With Apple’s $3,500 headsets out in the wild, new social norms apply

livemint.com:

Yam Olisker was walking around New York City’s Times Square getting stares and questions from strangers. That can happen when you have a $3,500 hunk of tech strapped to your face. Olisker was wearing Apple’s new Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset that looks like giant silver ski goggles.

Yes, even in bustling Times Square—among naked cowboys, costumed Spidermen hustling for tips for selfie pics, evangelists shouting Scripture about the end of the world, and out-of-towners trying to follow janky directional apps to the next performance of “The Lion King"—the Vision Pro stood out. A few passerby asked Olisker to tell them how many fingers they were holding up. “They didn’t believe that I could see them," says Olisker, 19, who had flown from Israel to buy the device.

Call it the curse of being first. Since the Vision Pro went on sale, early adopters taking them into the wild have been gawked at and judged for covering their eyes and about half their faces—when they could be, well, avoiding eye contact with other humans the normal way, by staring at their phones. The Vision Pro is one of Apple’s first major product launches in years.

It does what a phone or laptop can do—send emails and show movies—but tracks your eye and hand movements when you want to click on an app or write something down. The questions from strangers are reminiscent of when the first iPhone came out. How do you type with no buttons? Or when AirPods took over the streets: Is that person talking to themselves? Apple, which first unveiled the Vision Pro in June, calls it revolutionary—its first product you look through and not at.