Apple barged into Meta’s metaverse party yesterday, unveiling an augmented-reality headset called the Vision Pro in its riskiest and biggest bet since the introduction of the iPhone more than a decade ago.
Vision Pro will start at $3,499, more than three times the cost of the priciest headset in Meta’s line of mixed and virtual reality devices that currently dominate the nascent AR/VR market, Apple said at its annual developer conference.
Apple’s headset will be available early next year in the US with more countries coming later in 2024, the company said.
The company also introduced a raft of new products and features at the conference, including a 15-inch MacBook Air, a powerful chip called M2 Ultra, improvements to its iOS software and a long-awaited tweak to prevent its autocorrect from annoyingly changing a common expletive to ‘ducking’.
Apple did not make any major announcements about generative AI products similar to ChatGPT or Google’s Bard search engine, although it quietly imbued several smaller features with AI, like live transcriptions of voice mails.
It said users of the Vision Pro will be able to select content inside the goggles with their eyes, tap their fingers together to click and gently flick to scroll, while also using a three-dimensional camera and microphone system to capture videos and pictures than can be viewed in 3D later.
In its most visually striking difference from Meta’s headsets, the device also has an exterior display that shows the user’s eyes to people in the outside world.
The exterior screen goes dark when a user is fully immersed in a virtual world. When a person approaches a user who is in full virtual mode, the headset will show both the user and the outside person to each other, an augmented reality advancement over Meta’s devices which show a more basic video feed of the outside world.
“It’s the first Apple product you look through, not at,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said.
Shares of the iPhone maker rose by two per cent to hit a record high of $184.95 ahead of the launch but shares closed down by 0.8pc.
The headset launch will see Apple test a market crowded with devices that have yet to gain traction with consumers and put it in direct competition with Facebook-owner Meta, after years of clashes between the companies over issues like user privacy and control of developer platforms.
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