Has Augmented Reality just killed off the Virtual Reality dream?
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How does the old song by the Gershwins go? “You like VR and I like AR/ VR, AR, VR, AR/ Let’s call the whole thing off.”
VR or AR, I think we can all agree that those options are better than their hybrid sibling, VAR (apologies to my American readers; that’s a football joke). But the debate over whether the future of reality is V for Virtual or A for Augmented seemed to enter a new chapter this week, with Apple announcing a new product, Vision Pro, which offers users — for the princely sum of $3,499 — an iOS infused version of reality.
In layman’s terms, this is Augmented Reality. It doesn’t seek to displace the material world that we all know and love, but instead wants technology to unlock its capabilities. The headset, which might reach consumers at some point next year, looks like a ski mask but includes what Apple are calling “spatial computing”. Users will have the ability to summon a menu of apps, not unlike the dashboard we all know from the iPhone, and navigate this interface with flicks of their eyes. TV and movies, video games and conference calls: Apple Vision Pro is made with all these in mind. As a fairly primitive version of the long expected Ready Player One technology, it’s pretty cool. After all, this is Apple; the headset looks a bit sleeker than its rivals.
But most importantly, the announcement about Apple Vision Pro — arguably the most exciting new product on Apple’s slate since the iPhone — has been seen as a victory for Augmented Reality over Virtual Reality. This is a power shift that has been emphasised by the profound issues facing Meta, Facebook’s parent company and the owner/operator of the Metaverse and Reality Labs. In 2021 and 2022 Reality Labs, the overarching home of metaverse products, recorded a $24bn loss. This is not chump change, and with the advent of hyper-powered AI, and a perceived arms race there in Big Tech, Meta seems to be re-strategising away from VR. Huge layoffs and budget cuts have followed the dismal performance of metaverse products and a struggle to shift hardware.
So, the fact that Apple has now decided to invest in AR feels like a riposte to that highly publicised bomb. They are not the first member of FAANG to flirt with AR — nor even the first to put it into wearable specs — after the ill-fated Google Glass project a decade ago. But technology has moved on a lot since then, and Apple has a reputation for being less speculative than Google, especially in recent years. When you think of Apple failures, you think of the Apple Newton (1993), the Apple Pippin (1996), or the Apple eMate (1997). Essentially nothing produced by Apple since they got the world hooked on smartphones has been a bad bet. Even fairly crappy products like HomePod could only be classified as failures under the sharpest critiques.
And so, it feels like Apple will probably force through the advent of AR with Vision Pro. It is, after all, the logical extension of a product base that has been tied together, as much as anything, by a shared UX. But I have a few thoughts.
Firstly, I am not really convinced that this product is Augmented Reality. It strikes me that it falls into the trap of being ASP (Augmented Smart Phone) rather than AR. Augmented Reality must, definitionally, be something that augments the lived, human experience. Think about how satnavs have improved the way we navigate around cities, or speed down foreign motorways. At its best, this is always the pursuit of technology: to unlock new possibilities for the real experience of living life in our fleshy corporeal forms.
ASP (as I’m calling it) prioritises the augmentation of smart phone experiences, rather than human ones. Being able to watch a movie in a headset, for example, is an improvement on watching it on a 6-inch screen, probably. But does it meaningfully augment reality? Does it improve on the experience of cinema (which is already an augmentation of reality in its own right)? Most of the capabilities that Apple has showcased with Vision Pro involve something like ASP. Improving the way we experience FaceTime and Zoom calls is, in my opinion, not a way of unlocking new pathways for the human experience, but a streamlining of extant technological advances. Almost everything about Apple Vision Pro seems to acknowledge the fact that humanity — Western humanity, at least — has engaged in a co-dependent relationship with the smartphone. But our analysis should not be so shallow as to elide the distinction between “reality” and “technology”.
Secondly, the price point and delivery date that Apple has chosen makes it clear that the announcement of Apple Vision Pro is a statement of intent, but not the household adoption point. At $3,499, the headset costs more than my car (a beautiful, vintage, 2008 VW Polo) which will put it out of reach for the majority of consumers. Sure, there will be plenty of obsessive Apple adopters who shell out for it (after all, Apple expects its most loyal evangelists to spend $1000 a year on a new iPhone) but most consumers will see it as an expensive luxury product. Everyone needs a smartphone; nobody needs an AR headset.
