Apple Vision Pro’s secret weapon? Mindfulness

Image credits: brian heater

Above all, Apple’s Vision Pro is a start. When using it, there are moments when it feels like a porthole into another world, and perhaps the future. Sure, it’s imperfect, but there’s no denying that it’s the result of decades of false starts in augmented reality. Even just a few minutes of using the headset can be a fascinating experience, but perhaps more importantly, it gives you a tangible glimpse into how things are going.

I’ve been obsessed with mindfulness apps for a long time. It’s not that I haven’t used them much lately, but I feel like I’ve tried them all. One key thing that Headspace and Calm lack on phones and tablets is immersion. It cannot be overstated how powerful the immersion of the tool is, especially for those just beginning the practice. That’s what Vision Pro has.

Just like in the world of AR and VR, my own practice has been full of false starts. Meditation is difficult. Full stop. Even for veterans, it’s difficult to silence a noisy brain. It’s much more difficult when you’re first trying to get your footing. It can be irritating and anxiety-provoking, and can actually have the opposite of the intended effect. But to get through it, you need to be patient, dedicated, and willing to put in the time.

In addition to apps, I’m a sucker for trying out almost any hardware that I hope will help me practice mindfulness. As you can imagine, they’re mostly crap, the kind of plastic trash that’s been used twice and stashed away in a drawer until your family gets something for an estate sale. (Here’s a quick note about Muse’s clever meditation band, which really helped me.)

I’ve always found mindfulness to be one of the most fascinating use cases for augmented reality. Again, it’s that total immersion that does a lot of the heavy lifting and drowns out the distractions of life. Well, up to a certain point. In the middle of this morning’s session, the annoying buzzer in my New York apartment went off. There are limits to what you can do. When it comes to messy apartments, whirring radiators, rustling rabbits, and angry neighbors, AirPods Pro will take you out of the race.

Apple has previously offered mindfulness on iPhone and Apple Watch. This is a basic app, primarily aimed at breathing. It doesn’t have the complexity or content of an app like Calm, but anyone who has meditated successfully will be happy to tell you how important breathing is to the meditative process. It’s like the drums on a rock track, centered and constant.

Image credits: apple

These are the words of Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki from his seminal 1970 book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

When we practice zazen, our mind always follows our breath. When we breathe in, air enters our inner world. When we exhale, air leaves into the outside world. The inner world is infinite, but so is the outer world. We talk about the “inner world” and the “outer world,” but in reality there is only one world. In this infinite world, our throats are like swinging doors. Air flows in and out like a person passing through a swinging door.

When you think “I am breathing,” “I” becomes redundant. There is no one who can say “I”. What we call “I” is just a swinging door that moves when we breathe in and out. It just moves. That’s everything. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing. There is no “I,” no world, no mind, and no body. Just a swinging door.

The Vision Pro version of Mindfulness works in much the same way. Images like a circle of flower petals expand and contract to help you focus on your breathing, and a narrator offers a guided meditation. It’s simple, like the best parts of Zen.

Combined with the headset’s environmental offer (an effective 3D desktop wallpaper of the world around you), you get the right level of immersion, which forces you to focus on the app and on your breathing, which It’s a powerful and important aspect of our lives that most people take for granted most of the time. Suddenly you are meditating on a sandy beach or on the moon.

This is the kind of tool I would have loved to have access to in my early days when I was having such a hard time concentrating. It’s also a much-needed break on a device that’s half productivity, half entertainment.

Apple’s mindfulness app isn’t the be all and end all, but it’s certainly the be all and end all. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a hopeful hint. If such a basic app can have such powerful effects, it’s exciting to think about the directions developers could go in both in terms of mindfulness tools and altered states. Sorry, I’m going to sound like a late Timothy Leary writing about this, but I’m really looking forward to seeing where this goes.