Unity, makers of the popular game engine, announced earlier this week it’s getting ready to levy some pretty significant fees on developers, causing many to rethink whether it makes more sense to actually go with the main competition, Unreal Engine from Epic Games. It seems Epic isn’t wasting any time to help transition those creating projects for Apple Vision Pro.
According to Victor Lerp, Unreal Engine XR Product Specialist at Epic Games, the company is now “exploring native Unreal Engine support for Apple Vision Pro,” the upcoming mixed reality headset due to launch in early 2024.
Lerp says it’s still early days though, noting that it’s “too early for us to share details on the extent of support or timelines.”
Lerp posted the statement on Unreal Engine’s XR development forum. You can read it in full below, courtesy of Alex Coulombe, CEO of the XR creative studio Agile Lens:
During Vision Pro’s unveiling at WWDC in June, Apple prominently showcased native Unity support in its upcoming XR operating system, visionOS. Unity began offering beta access to its visionOS-supported engine shortly afterwards, making it feel like something of a ‘bait and switch’ for developers already creating new games, or porting existing titles to Vision Pro.
As explained by Axios, Unity’s new plan will require users of its free tier of development services to pay the company $0.20 per installation once their game hits thresholds of both 200,000 downloads and earns $200,000 in revenue. Subscribers to Unity Pro, which costs $2,000 a year, have a different fee structure that scales downwards in proportion to the number of installs. What constitutes an ‘install’ is still fairly nebulous at this point despite follow-up clarifications from Unity. Whatever the case, the change is set to go into effect starting on January 1st, 2024.
In the meantime, the proposed Unity price increase has caused many small to medium-size teams to reflect on whether to make the switch to the admittedly more complicated Unreal Engine, or pursue other game engines entirely. A majority of XR game studios fit into that category, which (among many other scenarios) could hobble teams as they look to replicate free-to-play success stories like Gorilla Tag, which generated over $26 million in revenue when it hit the Quest Store late last year.
Apple’s “Wonderlust” product launch event featured the official unveiling of iPhone 15 and both Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. While XR wasn’t a major focus of the event, Apple confirmed its upcoming mixed reality standalone Vision Pro isn’t seeing any delays to push it off its early 2024 release.
First unveiled at WWDC in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook said last night during the product event that Vision Pro is still “on track for release in early 2024.”
Vision Pro, which comes along with the very ‘pro’ price tag of $3,500, has reportedly been the subject of multiple delays in the past. The MR headset was widely thought to arrive sometime in 2022, although several successive reports maintained it was delayed multiple times since then.
With an “early 2024” launch in site, Apple seems to be making some of the right moves in the background, as the company has already opened up applications for developer units which are undoubtedly already in the hands of studios.
Meanwhile, the Cupertino tech giant also announced it’s prepping iPhone 15 Pro to take stereoscopic video which can be viewed on Vision Pro. It’s an interesting choice, as features on company’s most premium ‘Pro’ phone offerings tend to trickle down in successive generations. Here, the phone’s ultrawide and main cameras work together to create what Apple calls a “three-dimensional video.”
Apple Vision Pro is coming next year, not only making for the Fruit Company’s much awaited first XR headset, but also spurring a resurgence in public interest (and likely investment) in the XR space. At $3,500, Vision Pro is undoubtedly an expensive steppingstone to the company’s future augmented reality ambitions, but even if it’s ostensibly ignoring virtual reality in the meantime, it probably won’t forever.
Apple has a tendency to undervalue gaming initially, though perhaps reluctantly, eventually acknowledges its importance. Gaming in XR is considerably enhanced by fully immersive experiences and motion controllers, and Apple will probably start feeling the pressure of that demand from gamers and developers alike when it kicks off a consumer headset sometime down the road, causing them to relent (if only just).
What is Vision Pro?
