Apple is adding two new locations to its Vision Pro ‘Developer Labs so devs can get their hands on the headset before it launches early next year.
It might not feel like it but 2024 will be here before we know it, and Apple has recently said it’s on track to launch Vision Pro “early” next year.
To get developers’ hands on Vision Pro launches, Apple has a handful of ‘Developer Labs’ where developers can go to check out the device and get feedback on their apps. Today the company announced it’s opening two more locations: New York City, USA and Sydney Australia.
Even with the two new locations, Vision Pro Developer Labs are still pretty sparce, but here’s the full list to date:
Cupertino, CA, USA
London, England, UK
Munich, Germany
Shanghai, China
Tokyo, Japan
New York City, USA
Sydney, Australia
Singapore
Apple is also offering developers ‘compatibility evaluations’ where the company will test third-party Vision Pro apps and provide feedback. The company is also giving select developers access to Vision Pro development kits.
Vision Pro is Apple’s first-ever XR headset and it’s sure going to shake up the industry one way or another, perhaps starting with the way the company is approaching ‘social’ in XR.
As a leading social media company, it seemed like Meta would be in the best position to create a rich social experience on its XR headsets. But after almost a decade of building XR platforms, interacting with friends on Meta’s headsets is still a highly fragmented affair. With Vision Pro, Apple is taking a different approach—making apps social right out of the box.
Meta’s Social Strategy in a Nutshell
Horizon Worlds is the manifestation of Meta’s social XR strategy. A space where you and your friends can go to build or play novel virtual games and experiences. It’s the very beginnings of the company’s ‘metaverse’ concept: an unlimited virtual space where people can share new experiences and maybe make some new virtual friends along the way.
But if you step out of Horizon, the rest of the social experience on the Quest platform quite fragmented.
The most basic form of ‘social’ is just hanging out with people you already know, doing things you already know you like to do—like watching a movie, playing a board game, or listening to music. But doing any of that on Meta’s headsets means jumping through a fragmented landscape of different apps and different ways to actually get into the same space with your friends.
On Quest, some apps use their own invite system and some use Meta’s invite system (when it works, anyway). Some apps use your Meta avatar and some use their own. As far as the interfaces and how you get in the same place with your friends, it’s different from app to app to app. Some even have separate accounts and friends lists.
And let’s not forget, many apps on Quest aren’t social in the first place. You might have made an awesome piece of 3D art but have no way to show your friends except to figure out how to take a screenshot and get it off of your headset to send to their phone. Or you might want to watch a movie release, but you can only do it by yourself. Or maybe you want to sit back and listen to a new album…maybe you can dig through the Quest store to find an app that allows a shared browser experience so you can listen through YouTube with someone else?
Apple’s Approach to Social on Vision Pro
Image courtesy Apple
Apple is taking a fundamentally different approach with Vision Pro by making social the expectation rather than the rule, and providing a common set of tools and guidelines for developers to build from in order to make social feel cohesive across the platform. Apple’s vision isn’t about creating a server full of a virtual strangers and user-generated experiences, but to make it easy to share the stuff you already like to do with the people you already know.
This obviously leans into the company’s rich ecosystem of existing apps—and the social technologies the company has already battle-tested on its platforms.
SharePlay is the feature that’s already present on iOS and MacOS devices that lets people watch, listen, and experience apps together through FaceTime. And on Vision Pro, Apple intends to use its SharePlay tech to make many of its own first-party apps—like Apple TV, Apple Music, and Photos—social right out of the box, and it expects developers to do so too. In the company’s developer documentation, the company says it expects “most visionOS apps to support SharePlay.”
For one, SharePlay apps will support ‘Spatial Personas’ on Vision Pro (that’s what Apple calls its avatars which are generated from a scan of your face). That means SharePlay apps on the platform will share a common look for participants. Apple is also providing several pre-configured room layouts that are designed for specific content, so developers don’t need to think about where to place users and how to manage their movement (and to finally put an end to apps spawning people inside of each other).
For instance, if a developer is building a movie-watching app, one of the templates puts all users side-by-side in front of a screen. But for a more interactive app where everyone is expected to actively collaborate there’s a template that puts users in a circle around a central point. Another template is based on presenting content to others, with some users close to the screen and others further away in a viewing position.
Image courtesy Apple
With SharePlay, Apple also provides the behind-the-scenes piping to keep apps synchronized between users, and it says the data shared between participants is “low-latency” and end-to-end encrypted. That means you can have fun with your friends and not be worried about anyone listening in.
People You Already Know, Things You Already Do
Perhaps most importantly, Apple is leaning on every user’s existing personal friend graph (ie: the people you already text, call, or email), rather than trying to create a bespoke friends list that lives only inside Vision Pro.
Rather than launching an app and then figuring out how to get your friends into it, with SharePlay Apple is focused on getting together with your friends first, then letting the group seamlessly move from one app to the next as you decide what you want to do.
