The immersion capabilities of this, and more importantly its ability to be used without taking you out of the world, are simply unparalleled at this point in time.
There’s a few people who have worn it (even eyeglass wearers) and have already stated that you forget it’s even on. I don’t think anyone in the “competition” (VR headsets) have pass-through that’s even remotely that seamless.
The sheer amount of processing that this is doing is incredible. For something as simple as showing a person walk up to you and automatically/seamlessly be “let in” to your virtual space. That’s a breathtaking feat and it looks so natural that I bet most people didn’t even get what an achievement that 2 seconds was.
This is an incredible device. Does that mean it’s going to get mass adoption? No, of course not, but what Apple showed today is simply *not possible* on any other hardware today. Given the state of the industry, I don’t think anyone will be able to match these day 1 features for several years, and god only knows what Apple has on the roadmap to pull away.
Simply put, there is no other company in tech today that has the business model, resources, control over the hardware required, etc, to replicate this today.
To say nothing of the decade+ of building the integrating technologies and frameworks in plain view (ARKit for the obvious, MapKit for what the future holds 😉) to lead up to this. Nobody will be able to match this device in the next few years, but we’ll see some real fun attempts along the way…
To be plain. I have no interest in ever wearing this thing, but I can see where it’s going. What was delivered today is still an engineering marvel, full stop.