Rumour has it that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has set an official reveal date for its much-anticipated mixed-reality headset of June 5, coinciding with the world’s largest tech company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.
In typical Apple fashion, few details about the headset have been leaked to the public, with even its name a matter of speculation.
We don’t yet know when the headset will unleashed on the public, with sources noting that there could be production delays, nor do we have a clue what it will look like.
Journalist and Apple insider Mark Gurman reckons there are a few hits to the headset’s design in the latest WWDC promotional material, which displays a rather lush rainbow of metallic colours spreading outwards in a semicircle space that could pass for an AR/VR form factor.
“WWDC23 is going to be our biggest and most exciting yet, and we can’t wait to see many of you online and in person at this very special event!” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of developer relations. Note the distinct lack of reference to the headset.
We don’t know what it will be called, though the tech titan did recently file trade marks for ‘REALITY ONE’, ‘REALITY PRO’, AND ‘REALITY PROCESSOR’. Catchy!
How many cameras will it have? What is the screen resolution? Can it cook you breakfast? Make you feel love again? These details have all been held extremely close to Tim Cook’s normcore shirt front.
What the hell do we know then?
We know that it will be expensive. Exactly how expensive is unclear, but this is Apple; what more proof do you need?
A US$3,000 price tag has been thrown around the interweb, which would put it at 10 times the price of Meta’s Oculus VR headset and over five times the price of Sony’s already pretty expensive PlayStation VR2 headset.
Sure, Apple has kept all of these specificities a secret, but the group has been more candid about its grander vision of where it sees the future of augmented reality going.
While Mark Zuckerberg has thrown the full weight of his Meta empire behind the fully immersive world of the metaverse, Apple believes in the concept of a mixed reality, where digital objects are overlaid on the physical space, collaborating with the real world rather than replacing it.
Tim Cook’s interview with GQ today goes into detail.
“The idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” said Cook. “We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it.
“And so it’s the idea that there is this environment that may be even better than just the real world—to overlay the virtual world on top of it might be an even better world.”
For Apple, the future resembles Minority Report more than Ready Player One – Credit: 20th Century Fox
Will Cook’s AR gambit pay off, or become one of Apple’s rare tech blunders? Here’s hoping we know more after June 5 rolls around
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