VR headsets are having a moment. And now that Apple is making one, the things might even stick around for a while—assuming enough people actually want to wear them.
Apple followed up a week stuffed with virtual reality news—Meta has a new headset, so does Lenovo—by debuting its own mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, during its WWDC keynote yesterday.
Nearly a decade after Google Glass was mocked relentlessly online, Apple’s announcement has roused a similar chorus of questions—like “Why?” and “OK, really, but why?” Apple’s aluminum goggles look finely engineered, but the examples the company showed of the Vision Pro being used aren’t the types of scenarios where a face computer would be practical or comfortable.
Apple fell into the same trap as Meta—which encouraged people to wear a VR headset to business meetings—by showing how the Vision Pro headset could put the wearer front and center in a videoconferencing work call. Even if Apple captures the imagination of the hustle culture and finds a user base willing to strap on a $3,499 headset to condition columns in AR Excel, wearability would still be a problem. Apple hasn’t said how much the Vision Pro will weigh or exactly how long its battery will last (a couple of hours, maybe less), but we can tell from the videos and images it did share that the device is bulky and tethered to an external battery pack.
“People’s tolerance for wearing something on their head for an extended period of time is limited,” says Leo Gebbie, a VR analyst at CCS Insights. “If it’s something that people are going to wear all day, it needs to be slim and light and comfortable. No one has really achieved that just yet in the VR world.”
Apple’s headset, like others before it, is a mixed-reality device, meaning it allows users to interact with virtual elements while allowing some of the real world to bleed through. That real-world video pass-through is something Apple focused on during the Vision Pro’s reveal by positioning the device as something you could wear while walking around, without constantly bumping into furniture, countertops, pets, and children. But Apple’s AR vision is still packaged in a VR headset, a wraparound device that obscures your entire field of vision.
Tuong Nguyen, a director analyst at the tech analysis firm Gartner, says it leads to the “head-in-a-box” problem. Something like Google Glass or Meta’s Facebook Ray-Bans may not be as feature-rich as Apple’s Vision Pro, but at least you can see around their frames. Apple’s headset has a physical knob that lets you adjust how much of the screen is taken up by digital elements, but you’re still relying on a screen to pump the real world visuals in.
“Video pass-through is essentially your head in a box,” Nguyen says.
Also, the screens we already use every day aren’t totally reliable. You’ve probably had the experience where you want to snag a photo or video of something, so you launch your phone’s camera app, only to see the image stutter or the app crash. Now imagine that happening with your entire field of vision.
“If I have my head in a box, I don’t want any video stuttering, especially if I’m crossing the street,” Nguyen says. Something goes wrong, you’re left in the dark.
Something we haven’t touched on yet is the pure goofiness factor of VR. The headsets just don’t look cool. One of Apple’s promotional videos showed somebody wearing a Vision Pro headset on an airplane ride, though the most unrealistic part about that fantasy was that none of the passengers on the plane were staring at her weird, goggle-clad face. Gebbie, who recently took a trip by plane, says the devices just aren’t unobtrusive enough to become a regular thing people wear.
“I could’ve brought a headset and sat on the plane and watched Netflix on a huge virtual screen,” he says. “I didn’t, because that would be extremely embarrassing.”
VR headsets will likely become slimmer, less cumbersome, and easier to wear over the next few years, and by then, brandishing one in public may not feel as odd. But there’s yet another problem they’ll still have to overcome: the sense of isolation that comes from immersive experiences.
Apple’s video pitching the Vision Pro as an entertainment device showed people strapping the device to their heads, battery packs stuffed in their pockets, then kicking back on their couches to watch some movies on their own personal gigantic screens. Alone.
Apple is also positioning its headset as a social device, one that allows enhanced FaceTime features on calls with friends. But every social feature Apple showed was being demonstrated by people alone in their homes connecting with someone far away. The Vision Pro—at least the version we saw during the WWDC keynote—has no real way to share the experience with someone near you or in your own home. If you want to interact with the other humans in your vicinity, you can do so by showing them a creepy, AR-tinted image of your eyes peering out from behind the Vision Pro’s glass front.
Disney+ will be available on the device, so you can use it to watch kids’ movies. But you’d think people would want to watch Disney movies with their actual kids, not alone in their own AR headspace while staring sadly at a movie projected over the video pass-through of their kitchen counter.
Besides, long-form video is just awkward in VR, says Nguyen. “Head-in-a-box is a snacking exercise,” he says. The ideal use time is ”a little bit here, a little bit there”—not hours on end.
Realistically, as long as VR or AR headsets are such solitary, uncomfortable experiences, people just aren’t going to want to wear these devices for long.
