because I keep seeing some variation of this, mostly from capitalists and tech people (and those subjected to that ideology) with no real sensitivity to what is actually involved in creating or learning. To put it plainly, you know when pasta is finished when it's al dente. You know sausage is finished because it's cooked. All other problems (bringing your $3500 face-mounted camera computer into a hot steam-filled environment) aside, the time given in a recipe isn't the thing. Time passed has only a surface relationship to the processes involved in cooking, but it's the only parameter that can be made cleanly instrumental in a way that doesn't involve a practitioner having to learn how to listen to their body, their eyes, their taste buds, their olfactory faculties, their innate sense of real materials in the existing universe coming into contact with one another.
I had a similar experience, also yesterday, in a musical community. Somebody asked how they should go about ear training - a wonderful question. But I was so shocked when everyone came back with interval-quizzing apps. Software that plays two tones then has you listen and identify that tonal distance as a minor Third, Perfect Fifth, and so on. This is the same exact problem as the cooking with AR headset problem. The intervals aren't the thing. Recognizing that one tone is 6 semitones from another tone can be helpful, in the same way that having a rough sense of how much time something should take in boiling water is helpful. But what your brain actually needs is contextual information. How you build this is by working out how the musical ideas you hold in your head - the birthday song, childrens' rhyming tunes, that song that's been stuck in your head since high school prom, whatever - map to the instrument you're learning, its relationship in physical space to your physical body and mind. Raw intervals are only ever relevant in context, and outside of that context they are actively misleading. But they are the parameter that it's possible to shove into an app. So they're what we get, and they're what we reach for.
Ultimately, I feel it's about maintaining an emotional distance. So many of us are trained to find comfort in distance from our bodies, from our faculties, from perception and relationship to the world around us. Skill-building is so much about re-finding that connection, an engaged curiosity ubiquitous in children then worked out of us in a thousand thousand ways.
It's done when it's cooked. You know it's cooked because you learn to trust yourself. I'm pleading with you: there's no need to be afraid.
The thing that gets me is not even the limited utility of having floating timers over stuff as though processes worked according to video game rules but the implication that this can only be done with a bulky headset costing multiple thousands of dollars. It's a questionable use-case that is, if you really wanted it, vastly more effectively performed by devices that cost less than a tenth of what they're selling this for and they don't obstruct your vision to this degree.
I've always believed VR headsets will never catch on because, even aside from how expensive they are, they are way too uncomfortable, isolating, and, per a prior post of mine, easy to end up breaking or injuring yourself with. If this tech was so significant, everyone would have done the google cardboard thing. At least that didn't demand being physically tethered to something to feed the display.
I'll save my thoughts on interval training for another time.
