It’s my birthday this week and the end of my seventh decade (mathematicians will note that this does not make me 79). Looking at my long and generally happy life, I do wonder quite how we arrived where we are with this all-pervading sense of gloom and despondency. Gaza, Ukraine, Putin, Trump, Islamic State, Brexit… whichever way you look, there’s something you don’t want to see. The doomsday clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest we’ve ever been to complete annihilation. Happy birthday to me.
It’s not all bad though. Last week my son came home with a borrowed Apple Vision Pro, the wrap-around headset which retails at around £3,000. I put it on and took my first steps into the brave new world of augmented and virtual reality which, coincidentally, I described in my last Alex Rider novel. The experience is stunning. Non-existent switches floated in front of me but I could reach out and turn them on. A butterfly appeared and began to flutter around my kitchen. A wall slid open to reveal a vast desert with mountains and a full moon beyond. The butterfly settled on a rock at which point a massive dinosaur lumbered forward, examined it and then turned towards me… I was there, surrounded by it! The system may have its critics (its price, its weight), but these are early days and, quite honestly, I felt the same excitement that audiences must have experienced in 1888 when the first film ever made was screened, watching people walk in a garden for all of three seconds. With the Apple system, you can see films projected on to a screen the size of an office block and it makes me wonder if, ten years from now, people will still bother going to the cinema.
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