in their rolling tablets. Maybe the Lexus Texas article and thread is stuck in my head, or maybe I’m just a crude bastard (likely!), but when browsing a certain website with an orange and black logo that rhymes with horn pub I’ve encountered multiple videos of Tesla people turning on autopilot and banging in the damn things.
Fucking grow up. Be an idiot at home. Don’t subject the rest of us to your weird personality disorders….
In the past… six months? I think every Tesla I’ve gone around that was causing some sort of traffic issue had a driver that was sitting on their phone or leaned over and poking at the tablet. Completely ignoring traffic.
“And of course it’s goddamn Tesla stans. It’s always goddamn Tesla stans. They’re like moths to flames when it comes to antisocial behavior, and I’ve said a few times that the vast majority of them are very different from car enthusiasts.”
Different but no better than Mustang drivers leaving CnC, coal blowers, Carolina squatters, muffler deleters, emissions deleters, speeders, sideshowers, DUIers, there’s lots of shitty, dangerous, antisocial behavior going around.
This is a tragically correct take
Doing this in any scenario is just insanely dangerous. Your view out of the headset is not the same as without it (everything is just a bit – off, due to color differences and motion blur) and Autopilot even WITHOUT the headset is hardly up to the task of hands-off driving. I don’t like being part of these people’s insanity.
Not clicking any of those, I will not reward attention-seeking behavior with attention.
As Elon has already proven the whole world is simply just a Beta test playground, and all of us are acceptable collateral.
Twatwaffles, all.
Don’t Feed The Idiots. Writing this article just increased their click count. This ensures they will try to do something even more stupid next time.
I refuse to click on the links.
I mean, only one of the three is not at all connected to the person doing it for e-clout. You can click that link.
Don’t click. I didn’t.
Descriptions of the content are enough. No need to feed the morons.
Another episode of black mirror… geez