Apple’s Vision of the Future Arrives

With a price tag of US$3499, Apple’s long-awaited mixed reality headset is sure to get a mixed reaction. There are excellent recaps of the live stream launch event via MacRumors and ArsTechnica that showcase dozens of images of the new device, so I’ll just include a couple here.

The overall design is impressive and an interesting inclusion is that the CPU/GPU and new dedicated headset controller chip are all built into the device, with an external battery pack. The latency though cables to a PC and back to the headset is noticeable with other VR systems, so this is a bold step to include all of the hardware into the same headset device, rather than an external CPU.

This means that the level of engineering that has gone into the headset device is unlike anything that Apple, or potentially anyone else has done before. They made the bold claim that it is the most advanced consumer electronics device ever - and that may be true.?

Some device internals were shown throughout the presentation, and show intricate components that help to ensure each eye piece is at the correct position. Zeiss lenses will be used to magnetically clip onto each eyepiece for corrective vision. But simple correction may be built into the system in future versions.

The variety of demonstrations included in the launch presentation covered the gamut of Apple consumer use cases, including education, creative tasks, basic office document management and entertainment.

In environments like advertising studios, marketing agencies, and creative content businesses, the Apple VisionPro will be an interesting addition, and likely to be well received by fashionable creative types that value innovation.

'Serious' industries are still relatively conservative and will take time to change. Sitting in an office dedicated to finance, insurance or accounting, one is surrounded by equipment that has not changed largely for decades. Monitors are thinner, but that is the only difference.?

Those kinds of conservative office environments are not included in today’s presentation or the TV commercial. Apple knows that the business audience is skeptical, and will not see the need to include the technology in their corporate environments anytime soon. But in a decade from now, when young Gen Z tech fans are the main executives in management, and all baby boomers have exited the workforce, we may see some fascinating changes.

In the mean time, the bigger target market for Apple is entertainment and the launch presentation showcased a range of applications of that will need to be built by developers using a new VisionOS and working with the 3D development platform Unity. Apple has it's own Reality Composer app, which is used for building AR experiences, and it announced Reality Composer Pro which will allow for more immersive environment building.

At the very least, if it doesn't find a wide market over time (in the multiple versions that will eventually result) at least the launch was flawless. The live stream didn't actually have any live elements in it and was all rehearsed, captured, edited and polished within an inch of its life ahead of the launch stream.

Impressive individual scenario sets, combined with compositing gave an impression of an immersive, modular environment of spatial content. Exactly the thing that the product is trying to convey. Apple was able to leverage its deep and highly talented product team to explain each feature. A large number of the use case demos featured women wearing the device, and many of the women in Apple's design and development teams spoke about features.

As I mentioned last week, Sports may be the killer app for this platform as the big screen TV experience is what often draws fans to invest in technology to watch their favourite teams. However this viewing experience will be very different, and has not caught on yet with other VR offerings. The testing ahead of the headset release next year will be very interesting.

But whether the device will find an audience remains to be seen. As I covered last week, the history of virtual, augmented and mixed reality for consumer and commercial use is littered with plenty of failures and legacy equipment.

The device, when it is released next year, will (eventually) be sold through Apple stores and includes different customisation elements, including lenses for corrective vision, which are expensive to produce and distribute, likely resulting in delays before a user can just pick up the device and use it.?

These all provide barriers, that make the device much harder to access than a simple touch-screen computer. Even when Apple first released the iPhone and the iPad, consumers had all experienced a touch screen information kiosk at a mall or simple touch controls on a microwave. The leap to a personal touchscreen device was not a massive one.

A headset device is a niche device and will continue to be until the technology is able to be delivered in a significantly smaller form factor. This will simply take more time, and we are still moving through this technological transformation which takes place on a nano scale, with billions of transistors built into each device.

Even if the device is of no interest to you, take a look at the VisionPro website. The content displayed is the current state of the art in immersive web design with video and image content that flows and interacts with the user. Apple has invested billions in the development of this product and wants to ensure that the marketing content is better than anything that has come before it.

At the starting point of 'personal computing', devices were the size of a room in the 60's, then eventually a fridge in the 70's and a desktop box in the 80's, and then we eventually made it to the hand-held computer with the release of the iPhone in 2007. Computing power always gets smaller and more powerful over time. It's easy to forget that that 2007 is now 16 years ago and the original Macintosh was released 39 years ago. Next year will be the 40th anniversary of the release of the Mac. I encourage you to view this technology through the eyes of a kid, what could you imagine the world to be like once the future arrives.

After a recent visit to Silicon Valley for the first time, I realised that we are always just getting started. There are always more technical innovation, and not all of them land well individually as devices. Sometimes the timing is wrong and the form factor is not ideal. Sometimes the market is not ready, and sometimes the market has moved on. They don't all have to be ground breaking, but each one inspires other people to develop new technology that moves forward and can eventually save us time and be more productive (and creative).

I don't know that Apple VisionPro is going to save us any time and improve the productivity of the average worker, but it doesn't have to. Apple is making a statement about what state of the art technology looks like with it's significant financial resources, gained from the profits more than 40 years of innovation. And this will be the worst mixed reality headset that Apple ever releases. What will the technology look like in another 16 years or more?

I'm encouraged that some of the worlds largest companies now create things and put them into the world, instead of just polluting it. The future we once dreamed of is actually happening to us everyday. It may not be perfect, but nothing ever is.