Like many, Apple is investing in AR today because the headsets and glasses of tomorrow have a good chance of supplanting smartphones and becoming the dominant mobile computing platform of the future. Long considered the holy grail of immersive computing, all-day AR headsets represent a way of interacting with new layers of information in daily life which would span everything from turn-by-turn directions to gaming applications—like Google Maps directions floating on the street in front of your car or a city-wide version of Pokémon Go.
Granted, Vision Pro isn’t yet the sort of device you’ll take out to the park to catch a random Zubat or Rattata—it’s very much an indoor device that Apple envisions you’ll use to sit down and watch a virtual TV screen or stand up in place to have an immersive chat with a work colleague. But as an opening gambit, Apple’s initial pitch of Vision Pro has been fairly telling of its strategy for XR.
In the ‘one more thing’ bit of the WWDC keynote, Apple lauded Vision Pro’s AR capabilities thanks to its color passthrough cameras, impressively responsive UI, and, from our hands-on with the headset, rock-solid hand-tracking. The company focused almost entirely on the work and lifestyle benefits of AR, and much less on the comparatively more closed-off fully immersed capabilities of virtual reality.
Image courtesy Apple
Considering just how much time and effort Apple has spent talking about AR, you may be surprised to find out Vision Pro can actually play VR games. After all, like Meta Quest Pro or the upcoming Quest 3, it’s basically a VR headset with passthrough cameras—what we’d call a mixed reality headset. In fact, the headset is already confirmed to support one of VR’s most prominent social VR games.
Instead, Vision Pro is focusing on eye-tracking and hand-tracking as primary input methods, with support for traditional peripherals like keyboards and mice and gamepads filling in the gaps for work and traditional flatscreen gaming. This means many VR developers looking to target Vision Pro will need to pare down input schemes to refocus on hand-tracking, or create games from the ground-up that don’t rely on the standard triggers, grip buttons, sticks, and half-dozen buttons.
Still, many VR games simply won’t translate without controllers, which above all provide important haptic feedback and a bevy of sticks and buttons for more complex inputs. Not only that, Vision Pro’s room-scale VR gaming chops are hobbled by a guardian limit of 10 feet by 10 feet (3m × 3m)—if the player moves any further, the VR experience will fade away, returning to the headset’s default AR view. There’s no such limit for AR apps, putting VR more or less into a virtual corner.
Denny Unger, CEO of pioneering VR studio Cloudhead Games, nails it on the head in a recent guest article, saying that Vision Pro “appears to be a VR headset pretending not to be a VR headset.”
Apple’s Chronically Late Adoption
Without speculating too far about into its XR ambitions, it appears Apple is turning somewhat of a new leaf with Vision Pro. The company is reportedly departing from tradition by creating a dedicated Vision Products Group (VPG), which is tasked with spearheading XR product development. Apple typically distributes its product development efforts across more general departments, such as hardware, software, design, services, etc, instead of sectionalizing hardware development into individual product teams, like Mac, Watch, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Not only that, but the company is also publicly accepting applications for development kits of the headset and hosting a handful of ‘developer labs’ around the world so that developer can get their hands and heads into the device ahead of time. It’s a decidedly different tactic than what we usually see from Apple.
The company’s wider strategy still seems to be in play however. Apple traditionally enters markets where it believes it can make a significant impact and actually own something, making it oftentimes not the first, but in many cases, the most important Big Tech company to validate an emerging market. The paradox here is Apple is actually early to AR, but late to VR. Deemphasizing the now fairly mature VR in favor of potentially creating a stronger foundation for its future AR devices makes a certain amount of sense coming from Apple.
Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly preparing a more consumer-focused follow-up to Vision Pro that will hopefully cost less than a high mileage, but still serviceable 2008 Honda Civic. Whenever Apple pitches that cheaper Vision headset to everyday people, they’ll likely need more entertainment-focused experiences, including fully immersive VR experiences with VR controllers.
Image courtesy Apple
And while Apple still isn’t positioning Vision Pro as a fully-fledged VR headset, that doesn’t mean it won’t relent in the future like it does with many crowd-pleasing features on iOS that in many cases don’t appear until years after they’ve been available on Android. In classic Apple style, it could offhandedly announce a pair of slick and ergonomic VR controllers as a pricey accessory during any of its annual product updates, and of course pretend it’s some great home-grown achievement.
