An attendee uses a manual tracking feature with Facebook’s Oculus Quest VR headphones during the Oculus Connect 6 conference in San Jose, California, on September 26, 2019.
Photographer: Michael Short / Bloomberg
Photographer: Michael Short / Bloomberg
The first headset crack from Apple Inc. it is designed to be an expensive and niche precursor to a more ambitious augmented reality product that will take longer to develop, according to people who are aware of it.
The initial device has faced several obstacles to development and the company has conservative sales expectations, illustrating how challenging it will be to bring this fledgling consumer technology to the masses.
As a mostly virtual reality device, it will showcase a three-dimensional digital environment that spans everything to play, watch videos and communicate. RA functionality, the ability to overlay images and information on a real world view, will be more limited. Apple has planned to launch the product as early as 2022, facing Facebook Inc.’s Oculus, Sony Corp.’s PlayStation VR. and HTC Corp. headphones. They asked not to be identified by discussing private plans.
The typical Apple game book is to take emerging technology for consumers, such as music players, smartphones, tablets and smart watches, and make it reliable and easy to use for everyone. This time, though, Apple doesn’t want to create a hit similar to the iPhone for its first headphones. Instead, the company is building a high-end niche product that will prepare developers and outside consumers for its eventual more traditional RA glasses.
Plans suggest that Apple’s first headphones will be much more expensive than rivals, which cost between $ 300 and $ 900. Some Apple experts believe the company can only sell one headset a day per retail store. Apple has about 500 stores, so in that scenario, annual sales would be just over 180,000 units, excluding other sales channels. This would put it on par with other Apple products, such as the $ 5,999 Mac Pro desktop computer. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Attendees visit Sony PlayStation’s virtual reality gaming booth at the Gamescom computer game industry event in Cologne, Germany, on August 20, 2019.
Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg
Apple aims to include some of its most advanced and powerful chips in headphones, along with screens with a much higher resolution than those of existing VR products. Some of the chips tested on the device outperform Apple’s Mac M1 processors. The company has also designed the headphones with a fan, which the company usually tries to avoid in mobile products, according to people.
The headphones, codenamed N301, are in a late prototype phase, but are not yet complete, so the company’s plans could be changed or completely undone before launch. The AR glasses, codenamed N421, are in an early stage known as “architecture,” meaning Apple is still working on underlying technologies. According to people, this product is several years away, although Apple had already signed up earlier since 2023 to make it known.
Powerful processors and the inclusion of a fan initially caused a device to be too large and heavy with some concern for neck tension in the early tests. Apple has removed the space that VR devices usually reserve for users who need to wear glasses, which brought the headphones closer to the face and helped reduce the size. And to target consumers with poorer vision, he developed a system where custom prescription lenses can be inserted into headphones on virtual reality screens.
This may expose Apple to regulations governing the sale of prescription products. The company usually sells its devices to dozens of countries, many of which have different prescription rules. Apple is also discussing how to implement the requirements at the online point of sale and retail stores.
Apple initially planned to include less powerful processors and download much of the work to a user’s home hub that streamed content wirelessly to the headphones. But that idea was crushed by Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer at the time, Bloomberg News reported last year. The headset is designed to work as a standalone device, meaning it can work with a battery instead of plugging it into a wall or a Mac. This is similar to Facebook’s latest virtual reality product, while Sony’s requires a PlayStation game console.
Read more: Apple’s virtual reality and virtual reality headset plans altered by internal differences
To further reduce the weight of the device, Apple plans to use a fabric exterior. This moves away from the metallic designs Apple uses for most products, though it has used plastic for devices like AirPods, which need to be lightweight, and fabrics for the HomePod speaker to enhance acoustics. .
Prototypes of the headphones, some of which are the size of an Oculus Quest, include external cameras to enable some RA features. The company is experimenting with cameras for manual tracking and is working on a feature where a user can type virtually on the air to enter text. It is unclear whether this feature will be ready for the first version of the device or whether it will ever exit the exploratory stage.
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted development, as Apple’s hardware engineers can only work on certain days from the office. The company has also faced delays in testing and collecting user data. This has slowed down some decisions in the engineering process.
The company also still faces the content and functionality it plans to ship with the device. Virtual reality is still a somewhat budding technology, with content beyond games still relatively limited. Last year, Apple acquired a company called NextVR, which recorded events such as concerts and sports games in virtual reality. There is also talk of bundling an App Store with the device, which works with an operating system called “rOS” within the company.
If Apple goes ahead with virtual reality headphones, it would be a forerunner of a possible pair of RA glasses, a product that the company sees much more common but also harder to launch. Microsoft Corp.’s HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap headphones, which emphasize AR over VR, retail for $ 3,500 and $ 2,295 respectively. HoloLens focuses primarily on work use cases, while Magic Leap didn’t get much of the first publicity reduced work last year.
A visitor tests a Magic Leap One during the Virtuality Paris 2019 program on November 21, 2019 in Paris, France.
Photographer: Chesnot / Getty Images Europe
Apple first added AR to the iPhone in 2017, allowing new games and mobile apps like those to virtually place furniture in the living room before you buy them. Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that both virtual reality and augmented reality have potential, but that RA is the biggest opportunity.
RA glasses must be packaged with small, powerful, and efficient electronic components to overlay notifications, map directions, and other information, while supporting Internet connectivity and a durable battery. This is a big technical challenge. Even Oculus, which launched its first all-in-one VR headphones in 2019, this year it will not include RA features in its first glasses.
Getting to this point requires years of work on goals, hardware and software, component miniaturization, production techniques, and content creation. Critically, getting most people to carry a computer in their face, even a small one, is difficult. This, in part, condemned Google’s first attempts to wear RA consumer glasses several years ago.
By developing less conventional headphones, Apple can invest in the underlying technologies, consumer education, content development and developer relationships to give its eventual RA glasses the best chance of success, when they are ready. .