Table of Contents
- Apple Vision Pro: Launch
- Rise Of VR Headsets
- VR Becoming Main Stream
- Apple’s Takeover Of The Industry
Apple Vision Pro: Launch
It was on 5th June of 2023 when apple first announced the Vision Pro, a mixed reality headset that promised to bring what was once considered as science fiction into reality, A headset that has set the world at storm.
Since its launch on January 19,2024, there have been crazy videos coming out where people are using the vision pro in public, while commuting, in the pool, in restaurants, in gyms and even in a cybertruck.
And what is even more crazy, is when the product was announced on 5th of June, the consensus among the public was that it will fail miserably as the price is too high for a VR headset, especially when its main competitor Meta Quest 3 is priced at 500 bucks and many were also terrified that the virtual and artificial reality will disconnect us from the real world even more.
But Apple has some different plans and this is not the first time apple has faced so much of heat.
In fact, whenever apple has done something new, it has faced a lot of criticism. when it launched the first generation of airpods back in 2016 and removed the headphone jack from iphone 7, the heat was unreal.
But today it feels so seamless and it was no different when it launched the first iphone.
And today it is the only way phones are built.
So, will Apple repeat the history or the fate this time around has some other plans?
Rise Of VR Headsets
VR may seem a recent phenomenon but its development has took many decades.
The year is 1965, Russian Cosmonaut, Alexei Leonov has become the first person to walk in space, Lyndon B Johnson is president of the USA and a man called Ivan Sutherland has set in motion the wheels of what we will ultimately call Virtual Reality, he did so by creating the worlds first head mounted display, this device placed the user in a virtual world for the very first time but the graphics were really terrible.
However, Steady development of early VR tech during the 60s and 70s was driven by the US military’s work on vehicle simulators, specialist teams at NASA and also researchers at the university of Utah, this progress in tandem with advancements in computer graphics technology really began to gain momentum in the 1980’s.
And in 1985 a team at NASA made a virtual environment workstation, this next step in VR consisted of 2 LCD TV displays, wide angle stereoscopic optics and a motorcycle helmet.
Also the term virtual Reality was first coined by Lanier Later, a member of the team involved in the creation of the gloves designed for use with the Virtual Environment Workstation.
And in the 90’s, VR videogames began to emerge, the earliest publicly available VR games came in the form of special arcade machines.
In 1991 to 93, the company virtuality games created a line of advanced VR machines with stereoscopic 3d visuals but success in early VR games was rare. Sega announced Sega VR in 1991 and it was even showcased in CES in 1993 but it never materialized as a retail product despite reportedly having 4 games developed specifically for it.
And in 1995, Nintendo released its Virtual Boy, marketed as the first portable video game console but the unit was a commercial flop for many reasons.
First, it only showcased two colours Red and black and customers just didn’t liked using it as it was impossible to play games with this thing in a comfortable position and a lack of software support made things even worse.
And after its massive failure, Virtual Reality in the world of games at least, had all but vanished from the scene across forms and developer events.
It was barely spoken of again until the 1st August in 2012, when there was a launch of a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter for a little device called oculus rift.
A campaign that started with a plan to raise 2,50,000 Dollars ended up raising 2.5 million Dollars within just 1 month.
And in 2014, to every one’s surprise it was acquired for a staggering 2 Billion Dollars, by Facebook.
An investment that shocked the world as Facebook had virtually no experience in gaming or Virtual Reality and 2 billion dollars was too high a price for a company that was barely around for 2 years and had not sold a single unit till date.
But Mark had some different plans, as he was skating to where the puck was going, rather than where the puck already was.
As after the Personal Computer revolution, two new computing platforms emerged Smartphones and tablets, both of which were ruled by Apple and Google and for Zuck it was a golden opportunity in capturing this new platform and playing a dominant role there.
VR Becoming Main Stream
After Facebook’s purchase of Oculus, the industry started seeing traction of other large corporates,
Sony announced that they were working on a Playstation Headset, Google released the Cardboard — a low cost and do-it-yourself stereoscopic viewer for smartphones.
Samsung announced the Samsung Gear VR, a headset that uses Samsung Galaxy Smartphone as a viewer.
And by 2016 hundreds of companies were developing VR products.
And finally in 2021, facebook went all in on the VR space, when it rebranded itself to Meta, an abbreviation for the term metaverse, and committed to spend atleast 10 Billion dollars each year on its Metaverse division called Reality Labs.
And also sold a dream that seemed too good to be true, as the VR headset would take you to a virtual space where you could do things that you could not in the physical world with people you couldn’t physically be with.
But investors did not really buy the dream as the stock fell by a staggering 70% in a matter of 9 months.
So, the industry even after receiving so much of investment was struggling to ignite interest in the general public and was only catering to a niche gaming audience.
But this was soon about to change, as the big brother of tech was about to enter the space.
Apple’s Takeover Of The Industry
Apple announced the Vision Pro at Worldwide Developers Conference in June of 2023 but the product took many years to build.
Apple is known for its secrecy of the products it has under development and has a very long development cycle for its products which may take 5 to 6 years before they become official Apple Products and many (and I mean 90% of them) may never even come into fruition as they do not match the Apple standards.
But Vision Pro according to some estimates has been under development for more than eye-popping 16 years as Apple had filed a patent that is similar to the Vision Pro back in 2007, which means it is under development way before the Oculus headset or anything form Samsung and other companies.
And it also means that it was Steve Jobs who was the CEO of apple back then, who may have envisioned the product.
Steve had just launched the iPhone and may have been thinking what the future would likely look like beyond the iPhone and iPad which was launched by him in 2010.
And here is Steve Jobs talking about building headphones for eyes back in 2005.
But the Vision Pro took as long to develop as it took is because Apple had to invent more than 50% of the technology in this headset by itself.
And that is a big deal as only Apple could pull it off due to its ownership of the CPU, GPU and proprietary chips like Vision Pro’s R1.
It also included proprietary hand tracking and optics and specialized 3D cameras that are all homegrown.
And in 2017, while other VR Companies Oculus were shipping their headsets, Apple was thinking about a more advanced headset, that would be of more outstanding quality and capabilities than any on the market then or even in the near future.
And despite the skepticism at its announcement, when it became available for pre-orders on 19th of January, it was selling like hotcakes and sold out within hours and the shipping time had slipped from February to march.
Till date Apple has sold around 200,000 vision pro headsets.
And According to Forbes, Apple may sell every Vision Pro they can make in 2024 and will ship 1 million units in 2024, and up to 10 million in its first three years.
But what really sets Apple apart from its competitor’s is that it is the only headset that people are willing to wear in public.
As before the launch of vision pro, VR headsets were considered to be something that only gamers will use in their room.
But Apple has already brought mass market appeal to it, people who are in no way gamers are willing to buy it for their day to day tasks and according to some reviews once you use them it is difficult to leave.
So, is it the classic Steve Jobs product that people don’t even know they want today but will in the future.
This only time will tell but I definitely, will not bet against the big brother.
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