When the Apple Watch was released, people wore it partly because of its vaguely useful notifications and fitness capabilities – and partly because it looked cool. There is a third option, though: a status symbol. Something that will usher in a “new era of spatial computing” is neither of those. Hardware this expensive generally either fills a concrete commercial need, or appeals to a niche group of diehard hobbyists.
APPLE VR PRO
In other words, there is a disconnect between the price of the Vision Pro and the promise of it. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy.
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Yes, the current market for VR headsets floats around $600, capping out at $1,000 or so, but the current market for VR headsets is also one for hobbyists and early adopters.
APPLE VR TV
(A huge TV no one else can watch with you a games console without any must-have titles.)īut the pricetag is, in a way, the most compelling thing about the Vision Pro, because it suggests that the company is focusing on making a headset that can actually meet its stated goals – of “all-day” use, of genuinely compelling “mixed-reality” experiences, of virtual desktops that are more than a novelty – rather than compromising for the sake of shipping an affordable device today. The company sounded defensive about the cost in the moments before it announced it, comparing it to the price of outfitting your home with a huge TV, surround-sound kit, new laptop and state-of-the-art games console. There’s one other massive novelty with the Vision Pro, of course: that $3,499 pricetag.
Or it could be the worst of both worlds: a cable that still inhibits movement and comfort, with none of the power of a real tethered VR system. Should VR headsets have a bulky battery mounted on your head, or should they rely on a tethered cable to a separate PC? Apple thinks there’s a third option: slip the bulky battery in your back pocket, and run the cable up to a lighter, more comfortable set of goggles. Even in the staged demos, it looked slightly uncanny, but it seems a far smaller hurdle to introduce into the world than trying to encourage people to have business meetings with their Memoji. It’s a photorealistic attempt to animate a real picture of you, using the data the headset captures of your eye, mouth and hand movements while you talk. The screen mists over if the wearer is in a fully immersive VR space, while allowing people to have (simulated, at least) eye contact when in AR mode.Īn array of downward and outward-pointing IR cameras let the headset keep track of your position and gestures at all times, allowing the company to build a controller-free experience without requiring the wearer to hold their hands in their eye-line when using the headset.Īn AI-powered “persona” (don’t call it an avatar) stands in for you when you make a video call using the Vision Pro. The company showed off a number of features that are genuinely novel:ĮyeSight, which sounded so ridiculous, could actually … work? A curved, outward-facing OLED screen displays the wearer’s eyes to the outside world, giving the impression of the headset as a simple piece of translucent glass. That’s not to say Apple’s purely following.
APPLE VR MAC
Compare that to the difference between the Mac and its command-line competition, or the iPhone and its keyboard-and-stylus PDA peers. But it’s hard to feel the categorical difference Apple insists there is between the Vision Pro and, say, Meta’s Quest Pro, another high-end VR/AR device that is already on shelves now. Yes, if even half of the tech demos work on launch (slated for “early next year” in the US, and “later” in other countries), it will be an extremely impressive VR headset indeed. It’s big talk for what is, once you look past the marketing fluff, a VR headset. The company is placing the device squarely in the pedigree of the Mac and iPhone, as the defining example of a paradigm. The device will usher in, Apple claims, a new era of technology: the age of “spatial computing”.
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