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Tim Cook with Apple's first computer glasses: they are scheduled to be launched in the US in early 2024
Photo: LOREN ELLIOTT / REUTERS
For 80 minutes, Apple boss Tim Cook and his team took their time on Monday evening for something medium-exciting. For example, at the WWDC developer conference keynote, it was announced that "Death Stranding Director's Cut" would soon be released for Macs – a video game that was already released in this version for the Playstation 2021 in 5 and for Windows in 2022. Apple also emphasized that the in-house Health app will soon be available on the iPad – which makes sense, but was long overdue.
In the second part of its product show, Apple actually had some really big news. As a notorious "one more thing", this time the company unveiled a device that had been rumored for years: its first pair of computer glasses. The market launch in the USA is planned for early 2024.
The so-called Vision Pro is a high-end device for 3500 dollars upwards, with twelve cameras, five sensors and six microphones. If you wear the glasses on your head, you can, among other things, plant huge virtual screens in your field of vision in order to surf the Internet in a live image of your real environment, view photo collections or 3D films or work in this augmented reality. All this is controlled primarily with the eyes, hands and voice, without additional controllers. You can read more about the device that Apple is staging as its "first spatial computer" here.
Is the future here now?
As usual with new Apple products, the announcement caused a stir on social media. First of all, there was enthusiasm from fans of new technologies and Apple fans. The US tech reporter Rich DeMuro, for example, tweeted quite euphorically from the keynote: "At the moment, I can't imagine life without Apple Vision Pro. I'm serious." Then he wrote: "This is real futuristic stuff. Something we thought would exist in the future. Now it's finally here.«
SPIEGEL reporter Matthias Kremp, who watched the Apple show live in Cupertino, was also impressed by the device's technology. "I've seen the future," he captioned the summary of his first impressions of an exclusive short test of the glasses. You can find his article from the site here .
The opposite pole to such comments are users who have not yet been able to gain much from Apple's novelty. People who find the presented headset either expensive, ugly or useless – or all at once. On Monday evening, video game designer Tyler Glaiel posted a photo of Google's flopped smart glasses next to a recent advertising image in which the Apple headset is reminiscent of diving goggles, and wrote: "Google Glass, circa 2013: failed miserably because people looked stupid when wearing them. Companies in 2023: People will wear it.«
"It's like sticking a 'Please rob me' sign on your chest"
How bad or chic the glasses really look is a matter of taste. Apple's idea of using a kind of pass-through view to display the wearer's eyes on the front of the headset as soon as the glasses perceive another person in the room is hotly debated. Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the first Oculus VR glasses, joked that the Vision Pro uses state-of-the-art technology for the feature called EyeSight. "With this vinyl sticker, you can achieve 50 percent of the realism for 0.1 percent of the cost." In the photo, Palmer was wearing a headset with a photo of his eye area glued to it.
Mike Isaac, a tech reporter for the New York Times, had a different objection on the subject of wearing glasses among people. I'm sorry," he wrote on Twitter, "but strapping $3500 VR glasses to your face in public is like sticking a 'Please rob me' sign on your chest."
There are also different opinions on the question of whether the Vision Pro will be just as natural as a TV or a computer monitor in the future, at least for home entertainment or for working from home. For example, John Lilly, a former head of the Mozilla Corporation, commented on the Vision Pro: "This is an amazing device – and Apple has absolutely no idea what for. I mean: huge desktops and movies??« In another tweet, Lilly also wrote: "We're going to find great things to do with it."
This basic optimism is also shared by others. "In a nutshell: Yes," answers digital marketing professor Philipp Rauschnabe l, who deals with topics such as augmented reality (AR), when asked whether Apple's glasses represent the "start of a new age of technology". It will be a while before the first people with such a headset can be seen walking around the city, he says. But Apple's initiative will "steer innovation activities of all players in this direction": "Companies such as manufacturers of monitors, hardware, decoration and so on can be substituted in the medium term."
And with a view to the first demos, which apparently disappointed some industry insiders such as John Lilly, Rauschnabel writes that he has the impression that there are no "real killer apps" yet, "but many ideas". Currently, the benefit of the device lies in having things in the field of vision, "even when there is no monitor nearby": "But I assume that a completely new ecosystem will develop here and that the real benefit will come from opening up to developers."
For whom are the new glasses intended?
So the first version of the glasses does not have to and should not be a hit with the masses: this is also the argument of other commentators. Author Ashley Esqueda, for example, attested to herself "an incredibly logical" view of things, writing that the Vision Pro is a $3500 device "that developers are supposed to buy to mess up with so that there will be a fully functional Vision App Store in about five years." Because then, according to Esqueda's idea, Apple could launch the wireless mass-market model of its product on the market, for example as Vision Air.
Nick Statt of the consulting firm Naavik noted: "For 3500 dollars, the Vision Pro will not prevail. But a version for $999 in 2025 (...) with much of the same design quality and new features and advances, that would be an attractive offer. The next two years of third-party development work will be crucial."
On the developer side itself, some people are cautious at first. "First of all, I need to know what the screen resolution and quality are like," said developer Christina Warren. "I need to see this personally, even before I spend money on a developer device. The whole thing only works if the resolution is super sharp. I also need to know how long the battery lasts." Apple has now published the latter information: According to this, the external battery, with which the Brillle is wired during use, should offer around two hours of runtime.
"Finally. All the screens on your face all the time«
Beyond such postings, there are still some meta comments. For example, political activist Brianna Wu wrote that the biggest difference between the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the launch of the Vision Pro is that the public is "a trillion times more cynical" about technology and its ability to improve lives.
A tweet from the Twitter account OnlyCFO fits in with this. It says: "Finally. All screens on your face all the time. No more excuses. Now I can really track the eye movements and see what my employees are actually doing! Efficiency is the order of the day!«
It's just one of many satire tweets. For example, the Account Shit User Story imagined what users of the Vision Pro could expect when surfing with the new device: cookie banners, advertising pop-ups and requests to install the next update – and all this as an extra window directly on the face. Fortunately for Apple fans, the whole thing is just a montage of images so far.