Apple may be reconsidering its AR strategy in the wake of Meta's Orion reveal

2024-09-30

It seems that Apple watched the launch of Meta’s new AR and VR glasses with interest and has started to reconsider its “spatial computing” strategy, reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. And it wasn’t the cheap Quest 3S that caused doubt within the walls of the Cupertino HQ, not so much the Ray-Ban Meta glasses either, but the Orion prototype.

VR cuts you off from the world and replaces it with a fully virtual world. Some goggles, like the Quest 3 and 3S, use cameras with color passthrough to create more of an AR experience – a mix of virtual and real things. Apple’s Vision Pro does this too, but also has an external display to render a virtual version of your face, so that people around you feel like they can look you in the eye.

But Meta’s Orion uses holographic displays, which are transparent. This means you see the real world and the real world sees you rather than faking it with displays and cameras.

Orion also introduced a novel control method – electromyography or EMG, which detects even the tiniest muscle movements to sense gestures that the user performs with their fingers. This is a lot more advanced, tactile and versatile than the current hand-tracking techniques.

Meta also designed and built the “Wireless Compute Puck”. Instead of packing all the processing power into the glasses (like Apple did), they moved it to the puck. And there are no wires involved, unlike Vision Pro’s battery pack.

So, what will Apple do? Management is considering several possible paths.

Apple can just continue with what it was doing – working on a cheaper Vision Pro. However, the Quest 3S costs less than one tenth of the Vision Pro ($300 vs. $3,500) and handles gaming and video streaming just fine, so a cheaper Vision with lower-quality displays might be a tough sell. If the company chooses this route, it will have to resume working on an Apple Vision Pro 2.

Alternatively, Apple could try to bring costs under control by using an iPhone as the compute module for a Vision headset. This will make the headset lighter and cheaper, while also making the iPhone a must-have (Meta’s glasses and headset are standalone).

Apple might make something similar to the Ray-Ban Meta instead. These are smart glasses with zero AR – they have cameras on them for photos and videos and also to let Meta’s AI see. Apple Intelligence could turn such glasses into an AI-powered version of the AirPods. This idea might extend to actual AirPods by adding tracking cameras and AI to a future version of the AirPods Pro.

The “holy grail” route is for Apple to build standalone AR glasses with everything built in (battery, processing, hand and eye tracking, etc.). This is reportedly the dream of CEO Tim Cook, but it is a monumental development challenge.

So, what will Apple do? That is yet to be decided, it could pick one or several of these paths. However, Gurman believes that Meta has a lead over Apple in AR tech, even the things that it is still keeping under wraps.

To be fair, the Orion was originally planned as a consumer product, but bringing the costs down to consumer-friendly levels proved to be a challenge, so Meta decided to launch it as a prototype to help in-house and third-party developers build new AR experiences.

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