What Apple’s Vision Pro means for the future of VR
By Sean Atkins
I drink the Apple Kool-Aid with the best of them. I like nothing more than succumbing to Apple’s reality distortion field and convincing myself that “just works” and “like magic” make the premium price and ludicrously high spec somehow inevitable (I’m starting to sound a bit Jonny Ive myself now).
Yes, I’m an Apple guy! Unabashed. I’m writing this on my MacBook Pro, wearing my Apple Watch Ultra while listening to lossless spatial audio on my AirPods Max. I’m a sucker for it. They’ve put a spell on me. I’m a proper fan boy and I know it.
But I’m also a VR guy. I love my Meta Quest 2. Massively flawed though it is. I love the snackable innovation of it all. A quick fix of the new. A calming round of Walkabout Golf with geeky mates, a cheeky 20 minutes immersed in the escape room puzzler I Expect You To Die 2, a frantic Pistol Whip session or the occasional battle to figure out if it’s possible to have a meaningful virtual meeting with cartoon colleagues in Horizon Workrooms.
I love that VR is sort of great and shit at the same time. New experiences, new ways to interact, genuine entertainment innovation – and all delivered on the back of a truck packed full of compromises. Heavy, low res, tethered, underpowered, uncomfortable, laggy, vom-inducing, hot, loud – for every headset you can pick a few of the above.
So imagine my confused little head when Apple spent a leisurely hour unveiling VR innovation upon innovation with their industrial strength, hands-free, eye-controlled, impossibly powerful, wonderfully light, ultra high definition Vision Pro headset (sorry, spatial computer) – and then punched me in the face with the $3500 price tag! And that’s before the $300 snap-on prescription lenses that I’ll need, mind you! Oh, and we’ll have to wait until next year. And it’s US-only at first. Jesus.
““Is this thing is the future or the death of VR?””
It’s been nearly two months since Apple unveiled the Vision Pro to the world and like the rest of Geekdom, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’ve watched a festival of hands-on reaction videos (see bottom of this post) and regularly ponder about whether this thing is the future or the death of VR. And here’s the unsatisfactory conclusion – it’s a bit of both.
Vision Pro isn’t the future of VR, but it is a tantalising glimpse of it. It’s a hodge-podge of exceptional ideas executed beautifully for reasons that haven’t quite been explained. A magpie-magnet – it’s a shiny new object glinting in the sun that can morph from being a genuine pin-sharp cinema, to a 3D memory machine, an uncanny augmented world, and a productivity powerhouse boasting the best collection of monitors the world has ever seen – all controlled by your eyes! Your eyes! Oh, and it’s a bank robber! Your bank that is.
It’s everything that we’ve been promised VR was going to be in movies and future-gazing tech journalism over the last 30 years. It’s grander and more ambitious than Zuckerberg’s vision of legless cartoons floating in his Roblox-on-steroids metaverse that is, well, as weird as he is.
Vision Pro may well be the classic tech solution looking for a problem – as the original Apple Watch was (coming out in a fanfare of fashion only to abandon all that a year later when user data told them it’s a fitness machine with low level alerts) – but it’s definitely the beginning of ‘something’. And it’s going to inspire the whole industry to up its game and create cohesive new computing platforms rather than snackable experience machines.
““Where the hell are the games?””
Here’s what bothers me the most though (aside from the properly creepy eyes on the outside of the thing) – where are the hell are the games? Did Apple bury the lead in their product announcement? There’s been pretty much zero mention of dedicated VR games or fitness in any of the Vision Pro comms - the two staples that drive the entire rest of the VR industry. No mention at all. On a three and a half grand headset. Something is up.
I think we’ve only seen stage one of this announcement. ‘Real’ VR games – those where you actually walk around, face giant foes, wield sabres and swords and generally get out of breath will surely be unveiled to reignite interest in the machine before launch. Of course, Apple is going to have to subsidise these. And I bet that’s exactly what’s next (in the same way that they got Disney to create their Vision Pro movie-watching experience nine months before launch to try and kick the arses of Netflix and Amazon Prime).
Killer app VR games must be coming and this is where the power and fidelity of Vision Pro could really move the needle for the masses – it’s certainly what intrigues me most. A library of iPad games ready to go on a virtual screen inside the headset is nice, but come on Apple, I’ll say it again, three and a half grand!
And if Apple Fitness Plus hasn’t been filmed in 3D from day one in readiness for this launch and a surprise unveiling in January too, then, er, my source is full of shit.
Like the Apple Watch, Vision Pro feels like it will go from expensive novelty toy to expensive essential machine, before the work can begin on shrinking the price and form factor. Until a third or fourth generation appears in a slimmer more affordable guise, it’s simply going ruin regular pixel-filled VR for everyone else until the industry accelerates to catch up. Which is a good thing! Zuckerberg faced the same seemingly impossible challenge when TikTok crashed onto the social video scene and overnight made Instagram feel quaintly retro. He ‘sent in the clones’ and now Instagram Stories very quietly generates significantly more revenue than TikTok. He dealt with it. But he’s fighting Apple on many fronts – can he hope to win them all?
Yes, like the Vision Pro itself, this post is a bit all over the place – a collection of ideas that never really come together, but are sort of fun nonetheless.
So, where does all this leave us? App and game makers have been patiently waiting for hardware that will do their creations justice and Apple has stepped up – Vision Pro sets a new standard for fidelity and immersion. But will this be an iPhone or a HomePod moment for Apple? If games and fitness become a ‘proper’ part of the story before launch the next couple of years are going to be fun.
Most importantly though, yes the reality distortion field got me in the end. Even though I spent 45 minutes of the announcement keynote muttering “any more than $1500 and I’m out”, by the final price reveal I was planning a trip to New York to snag one on day one (very much dependent on my boss’s Air Miles situation – are you reading, John?). I’m all in! Although I wonder how much of that $3,500 I can expense?