Another big reason Apple may eventually decide to un-hobble a future Vision headset is its strong hold on app revenue. Apple’s XR headsets are on the same path as its iOS devices, which means the company captures a slice of revenue from every app you buy on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Unlike Mac, which by all accounts is a second-class citizen for gaming, iOS devices seem to be getting their act together. Kind of.
In some ways the company has only just fully embraced gaming on iOS with the launch of Apple Arcade in 2019, which serves up a curated collection of high-quality games on iOS and Apple TV without any ads or in-app purchases. Still, it’s pretty clear Apple doesn’t have big gaming ambitions—it doesn’t hoover up game publishers or studios like Meta or Microsoft tend to—so if it does unharness Vision’s VR capabilities, it may do so without the same raison virtuelle d’être as Meta or ByteDance (the latter being the TikTok parent company that also owns the Pico XR platform).
Provided Apple can secure the same hefty market share with future Vision headsets as it does with iPhone today though, which is around 30%, it may be more inclined to stay competitive with more VR-forward companies. But it isn’t emphasizing VR now, or even really competing against anyone, which may be a safer bet as it ventures into some truly unknown territory. Once the ball gets rolling though, the Cupertino tech giant will have less and less excuse to not toss out a pair of VR controllers and remove some of the arbitrary restrictions it’s imposed.
When that might happen, we don’t know, but it does sound awfully Apple-like to sit on much wanted features and eventually release them with a flick of the wrist.
Apple has now opened applications for Vision Pro developer kits, which it’s sending out to app developers in effort to kickstart its first XR-specific App Store.
Vision Pro is set to launch sometime in early 2024, coming part and parcel with a load of first-party apps originally developed for iPad. This includes basic things like Safari, Photos, Music, Messages, and even an avatar support for Facetime.
Apple has been fairly mum on its list of third-party apps, listing only a few during its WWDC unveiling in June, including Word, Excel, Teams, Disney+, Zoom, WebEX, and Rec Room, its only VR game to be featured during the keynote.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Apple is couching the headset as a general computing device capable of doing most of what a laptop can do, however the $3,500 prosumer headset will need a lot more than a smattering of compatible 2D apps if it wants its first XR device to set the stage for generations of cheaper follow-ups, which will likely be aimed more squarely at regular consumers.
And while the headset emulator and software development tools have been out for a few weeks now, the Cupertino tech giant says developers looking to start creating apps with actual Vision Pro hardware can apply now.
Apple says the dev kit also includes help setting up the device and onboarding, check-ins with Apple experts for UI design and development guidance, and two additional code-level support requests so Apple can help troubleshoot issues.
Like with many hardware developer kits, there are some fairly stringent (if not entirely standard) caveats. The Vision Pro dev kit needs to be returned upon request, and also has to be stored in a private, secure workspace that unauthorized persons don’t have access to view, handle, or use. The dev kit also needs to be passcode protected and never left unattended, or removed from its home address without Apple’s prior written consent.
Again, that’s all pretty standard stuff so developers don’t lose, leak, or strip the headset down to its component parts for the glee of XR publications everywhere. We’ll likely be waiting for that last bit when it finally launches sometime in early 2024.
According to a Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman, Apple is changing things up with the creation of a new Vision Products Group (VPG), which is tasked with developing the company’s recently unveiled mixed reality headset, Vision Pro.
The report maintains that with the creation of VPG, Apple is departing from its “functional” management structure, which was introduced by Steve Jobs in the early ’90s.
Effectively, Jobs distributed the company’s product development efforts across more general departments, such as hardware, software, design, services, etc, instead of sectionalizing hardware development into individual product teams, like Mac, Watch, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
The so-called Vision Products Group is reportedly independent from Apple’s main software and hardware engineering and other departments, including its own internal versions of those teams which report to unit head Mike Rockwell.
