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Dear reader, Virtual reality is full of stop-starts. Five years ago I tried out a headset from Miami start-up Magic Leap that made virtual pink flowers bloom on the carpet in front of me. Walls melted and black holes took their place. It was the most impressive display of VR I’d ever seen. But the $2,300 headsets were too clunky and expensive to become mass products. Founder Rony Abovitz left the company. A few weeks ago, the Financial Times reported that Magic Leap was considering licensing its tech to Meta.
Meta, of course, threw in its lot with VR two years ago, going so far as to change its name from Facebook. The company hopes headset sales can ameliorate any decline in digital advertising revenue. So far, operating losses attributed to the Reality Labs unit exceed $37bn. In the wake of each new VR announcement, excitement fails to translate into sales. Go back to 1995 when Nintendo released the Virtual Boy. Players peered into this portable gaming console to experience the illusion of depth. More recently, manufacturers have launched 3D televisions that are supposed to make sports events and films come alive. Lots of press, not many sales.
Is Apple going to change all that? Early reviews of the $3,500 Vision Pro VR headset, including that of the FT, praise the comfort of the goggles, the realism of the virtual effects and the smooth eye and hand-tracking technology. Clearly, it is far ahead of the competition. But that does not mean it will sell. Lex sees the merits of a future in which online interactions are not limited to 2D screens on smartphones and laptops. We agree that the future of VR lies in tech that lets the wearer see real and virtual worlds. This is so-called mixed or augmented reality. But we are not sure many people want to wear thick goggles over their eyes while they work or play. Particularly not if they must tether themselves to a battery pack that lasts for just two hours.
Will people queue round the block to pay almost $3,500? And does Apple really expect to recoup VR research and development with sales of this headset? Perhaps the company should have waited until it could release something more people would wear. To do away with external packs, it needs tiny batteries in headsets that will not overheat. Sophisticated displays that can show images on unobtrusive screens are another nice-to-have. But if Apple sweated too long over the perfect product, there was a chance Meta would scoop up all the best developers and corner the market. A few days before Apple released its headset, I drove down to Santa Clara with the FT’s Patrick McGee to the annual Augmented World Expo (AWE), a conference that brings together developers, founders and other enthusiasts of augmented reality. Magic Leap was there, as was Meta. In fact, every big name bar Apple. There was a lot of focus on the weight of hardware and the ability to interact with the real world and have communal experiences. A lot of headsets looked like ’80s-style sunglasses. Enterprise use — for architects, surgeons and industrial repair — featured heavily. Haptics were big news too. This is the idea that to be fully immersed in VR, you need to feel virtual objects as well as see them.
One of the weirdest gadgets I tried on was a pair of gloves created by a Seattle-based start-up called HaptX. Attached to a headset and a backpack, the gloves let you turn on a virtual tap and feel virtual water running on your hands. They track user movements, pumping air and creating resistance with cables to create sensations. It didn’t feel like water exactly, but there was a definite difference between holding your hands under a virtual tap and pressing them down on a virtual kitchen countertop.
The gloves are not, it should be pointed out, consumer-friendly. They are bulky and heavy and covered in cables and pumps. One day, perhaps, gamers will swap handheld controllers for gloves and companies will use them to carry out remote tasks. I thought of those clunky gloves when I watched Apple’s VR headset presentation. People expect Apple to set a new standard for the sector when it releases a polished consumer product. That is what happened with smartphones, MP3 players and tablets. But the $3,500 VR headsets are in some ways still a work in progress. Nor are they priced for the average Apple customer. For now, these goggles are only for early adopters who are intensely focused on new technology.Elsewhere in techThere have been a lot of reviews of the Apple Vision Pro headsets this week. In addition to the FT’s, I liked this one from The Atlantic recording the author’s conflicting feelings about the idea that goggles are the future of computing. Two years into Lina Khan’s tenure at the Federal Trade Commission, Bloomberg takes stock of the “most aggressive trustbuster” in decades. This Vanity Fair story about the unhappy writers’ room of the TV series Lost takes place a few miles south of San Francisco in Los Angeles. It’s a great insider account about what sounds like a deeply toxic workplace. Enjoy the rest of your week, Elaine MooreDeputy head of [email protected] you would like to receive regular Lex updates, do add us to your FT Digest, and you will get an instant email alert every time we publish. You can also see every Lex column via the webpageRecommended newsletters for youCryptofinance — Scott Chipolina filters out the noise of the global cryptocurrency industry. Sign up hereFree Lunch — Your guide to the global economic policy debate. Sign up here
