Featured Image Credit: Disney/Simpsons
The Simpsons has a well-deserved reputation for predicting the future, and it's got another one to boast about now.
The past few days have seen customers finally getting their hands on Apple's long-awaited AR glasses, the Vision Pro - a headset that looks pretty wild to use.
True to form, this has immediately resulted in swathes of viral clips of people using the goggles while out and about, without a care in the world about how they look.
If you want to get a sense of what that's like to actually experience, there's no better way than checking out YouTuber Casey Neistat's new video as he roams around New York with the Vision Pro on his face.
For those who love The Simpsons, though, a clip has already surfaced from about eight years ago showing a vision of the future that now looks amazingly accurate.
OMG The Simpsons predict the future again pic.twitter.com/DjokvAW1qh
— Nate Chan (@nathanwchan) February 4, 2024
The skit from an episode from 2016 was probably more in reaction to the release of the first consumer-ready Oculus Rift headset that year, but imagined a world where everyone wore these reality-altering goggles at all times, and is pretty funny to watch.
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It's wild to view it now, though, knowing as we do that the technology has finally arrived to pretty much let people do exactly what The Simpsons thought they would.
We've seen people sitting on the Subway using the headset, walking over crosswalks with it on, and even driving their Tesla Cybertrucks while wearing the headset (which is definitely not something we'd recommend doing).
The Vision Pro apparently has some of the best video passthrough technology ever, meaning that when you have the headset on, you get a really accurate video feed of what's around you in real time.
This means that technically people can still move around the world relatively competently, unlike the jokes in The Simpsons which see people walking into lampposts and falling through open manhole covers, but there are still some safety concerns around using the headset out and about and not fully paying attention to what's around you.
It's not the first time The Simpsons seemingly predicts the future in the show - from Donald Trump getting elected to the now-widespread use of smartwatches, it's often been uncanny in its forecasting.
While VR headsets with passthrough tech have been around for years now, it's always amazing to see the Apple effect in motion - people trust the giant company to make good products, so we're immediately seeing more viral posts about people using Vision Pro out in the wild than we did for the likes of the Meta Quest 3, which launched last year.
The catch? The Vision Pro doesn't come cheap - with prices starting from $3,499.
