I look on this two ways - there's the AR/VR experience and the product proposition.
Granted, not one of us really knows what the full potential of this technology is
I mean I know and I keep telling you guys it's full potential, but y'all write it off. "VR is only good for games so I can't use it" despite me clearly pointing NO VR/AR does way more than just games.
, but what we can do is take educated guesses at how it could be meaningful to us and other peoples lives.
I can imagine a mechanical engineer using it to understand how many components of a part are assembled.
They already do that. Engineer designers use Vive headsets for making 3D CAD models
A person walking through a natural history museum and watching a huge dinosaur skeleton come to life, to understand how the beast moved.
Steam and the Oculus store already has a lot of experiences like this of full virtual museums. In fact, the Louvre in Paris has a VR experience called Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass, in which you can inspect the painting's tiniest little details without touching the art.
An artist could literally create pieces of work virtually on huge canvases, and share the work with others however they pleased for their own pleasure.
Also has been a thing since the OG Vive in 2016.
A senior-aged person could immerse themselves in a world long past, and in doing so help them to battle dementia.
Already been a thing:
https://alzheimersnewstoday.com/social-clips/tackling-dementia-with-virtual-reality/
A music fan could be 'at' a festival taking place on the other side of the world and even meet friends there.
Post Malone had a full VR concert last year.
https://www.billboard.com/music/mus...toothache-concert-virtual-reality-1235110887/
At school, children could 'see' and understand chemical reactions that would otherwise be too dangerous to perform in such a setting.
Man I'm getting tired of this:
https://www.viar360.com/education-schools-using-virtual-reality/
Architects could tour the very buildings they design, using the experience to improve their vision.
Goes back to the VR client for AutoCAD
In short, the possibilities are limited by your imagination.
I swear to god people listen to you more than they listen to me. 🥴
However, the issue with AR/VR at this present time is that the technology hasn't caught up with the level of convenience required to make it a compelling product.
It's already at the level of convenience with the Quest 2. People wanted something cheap and standalone. They won't want wires, so John Carmack told Zuckerberg the Quest was the direction they needed to go. The result? The Quest 2 is now the most dominant VR headset on the market, completely dominating PCVR because of it's low price and lightness.
The problem VR/AR has, is software. It's one thing to make an affordable and convenient headset, but you need content to keep people interested, as well as to attract newcomers, something VR struggled with as last year not a single big title released. We were in a massive content drought, a drought that is slowly passing with the new PCVR games coming this year as well as the PSVR 2, and soon Apple Reality.
If you think about any of Apple's successful product lines, the hardware was always roughly close to what would benefit users.
The Macintosh 128k was radical as an all-in-one, and despite being underpowered Apple got the form exactly right. The iPhone started life as a ping-pong table-sized touchscreen, miniaturised into something that could fit into a pocket. The Apple Watch combines many sensors effectively into something as discrete as a pebble strapped to a wrist, in the familiar guise of a watch. The Apple Pencil is used just like an actual pencil.
Consumer VR as we know it now started in 2016 and required base stations to be mounted throughout a room and you needed a massive playspace, and a cable was always in your way. The original Oculus DK1s only had 3 degrees of freedom versus nowadays with the much better 6DOF.
Fast forward to now and we have standalone VR with the Quest 2, Quest Pro, and Pico 4. PCVR headsets are pretty much dead now as Windows Mixed Reality has been shut down, the Valve Index is old and outdated, and Meta doesn't make PCVR headsets anymore. Consumers only want standalone headsets that can be plugged into a PC when needed since it's a lot more convenient just putting the headset on and going, versus plugging it into a PC, setting up the VR environment software, and installing base stations
For AR/VR to reach these levels of discreet design where the outcome is almost inevitable to the user, as Jony Ive used to put it, the technology needs to advance significantly to the point where such a headset isn't too different from a pair of glasses.
Yeah I don't think we're gonna see that this decade. Apple Glasses is gonna be a long way out as to create something like that you're gonna need to shrink the silicone down massively while still being able to supply a battery, which is why Apple's starting with a traditional HMD first.
In the past, Apple has been patient and waited until the time was right. But it appears in this instance that Apple is employing a strategy, entering the market early with a cumbersome product in order to get developers (and a niche consumer audience) used to the idea of AR/VR in the first place.
Patient? C'mon you're the Apple Knowledge Navigator I thought you knew them better. The iPod had a tight deadline in 2001 to get it ready by the Holiday sales. iPhone also was rushed to get ready for the Macworld 2007 keynote, all the while it still wasn't ready. The demo prototype was unstable and could crash at any moment so Steve Jobs had to follow a "Golden Path" script when demoing it to minimize the chances of it breaking, and every time a demo was successful everyone in the greenroom took a shot of whiskey. It was a miracle nothing went wrong during the presentation.
From a investor and PR standpoint, this is the issue - everyone just expects Apple to sell millions of whatever it releases for no other reason than the company is successful.
Now this is true, and this is the argument I have with many others on this forum who argue that "VR isn't mainstream" because it doesn't sell the units an iPhone does. Nevermind the fact the Quest 2 in just two years sold over 30 million units, or that SteamVR has over 100 million monthly active users, that's not good enough it needs to sell 200 million or else it's not mainstream. They make the same argument when game consoles are brought up since game consoles don't sell the units phones do, and yet they're mainstream.
People will make excuses and shift goalposts no matter what because they don't like being wrong.
Investors also never see the longterm as they want short term gains so they can make profit on their stocks. Just look at Nintendo. They keep losing investors because Nintendo wants to go into a direction investors don't like, despite the company being wildly more successful than they've ever been, crawling from the clutches of death during the Wii U era into a global phenomenon with the Switch, and now even getting into movie and TV production.
But Apple doesn't need to sell millions of these units for it to be 'successful'; what will be success is when the potential of the experience is realised. Unfortunately, it's going to take a very, very, very long time before a headset can be both physically discreet enough and cheap enough to get mass market attention.
Welcome to the first gen Apple curse. It wasn't until the Apple Watch Gen 3 that the Apple Watch kicked into overdrive. The iPad kicked into overdrive when the 2nd gen came out. The iPhone kicked into high gear with the iPhone 4.
As I said earlier, give it time.
I mean, can you imagine Jobs approving an iPhone that had the size and battery life of a Motorola DynaTAC?...
"You're holding it wrong!"
To be honest Steve Jobs thought the hockey puck mouse was a good idea so...yes? 🥴
