Black Mirror Season 7 features a headset resembling a Quest Pro but with reverse passthrough, seemingly mocking Apple Vision Pro’s EyeSight feature.
A one second clip from the official trailer shows a character tapping the side of the headset to activate reverse passthrough. If you’re not familiar with that term, it refers to when a technically opaque headset mimics transparency to outside observers by showing a rendered view of your eyes on a positive parallax (depth-in) 3D display on the front.
The only shipping headset with reverse passthrough today is Apple Vision Pro, where the feature is branded as EyeSight, and this is almost certainly what Black Mirror is aiming to parody.
As for the hardware actually worn by the actor, with the reverse passthrough almost certainly superimposed in postproduction, while it resembles a Quest Pro, its strap material and shape is slightly different, and looks to be 3D printed.
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Apple Vision Pro’s EyeSight has been widely mocked for its “creepy” appearance and dim display that only has parallax horizontally, not vertically.
But this is likely simply the result of first generation reverse passthrough, not a fundamental limitation of the idea. Multiple startups are working on higher quality reverse passthrough, with the goal of licensing it to headset makers, and just over a year ago Meta showed a concept render of a headset with reverse passthrough it claimed was “practical to build now”, with much higher quality results.
Meta concept render.
This suggests that Netflix’s intention is to mock the reverse passthrough of today, despite likely being set in the future. But just as the incredibly bulky VR headsets in many other TV shows and movies set in the future are already outdated now in the era of pancake lenses, the primitive reverse passthrough depicted in Black Mirror Season 7 too could seem anachronistic a few years from now.
