VR-only headsets have until now basically isolated the wearer from their environment and were even mocked for causing users to bump into objects around them. In this case, Apple has already doubled the capabilities of most “extended reality” headsets by allowing users to transition easily from VR to AR mode - and improved the user experience, resolution and capabilities of both. It’s important to remember that Apple’s historical success has often relied not on being first with a technology, but on providing the best iteration on it - as it did with both MP3 players (the iPod) and smartphones (the iPhone). Cathy Hackl, former enterprise strategist at Magic Leap, told me on Monday, “What you saw unveiled today is the most advanced tech product ever created, it’s a super computer on your face.” Those who have used the product have already declared Apple’s headset the best product in this market, and according to CNN’s Samantha Kelly, “it felt like I’d seen the future - or at least an early and very pricey prototype of it.” Opinion: A hallelujah moment for iPhone users everywhere Person holding stack of a different electric wires. I see many reasons why Apple may succeed in reaching mass adoption where others have spectacularly failed to do so. I am also doing my doctoral research on the history of virtual and augmented reality (known together as “extended reality”). While I haven’t personally used Apple’s headset yet, I ran a VR/AR incubator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the last hype cycle and saw both the promise and perils of the technology. In fact, a wearable computing platform that is always with you and can create displays of any size in real time could eventually replace desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones those are all unnecessary if you can have any number of high-resolution screens floating in the air around you and a virtual keyboard that responds to your hand and eye movements, the main control mechanism of Apple’s Vision Pro. Adrees Latif/Reutersīut Apple’s headset (which it calls a spatial computer) has the potential to herald a new era of wearable “ ubiquitous computing,” a somewhat fuzzy term conveying that computers will become small and be everywhere, ridding us of the need for dedicated computing devices and accessories like keyboards and monitors. Tiago Amorim of Brazil, poses with a Google Glass eyewear frame in Manhattan, New York September 19, 2014. That chapter was a sad sequel to previous disappointments that failed to gain significant traction: 2014’s much-hyped and then maligned Google Glass, one of the earliest augmented reality glasses, followed by the much-ballyhooed AR headsets Magic Leap and HoloLens (from Microsoft), as well as VR headsets from HTC, Samsung and Sony. It wanted to become a leader in building the immersive online world of the Metaverse, itself a science fiction concept governing peoples’ lives depicted in movies such as “ Ready Player One.” Half a year and a few billion dollars later, pundits were declaring Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to be dead as the clunky headsets and other product shortcomings underwhelmed consumers. You could be excused for thinking Vision Pro is a prop from a science fiction film sure to disappoint in real life, something that aspires to the lightweight sunglasses that “ Westworld” characters use to communicate with augmented full-body holograms of far-away colleagues, or the augmented screens and gloves Tom Cruise’s police chief uses to sift through volumes of data to find potential criminals in “ Minority Report.”Īs such, it would be reasonable to figure that Apple’s Vision Pro will follow the same overhyped path as Facebook did when it changed its name to Meta in 2021. Apple’s new device could very well break this boom-and-bust cycle to become a new type of computing platform, one as revolutionary as the Macintosh was in 1984 or the iPhone in 2007. But in this case the negativity is premature.
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