With the Apple Vision Pro, wearers navigate 3D environments via sophisticated eye-tracking and hand gestures – no hand-held controllers necessary. As such, Apple has figured out how to bring VR and spatial computing to the masses.
Janko Roettgers for Fast Company:
Andrew Eiche, for one, can’t wait for a controller-free future. Eiche is the CEO of Owlchemy Labs, a Google-owned VR studio best known for its Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator games. Owlchemy has been experimenting with hand tracking as an alternative to controllers, and Eiche believes that this approach is the only way to bring VR and spatial computing to the masses.
“To be perfectly blunt,” Eiche says, “it’s the future of the medium.”
Eiche believes that most headset manufacturers will eventually follow Apple’s example and ship their devices without controllers. He likens this transition to a controller-free future to the jump from early smartphones like the BlackBerry, with their integrated keyboards, to the touchscreen-only iPhone. “Controllers are a huge impediment if your goal is to get VR out to the masses,” he argues. “The second you remove controllers, it just removes a barrier.”
Eiche doesn’t discount controllers entirely; he believes that they could become an optional third-party accessory for future headsets. Whether these will include Apple products remains to be seen: The company did announce that Vision Pro owners will be able to use existing console game controllers for traditional gameplay, but reportedly has no intention of adding support for VR game controllers to its headset.
MacDailyNews Take: As the Apple Pencil is to iPad, an accessory for specific use cases, hand-held controllers will be to Apple Vision Pro.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
At $3500 a pop, Apple has definitely not figured out how to bring AR, VR, and spatial computing to the masses. When they manage to bring this price down by two thirds so that “the masses” can actually afford it, there’d be some truth to the headline.
But it’s questionable whether Apple even has that in its plans! According to Tim Cook, Apple’s future lies in AR glasses, not some combined AR/VR headset like the Vision Pro. So in a few years, the masses will be able to get Apple AR glasses for (I’m guessing) the price of an iPhone. But even then one would only be able to say “Apple has figured out how to bring AR to the masses”.
For all their faults real analysts at least still manage to avoid sounding like snotty know-it-alls
A 13 inch MacBook Pro moderately equipped 24GB memory and 512GB SSD is 1900 dollars, if you add 11 camera’s and one Apple R1 processor probably the cost is 2500-2700 dollars? if not more, the price of the Apple Vision Pro is probably priced fairly. It is basically a miniaturize MacBook Pro laptop with 11 additional cameras and another new desktop class R1 SOC. (whose true specs haven’t been shared yet? Also, I don’t think Apple has shared with the public the total memory used?)
I don’t see how the Apple Vision Pro could ever be less than two grand realistically, usually the more you miniaturize something the higher the price.