Vision Pro: Apple’s $3,499 VR headset
Here’s Apple’s next big thing, said Mark Gurman in Bloomberg Businessweek. “Billions of dollars of investment into computers you wear on your face from the tech industry’s largest companies,” like Meta and Microsoft, “have yet to produce a breakout success.” Now comes Apple, which this week unveiled the Vision Pro, its longawaited mixed-reality headset. Initially conceived in 2015 as a pair of augmentedreality eyeglasses, the device “has morphed into a $3,499 headset that resembles a pair of ski goggles that requires a separate battery pack.” It can toggle back and forth between virtual reality and augmented reality, in which digital items appear in the physical world; runs “many of the apps found on Apple’s other devices”; and boasts “an outward-facing display showing the wearer’s eye movements and facial expressions.” But even internally, the expensive production has been “likened to a science project.”
This is a big bet on the metaverse, which feels very 2021, said Kellen Browning and Mike Isaac in The New York Times. “The idea of an immersive, all-encompassing online universe made more sense to investors when people weren’t leaving their homes during the pandemic.” Lately, though, even Meta, which changed its corporate name from Facebook to highlight its metaverse ambitions, has “spent more time talking up its expertise in AI.”
A primary criticism of Apple CEO Tim Cook is that “he is yet to come up with a bold new idea of his own,” said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. Well, that’s here now. It just doesn’t feel like crowds will be lining up around the block when the Vision Pro goes on sale next year. “There is a strong feeling among much of the techbuying public that this is technology that is neither needed nor wanted.”
Apple is pulling out all the stops to get the public excited about the headset, said Sara Ruberg and Jacob Ward in NBCNews.com. CEO Tim Cook showed off a gee-whiz virtual reality Facetime that lets users “scan their faces using the headset’s cameras” to create a 3D “persona.”
And Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, put in a cameo appearance to promise that the Vision Pro would “bring Disney World’s Magic Kingdom into your home.” All told, Apple gave us “the most perfect headset demo reel of all time,” said Nilay Patel in The Verge. But that may not accomplish what Apple hopes for. Seeing 3D video of kids blowing out birthday candles made me wonder, does Apple really “want you to wear a headset at your child’s birthday party?” After seeing Apple’s procession of VR’s greatest hits, I still didn’t know what I’d want to do with the Vision Pro. I did know, though, that locking myself up in a VR headset “felt oddly lonely.”