Apple seems poised to unveil a long-rumored headset that can place its customers between the digital and actual world, whereas additionally testing the know-how trendsetter’s capacity to popularize new-fangled units after others failed to seize the public’s creativeness.
After years of hypothesis, the stage is ready for the broadly anticipated announcement to be made Monday at Apple’s annual builders convention in a Cupertino, California, theater named after the firm’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.
Apple can be seemingly to use the occasion to exhibit its newest Mac pc, preview the subsequent working system for the iPhone and talk about its technique for synthetic intelligence.
But the star of the present is anticipated to be a pair of goggles — maybe known as “Reality Pro,” in accordance to media leaks — that might grow to be one other milestone in Apple’s lore of releasing game-changing know-how, although the firm hasn’t at all times been the first to strive its hand at making a explicit system.
Apple’s lineage of breakthroughs date again to a bow-tied Jobs peddling the first Mac in 1984 —a custom that continued with the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, the Apple Watch in 2014 and its AirPods in 2016.
But with a hefty price ticket that might be in the $3,000 vary, Apple’s new headset might also be greeted with a lukewarm reception from all however prosperous technophiles.
If the new system seems to be a area of interest product, it would depart Apple in the identical bind as different main tech corporations and startups which have tried promoting headsets or glasses outfitted with know-how that both thrusts individuals into synthetic worlds or initiatives digital photos with surroundings and issues which can be truly in entrance of them — a format often known as “augmented reality.”
Apple’s goggles are anticipated be sleekly designed and able to toggling between completely digital or augmented choices, a mix typically often known as “blended actuality.” That flexibility also is sometimes called external reality, or XR for shorthand.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been describing these alternate three-dimensional realities as the “metaverse.” It’s a geeky concept that he tried to push into the mainstream by changing the name of his social networking company to Meta Platforms in 2021 and then pouring billions of dollars into improving the virtual technology.
But the metaverse largely remains a digital ghost town, although Meta’s virtual reality headset, the Quest, remains the top-selling device in a category that so far has mostly appealed to video game players looking for even more immersive experiences.
Apple executives seem likely to avoid referring to the metaverse, given the skepticism that has quickly developed around that term, when they discuss the potential of the company’s new headset.
In recent years, Apple CEO Tim Cook has periodically touted augmented reality as technology’s next quantum leap, while not setting a specific timeline for when it will gain mass appeal.
“If you look back in a point in time, you know, zoom out to the future and look back, you’ll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality,” Cook, who is 62, said last September while speaking to an audience of students in Italy. “Just like today you wonder how did people like me grow up without the internet. You know, so I think it could be that profound. And it’s not going to be profound overnight.”
The response to virtual, augmented and mixed reality has been decidedly ho-hum so far. Some of the gadgets deploying the technology have even been derisively mocked, with the most notable example being Google’s internet-connected glasses released more than a decade ago.
After Google co-founder Sergey Brin initially drummed up excitement about the device by demonstrating an early model’s potential “wow factor” with a skydiving stunt staged during a San Francisco tech conference, consumers quickly became turned off to a product that allowed its users to surreptitiously take pictures and video. The backlash became so intense that people who wore the gear became known as “Glassholes,” leading Google to withdraw the product a few years after its debut.
Microsoft also has had limited success with HoloLens, a mixed-reality headset released in 2016, although the software maker earlier this year insisted it remains committed to the technology.
Magic Leap, a startup that stirred excitement with previews of a mixed-reality technology that could conjure the spectacle of a whale breaching through a gymnasium floor, had so much trouble marketing its first headset to consumers in 2018 that it has since shifted its focus to industrial, healthcare and emergency uses.
Daniel Diez, Magic Leap’s chief transformation officer, said there are four major questions Apple’s goggles will have to answer: “What can people do with it? What does this thing look and feel like? Is it comfortable to wear? And how much is it going to cost?”
The anticipation that Apple’s goggles are going to sell for several thousand dollars already has dampened expectations for the product. Although he expects Apple’s goggles to boast “jaw dropping” technology, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said he expects the company to sell just 150,000 units during the device’s first year on the market — a mere speck in the company’s portfolio.
By comparison, Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones, its marquee product a year. But the iPhone wasn’t an immediate sensation, with sales of fewer than 12 million units in its first full year on the market.
In a move apparently aimed at magnifying the expected price of Apple’s goggles, Zuckerberg made a point of saying last week that the next Quest headset will sell for $500, an announcement made four months before Meta Platform plans to showcase the latest device at its tech conference.
Since 2016, the average annual shipments of virtual- and augmented-reality devices have averaged 8.6 million units, according to the research firm CCS Insight. The firm expects sales to remain sluggish this year, with a sales projection of about 11 million of the devices before gradually climbing to 67 million in 2026.
But those forecasts were obviously made before it’s known whether Apple might be releasing a product that alters the landscape.
“I would never count out Apple, especially with the consumer market and especially when it comes to finding those killer applications and solutions,” Magic Leap’s Diez said. “If someone is going to crack the consumer market early, I wouldn’t be surprised it would be Apple.”
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – Associated Press)
