Jacob Wright knew a single photo would earn him some “Twitter clout.”
He had seen it happen just days before, when a video of a man seemingly driving a Tesla Cybertruck hands-free wearing an Apple VisionPro in Lehi went viral. (The video was a stunt, the driver later told The Salt Lake Tribune.)
“I’d seen a lot of viral content about it,” Wright told The Tribune. “If we get, like, one photo, it’ll blow up.”
So, roughly an hour after he and his new bride, Cambree, exchanged their vows and said their “I dos,” the freshly wed Wright put on his brand-new Apple VisionPro and posed for a photo outside the Jordan River Temple in South Jordan, still in his tuxedo, next to his bride. Virality soon followed.
A single photo to X, formerly Twitter, got him all the attention he’d hoped for, and then some. The original post on Feb. 10 on X, captioned #JustMarried, has gotten 360,000 views. A follow-up posted the next day accompanied by “Caption contest” has more than 100,000 views. The photo has circulated on Reddit and Instagram; the moment has made headlines in national publications.
Wearing an Apple VIsionPro in unexpected places is enough on its own to grab the internet’s attention. Wright is among a growing handful of tech users and employees — Wright himself is a software engineer — who have capitalized on the product’s novelty for a viral moment.
But plenty of attention to this particular post has been on Cambree. In the frame, the bride’s face is frozen in something like a grimace. The internet has gleefully labeled her look as one of anger, disappointment, disgust or some combination of all three.
“You can see her wondering if she’s made a huge mistake,” one Reddit user commented.
Cambree swears she wasn’t mad. She was just cold.
“I do look pissed,” she admitted on a Zoom call with her husband. “But I wasn’t mad.”
And the VisionPro headset that made Jacob briefly famous? He returned it. It was fun for a minute, he said, but it also started to feel “like a chore.”
Virtual reality, real love
The couple met at the gym when they were both students at Brigham Young University. Cambree is a personal trainer and neuroscience student; Jacob was studying computer science. They’re both “pretty into fitness,” Cambree said, and were drawn to each other’s devotion to the gym.
Plus, Cambree admitted, “I liked his muscles.”
But unlike some of her classmates and fellow Latter-Day Saints church members, Cambree said she didn’t mean to marry young. She wasn’t looking for a husband when she met Jacob, she said.
“I was career-oriented. I wanted to be super-independent,” Cambree said. “Ironic, because I ended up marrying at 19.”
The couple dated for a little over a year before their wedding on Feb. 10. It’s a fairly long courtship for LDS couples, Cambree said. So by the time they exchanged vows at the temple in South Jordan, Cambree was fully in. Nothing — not even a little stunt like the one Jacob pulled — could have pulled her away from her husband.
“I keep getting a lot of messages and DMs that I need to divorce Jacob, because I think people thought we actually got married in the Apple VisionPro,” Cambree said. “That’s not what happened. It was a lot more chill than that. And I was actually OK with it.”
Wright wore the headset long enough to take a picture, and only after the wedding ceremony was over and the guests had started to peel off. He brought it out again at the reception for another photo and so that he, too, could record some memories. That’s one feature of the Apple Vision Pro he said came in handy — he now has some immersive video clips from their reception, so he can relive moments from his wedding exactly as he saw them.
“We have ... a first-person view, from my point of view, of the tail end of our wedding day,” Wright said.
“We have a video of us running to the car. ... It’s really cute,” Cambree added. “It’s something we’ll save and look back on.”
The virtual reality headset, which Apple released at the beginning of February, bought Wright his 15 minutes of fame. But it wasn’t enough to keep the new device around, he said.
The software engineer said the concept of virtual and augmented reality is the “holy grail” of computing. Devices, especially “wearable” ones like watches or headsets, are a “fun way to augment and improve your day-to-day experience,” he said.
But the Vision Pro hasn’t reached its full potential yet. Wright said he enjoyed it most when he was sharing it with other people and witnessing their reactions. But after a full day of using it as a “virtual work environment,” Wright said he felt “a little disoriented.” And the pressure to use it — to justify its $3,500 price tag — started to feel like a “chore.”
“It’s just so expensive. It’s kind of a stupid purchase,” Wright said.
‘A fleeting moment’
It’s an unusual test of a new marriage to make a joke of your wedding on the internet. Not all couples could withstand the visibility.
The Wrights aren’t deterred.
“We love being married,” Cambree said, as a hairless cat named Mina peered over her shoulder.
The couple has plans to move to San Fransisco, or maybe Texas, if Cambree gets her way.
Wright has an established career in software start-ups. Cambree is considering a graduate degree in neuropsychology; she might also stick to personal training. They are young, she said, and the lives ahead of them are full of possibility.
This momentary attention, Cambree said, is out of her control.
Wright, meanwhile, said he’d do it again — and he’d milk it for more content next time.
“I would probably bump it up a little notch,” he said. “Fan the flames.”
But on the whole, Wright said, this is just a “fleeting moment,” a “small speck” in their marriage and their life together.
Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
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