Why Apple’s new Vision Pro could revolutionize the immersive market
Ever since Apple announced its new Vision Pro virtual reality headset this summer, the immersive industry has been abuzz with speculation about what it could mean for the immersive market.
The Fantasy Futures project aims to be at the cutting edge of this constantly advancing tech world, so it’s essential that we future-proof our adopted technologies and methods. In this blog, we sift through the hype to assess exactly what impact Apple’s venture into the market could have.
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Apple has hailed the Vision Pro as “its most significant product launch since the iPhone”, and certainly, in conversations we’ve had with industry insiders, there is talk of the software becoming a so-called ‘hero’ device, capable of disrupting the market and having a knock-on effect to increase competition and reduce the costs of headsets across the board.
If this did come to pass, this could only be a good thing, helping to increase accessibility and open up the immersive market to those currently unable to afford the hefty £2.5k price tag that the Vision Pro comes with.
Indeed, our early market analysis has identified the high cost of headsets as a key limiting factor in the growth of the immersive market, a fact supported by Immerse UK’s latest Immersive Economy Report. We are keen to reverse this trend and design our immersive experience to overcome as many barriers to participation as possible, whether to those on tight budgets or differently abled people.
We also know that academic research is generally only accessed by small, specialist audiences, so one of the objectives of the Fantasy Futures is to explore how immersive screen-based experiences engage new audiences, delivering knowledge in exciting and genuinely accessible ways.
Brian Mitchell, head of MoCap Academy and one of our main tech collaborators, puts it like this:
You can take an academic document full of facts that is only really accessible by a few, whereas if you take that information into a video game, the reach is global, and to all sorts of different age groups.
Brian and the team here at Fantasy Futures have already been testing audience responses to different headset technologies, including Meta’s Quest Pro device, which has performed well in our early evaluations of an immersive exhibition in Oxford city centre.
Apple’s Vision Pro promises to offer a whole new level of clarity and high resolution, thanks to its two micro-OLED displays and an outward-facing, curved 'lenticular' lens. This will not only provide the wearer with a resolution exceeding anything currently on the market, but Apple’s game-changing USP is perhaps the outward-facing lens, which projects the headset wearer’s eyes to the outside world, enabling greater interaction with those ‘outside’ the virtual world.
Another aim of ours is to create an immersive experience that is genuinely shared, social and collective in nature, so this is certainly a feature that we will keep a close eye on (pardon the pun)!
But are the high specs of the Vision Pro causing Apple some headaches that they aren’t as keen to publicize? The Financial Times has reported that Apple has had to make major cuts to its production plans, scaling back its initial targets of 1 million units in the first year to only a few hundred thousand.
There is no shortage of far more optimistic forecasts of Apple's new product, however, with market intelligence group Canalys predicting that Apple will acquire over 20 million users within five years of launch. Taking into account Apple’s design credentials and marketing clout, it would be a brave pundit to bet against them.
Whatever the impact of Apple’s new headset on the market, we at Fantasy Futures will be sure to be watching closely.