Gurman maintains that VPG still collaborates with other parts of Apple though, including design and operations teams overseen by COO Jeff Williams, Johny Srouji’s chip unit known for the company’s M2 and R1 processors, and iOS/macOS frameworks headed Craig Federighi’s software engineering group.
Some reportedly believed the dedicated group would be disbanded, making it follow the company’s functional management structure. It has however both persisted beyond the Vision Pro’s June unveiling at WWDC and was branded to reflect that the group is tasked with creation of Vision Products, implying the team will be sticking around for multiple product cycles yet to come.
If a recent Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman holds true, not only is Apple not planning to release a motion controller for Vision Pro in the future, but it may not even support third-party VR controllers at all.
When the Cupertino tech giant unveiled Vision Pro last month, it didn’t emphasize the headset’s ability to potentially support VR games, which have typically been designed around motion controllers like Meta Touch or Valve’s Index controller for SteamVR headsets.
Among Vision Pro’s lineup of content, which features a standard suite of Apple ecosystem and standard content viewing apps, the studio only off showed a single VR app, Rec Room, the prolific social VR app that supports most major VR headsets (excluding PSVR 2 for now) in addition to consoles, desktop, and both iOS and Android mobile devices.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Mark Gurman, one of the leading journalists reporting on unreleased Apple tech, maintains that Apple is neither actively planning a dedicated controller, nor planning support for third-party VR accessories.
When the $3,500 headset launches in early 2024, this would leave Vision Pro users relying on the headset’s built-in hand and eye-tracking, which admittedly worked very well in our hands-on. It’s also using Siri-driven voice input, Bluetooth and Mac keyboard support, and PlayStation 5 and Xbox controllers for traditional flatscreen games.
For VR gaming though, hand and eye-tracking lack the haptic feedback required for many game genres, meaning what VR games do come to Vision Pro will likely require overhauls to make sure hand-tracking is fully baked in.
Provided Apple sticks with its purported internal plan to not support VR controllers, that would essentially shunt development away from VR gaming and towards the headset’s AR abilities. For Apple, that’s where the ‘real’ money presumably lies.
Denny Unger, founder and lead of pioneering VR studio Cloudhead Games, explains the move as a way to provide a strong development foundation now for Apple’s AR glasses of the future, which will be both more affordable and more capable of replacing a standard smartphone than the admittedly bulky MR headsets of today.
For more from Unger, who heads one of the most successful VR studios, check out his Road to VR guest article to learn more about Vision Pro and why Apple may be launching an AR headset in VR clothing.
Apple has allegedly slashed production targets for Vision Pro due to manufacturing issues related to the mixed reality headset’s complex design, a Financial Timesreport maintains.
Unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in early June, the $3,500 Vision Pro represents the first big step into XR for the company. Launching sometime next year, Vision Pro is a high-end headset that combines virtual reality displays with color passthrough cameras, allowing it to do both VR and AR tasks.
Apple’s China-based contract manufacturer Luxshare, allegedly the sole assembler of the device, is now preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units of Vision Pro in 2024, according to the report, which cites “multiple people with direct knowledge of the manufacturing process,” including sources close to Apple and Luxshare.
Supply chain rumors also allege that two of Apple’s China-based component suppliers only have enough parts to produce around 130,000 to 150,000 Vision Pro units in the first year. It was previously thought Apple was operating with an internal 12-month sales target of one million units.
Manufacturing complications apparently hinge on Vision Pro’s micro-OLED displays and outward-facing, curved lenticular display, the latter of which allows a sort of digital passthrough view of the user’s eyes.
In our hands-on, we noted Vision Pro packed top of its class lenses and displays, something Apple says is “more than a 4K TV for each eye.”
The company is reportedly unhappy with supplier productivity. It’s said the most expensive component is its internal displays, and getting enough of those micro-OLEDs to be defect-free has purportedly been a significant hurdle. Additionally, Financial Times reports the micro-OLED displays used in the headsets demoed to press at its June launch were supplied by Sony and the chipmaker TSMC.
