Apple
At its annual WWDC developer conference in California on Monday, Apple is quite likely to present the long-awaited Reality Pro headset for augmented or mixed reality. It’s an announcement that has been hinted at or teased for years, and reports on the subject have claimed that the project has experienced delays, internal scepticism and disagreement, technological difficulties, and other issues at various points. Leaving aside anything outside Apple’s control, there has been a significant change in the global perception of augmented reality and virtual reality, from one of optimism to scepticism.
You might easily argue that the moment to make the most significant influence in every such cycle is after the surge of excessive optimism and energy has passed. That trajectory is simply the natural development of any big tech hype cycle. But when it comes to AR and VR, we’ve already seen some of the biggest tech companies with the biggest budgets give it their all and fall short – not for lack of effort, but rather due to constraints in what’s feasible even at the cutting edge of existing technology. Due to differences in the human side of the equation needed to make mixed reality magic happen, some of those limitations could really apply equally to AR and VR.
Meta is obviously the virtual elephant in the room.Situation: Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, thought that virtual reality (VR) was the inevitable culmination of human endeavour after reading a poor book. In other words, VR was the mobile moment he essentially missed out on, but even larger and better. As Zuckerberg became more and more enamoured of his fantasy, he first bought the popular crowd-funded VR company Oculus and later appropriated the name of a shared virtual universe from a better novel and renamed the whole Facebook platform after it.
Meta has already taken a shot at the can; in fact, it has been kicking vehemently for at least the last five years. The most recent noteworthy efforts were the Meta Quest 3, which was unveiled earlier this week to muted acclaim, and the wildly expensive Meta Quest Pro, which debuted with a real-world thud rather than a virtual one. The Meta Quest and Quest 2 attracted a respectable number of VR-curious casuals, but not quite enough to support a viable business on the scale of Facebook or the iPhone.Mark’s metaversal goals.
We have a hard time finding prospects while searching for a second-place finisher to add to Meta’s little evidence that AR/VR is the platform of the future. HTC eventually decided to go all-in on VR when it gave Google its smartphone business, but it hasn’t exactly helped the company become well-known. The second generation of Sony’s PSVR was released this year, however most reports indicate that it . I just bring up Steam’s VR headgear in case you did (for which you would be pardoned).
This is Apple, though. It is the business that, in essence, created both the MP3 player and the smartphone. However, it just improved them; neither of those items were truly invented by it. And the items it was based on—any number of generic MP3 players in the former case, and the BlackBerry in the latter—were already quite well-liked and widely used. Apple has never genuinely faced a cold start issue since it has always been a refiner rather than a creator or rescuer.
Developing them, no matter how cutting-edge the technologies they include (or, conversely, how many compromises are made to comfort and convenience), consumers frequently stand up and say “neat, but no thanks.” This is not the case with early MP3 players or smartphones.
Regardless of your opinion of the firm and its past performance, it seems doubtful that Apple’s debut will fare any differently. When it comes to accessibility, AR and VR have serious issues since large segments of the public find them nauseating despite any mitigating measures that may be taken. Many individuals just plainly dislike having to wear anything on their face. In these situations, it’s unlikely that a value threshold even exists that can disprove that argument, and none have been shown by the attempts that have reached people’s hands, no matter how well-funded and diverse they may be.
There are countless blog entries on the internet written by writers who dismissed Apple at their peril, calling the iPhone a “toy” or predicting the Apple Watch would be a public disaster. It would be foolish to exclude the prospect that, like in those other areas, Apple may pull off a surprise triumph that ends up connecting with a mass-market audience. However, AR and VR are quite distinct technological areas, and the Apple of today is quite literally a different corporation from the one that first released the iPhone or even the Apple Watch.