But what they have done, extremely effectively, is put AR firmly into the marketplace of ideas. And, in doing so, they’ve got in first. If Meta will forever be the company most synonymous with VR (possibly to their detriment) then Apple wants to be the company you think of when you think about AR. They made this bet with personal computers (in a very crowded market) and then, hugely effectively, with both MP3 players and smartphones. The Vision Pro is nowhere near the final iteration of the AR headset — in point of fact, it will likely look prohibitively clunky in just a few years’ time. But now everyone knows that Apple sees AR as its future.
While some pundits have seen this as a gamble on the failure of VR (something that is far from established), I’ve long felt that AR has huge advantages over its Vibling. This is what I wrote back in October after Meta’s viral tweet about “legs” coming to the Metaverse:
“Big Tech, which has had a tough few years, might be gambling heavily on the metaverse, but old-school finance is doubling down on commercial real estate. Who will win? Can both win?… If both are to win, it will require the compromise of augmented reality…But what does it mean to augment reality?
Augment is not a word that gets used very often in modern Britain (usually it’s deployed in the context of observing that X politician has been augmenting his/her income by lobbying for Y company). It comes from the Latin — augere — meaning to increase. And that’s what it means: to add to what we have, to make greater. To augment reality is to increase its bounds…
The reality is that the smartphone does augment reality. It allows me to ring my, real, mother more often. It allows me to look up directions to the, real, pub I’m walking to. It allows me to check the, real, train times. It allows me to take photos of my, real, dinner…
This is why I feel an instinctive, almost Luddite, despair at the prospect of the metaverse. It’s not virtual reality, and it’s certainly not augmented reality. It’s replacement reality.”
I don’t think it takes a genius to realise that Virtual Reality, as it was being sold by Meta, wasn’t going to work. It violates two fundamental rules for technological success. Firstly, it runs contrary to the interests of basically every rich and powerful firm in the world, from oil companies and car manufacturers to property developers, airlines and purveyors of luxury handbags. Secondly, it fails, spectacularly, to improve upon reality. The experience of walking into a virtual pub in the Metaverse was always wildly inferior to its IRL counterpart. If you’re going to be a pale facsimile of the real experience, you have to offer something additional. In fact, the Metaverse pub offered far less: a pub that not only looked terrible but that you couldn’t drink in. Who’s buying that?
No, VR wasn’t it. And I’m confident that, for some years to come, AR (in the form that Apple is marketing it) won’t be it either. While the headset is less dramatically ugly than its competitors, it is not something that any sane human would consider un-detrimental to conversation (which makes it Impaired Reality, IR, rather than AR). It also has a 2-hour battery life, meaning you need to be tethered if you want to watch a movie or play a video game for any stretch of time.
SIDENOTE HERE: I’ve written before that I think that the potential consequences for AI, which are profound, have been mitigated by the lack of progress in the field of robotics. Similar, the fields of VR and AR have been massively hamstrung by the failure of technologists to radically improve battery life. This is, I gather, partly a resource scarcity issue, but it does speak to the fact that our technological development of software seems to be racing way ahead of our engineering development of hardware.
But I can also see real use cases for the headset from an entertainment perspective, and, after all, entertainment is the reason why we all do anything. It’s the only real reason to live, isn’t it? I would not be remotely surprised if, in 5 years’ time, every video game system was basically fully integrated with an AR or VR headset. After all, the use of TVs was an important part of gaming back in the olden days, when 2 or 3 or 4 kids would huddle around the same set to play Pro Evo or NightFire. Now kids game more communally than ever, but more remotely. In many ways, the use of the internet for multiplayer gaming is the most ubiquitous adoption of virtual reality in our world to date. And where gaming leads, the rest of the world seems to eventually follow: if you’d been playing Counterstrike a decade ago, you might’ve been better able to predict the modern workplace’s reliance on Microsoft Teams.
But for now, the product is a home entertainment device. For maximum uptake, the point at which we can expect everyone to start augmenting their own personal reality, it will have to leave the cloying confines of the homestead. That’s what happened to the phone. For decades it was tethered to households’ kitchens or living rooms. Then it was available, for select customers, in their Mercedes or BMW. And finally, after decades when everyone knew and used a telephone, it became ubiquitous as a portable, handheld device. Only then, when it could be used 24/7 and wherever its owner saw fit to wander, did it take over our brains. If wearable AR is to be the future, it will need to get a lot nimbler. But Apple has plenty of time, now that its flag is staked firmly at the heart of the discourse.