Meanwhile, Apple is said to be working with Samsung and LG on a second-gen version of the headset, which will be reportedly cheaper than the first, which is launching sometime in 2024 for $3,500.
Apple Vision Pro is about to set a lot of expectations in the industry of what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ about mixed reality, something the fruit company prefers to call spatial computing. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey weighed in on his thoughts, and coming from one of the main figures who kicked off the VR revolution of today, it means something.
Speaking to Peter Diamandis in a nearly two hour-long podcast, Luckey delved into many areas of his work over the years, touching on the role at his defense company Anduril, his role in kickstarting the modern era of VR, and basically everything under the Sun that the tech entrepreneur is doing, or thinks about when it comes to augmented and virtual reality.
Undoubtedly the hottest of hot button issues is whether Apple is doing mixed reality ‘right’ as a newcomer to the space. Luckey is mostly positive about Vision Pro, saying it’s patently Apple.
“I think there were things that I would do differently if I were Apple,” Luckey tells Diamandis. “They did basically everything right—they didn’t do anything terrible. I mean, I think Apple is going after the exact right segment of the market that Apple should be going after.”
Luckey maintains that if Apple went after the low end of the market, it would be “a mistake,” saying the Cupertino tech giant is taking “the exact approach that I had always wanted Apple to take, and really the approach that Oculus had been taking in the early years.”
Apple is admittedly going at XR with little regard for affordability, but that’s not the sticking point you might think it would be. To him, the $3,500 headset packs the best components for the premium segment, including “the highest possible resolution, the highest quality possible displays, the best possible ergonomics.”
In fact, Apple’s first-gen device shouldn’t be about affordability at this point, Luckey says. It’s about “inspiring lust in a much larger group of people, who, as I dreamed all those years ago, see VR as something they desperately want before it becomes something they can afford.”
Image courtesy Apple
In the world of component configurations, there’s very little that catches Luckey off guard, although Vision Pro’s tethered battery ‘puck’ was choice that surprised the Oculus founder a little bit. When it comes to offloading weight from the user’s head, Luckey says shipping a battery puck was the “right way to do things.”
“I was a big advocate of [external pucks] in Oculus, but unfortunately it was a battle that I lost in my waning years, and [Oculus] went all in on putting all batteries, all the processing in actual headset itself. And not just in the headset, but in the front of the headset itself, which hugely increases the weight of the front of the device, the asymmetric torque load… it’s not a good decision.”
One direction Apple has going that Luckey isn’t a fan of: controllers, or rather, the lack thereof. Vision Pro is set to ship without any sort of VR motion controller, which means developers will need to target hand and eye-tracking as the primary input methods.
“It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of VR input, and I think that’s probably one of the things I would have done differently than Apple. On the other hand, they have a plan for VR input that goes beyond just the finger [click] inputs. They’re taking a focused marketing approach, but I think they have a broader vision for the future than everything just being eyes and fingers.”
Luckey supports the company’s decision to split the headset into a puck and head-worn device not only for Vision Pro in the near term, but also for future iterations of the device, which will likely need more batteries, processing, and antennas. Setting those expectations now of a split configuration could help Apple move lighter and thinner on head-worn components, and never even deal with the problems of balancing the girth and weight seen in the all-in-one, standalone headsets of today.
In the end, whether the average person will wear such things in the future will ultimately come down to clever marketing, Luckey maintains, as it’s entirely possible to slim down to thinner form factors, but devices may not be nearly as functional at sizes smaller than “chunky sunglasses”. To Luckey, companies like Apple have their work cut out for them when it comes to normalizing these AR/VR headsets of the near future, and Apple will most definitely be seeding their devices on the heads of “the right celebrities, the right influencers” in the meantime.
You can check out the full 15-minute clip where Luckey talks about his thoughts on Apple Vision Pro below:
Ahead of the Apple Vision Pro’s release in ‘early 2024’, the company says it will open several centers in a handful of locations around the world, giving some developers a chance to test the headset before it’s released to the public.
