VR headsets are having a moment. And now that Apple is making one, the things might even stick around for a while—assuming enough people actually want to wear them.
Apple followed up a week stuffed with virtual reality news—Meta has a new headset, so does Lenovo—by debuting its own mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, during its WWDC keynote yesterday.
Nearly a decade after Google Glass was mocked relentlessly online, Apple’s announcement has roused a similar chorus of questions—like “Why?” and “OK, really, but why?” Apple’s aluminum goggles look finely engineered, but the examples the company showed of the Vision Pro being used aren’t the types of scenarios where a face computer would be practical or comfortable.
Apple fell into the same trap as Meta—which encouraged people to wear a VR headset to business meetings—by showing how the Vision Pro headset could put the wearer front and center in a videoconferencing work call. Even if Apple captures the imagination of the hustle culture and finds a user base willing to strap on a $3,499 headset to condition columns in AR Excel, wearability would still be a problem. Apple hasn’t said how much the Vision Pro will weigh or exactly how long its battery will last (a couple of hours, maybe less), but we can tell from the videos and images it did share that the device is bulky and tethered to an external battery pack.
“People’s tolerance for wearing something on their head for an extended period of time is limited,” says Leo Gebbie, a VR analyst at CCS Insights. “If it’s something that people are going to wear all day, it needs to be slim and light and comfortable. No one has really achieved that just yet in the VR world.”
Apple’s headset, like others before it, is a mixed-reality device, meaning it allows users to interact with virtual elements while allowing some of the real world to bleed through. That real-world video pass-through is something Apple focused on during the Vision Pro’s reveal by positioning the device as something you could wear while walking around, without constantly bumping into furniture, countertops, pets, and children. But Apple’s AR vision is still packaged in a VR headset, a wraparound device that obscures your entire field of vision.
Tuong Nguyen, a director analyst at the tech analysis firm Gartner, says it leads to the “head-in-a-box” problem. Something like Google Glass or Meta’s Facebook Ray-Bans may not be as feature-rich as Apple’s Vision Pro, but at least you can see around their frames. Apple’s headset has a physical knob that lets you adjust how much of the screen is taken up by digital elements, but you’re still relying on a screen to pump the real world visuals in.
“Video pass-through is essentially your head in a box,” Nguyen says.
Also, the screens we already use every day aren’t totally reliable. You’ve probably had the experience where you want to snag a photo or video of something, so you launch your phone’s camera app, only to see the image stutter or the app crash. Now imagine that happening with your entire field of vision.
