A decade to develop - but will anyone want to visit Apple’s virtual reality?

Current VR kit can has been beset by issues, writes Andrew Griffin. Can Tim Cook and his fellow Apple executives find a way to fix it?

(AFP via Getty Images)

Apple is just days away from releasing the product that could decide both it and our future.

The company’s “mixed reality” headset has been rumoured for years, and has been in the works for almost a decade. Now rumours suggest that it will be introduced at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference event on Monday, during a live keynote.

But the headset will be entering into a market that has been blighted by a host of issues – both technical and reputational. Even the world’s biggest company will have to work hard to convince the public that it is different from the clunky and useless equipment that has been thrust upon them in the name of the future so far.

Here are seven of the biggest issues that Apple’s headset will face as it is revealed to the world, as well as the ways that its developers might hope to overcome them.

Motion sickness and eye problems

For many people, virtual reality headsets are literally sickening: some people including this writer are unable to wear them for a long time for fear of becoming nauseated. That’s just the beginning of a variety of optical and accessibility problems that have blighted existing headsets.

The problems of motion sickness are really a failure of the technology: it is unable to adjust to you moving your head as quickly as you actually do, which means that there is a disconnect between what you are feeling and seeing. That may have been solved in the Apple headset, especially if the claims about its realistic displays and vast power are correct.

The problems of other optical issues are more practical. There is, for instance, no easy way to wear glasses with most virtual reality headsets, which means that people who need them might struggle to get inside.

Apple has been intensely and publicly focused on accessibility throughout its history, and it would be very surprising if it gave up on that commitment for the new headset. But it’s still unclear how much of those problems are inevitable – or whether they have found a technological fix for that issue.

Beyond those more basic problems, there is a wider issue of realism: so far, headset developers have been able to make their displays as bright or as crisp or as responsive as real life, but not all at the same time, and often not at all. People will no doubt be forgiving of some failures of verisimilitude, at least in the first version of the product, but big gaps between the virtual and real world could quickly lead people to give up.

Price

All rumours suggest that the Apple headset is likely to be incredibly expensive: at $3,000, it is more expensive than most other mainstream headsets, and likely to be out of reach of even most committed Apple fans. Early analysis has suggested it might have to be that way, given that the advanced components that have been rumoured and are needed to provide a premium experience are likely to be very expensive and hard for Apple to acquire.

Most of Apple’s products are more expensive than those offered by competitors, of course. But they aren’t usually quite that expensive; all of Apple’s other products have relatively cheap versions, even if you can spend far more than $3,000 on a Mac computer, for instance.

Similarly, Apple’s price has always been justified in part because of the quality of its products. So the real test will be whether it is all that much better than cheaper alternatives – such as the Meta Quest 3, launched just a few days ahead of Apple’s big day, and priced at a relatively modest $499.

All of this might be made irrelevant when Apple actually announces the details of the new headset. When Apple revealed the iPad in 2010, rumours suggested that it was going to cost $999, a fact that even Steve Jobs pointed to during the keynote, mocking the “pundits” who had speculated about the price. He then said he was “thrilled” to announce that the iPad would cost $499, backed by a video of the actual price smashing through that guess.

For all the mockery from Jobs, the rumours were of course helpful; $499 is still a lot of money, but it’s a lot less than $999. Apple could well have done the same this time around, allowing the rumours of a $3,000 price tag to percolate around precisely so that they can smash them and make the headset seem relatively cheap.

But Apple might also make peace with the expensive price. Some reports have suggested that it sees this headset as a first go that will inevitably be sold in smaller volumes than its other products, and the focus might be less on selling lots of the headsets and more about getting them ready for the mainstream. It might only be targeting developers and other moneyed early adopters, in which case the price might not prove a major issue.

The nerd factor

Headsets might be a lot of things, but they are not cool. Most examples so far look decidedly gadget-y, and are yet to break into mainstream culture. If Apple wants the headset to be a mainstream product, it’s going to have to shed at least some of that reputation.

Apple successfully did this with the Apple Watch, which was mocked before release but gradually became at least acceptable, if not cool. It did so in two main ways: stressing the personalisable nature of the Watch, through a variety of accessories, as well as courting celebrities and fashion influencers from the very beginning. (Much of that work – both the design and the marketing – was reportedly led by Jony Ive, who has since left the company.)

Apple will probably take much the same approach with the headset. Don’t expect it to look like a computer on the face, or at least too much like one. The headset will probably borrow heavily from those wearable devices that Apple already makes, which have come with a focus on premium soft materials that aim to make them look like the kind of devices that normal people will be happy to have in their lives.