It’s clear that developers will need time to start building Apple Vision Pro apps ahead of its launch, and it’s also clear that Apple doesn’t have heaps of headsets on hand for developers to start working with right away. In an effort to give developers the earliest possible chance to test their immersive apps, the company says it plans to open ‘Apple Vision Pro Developer Labs’ in a handful of locations around the world.
Starting this Summer, the Apple Vision Pro Developer Labs will open in London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Cupertino.
Apple also says developers will be able to submit a request to have their apps tested on Vision Pro, with testing and feedback being done remotely by Apple.
Image courtesy Apple
Of course, developers still need new tools to build for the headset in the first place. Apple says devs can expect a visionOS SDK and updated versions of Reality Composer and Xcode by the end of June so support development on the headset. That will be accompanied by new Human Interface Guidelines to help developers follow best practices for spatial apps on Vision Pro.
Additionally, Apple says it will make available a Vision Pro Simulator, an emulator that allows developers to see how their apps would look through the headset.
Developers can find more info when it’s ready at Apple’s developer website. Closer to launch Apple says Vision Pro will be available for the public to test in stores.
Today at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) the Cupertino tech giant unveiled its long-awaited XR headset, dubbed Vision Pro.
Similar to Meta’s Quest Pro and newly unveiled Quest 3 headset, Apple’s first mixed reality headset is capable of both virtual reality and augmented reality thanks to its color passthrough cameras, however it appears the company is focusing much more on AR tasks.
Called a “spatial computer” by Apple, the device is in large part targeting general computing tasks such as content consumption, video chatting, and productivity apps–the sort you might find on the company’s iPads and Macs, albeit available through its own device-specific App Store.
Apple Vision Pro’s input is based on optical hand tracking, eye-tracking, and voice input, and doesn’t feature controllers like headsets decidedly more dedicated to gaming.
Image courtesy Apple
Here’s a brief breakdown of the spec shared with us today: Apple’s M2 chipset runs the standalone headset, while its new R1 chip processes input from 12 cameras, five sensors, and six microphones. R1 is said to stream new images to the displays “within 12 milliseconds — 8x faster than the blink of an eye,” the company says. That cable and pack you see in the image above is actually a battery, which the company says provides two hours of use.
Image courtesy Apple, via ArsTechnica
Vision Pro features custom micro‑OLED display system which the company says packs in 23 million pixels, or more than a 4K TV. We’re still learning about more specific hardware specs, such as field-of-view (FOV) and more concrete numbers for its displays.
The headset also features an exterior display to show a user’s eyes. A system, called EyeSight, can either obscure the digital version of your eyes to other people in the room, or show them to indicate you’re ready to talk face-to-face.
Image courtesy Apple
Vision Pro is coming to the US first in early 2024, priced starting at $3,500, putting it clearly in the “enthusiast” camp. Apple calls it its “most advanced personal electronics device ever.”
We’re at Apple’s campus for WWDC today and are going hands-on with Vision Pro today. Check back soon for our full impressions, and to find out if Apple’s first big entry into XR was worth the wait.
This story is breaking. Check back soon for more info.
Apple’s WWDC keynote is today, and the company is heavily expected to reveal an immersive headset for the first time. Here’s where to see the action live.
Apple’s WWDC keynote will be held at 10AM PT on June 5th (your timezone here). You can catch the official livestream from Apple embedded below:
Follow for Up-to-the-minute Updates
I’ll be on-site at Apple Park for the WWDC keynote, and maybe more than that… if you want the most up-to-the-minute updates for what comes after the keynote, follow along on Twitter: @benz145.
What to Expect
We’re expecting that Apple’s WWDC keynote will first focus first on its existing products, including major updates to its mobile and desktop operating systems, with the potential for a revamped 15-inch MacBook Air.
