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| A bet on injecting iPhone-esque magic into virtual reality |
| It’s here (or it will be “early next year”): Apple unveiled its long-awaited entry into virtual reality, or what the tech giant calls “spatial computing,” in the form of the Apple Vision Pro, a $3,500 device that looks like exquisitely designed futuristic ski goggles. |
| The initial reviews were mixed and skeptics questioned whether even Apple could make virtual reality anything more than a niche technology. But boosters say that if any company can make it mainstream, it’s Apple with its ecosystem of two billion iPhone, iPad and Mac users. |
| “We believe Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary product,” Tim Cook told developers and journalists on Monday. It certainly looks like an Apple product: Unlike other virtual reality headsets, an external display shows your eyes to others, and the device is controlled using hand gestures, eye movements and your voice. A dial allows you to adjust how immersed you want to be in the virtual world, which is beamed to your eyeballs via two tiny 4K screens. |
| Yet what Apple demonstrated on Monday were mostly immersive versions of apps like FaceTime and Safari, as well as 3-D photos and video, rather than a wholly VR experience. Here’s what early testers had to say: |
| • “At the end of the demo, I took off the headset and felt two things: 1) Wow. Very cool. 2) Did I just do drugs?” wrote Joanna Stern of The Wall Street Journal. |
| • The device’s eye-tracking “is the closest thing I’ve seen to magic,” said the tech reviewer Marques Brownlee. |
| • “The most perfect headset demo reel of all time is still just a headset demo reel,” wrote Nilay Patel of The Verge. |
| These are tough times for virtual reality. Enthusiasm for virtual worlds, often called the metaverse, rose during the pandemic, but waned as lockdowns eased. Investors also appear to have moved onto shinier new technologies like artificial intelligence: Metaverse-related start-ups raised about $664 million in the first five months of 2023, down 77 percent year on year, according to PitchBook. |
| But Apple has supercharged new product categories before. Remember that the market for portable digital music players was just 3.3 million units in 2000 before Apple released the iPod; four years later, it surged to 26.4 million. |
| And Apple is often content to play the long game: “They know this is an evolution that’s going to take some time,” Jeff Fieldhack of Counterpoint Research told The New York Times. (Then again, not all Apple products turn out to be hits.) |
| Others may profit from riding Apple’s coattails. Shares in the game developer Unity jumped 17 percent on Monday on the news, while those in Disney shot up after the media giant said its Disney+ service would be available on the Vision Pro. |
| Even Meta, which has invested — and lost — billions in trying to make the metaverse go mainstream, may benefit: Could its lower-cost Quest Pro, whose newest version will start at $500, end up becoming the Android to the Vision Pro’s iPhone? |
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