Vision Pro: When Apple headsets arrive in Europe, will VR ever reach the top? – BBC News

To get a sense of the public’s interest in Vision Pro, Apple’s high-tech, super-expensive (VR) headset – finally launched in the UK and Europe on Friday – where better to go than a store one of it?

In the past, people would sit outside Apple branches overnight, eager to get the tech giant’s latest product.

However, when I went to its central London branch on Friday morning, there was only a small group, mostly men, waiting at the doors. open it.

Basically, it’s because people these days prefer the convenience of buying in advance.

But perhaps it also tells us something about the question that continues to hang over the VR headset market: will it ever escape the realm of tech aficionados and truly take off?

Apple’s plan to get its product across is to position it as a product that you use to do things you already do – well. Home videos become 3D-like, panoramic photos from floor to ceiling, 360 degrees around you. Apple keeps reminding me that it calls it “local content”. No one else does. However, many are biting their teeth at the price of the Vision Pro – which is £3,499.

Facebook owner Meta has been watching Apple’s approach closely. It has been a VR game for a long time. At the recent presentation of Meta Quest 3, which took place in the UK from 2023, the team was eager to talk to me about “multitasking” – having multiple screens working at once. Pictured I had a web browser, YouTube and Messenger lined up in front of me. “We always did this, we didn’t talk about it,” one Meta worker told me.

And in its latest ad, a man wears a Quest 3 to watch video instructions while building a crib. It’s not the most exciting idea, perhaps, but it shows how Meta wants people to see its technology.

Apple and Meta are the two big players but VR is a crowded market – there are many, maybe hundreds, of different headsets out there.

But what they all have in common is that none of them ever reached the top.

So far, the Vision Pro has been sold in the US – research firm IDC predicts it will shift less than 500,000 units this year.

Meta, which has been on the market for a long time, does not release sales figures for the Quest but it is thought to have sold 20 million units worldwide.

VR headsets are nowhere near as popular as tablets, let alone mobile phones.

And it’s getting worse – George Jijiashvili, an analyst at the market research firm Omdia, said that of those devices that are sold, many have been abandoned.

“This is largely due to a lack of compelling content to continue engagement,” he said.

But of course the lack of content leads to less interest – and less incentive for developers to make that content in the first place.

“It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Mr Jijiashvili told the BBC.

Alan Boyce, founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of Vision Pro will have to “be patient” as more information arrives.

That’s where the Quest 3 beats him – it already has a “powerful library” of games, and can perform the same computing tasks as the Vision Pro.

And the IDC analyst, Francisco Jeronimo, says that we shouldn’t be in a hurry to write off a slow start for Apple’s new product.

“There is always an expectation that Apple with every product will sell millions immediately, there is always a comparison with the iPhone,” he said.

But the truth is that even the iPhone took time to find its feet – and a large number of customers.

According to Melissa Otto of S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone became mainstream when the App Store “started exploding with applications that increased the quality of our lives”.

“When people start to feel that their lives are getting better and easier, that’s when they’re willing to jump,” he said.

There is one more factor to consider here: the physical experience of using the headset.

Apple and Meta both use so-called “passthrough” technology to enable what’s known as mixed reality – the blending of the real world with the computer-generated world.

By using cameras on the outside of the headset, users are provided with a live, high-definition video feed of their surroundings – meaning they can wear them while doing things like walking or to exercise.

But strapping something heavy to your face that weighs half a kilogram doesn’t feel very natural. In general the headsets are now lighter than before, but I can’t imagine wearing them for hours – although a colleague says he often does this.

A large number of people, including myself, have experienced VR sickness, which is when being in VR makes you feel dizzy. This has improved greatly as technology has advanced and is less of a problem – but any experience you have of walking around with a controller instead of your feet will still take some getting used to.

Most VR experiences now include all sorts of settings to avoid this, such as the ability to “teleport” between locations. Sony’s VR game Horizon: Call of the Mountain solved the problem by letting you move around by waving your arms up and down – it sounds silly, but it goes some way to tricking the brain and avoiding nausea the heart

Regardless of what the experts say, the companies themselves seem to be strong with their products, and their different strengths.

It’s no secret that a long-term ambition from the tech giants here is for mixed, or augmented, reality to become mainstream reality. Facebook owner Meta named himself after his grand plan for us all to live in a world called the Metaverse – where we work, rest and play, and appear as digital avatar versions of ourselves. our common ones. That seems a little quiet at the moment.

But they are fine one day, there will be a replacement for our phones and maybe that thing is some kind of VR headset. Eventually, I expect these things to start looking more like glasses and less like giant ski goggles…if not brain implants (I’m not kidding).

“The devices that look like today – I think we know that it is not a device for the mass market. It is very heavy, very difficult,” said Mr. Jijiashvili.

It’s an area where their competitors are focusing, with Viture and XReal producing sunglasses with high-quality screens built into them.

Melissa Brown, head of Meta Development Relations, told us she “absolutely” thought the Quest 3 could one day replace the smartphone. But the next day Meta’s PR team met with a more measured response than Mark Zuckerberg, in which he said that “the last generation of computers is not going away… it’s not like when we get phones , people stop using computers”.

From what I saw at the Apple store on London’s Regent Street, the UK isn’t going to be full of people wandering around on Vision Pros or Quest 3s.

The first customer I spoke to had just walked into the charger, and was surprised by the applause from Apple employees when he walked in.

But after a few hours of being there, several people came out crying with big white Apple bags. The question remains: how many others can be inspired to do the same.