Despite decades of development and billions invested, Virtual Reality (VR) has struggled to find a place in our daily lives. But with tech giants betting big on the next generation of headsets like the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest, could this finally be the moment VR breaks through?
Watch my short explainer to find out more:
False starts and flops
Picture the scene: a revolutionary new VR device transports users into a fully immersive, hyper-realistic world where they can see, hear and feel everything with astonishing clarity. The technology is so awe-inspiring that once users experience it, they never want to take their headsets off.
This isn’t a cautionary tale about 21st-century gadgetry but the plot of Stanley G. Weinbaum’s sci-fi novel Pygmalion’s Spectacles. His short story explores the possibilities of virtual reality in impressive detail and warns about the dangers of becoming too immersed. It was published in 1935.*
We’ve spent the best part of a century trying to bring virtual reality to life, and the results have been decidedly mixed…
The first computer-powered VR headset was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling. Computer scientist Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull’s scary-looking contraption earned the nickname “the Sword of Damocles” when it was unveiled in the 1960s.
The 1990s were rife with failures like Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, which gave users headaches and nausea with its low-resolution red-only graphics, and Sega’s VR-1 which, after much hype, never actually made it into production.
However, we may have reached a point where computing power has finally caught up with the concept. Notwithstanding its weight and clunkiness (issues which will surely be resolved before too long), Apple’s Vision Pro can render a version of reality as detailed and immersive as sci-fi writers envisioned almost 100 years ago.
So, what does the future hold?
Blurring reality
Whether you want to explore a medieval castle, stroll on the moon, or visit an imaginary wonderland, modern VR systems can render it in stunning, photo-realistic detail. But just as significant as what they show is what they see through their impressive array of cameras and sensors.
Some of these sensors point inwards, tracking facial expressions and gestures for interacting with the virtual world; but others point outwards, so instead of the headset obstructing your surroundings, it can represent them in real time. Then, with the twist of a dial, you can adjust the blend of reality to virtuality, creating something much more flexible: mixed reality, where computer-generated elements appear alongside what’s really there.
Mixed reality isn’t the only way to merge the real and the virtual. Another is augmented reality, where digital content is layered over a clear lens.
It’s an important distinction. The ability to blend the virtual with the real could be the key to VR evolving beyond a novelty. And the two technology giants leading the way in trying to make this happen are each backing a different approach.
Has Apple’s Vision Pro failed already?
When it first went on sale earlier this year, the Vision Pro was hailed as “Apple’s moonshot” and “a ‘mindblowing’ new device that could change the way we live and work.”
A Vanity Fair interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook was particularly hyperbolic. Here’s how it recounted the moment Cook first tried out a prototype:
He knows that this is the future of computing and entertainment and apps and memories, and that this crude apparatus wrapped around his head will change everything.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman said it was the most impressive new technology since the iPhone. Not to be outdone, Oscar-winning film director James Cameron recalled his first time putting on the headset: “I would say my experience was religious.”
Even this reliably slick promotional video doesn’t do it justice. The graphics are incredible and the experience is breathtaking. Impressive? Absolutely. Practical? Well, I’m not sure I’d be casually packing a suitcase or making breakfast while wearing a 650g headset that cost £3,500.
Maybe this partly explains why the narrative around the Apple Vision Pro has changed so quickly. In a few months, we’ve gone from “this changes everything” to “is this thing actually a bit of a flop?” There have even been (unconfirmed) reports that Tim Cook and co. are going back to the drawing board and rethinking their entire approach to VR.
After the buzz of the initial reviews, YouTube is now full of videos from tech influencers offering a more lukewarm long-term verdict: most agree that it’s an expensive novelty that has yet to carve out a significant practical purpose. Given the limited number of apps currently available and the steep price tag, it certainly feels like more of a niche prototype for developers than a must-have product for the masses.
With this backdrop, Microsoft announced last week that it was scaling back its VR ambitions. Production on its HoloLens 2 has ceased, and it has no plans to develop another headset.
Meta’s big bet
Meta’s Quest 3 has sold significantly more units, offering similar functionality to the Vision Pro at a fraction of the price. The trade-off, however, is that the graphics are nowhere near as high-resolution.
But as popular as the Quest has become among gamers, Mark Zuckerberg believes the big VR breakthrough will come from another ace he has up his sleeve.
