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CUPERTINO (United States), June 5 (AP) — Apple on Monday unveiled long-rumored headsets that will place users between the virtual and real worlds, while also testing the technology trendsetters. The ability to popularize novelty devices in a way that others failed to capture the popular imagination.
After years of speculation, Apple CEO Tim Cook hailed the arrival of the sleek goggles, dubbed the “Vision Pro,” at the company’s annual developer conference on its park-like campus in Cupertino, California, Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs helped design it.
“This marks the beginning of a journey that will bring a new dimension to powerful personal technology,” Cook told the crowd.
While Apple executives provided a broad preview of the headset’s capabilities in the final half-hour of Monday’s event, consumers will have to wait to get their hands on the device and prepare to pay a hefty price tag to get it started. When it goes on sale early next year, the Vision Pro will cost $3,500.
The headphones could be another milestone for Apple to release game-changing technology, though the company isn’t always the first to try and make a particular device.
Apple’s string of breakthroughs dates back to the bow-tie Jobs who peddled the first Mac in 1984 — and the 2001 iPod, 2007 iPhone, 2010 iPad, 2014 Apple Watch and 2016 AirPods continue the tradition .
The company stresses that in developing the Vision Pro over the years, it drew on product designs from the past few decades, which Apple says are involved in more than 5,000 different patents.
The goggles will be equipped with 12 cameras, 6 microphones and various sensors, and users can control it and various applications with only their eyes and hands. Apple has also developed technology that creates a three-dimensional digital version of each user for display during video conferences.
If the new device proves to be a niche product, it would put Apple in the same position as other major tech companies and startups that have tried to sell headphones or glasses equipped with technology that would either People are thrust into artificial worlds, either projected with digital images of landscapes and the things that actually appear in front of them—a format known as “augmented reality.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has long described these alternate three-dimensional realities as “metaverses.” He’s trying to push the geeky concept into the mainstream by changing the social networking company’s name to Meta Platforms in 2021, then pouring billions of dollars into improving virtual technology.
But the virtual world remains largely a digital ghost town, though Meta’s virtual reality headset, Quest, remains the best-selling device in a category that so far has largely appealed to video gamers looking for a more immersive experience. Cook and other Apple executives avoided mentioning the Metaverse in their presentations, instead describing the Vision Pro as the company’s first step into “spatial computing.”
The response to virtual, augmented, and mixed reality so far has been decidedly lackluster. Some gadgets deploying the technology have even been ridiculed, most notably Google’s internet-connected glasses released more than a decade ago.
After Google co-founder Sergey Brin demonstrated an early model’s potential “wow factor” during a tech conference in San Francisco with a skydiving stunt, consumers initially sparked excitement about the device. Soon the pair will allow users to take photos and videos surreptitiously. The backlash became so strong that people who wore the gear became known as “Glassholes,” leading Google to withdraw the product a few years after its debut.
Microsoft also had limited success with its mixed reality headset HoloLens, released in 2016, although the software maker insisted earlier this year that it remained committed to the technology.
Magic Leap, a start-up that sparked excitement with a preview of its mixed-reality technology that might conjure up the spectacle of a whale bursting through a gym floor, struggled to market its first headset to consumers in 2018. It has encountered a lot of difficulties, so it has shifted its focus to industrial, healthcare and emergency uses.
Daniel Diez, Magic Leap’s chief transformation officer, said Apple’s goggles had to answer four main questions: “What can people do with it? How does this thing look and feel? Is it comfortable to wear? How much will it cost?”
Anticipation of Apple’s goggles costing thousands of dollars has tempered expectations for the product. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives expects Apple’s goggles to have “amazing” technology, but he expects the company to sell just 150,000 in the device’s first year — and that’s just A hiccup in the company’s product portfolio. By comparison, Apple sells more than 200 million big-name iPhones a year. But the iPhone wasn’t an immediate hit, selling fewer than 12 million units in its first year.
Since 2016, annual shipments of virtual and augmented reality devices have averaged 8.6 million units, according to research firm CCS Insight. The company expects sales to remain subdued this year, with sales expected to be around 11 million units before gradually climbing to 67 million in 2026.
Before unveiling the new goggles, Apple announced that the latest models in its two high-end computer lines, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, will feature a company-designed chip that’s already in cheaper Macs.
The Mac Studio is priced at $2,000 and the Mac Pro is $7,000. As it usually does at this conference, Apple showed off iOS 17, the next-generation iPhone operating system. The software, which will include more personalization and location-sharing tools for calls and text messages, is expected to be released as a free update in September. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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