But of course the thing we’re looking for is the rumored announcement of Apple’s first XR headset, which we expect will come at the end of the keynote—though we’re still 50/50 on whether or not it’ll be preceded by the words “one more thing,” which the company hasn’t dropped since 2020.
Rumors for what an Apple XR headset might actually do or look like have varied substantially over the years, though recent leaks suggest the following:
Resolution: Dual Micro OLED displays at 4K resolution (per eye)
FOV: 120-degrees, similar to Valve Index
Chipset: Two 5nm chips. Includes a main SoC (CPU, GPU, and memory) and a dedicated image signal processor (ISP). Chips communicate via a custom streaming codec to combat latency.
Battery: Waist-mounted battery, connected via MagSafe-like power cable to the headset’s headband. Two-hour max battery life, although hot-swappable for longer sessions.
Passthrough: ISP chip contains custom high-bandwidth memory made by SK Hynix, providing low latency color passthrough
Audio: H2 chip, providing ultra-low latency connection with the second-generation AirPods Pro and future AirPods models. No 3.5mm and possible no support for non-AirPod BT headphones.
Controller: Apple is said to favor hand-tracking and voice recognition to control the headset, but it has tested a “wand” and a “finger thimble” as alternative control input methods.
Prescription Lenses: Magnetically attachable custom prescription lenses for glasses-wearers.
IPD Adjustment: Automatic, motorized adjustment to match the wearer’s interpupillary distance.
Eye Tracking: At least one camera per-eye for things like avatar presence and foveated rendering
Face & Body Tracking: More than a dozen cameras and sensors capture both facial expressions and body movements, including the user’s legs.
Room Tracking: Both short- and long-range LiDAR scanners to map surfaces and distances in three dimensions.
App Compatibility: Said to have the ability to run existing iOS apps in 2D.
It’s very likely that this is only an initial announcement of the company’s headset, with a heavy focus on what developers will be able to do with it (need we remind you, this is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference). We don’t expect it to launch until later this year at the earliest, but when it does it’s not clear if Apple will position the device like a sort of early adopter development kit, or market it to consumers outright. The latter seems less likely considering the rumored price between $1,500–$3,000.
While Apple pretty much never launches any product as a ‘dev kit’, an XR headset might be such a shift for the company and its army of iOS developers that they will need that interim step to hone the experience ahead of a full blown push to consumers. We’ll find out soon enough.
Independent tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple’s highly anticipated mixed reality headset is very likely set for its reported Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) unveiling in June. Another generation is also in the pipeline, Kuo maintains, which he suggests may come at some point in 2025.
Kuo, a long-time Apple analyst and respected figure in supply chain leaks, says in a Medium post it’s “highly likely” we’ll see an unveiling at WWDC. This comes despite earlier reports of supply chain delays that would ultimately see the headset launch later this year. He says Apple is “well prepared” for the announcement of the headset, which is rumored to cost $3,000.
Should Apple’s MR headset announcement surpass expectations, Kuo suggests the device will pave the way for a transformative investment trend in the industry, as other makers follow suit to jump on the trend.
A positive announcement at WWDC could be a promising development for the share prices of companies involved in the headset’s production, Kuo maintains. Apart from Luxshare-ICT, which the analyst says has an exclusive assembly agreement for the headset, companies such as Sony (micro-OLED display), TSMC (dual processors), Everwin Precision (primary casing supplier), Cowell (12 camera modules), and Goertek (external power supply) may greatly benefit from their involvements as exclusive component suppliers.
Furthermore, Kuo claims a second-generation Apple headset is expected to go into mass production in 2025, which will be offered in both a high and low-end version.
“Shipments of the 2nd generation in 2025 are expected to be around ten times those of the 1st generation in 2023,” Kuo says in a separate Medium post.
Outside of the avalanche of leaks, and even a brief tweet by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey stating Apple’s headset was “so good”, the whole industry is waiting for the June 5th keynote at the company’s annual developer conference. One thing is for sure: whether a hit or miss, however you slice it Apple’s headset will be pivotal for the XR industry as a whole.