In contrast with the Watch, however, Apple might not have to work so hard to make people want to live with these products. When the AirPods Max were released, some technology critics dinged them for their large size and unapologetic design. But they caught on among young people, and are now regularly boosted on TikTok. Apple might choose to embrace the nerdy nature of the headset in the same way.

Screen time worries

Apple’s headset comes at an unusual time for personal computing devices, in that lots of people currently don’t like them, or more accurately like them too much. There is a growing awareness that spending too much time on our devices might be bad for us, and a push even inside Silicon Valley to spend more time outside and away from our phones.

The company has already responded to that within its other devices, with features such as Screen Time that allow people to limit the amount of scrolling they do in a day. That has been made easier by the fact that – unlike VR rival Meta – Apple doesn’t really need people to stay engaged with their devices, so long as they are buying them in the first place.

But that context might nonetheless make it difficult for people not just to spend more time in virtual worlds but to attach the device that is showing them directly onto their face and in front of their eyes. In a time of increasing interest in the real world, a new digital one might not be so alluring.

Through the years of developing these features on the iPhone and iPad, Apple has always favoured augmented reality over virtual reality, however; its interest has been in putting virtual objects on the real world, not putting real people into virtual worlds. It might choose to use that as a differentiating feature, with Maps features that will actually help you explore the real world rather than shut you off from it, for instance.

Playing the games

Apple will no doubt want broad adoption of the headset, in work and social contexts. It has already been rumoured to be working on augmented reality versions of its existing apps such as FaceTime and Messages.

But at the moment, the primary use of such headsets is for gaming. It’s no coincidence that one of the most popular VR headsets are those made by Sony for the PlayStation, and even Meta – a social network company, after all – leans heavily on games in its marketing.

Apple has something of a patchy history with that kind of serious gaming. While the iPhone and its App Store are a huge market for casual and children’s gaming, the bigger-screened platforms such as the Mac have failed to pull in bigger games. Many fewer titles are released for the Mac than for PCs or consoles, and many of those that are released are sub-standard versions of games released on other platforms.

Apple does seem to be addressing this with its headset; the makers of No Man’s Sky, the popular game, have been posting a number of cryptic tweets that suggest that it might be coming to the platform when it launches, and veteran games designer Hideo Kojima has reportedly been spotted around Apple’s campus.

But it has often looked to address criticism over gaming with high-profile titles, and big games have been a central part of its keynotes before. The real question is whether those big launch games will encourage other developers to bring their titles to Apple’s virtual reality platform – or whether it will suffer a similar fate to the Mac and iPad.

AI hype

One of the biggest challenges for the headset is what it isn’t: AI. Artificial intelligence is the most hyped technology of the moment, to the exclusion of other innovations, and is all anyone wants to talk about.

Apple does of course have a tremendous power to change that conversation, and it is not as if the world is going to ignore a new release from the world’s biggest company because they are more interested in news about AI. But it does mean that it could struggle to gain purchase without the boost offered by following the zeigeist.

It is yet more difficult because Apple has so far stayed out of the conversation about the future of AI, even as almost every other major technology company has thrown its weight and money behind it. That might be because it has a host of new updates planned for WWDC – and it will almost certainly say something, even if that is just to rebrand some existing features as AI – but it might also be because it is behind the curve on that technology, either by choice or by mistake.

Hype is helpful to a product, even one made by the world’s most hyped company. Much will depend on whether Apple can answer questions about AI – or shift the story somewhere else.

… and metaverse anti-hype

Don’t expect Apple to say “metaverse” at all on Monday. Last October, Tim Cook said that people don’t really know what the Metaverse is; later that month, its marketing chief Greg Joswiak promised to never use the word. But no matter how much Apple avoids saying it during the launch event, the word will nonetheless be hovering over the whole presentation like a spectre.

Once upon a time, that might have been a good thing: for a brief few months last year, everyone was hailing it as the future, and Meta’s decision to rebrand in line with it shows just how much pull it had. Technologists were abuzz about the possibility of creating new virtual worlds that can be inhabited in immersive ways, and it sounded exciting.

In the time since, however, the metaverse has been declared dead. That was for the most part not the technology or idea’s fault – it doesn’t even really exist yet – but rather the incessant marketing of the idea and the lack of substance that exposed. Becoming attached to other meaningless, buzzy, cynical concepts such as NFTs and Web3 didn’t help matters.

Apple will be trying to find a way to tell people about the exciting possibilities that were offered by the metaverse at its beginning, without reminding them about what it has become since (or saying the word metaverse).