At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, they announced, as they always do, some of the world’s greatest and newest technologies. Usually, these conferences take people’s breath away, but the announcement by Apple of its latest gadget, an expensive VR headset, there were fewer instances of breath people taken away and a few more scoffs and laughs.
Below was the response when Apple unveiled the Vision Pro VR Headset, as one outlet put it, “pair of goggles the company promises will unlock a new universe of magical new virtual- and augmented-reality apps.”
“Built upon decades of Apple innovation, Vision Pro is years ahead and unlike anything created before — with a revolutionary new input system and thousands of groundbreaking innovations,” Cook said, according to Variety. “It unlocks incredible experiences for our users and exciting new opportunities for our developers.”
The headset is listed at nearly $3,500 to start.
The outlet also noted that “Disney CEO Bob Iger made an appearance during Apple’s Vision Pro launch, saying the “revolutionary” platform will let the company create ‘deeply immersive’ stories in ways that were ‘previously impossible.’ Disney’s sizzle reel for Vision Pro showed various concepts the media company is working on for the device, ‘to bring you real-life magic,’ Iger said. Disney+ will be available on Vision Pro on ‘day one,’ he added.
Apple’s Vision Pro uses eye movements and hand movements for navigation — with no external controllers — and also employs voice input. (Individual app developers, however, cannot access a user’s exact eye location or other personal info.) Vision Pro uses a feature Apple calls EyeSight that shows other people a wearer’s eyes if they’re in augmented-reality mode to help ‘users stay connected with those around them’; the screen turns opaque to the outside world if the wearer is in fully immersive VR mode. The headset also includes Apple’s first 3D camera, for capturing spatial video and photos, and can serve as a ‘personal movie theater’ with a screen “that feels 100 feet wide” with support for Apple TV+, Apple Arcade games (more than 100 titles at launch) and other Apple services.
Vision Pro provides ultra high resolution, with more pixels for each eye than a 4K TV — with 23 million pixels across two displays — and provides a newly designed spatial-audio system, according to Apple. Vision Pro will change ‘the way users interact with their favorite apps, capture and relive memories, enjoy stunning TV shows and movies, and connect with others in FaceTime,’ the company said.”
The goggles weren’t the only update provided at the event, however.
CNN reported, “In recent months, most of Apple’s Big Tech rivals have laid out ambitious plans for how to incorporate generative AI into their products following the viral success of ChatGPT. WWDC would have been a natural opportunity for Apple to do the same.
Instead, Apple spoke about artificial intelligence in a more subtle way. For example, Apple announced an update to autocorrect that uses machine learning and a language model for better accuracy and even ‘sentence-level autocorrections.’ Apple will also expand its predictive text abilities.”
“When it comes to speeding up your typing, predictive text already helps you quickly finish add or change a word,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, said at the event. “And now you’ll get predictions in line as you type.”
The world’s biggest tech company also used the event to announce a new Macbook Air, along with some software enhancements to its operating systems across devices.
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