What will it take to get hundreds of millions of “normal” people to don a virtual reality headset while going about their daily lives?
The answer to this problem may be right around the corner. After redefining the music industry with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, Apple is closing in on its initial augmented reality headset. For a business that generated $379 billion in revenue in 2021, it takes an earth-shattering concept to make a difference.
Expanding Their Core Business
Apple keeps its secrets better than many world governments. However, we can infer this based on sources who spoke with The New York Times, as the firm is expected to release its first headset in 2018, into a competitive market:
- According to research firm IDC, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta dominated the virtual reality market last year, selling 10 million Q2 headsets for a 78 percent market share. The “metaverse” technology is developed by Meta with 17,000 employees and a $3 billion budget per quarter, but the Quest is mostly focused on gaming.
- Apple, which generated half of the firms $366 billion in sales in 2021 with 240 million iPhones, isn’t a specialist. By 2030, Citi analysts predict that 1 billion people will use headsets, equating to the number of active iPhone users today. It’s an Apple-worthy market.
Plan of Attack: The company has signed on well-known Hollywood directors, which include Jon Favreau, to produce content for its device. But Apple didn’t become a $2.3 trillion giant just to make it a little easier to watch Marvel movies through some ski goggles.
Apple acquired “pass through” technology from Vrvana in 2017, which allowed headset wearers to view the world around them with digital pictures overlaid on top – providing everything from paying bills to obtaining directions hands-free.
This has analysts hopeful for a commercial breakthrough on the same level with the iPhone. “There is a strategy to eliminating the requirement of your phone, and virtual reality eyewear will become the future computing platform,” Cristiano Amon, chief executive of Qualcomm, told the Financial Times.
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