Success is a poor teacher.
In my view, the Apple Vision Pro is a failure in interaction design. It’s as though they’re trapped within the confines of the iPhone paradigm. You’ve likely experienced the bizarre sensation of operating software while donning the Vision Pro. This “gesture in the void” is no secret martial arts technique from a Chinese kung fu master, but rather a reluctant compromise.
Eye contact as a means of interaction is excessively taxing, while resorting to a touchpad or mouse seems to betray a lack of sophistication. Engineers in Cupertino’s spaceship were compelled to resort to this measure, leaving users to tap and swipe at thin air without any feedback.
If you argue that this represents a good interaction model, then we might as well remove touchscreens from the next generation of iPhones and iPads. Imagine users wielding their “finger-kung fu” to control apps. But of course, you wouldn’t buy an iPhone without a touchscreen, would you?
Steve Jobs brought a breakthrough in interaction design by advocating for the use of fingers over styluses. As he put it, this was the more natural way.
Is “air-tapping” a natural way? Obviously not. It’s just a “legacy” of the iPhone. Or to put it more precisely, it’s an instance of what psychologists call “functional fixedness,” a mental bias that can limit our problem-solving capabilities.
Obviously, the Vision Pro is not an iPhone. It’s a new category of product, which means it should adopt an interaction model distinct from that of the iPhone.
So, how do we tackle the interaction challenge of the “spatial computing” era?
As Apple executives often say, it’s easier said than done. Criticizing others’ work is easy, but finding solutions is much harder.
However, at the level of interaction design, the problem is not insurmountable.
In fact, the solution has been right in front of us. ChatGPT is also an innovation, yet it resolves the challenge of AI interaction through chat, a simple way for communication.
In my opinion, for a device like the Vision Pro, the combination of eye contact and verbal communication is the optimal mode of interaction, reflecting the truly natural way humans communicate.
What do you think?