Industry Gathers in Malibu for Apple Vision Pro VR Headset Release

(MALIBU / June 7, 2023) Apple, the world’s most profitable hardware and software company, and Disney, the world’s most cherished entertainment brand, announced their commitment to mainstreaming virtual reality for the consumer marketplace with the release of the Apple Vision Pro headset, which will go on sale in early 2024 with Disney Plus content.?

“This is a seminal moment for mixed reality, or as Tim Cook prefers to call it, spatial computing,” says VR expert Bob Cooney, who predicted that Apple would release a VR headset and hosted a keynote viewing party at a beachfront Malibu estate, drawing the world’s who’s who of the VR AR trade to Paradise Cove.?

“We've been waiting for this day for so long,” said Joanna Popper, chief metaverse officer at Creative Artists Agency (CAA). “Apple has the unique ability to wait it out until the technology, the user interface, and the content are ready. This signifies that spatial computing is finally here,” she says.

Hardware and software are distinctly different businesses. Google Andriod headsets got a slow start, and Zuckerberg has been unable to drive mass adoption of his Oculus VR headset. Over the last 4 years, Meta has dumped roughly $36 billion into VR, according to an analysis by Business Insider. Nevertheless, their Oculus headset is a real drag to use. It’s heavy, which makes it uncomfortable. Frequent, mandatory system updates make getting Oculus up and running slow and tedious. The display resolution is porous and grainy, the hand controls are complex unless you’re a seasoned gamer, and you can’t see what’s happening around you when the device is on your head.

In the pilot episode of Pete Davidson’s new Peacock series Bupkis, he puts on a headset and gets caught by his mom jacking off while jacked in, to borrow a term from William Gibson, who also coined the term cyberspace in his seminal book Neuromancer and inspired the film The Matrix. But regardless of the use case, sacrificing your vision while jacked into cyberspace or the metaverse or whatever you want to call it is another good reason for consumers to put off adopting VR. The idea of wearing a headset and having a virtual experience when you can’t see what’s going on around you is weird for most people, even when viewing family-friendly fare.

The Apple Vision Pro headset overcomes many of the problems that so far have prevented widespread adoption of this promising yet nascent technology, by bringing the elegance and simplicity of the Apple lifestyle brand to virtual and augmented reality. Unlike previous VR headsets, users control the Apple Vision Pro – which looks kind of like ski goggles – with their eyes, voice, and hand gestures.?

The battery is attached to the headset with a tethered cable that seats in a swivel plug, making it durable, lightweight, and comfortable.? “I think the battery life of two hours is unbelievable,” says VR location-based esports entrepreneur Salem Thyne. The screen resolution puts 64 pixels into the same amount of space that the iPhone displays a single pixel. The result is 2.3M pixel resolution.

Vision Pro may also explain why the Airbook M2 only supports a single monitor. Who needs external monitors when you can wear a headset and have as many screens as you want right in front of your eyes? And when sharing virtual experiences, Vision OS – the new spatial computing operating system that powers the device – creates a digital persona of yourself that mirrors your facial expressions so others can see your face in the metaverse. They even made a new chip designed explicitly for spatial computing called the R1, which according to Apple is 8x faster than the blink of an eye. The result is no lag effect and zero latency. Vision Pro also has an Apple M2 chip inside.?

Apple’s new spatial computer even addresses the personal safety issues of blocking out the real world. The device senses when someone is around, and the glass screen becomes transparent so you can see your surroundings and the virtual environment at the same time, making it the first headset to combine VR and AR functionality. Priced at $3,499.00 USD, the first iteration of Vision Pro will probably appeal mainly to early adopters willing to shell out big bucks to be first. Early adopters also tend to be more tolerant and forgiving of glitches and bugs that often come with new hardware and software.?

In addition to the Disney partnership, Apple also released a Reality Composer Pro software developer’s kit to start building an ecosystem of programmers to create Vision OS experiences. But unlike the iPhone, which can only load apps through the Apple App Store, Vision Pro appears to be a much more open, tolerant platform, capable of loading spatial computing experiences via the web.

“Safari will be the gateway for most of the experiences that people are going to have with this headset,” says Dulce Baerga, and augmented reality research and development veteran. “It’s easy to scan a QR code and go straight to a web link. And if Safari is integrated as deeply as it's been announced, it's going to launch quite a few experiences that aren't necessarily in the Apple ecosystem. It really opens up the metaverse beyond just native apps on the web. And having the Unity game engine as a partner is also very exciting because a lot of the existing AR and VR experiences are already built on Unity. So now it's just a matter of porting it over to these Apple devices,” says Baerga.?

Apple is working with OpenXR (an open royalty-free API standard from Khronos) and WebGL (a JavaScript API for rendering high-performance interactive 3D graphics), and glTF (a royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes) to help creators build interoperable, seamless experiences. The spread of pornography is inexorably linked to the adoption of new technology. The ability to consume spatial, erotic content could be a sales driver for Apple Vision Pro and teledildonics.

Still, the hefty price tag has experts mixed on just how fast the Vision Pro will achieve critical mass. “It's going to be like the Apple watch. It'll take a couple of years for people to integrate it into their lives,” said Maxx Bricklin, Partner at Bold Capital Partners, a key investor in Dreamscape, which has a theater in Los Angeles immersive virtual reality adventures. “You want to get these technologies into the hands of as many people as possible. At $3500, that makes it difficult,” says Aaron Grosky, President and COO at Dreamscape.

But the pandemic lockdown did change the price tolerance of consumers. Faced with the stark realization that tomorrow is not guaranteed, even eight percent inflation in 2022 didn’t chill demand, as consumers demonstrated their willingness to pay 28.5% more for air travel, and 41.5% more for gasoline. Flights were still packed, and traffic was still heavy. "Sonoma wine tasting are up 11%, which is twice the rate of inflation," says Sonoma winemaker Ross Halleck of Halleck Vineyard, who was invited to lead a wine-tasting at the event in honor of Apple's new OS, which is called Sonoma.

“The price point doesn't scare me,” says Dulce Baerga, and augmented reality research and development veteran. “It's an enterprise device to start. But it the price will go down. And some consumers will go out and buy it right away,” she continued.