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Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

> A new power wheelchair control feature leverages the precision eye-tracking system on Apple Vision Pro to offer a responsive input method for compatible alternative drive systems. [0]

The above caption for Apple Vision Pro is for a video that to me, as an Apple Vision Pro user, is discomforting.

More questions are raised than are answered by the short video: Is the user able to fit the Apple Vision Pro by him/herself? What happens when dwelling on a directional control misregisters? Can the user recalibrate the "Eyes and Hands" setting? Dwelling on a control displaces focus and there may be impeding objects in the path of the power wheelchair. Is this really a good idea?

To my sensibility, the video is unsettling (at best), especially given how cumbersome Apple Vision Pro is.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/05/apple-unveils-new-acc...

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Your concerns are completely nonsensical. It's clearly being marketed as a healthcare tool for people with debilitating injuries that preclude the use of hand-powered wheelchair controls, severe situations where there's no neck-down control and users would be limited to controls like head-tilt or mouth actuated systems. These people obviously require daily care to simply get them out of bed and into the chair and back again every single day - their nurse could just put on their Vision Pro for them! This seems like an incredible leap forward for people in this situation, if they iterate on this and it gets better then this could be a very viable wheelchair control system in the future.

> Your concerns are completely nonsensical.

With all due respect, my concerns are not nonsensical but borne of my daily use with Apple Vision Pro and my awareness of the limitations of dwell control.

Iterating on this idea with a device lighter than Apple Vision Pro and improvements to dwell control would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations of disabled users, but that is not what is depicted in the video.

My sense is that the possibility of an accessibility affordance with people who are severely disabled is driving opinions in this case more than the reality of what’s available.

To my mind, much of these AX announcements are reminiscent of the circumstance that led John Gruber to author “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”, which is that these are not shipping features but ones slated for “some time later this year”.

I’m a huge AX fan and work directly in the domain space, but something about that video in particular coupled with my near-daily use of Apple Vision Pro doesn’t feel right.

That still doesn't make sense. "improvements... would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations" so what? Are they claiming that everyone everywhere should use this immediately?

"possibility of an accessibility affordance" what do you mean possibility, that is literally the case. Even if it's not perfect (which nothing truly is, obviously), it is undeniably a novel control system for its target audience.

"doesn’t feel right" So your point is simply that your subjective opinion is that it 'doesn't feel right'? What does that even mean? I'm not saying, and the announcement is not saying, that this is some platonic ideal of accessibility controls. Not sure what you are getting at at all.

You are correct, the driving controls in AVP don’t use dwell, that is the wrong (and dangerous) approach. They use something more akin to hover activation.

It’s the hardware I designed coupling the power wheelchair to the AVP, and I’ve driven it myself.

Your work is incredible, best of luck going forward!

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