Now Apple bets on mixed reality
The company says its headset will enable ‘spatial computing’
We won’t know until early next year whether Apple’s longdelayed mixed-reality headset, unveiled this week and named the Vision Pro, will perform as demonstrated.
Judging by past successes and the slick launch on Monday night, this new device is destined to be the next big thing a brag by a company that has an uncanny ability to create that very next big thing. The Mac, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and its app economy, the iPad and the Apple Watch the list of gamechanging gadgets is impressive.
The Vision Pro, says Apple CEO Tim Cook, is the “first Apple product you look through, and not at”.
Continuing a company tradition of outlandish hyperbole, albeit often true, Cook says: “In the same way Mac introduced us to personal computing and iPhone introduced us to mobile computing, Apple Vision Pro will introduce us to spatial computing.”
And there you have it, a new product category, as it were even one that kind of already existed. Mixed-reality goggles have been around since Microsoft produced the first of its excellent HoloLens augmented-reality (AR) headsets in January 2015. Facebook, through its Oculus division, is the biggest seller of virtual-reality (VR) headsets.
By calling it “spatial computing”, Apple puts its stamp on this combination of VR and AR.
Notice how nobody said “metaverse”. Unlike Facebook’s $36bn venture into mixed reality, the iPhone maker knows how to hone its products and offerings. In the same way, all the components for a smartphone were already available, but it took Apple to combine them into the iPhone and truly launch mobile computing. Apple has also created other product categories and category-dominating be opaque devices (to signify with the “do iPad not and disturb the”Apple ) or clear Watch.
The Vision Pro looks like stylish, curved ski goggles, with a glass screen that can either (so others can see the wearer’s eyes).
The elegantly designed headset, laden with sensors and cameras, will project the equivalent of 4K resolution onto each of your eyes. You control it with your voice, and it tracks your eyes so you can look at a search field and begin talking, and the text will appear there. Tapping your fingers together is the equivalent of a mouse click.
Apple presented enticing use-case scenarios in high-design, Scandi chic settings that oozed tech-enthused hygge that curious Danish concept of cosiness and wellness. Perhaps the most compelling of these is 3D entertainment, with a giant virtual screen and sound piped in through Apple AirPods (natch). The shows on Apple TV+ will look great on this enormous hovering “screen”. Entertainment does look amazing. The promise of how 3D videos will display alone is worth trying the Vision Pro for as is the feature that displays panorama images in all their curved VR glory.
But a lot of it seems like a solution in search of a problem, especially the ability to look at “3D images from iMessage”. And the price, at $3,500 (R68,000), is not much of an incentive for experimenting with it.
What was the best thing about the Vision Pro launch? That Cook got to repeat late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s immortal line: “We do have one more thing.” Let’s see whether Apple can be right again.
You can look at a search field and begin talking, and the text will appear there