Welcome to the era of the Apple Vision Bros: How early adopters of new $3,500 headset are pushing boundaries of where they can use it – from behind the wheel of cars, riding subways and skateboarding!

Apple’s new augmented reality headset, the $3,500 Vision Pro, is scarcely more than two weeks old — but early adopters are already testing the boundaries of where they can road test their new toy in polite society.

Social media has become deluged in posts catching mesmerized Vision Pro users engaging with their virtual environments in public and looking like futuristic mimes. 

While many of these videos have proven to be influencers doing stunts for clicks, Apple’s big bet on its expensive, portable goggles means customers will be looking for every excuse to get their money’s worth and flaunt their luxury tech splurge.

Or, as one Instagram user phrased it, ‘Welcome to the era of the Vision Bro.’ 

Tesla owner Dante Lentini, 21, went viral on Elon Musk’s X last week for a video that appeared to show him being pulled over by the police for using his Vision Pro while driving on the highway.

Lentini later told Popular Science that the whole clip was a made in ‘skit-style fashion’ and that ‘the police were not even in the parking lot for me to begin with.’

Safety information for Apple Vision Pro on the company’s website, nevertheless, explicitly prohibits using the headset while driving regardless of intent.

‘Never use Apple Vision Pro while operating a moving vehicle, bicycle, heavy machinery, or in any other situations requiring attention to safety,’ the company said.

This didn’t stop YouTuber Casey Neistat from skateboarding down a bus lane in downtown Manhattan while wearing the headset for his review — a stunt that earned him more than 4 million views in just 48 hours. 

Another YouTuber, Shervin Shares and his roommates from ‘the Content Closet,’ challenged each other to wear the Vision Pro for 24 hours straight.

Given the device’s two-hours of battery life, this could come to having 12 battery packs charged and on hand apiece, or at least a few in rotation charging in wait. 

Their goggled tour of New York took them to Time Square, where the gleaming animated billboards clashed with the Vision Pro’s augmented reality, as well as onto the city’s public transit.

To pay their way onto the subway, Shares and his friends stooped over and put their faces and the headset inches away from the scanner where less tech-savvy New Yorkers would have simply swiped their debit card or used Apple Pay off their iPhone instead.

‘We’ve been wearing these for like three hours now,’ Share’s content partner Colt Kirwan told viewers, ‘and I feel (like) a dent in my forehead right now.’

With more than 600 apps and games designed specifically to take advantage of the Vision Pro’s capabilities, and a million older apps compatible with the device, it’s hard to predict just how much more content social media power-users are going to squeeze out of the headset.

But some are already dreading the prospect of having other’s augmented reality encroaching upon their own ordinary reality. 

When Zipeng Zhu, a Chinese-born designer and art director, posted his parody ‘Vision Bro’ ads to Instagram, one commenter summed up the sentiment these performative public expeditions with the software can provoke.

‘Not a good look,’ the commenter said. 

Another commenter said, ‘I pinch,’ in reference to the pinching motion Apple has chosen as the Vision Pro’s answer to clicking. Zhu joked, ‘iPinch.’ 

Outside of influencer and content-creator culture, my privately earnest Apple fans are debating more quietly how and where best to use the Vision Pro’s novel new ‘spatial computing’ interface.

Sincere efforts are being made how to integrate the Vision Pro into daily life not just functionally but sartorially – with some suggesting that only a mid-00s ‘Matrix’-inspired or cyberpunk aesthetic will fit the bill.  

Even devoted followers of the developments in virtual reality hardware — a visionary concept that has taken decades of false starts and risky ventures to get where it is today — are not sure where it’s acceptable to use their Vision Pro.  

‘Anyone else feel iffy about Vision Pro being worn in public?’ one Reddit user asked in the r/virtualreality sub-Reddit.

The user, who goes by freshclover, wondered if the issue is simply that the technology is too new and the social cues around it have not yet been normalized.

‘Even then, using VR while eating out with your friends will always seem dystopian to me,’ freshclover added. ‘Feels like the equivalent of talking to someone while looking down at your phone.’

Elsewhere, a moderator for Reddit’s ‘Wall Street Bets’ wondered in a post to X which of the 200,000 people who sold out Apple’s pre-orders for the Vision Pro will be the first to use high tech device so irresponsibly that they die. 

‘Who will be the first person to get hit by a car while wearing their Apple Vision Pro?’ they asked. 

But even the more earnest Apple fans and Vision Pro consumers in Reddit’s virtual reality subreddit entertained similar questions among themselves, some speculating that the disaster might come from the headset’s minuscule two-hours of battery life.

‘It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the battery dies,’ Reddit user MrRandomNumber said, ‘and the real world suddenly turns into a pitch black space.’

‘I hope they’re not driving when it happens.’