Remember the distinction between mixed and augmented reality? Meta is betting on the future being augmented. Last month, Zuckerberg excitedly unveiled his answer: the Meta Orion.
Looking like a pair of novelty, thick-framed sunglasses, Meta hopes these glasses (rather than bulky headsets) hold the key to VR going mainstream:
That’s the north star our industry has been building towards: a product combining the convenience and immediacy of wearables with a large display, high-bandwidth input and contextualized AI in a form that people feel comfortable wearing in their daily lives.
The Orion is only a prototype for now, with a full launch coming at some point in the “next few years”. When people can finally buy it, Zuckerberg believes it will become “the holy grail device that will eventually replace smartphones.”
It begs the question… would that be a good thing?
The dark side of VR
We may have come a long way from the Sword of Damocles and the Virtual Boy’s terrible graphics, but some of the old issues with VR persist. Even today’s best VR devices make people feel nauseous.
What’s more, there’s reason to fear that even if technological advances overcome these problems, VR might still be bad for us in other ways.
Social media promised to connect and unite people. But the reality has turned out to be quite different, with platforms rife with hate speech sowing the seeds of unrest.
A future where our reality is routinely “augmented” could have a similar divisive effect. Academics at Stanford University looked at headsets like Meta’s Quest. While mixed reality seems to represent the best of both worlds – immersing users in virtual reality while keeping them in the “real” world – the truth is less straightforward. Researchers found that the “reality” they experienced was distorted: it altered their perception of their surroundings and diminished their ability to connect with people in the same physical space.
Some of these issues will have technological solutions, but there are psychological implications too. For instance, what happens when you take the headset off? Many users have reported a concerning phenomenon that should give us all pause for thought. For a short while afterwards, they experience a sense of disconnection and find that people around them feel less… well… real.
In trying to bring people closer together, virtual reality can make people who are already close feel more distant.
Do we need a virtual future?
Meta has ploughed around $50 billion into the Metaverse in the hope that this will become the future of the internet and a place we choose to spend much of our time. Of course, with almost half of the planet’s population signed up to a Facebook account, Zuckerberg has a vested interest in creating something new to monetise.
The Apple Vision Pro may not have changed the world yet, but it has proved that we are finally close to overcoming some of the practical hurdles that have held VR back. Perhaps that will be enough to propel us into a VR-powered future, even if a compelling need for it hasn’t yet emerged.
The tech journalist Nick Bilton, who wrote the Vanity Fair piece I mentioned earlier, worries that this technology is too good. Once we’ve all tasted this brave new world of VR, he fears that — like in Pygmalion’s Spectacles — we may never again want to go without it:
The question is, is the place we’re about to go, into the era of spatial computing, going to make our lives better, or will it become the next technology that becomes a necessity, where we can’t live in a world that’s not augmented?
Alternatively, we may conclude that people's reactions to previous iterations of this technology were justified. Perhaps, after a brief period of feeling a bit nauseous, we’ll tuck virtual reality back in the box and decide that we actually preferred the original version all along.
Recommended links and further reading:
Where will virtual reality take us? (New Yorker – subscription required)
Editing memories, spying on our bodies, normalising weird goggles: Apple’s new Vision Pro has big ambitions (The Conversation)
Billions have been sunk into virtual reality. To make it worth it, the industry needs to grow beyond its walled gardens (The Conversation)
Apple Vision Pro’s moonshot strategy (Forbes)
Why Tim Cook is going all in on the Apple Vision Pro (Vanity Fair)
History of virtual reality (Virtual Reality Society)
In the news
Topical updates on subjects covered in previous iluli videos:
Nobel Prizes 2024:
Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this week for his work solving the protein folding problem with AlphaFold. We explored Hassabis’s incredible achievement in the last iluli newsletter.
The Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton – often called “the godfather of AI” – in recognition of his work developing neural networks and laying the foundations for modern AI. Hinton acknowledged his prize with a warning: “I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.”
AI hallucinations:
On the subject of the dangers posed by AI, here’s yet another example of why we shouldn’t put too much stock in anything written by an AI chatbot: Microsoft Bing Copilot defames a reporter by accusing him of the crimes he covered.
* Arguably, Aldous Huxley got there first. In his 1932 dystopian classic Brave New World, people go to an immersive version of the movies called the "Feelies" where they can see, hear, touch, and even smell everything that happens. It’s yet another example of science and technology following in the footsteps of fiction https://youtu.be/J2DqctAG0NY?feature=shared
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