That’s meta verse with two words.
As promised, Apple showcased the Vision Pro AR/VR headset at this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference. It’s everything we expected in a newly released Apple product.
- Great looking
- Well thought out
- High price tag
The Vision Pro headset is priced at $3,499. It’s not priced, nor designed for regular human consumption. The headset is specifically designed for software and product developers to create and invent.
Tim Cook has been talking about augmented reality and hinting at a headset for more than a decade.
What Is the Vision Pro
Once you get past the price, the first thing you’ll notice about the Vision Pro is that you look THROUGH it. Other VR headsets have tiny screens embedded in the goggles and is designed to keep you in a rendered environment. The Vision Pro has a clear visor with screens making up part of the transparent display. This is a mixed mode operation providing the ability to overlay information on top of the real world or make the display opaque. This is something we haven’t seen in commercial applications and only in movies or advanced military heads up displays.
Users can switch between AR and VR modes by turning a digital crown on the display. Pretty cool, right?
The headset will use “natural tracking” controls. Users can use hand and eye movements to navigate in the headset without a need for separate paddles or controllers.
What Does It Mean for a Meta Verse Future?
We don’t really know.
The device isn’t priced for people buying it off the shelf, and it’s not available for developers until 2024.
Apple built and priced the device to give developers a chance to invent a future we don’t have.
My biggest complaint about the Oculus series of VR content is the graphics haven’t improved since 1997. I played a VR game for the first time in the University of Maryland Eastern Shore’s parking lot. The same polygonal graphics in that headset, are the same polygonal graphics in every Oculus rendered world or app I’ve seen.
At this stage of the 21st century, I’m thinking we should be somewhere close to Ready Player One graphics in these things.
The Vision Pro may bring about this future. Hopefully, less dystopian than the book.
Developers will have a chance to write software for a custom operating system for the hardware with the same computing power available in laptop computers.
By giving developers early access to the hardware and software, Apple is letting the developers figure things out instead of implementing worlds dictated by Facebook.
Whether or not developers can pull it off, we’ll have to wait and see.