SACREMENTO — Derek Sooliman, 29, has spent an average of 14 hours daily in his Apple Vision Pro since purchasing the headset in February, emerging only for 'bathroom-adjacent activities' and a weekly DoorDash handoff he conducts through a mail slot he had installed specifically for this purpose. In a candid interview conducted via FaceTime — which he answered while still wearing the headset, his pupils visible through the front display, which was running a screensaver of a forest — Sooliman admitted that he could no longer confidently describe the appearance of a tree.
'I know they're... green? Or sometimes not green? There's a trunk situation, I think? Branches? Do they have branches? I want to say yes,' he said. 'The ones in the headset look better, honestly. More defined. Better depth of field. The real ones are just kind of... blurry. Like someone turned the render distance way down.'
Sooliman is not an outlier. He is a pioneer. Apple would call him a 'power user.' His mother would call him 'a concern.'
'We're seeing this more and more,' said Dr. Blibby J. Snorf, Director of Spatial Computing Dependency at Johns Hopkins University's Center for People Who Won't Take the Fucking Thing Off — formerly the Center for General Spatial Health, renamed in March after 'an incident at a donor brunch'. 'The brain adapts. After month three, most users can no longer process non-Retina reality. We had one patient who tried to pinch-to-zoom on an actual sunset and became inconsolable when it didn't work. We had to sedate him with benzodiazepines and a 4K nature documentary. He's doing better now. He thinks the documentary was real. We haven't corrected him.'
Snorf's center, which opened in January after a $12 million grant from an anonymous tech billionaire 'who definitely does not own a competing headset manufacturer, and frankly, the suggestion is hurtful,' has treated 147 cases of what Snorf calls 'reality attrition syndrome' in the past six months. The syndrome, which is not recognized by the DSM-5 but has its own ICD-10 code thanks to 'some very aggressive lobbying by the spatial computing industry, plus a $400,000 dinner that definitely wasn't a bribe because there was a PowerPoint,' is characterized by a progressive inability to distinguish between rendered and unrendered environments.
Symptoms include double-tapping physical objects to enlarge them, complaining that 'the graphics outside are so bad,' referring to one's own reflection as 'the character select screen,' and — in advanced cases — asking baristas if the coffee has haptic feedback.
'Case 89 was a 34-year-old who tried to swipe left on a parking meter,' Snorf said. 'He's married now. To the parking meter. We don't talk about Case 89.'
Sooliman, who works remotely as a 'metaverse consultant' for a company he cannot name due to an NDA he signed while 'extremely high on the immersion, which is not a drug, it's a state of mind, and also my lawyer has questions,' said his descent began gradually. 'At first it was just for work,' he said. 'Then it was for movies. Then it was for everything. I started eating dinner in there. I started sleeping in there. I have a virtual bedroom that's nicer than my actual bedroom. The virtual bed doesn't have the stain from when I spilled ramen in 2019. The virtual bed also has a view of a virtual ocean. The virtual ocean doesn't have seagulls. I asked. The virtual bed also doesn't have my actual girlfriend in it, which is, honestly, a feature at this point.'
His relationship with his girlfriend, who lives in the same apartment, has adapted to the new reality. 'We hang out in the headset now,' Sooliman said. 'She has her own avatar. It's actually better this way. She can be whatever she wants. Last week she was a dragon. The week before that she was just herself but with better hair. The week before that she was a dragon again, but with better hair. We watched a movie together in a virtual theater. It was very romantic. I think. It's hard to tell in the headset. Everything is romantic when you're sitting in a virtual beanbag chair next to a dragon who is not making eye contact.'
His girlfriend, reached by phone, declined to comment except to say that she is 'still here, physically, in the apartment, if anyone was wondering. I made actual lasagna last night. He ate it in the headset. He said it was "pretty good haptics."'
The Vision Pro's passthrough feature, which displays the real world through the headset's cameras, was designed to help users stay connected to their physical environment. Sooliman said he uses it 'sometimes, when I need to find the bathroom,' but finds it 'depressing.'
'Everything looks flat,' he said. 'The colors are wrong. The lighting is wrong. My dog looks weird. He's not supposed to look like that. He's supposed to look like the dog in the Apple commercial, all glossy and well-lit with that warm amber glow. The real dog is just... there. Being a dog. No LUT. No bokeh. It's unsettling. I think he knows I think this.'
Dr. Snorf said the passthrough problem is common among long-term users. 'The brain gets accustomed to Apple's image processing,' he explained. 'The noise reduction, the tone mapping, the automatic white balance. Real life doesn't have those features. Real life is poorly lit and has bad dynamic range. Users experience it as a downgrade. We've had people ask if there's a software update for reality. One guy wanted to know if he could toggle ray tracing. We told him the sun already does that. He said, 'Not well.''
Apple has not commented on the phenomenon, but the company is reportedly aware of it. Leaked internal documents suggest that visionOS 3.0 will include a 'Reality Re-Introduction' feature that gradually re-exposes users to unrendered environments through a series of 'comforting AR overlays.' The feature, codenamed 'Touch Grass,' will begin by displaying virtual leaves on real trees and slowly reduce the overlay opacity over six to eight weeks. Phase Two adds virtual birds. Phase Three removes the birds and tells you they were never real. By Phase Four, you're just standing in a park, crying, wearing a $3,499 headset that is now showing you an ad for the new one.
Dr. Snorf — Blibby J., full name, he insists — has been invited to consult on the project. He declined. 'I don't do beta software,' he said. 'I watched what happened to the butterfly keyboard people.'
'We believe in meeting our users where they are,' said an Apple spokesperson who may or may not have been an AI-generated avatar, and who definitely did not blink. 'And where they are, increasingly, is inside the headset. We're not going to judge that. We're just going to sell them the transition back. At $3,499, it's a bargain compared to actual therapy, which our research indicates does not come with Spatial Audio.'
Sooliman said he has no plans to reduce his headset usage. 'Why would I?' he asked. 'Everything I need is in here. Work. Entertainment. Social connection. Trees. The trees in here are amazing. They have this kind of glow. I don't think real trees glow. But maybe they do? I honestly can't remember. My girlfriend says they don't. But she's a dragon now, so her credibility is mixed.'
'I might get a second mail slot,' Sooliman said. 'For packages. The mail slot has been a game-changer. I don't even know what the delivery people look like. I assume they have faces.'
He paused, his avatar's face — a photorealistic scan of his own, but with better skin — displaying an expression that might have been contemplation or might have been a rendering error.
'I hear the new one has even better trees,' he said. 'I can't wait. My girlfriend says if I buy it, she's moving out. I told her she can just update her avatar. She hung up. I think. It's hard to tell in the headset.'