In 2013, Google released an all-new, much-hyped product: Google Glass. It came in the form of a pair of glasses that would overlay digital information on their view of the world. The company was confident people would still go wild for a device that let them blend tech with real life.

People hated it. They thought it looked ugly and was difficult to use. Wearers were quickly dubbed "glassholes".

But Big Tech was determined to sell the idea of adding digital information to our vision of the world, known as "augmented reality" or AR. 

And there were promising signs. In 2016, there was a wave of enthusiasm for Pokemon GO, a game that let players track down and catch Pokemon in real-life spaces with their phones. Google made a feature that allows users to project 3D models of animals into their living rooms with their phones.

Now Apple is hoping to succeed where Google Glass failed: moving AR from our phone screens to our very eyes.

The company bills its new Vision Pro headset as a new technology: "spatial computing". The idea is that it will be able to help with everyday tasks. For example, users will be able to cook a meal while keeping the recipe displayed in the corner of their eye.

But the response has not been favourable. The headset has been mercilessly mocked online. A reviewer in the New York Times said it gave them the "ick".

So why might people not feel enthused by the idea of augmenting their reality?

For some, it is a question of community. They worry that we live in an increasingly atomised world, where people find it harder to connect with each other. AR headsets, they fear, force us into an even more private world. 

This point was made by the German philosopher HegelA 19th-Century German philosopher.. He argued that while we might get a feeling of freedom from bending reality to our will, this does not actually make us free.

True freedom, he argued, comes from working with others to achieve both collective and individual goals. While we might be tempted to isolate ourselves from others and live in our own realities, we cannot truly be fulfilled unless we are part of a community.

So even if we might enjoy the power of being able to rearrange the world around our needs, it will not make us feel truly happy. We cannot be a community if we no longer share even the same reality. 

Others think the reason is simpler. They say the headset is all about letting people ignore a reality that is coming apart around them.

Global politics is turning sour. The far right is on the rise across the world. And above it all looms the climate crisis, which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable within our lifetimes. 

As Apple released the headset, wildfires raging in Canada were turning the sky in much of the northern USA orange. Scientists have linked these fires with climate breakdown.¹ These, critics say, are events that we have to face up to.

Yet Apple is offering a technology that lets us do the opposite: blot out this reality and replace it with our own.

Yes: Big Tech has already colonised our pockets, our homes, our time. Now they want to take over our very field of vision. Regardless of the success of Vision Pro, this development should worry us.

No: AR systems have all failed because people want the human touch. They have no wish to retreat into their own private realities. This means there is a limit on how far Big Tech can go.

Or... It is not a good sign that AR keeps coming back when people have already rejected it. It shows that Big Tech does not care what our actual preferences are: one way or another, it will get what it wants.