Moments before the dawn of Apple's headset?
Years of setup. Impressive VR headsets reached maturity last decade with Oculus and its competitors, but Tim Cook has publicly shrugged at "VR", saying that AR is much more interesting.
The everyday iPhone user might not really think about it, but Apple has been iterating on a sophisticated AR toolkit for developers since 2017. The iPhone and iPad are now very good at scanning the environment for real surfaces and objects, either with a laser radar sensor or even just by interpreting the input from the camera. They can recognize the presence of particular kinds of locations and objects. They can separate a photographic subject from the background. For a new headset, much of the software is already mature, and coders worldwide are already good at whipping their ideas up with it.
Many culminating rumours over several years now. The mouths of Apple senior executives are familiarly zipped. Apple messages developers with the phrase "code new worlds." There's a headset. (Go the rumours.) And there are glasses, analysts say? Two different devices? A separate tethered battery pack that sits in your pocket? The thing's going to cost three thousand dollars?! Internal turmoil over whether to ship or wait?! Is Apple DOOMED?? (AGAIN?!)
If there's any truth to the rumours, which historically varies, in my mind they've all been explained by the idea that the event flow will match what Apple's done for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The big announcement and product overview come with a later release date, Apple will provide some developers with testing devices for a cost or something like a deposit, and the eventual product launch will see the actual price. That would explain the three thousand-dollar rumoured price: I really don't imagine Apple's going to target only the group of customers who would go in for a Mac Pro. The alleged tethered battery would be one more way to lighten a headset, and I can see Apple relentlessly rejecting heaviness in a headset like Oculus and HTC previously haven't, but I can also imagine tethered battery is merely a description of an internal developer unit.
The strategy for the iPhone and the iPad was "price it aggressively and go for volume," meaning make it possible for a lot of people to buy, use, like and talk about it. But the hardware sophistication here sounds especially high: two tiny ultra-dense screens, all kinds of sensors and cameras, and the form factor which only wouldn't have been a pair of glasses because even at Apple's current technical apex, it still truly couldn't. There has to be a "1.0" of everything, and it can practically never be the idealized vision. Even Apple must iterate to reach that.
Software rumours, as well. I don't see Apple using joysticks or hand controllers – not when their existing software can already reliably recognize and track human body parts, including arms and hands, and draw things in front and back of them. I will not be surprised if the device understands where in their field of vision the user is looking, both for "foviated rendering" – efficiently using less computational power to render in detail only that area, and to help interpret the wearer's intent with respect to their input. (The iPhone has detected "eye contact" with the screen since 2017 as well.) Pressing and swiping floating buttons and objects seems fully doable. Sitting in your living room and chatting with one or more illusory Memoji seems doable. iOS can also capture 3D models of real objects for use in apps. Are they at the point of capturing models of the real you, to enable something like Google's Project Starline? (Google has become a company I've come to regard as avoidably bizarre, but they've made a few excellent contributions to software history, and seem to be the first to unveil something that makes it feel this much like you're in a room with someone. But it's not perfect, and there are whole mini-rooms of external sensors involved.)
Games. Last decade's VR saga was about games first, no question. Apple has always had a notion of "what games are," and it's never struck me as fully harmonized with gamers' notion of what games are. How will that go?
If there indeed is such an annoucement tomorrow, I'll type this week with impressions.