Apple Vision Pro headset: Meta Can Ride Apple’s Coattails to Victory in Mixed Reality

tech.hindustantimes.com:

It's generally accepted that Mark Zuckerberg, in the two years since he renamed Facebook to Meta Platforms Inc., has done a poor job of selling his metaverse vision to the masses. The words “metaverse,” “virtual reality” and “augmented reality” have all become so tainted, in fact, that the newest arrival in the sector refuses to use any of them. Instead it touts “spacial computing” when describing the Apple Vision Pro headset, which is being released early next month.

Will spacial computing prove more marketable than the metaverse? Maybe. The Vision Pro release will for sure bring a renewed buzz around the mixed-reality concept that only Apple can generate thanks to its impeccable reputation for hardware excellence. Given its $3,500 price tag, however, and a limited production run, the Vision Pro's first iteration won't be an iPhone moment. As I've written before, most people's experience of Apple's most daring new device in more than a decade will be to peer at it in one of the company's stores.

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With that on the horizon, the question reverberating around the corridors at Meta is whether it can use this interest to drive sales of its own headsets. I think it can, and Meta's leadership feels the same way.

“One of the benefits that we'll get as Apple releases their devices,” Vishal Shah, Meta's vice presdient for the Metaverse, said when I met him last week, is that “people will be able to see it, and try it, and use this thing.” He said people will be left thinking: “‘Maybe I can't, and shouldn't, buy a $3,500 device — but I can find something that's more affordable.' If we wanted to build a $3,000-plus device, we could do that. That is not our strategy. Our strategy is to make the device as accessible as possible.” The latest model of Meta's device, the Quest 3, costs $499.

Meta is the market leader in VR and AR though, granted, it's not much of a market. Insider Intelligence estimates 35.6 million people in the US use VR headsets