It strikes me that there are already some decent and affordable headsets around for VR, like the Oculus Quest 2 and the PlayStation VR, but you don’t hear them being talked about very much? I’ve not yet come across anyone who says, you’ve got to try this, it’s so cool. Like with the Wii there was a genuine enthusiasm about the product, and no one has yet mentioned that about VR/AR, while I have seen some pretty funny viral ‘fails’ videos about people falling over furniture.
It looks to me like a product that may never take off in a serious way. I just get a vibe that people don’t really want to become more immersed in a virtual world and away from the real world. Even when you take into account Apple’s many fans, quite a few of whom would be willing to buy a product just because it was from Apple, i doubt whether that would be enough to make the product a hit without the mainstream audience getting involved.
What made the iPhone a hit was that it unified devices — your phone, your music player, your camera — and then it added extra functionality, the internet, maps, gps, email. With the glasses you can’t do the same thing over again, because there aren’t the same array of things people carry. Are the glasses going to replace my regular glasses?
Instead, the glasses are going to have to bring people “the experience that they don’t yet know they want.” This is largely a software problem, like writing a whole new set of operating system services for VR, and software often takes longer to mature than hardware. It is also about psychology, what brings people to a virtual world. That’s where Apple needs to look in creating a succesful product that is a combination of hardware and software.
It looks to me like a product that may never take off in a serious way. I just get a vibe that people don’t really want to become more immersed in a virtual world and away from the real world. Even when you take into account Apple’s many fans, quite a few of whom would be willing to buy a product just because it was from Apple, i doubt whether that would be enough to make the product a hit without the mainstream audience getting involved.
What made the iPhone a hit was that it unified devices — your phone, your music player, your camera — and then it added extra functionality, the internet, maps, gps, email. With the glasses you can’t do the same thing over again, because there aren’t the same array of things people carry. Are the glasses going to replace my regular glasses?
Instead, the glasses are going to have to bring people “the experience that they don’t yet know they want.” This is largely a software problem, like writing a whole new set of operating system services for VR, and software often takes longer to mature than hardware. It is also about psychology, what brings people to a virtual world. That’s where Apple needs to look in creating a succesful product that is a combination of hardware and software.