Starting a group is as easy as making a FaceTime call to a friend whose number you already know. Then you’re already chatting virtually face-to-face before deciding what you want to do. In the mood for a movie? Launch Apple TV and fire up whatever you want to watch—your friend is still right there next to you. Now the movie is over; want to listen to some music while you discuss the plot? Fire up Spotify and put on the movie’s soundtrack to set the scene.
Social by Default
Even apps that don’t explicitly have multi-user experience built-in can be ‘social’ by default, by allowing one user to screen-share the app with others. Only the host will be able to interact with the content, but everyone else will be able to see and talk about it in real-time.
Image courtesy Apple
It’s the emphasis on ‘social by default’, ‘things you already do’, and ‘people you already know’ that will make social on Vision Pro feel completely different than what Meta is building on Quest with Horizon Worlds and its ecosystem of fragmented social apps.
Familiar Ideas
Ironically, Meta experimented with this very style of social XR years ago, and it was actually pretty good. Facebook Spaces was an early social XR effort which leveraged your existing friends on Facebook, and was focused on bringing people together in a template-style layout around their own photo and video content. You could even do a Messenger Video Chat with people outside of VR to make them part of the experience.
Image courtesy Facebook
Facebook Spaces was a eerily similar microcosm of what Apple is now doing across the Vision Pro platform. But as with many things on Quest, Meta didn’t have the follow-through to get Spaces from ‘good’ to ‘great’, nor the internal will to set a platform-wide expectation about how social should work on its headsets. The company shut down Spaces in 2019, but even at the time we thought there was much to learn from the effort.
Will Apple Succeed Where Meta Faltered?
Quest 3 (left) and Apple Vision Pro (right) | Based on images courtesy Meta, Apple
Making basic flat apps social out of the box on Vision Pro will definitely make it easier for people to connect on the headset and ensure they can already do familiar things with friends. But certainly on Meta’s headsets the vast majority of ‘social’ is in discrete multiplayer gaming experiences.
And for that, it has to be pointed out that there’s big limitations to SharePlay’s capabilities on Vision Pro. While it looks like it will be great for doing ‘things you already do’ with ‘people you already know’, as a framework it certainly doesn’t comport to many of the multiplayer gaming experiences that people are doing on headsets today.
For one, SharePlay experiences on Vision Pro only support up to five people (probably due to the performance implications of rendering too many Spatial Personas).
Second, SharePlay templates seem like they’ll only support limited person-to-person interaction. Apple’s documentation is a little bit vague, but the company notes: “although the system can place Spatial Personas shoulder to shoulder and it supports shared gestures like a handshake or ‘high five,’ Spatial Personas remain apart.” That makes it sound like users won’t be able to have free-form navigation or do things like pass objects directly between each other.
And when it comes to fully immersive social experiences (ie: Rec Room) SharePlay probably isn’t the right call anyway. Many social VR experiences (like games) will want to be able to render different avatars that fit the aesthetic of the experience, and certainly more than five at once. They’ll also want more control over networking and how users can move and interact with each other. At that point, building on SharePlay might not make much sense, but we hope it can still be used to help with initial group formation and joining other immersive apps together.
With the early 2024 release of Vision Pro quickly approaching, Apple is steadily updating its products to prepare for the new headset.
In addition to an upcoming spatial capture feature on iPhone 15 Pro, Apple also says its latest AirPods Pro wireless earbuds (2nd-gen, now with USB-C) will support lossless audio with ‘ultra-low latency’ to ensure that what you see and what you hear are closely synchronized for an immersive experience.
What Apple is calling a “groundbreaking wireless audio protocol” is powered by the H2 chip in the AirPods Pro 2 and Vision Pro. The specifics of the protocol haven’t been divulged, but the company says it will deliver 20-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio with a “massive reduction in audio latency.”
Image courtesy Apple
Low latency in XR is important because a headset’s visuals need to be as low latency as possible in order to keep users comfortable. Having audio that’s just as responsive (in order to keep sight and sounds in sync) sometimes comes at the cost of quality. The audio protocol Apple is now touting seems designed specifically to maintain lossless audio while also keeping latency as low as possible.
The AirPods Pro 2 have been out for a while, but when the company revealed its latest phones earlier this month with USB-C connectors for the first time, it also took the time to release the refreshed version of the Airpods Pro 2, now with USB-C as well.
This is also when we saw the first mention of the new low latency audio protocol; though considering that the original AirPods Pro 2 (with lightning connector) also has an H2 chip, we certainly hope it will also support the new protocol. As for the non-Pro version of AirPods—which only have an H1 chip—it isn’t clear if they will get support. We’ve reached out to Apple for more clarity on which devices will be supported.
Apple is having a rough time of it in France as of late. As if mandated updates to the iPhone 12 due to radiation concerns weren’t enough, Apple customers in the country may now struggle to get their mitts on the latest model when it’s released.
French Apple store workers have voted to strike at the end of the week — coinciding with the launch of the iPhone 15. Apple unions including CGT, Unsa, CFDT and Cidre-CFTC, are asking for better pay and working conditions, or their members will walk out this Friday and Saturday.
Among the demands is a 7% increase in wages to make up for inflation (Apple is offering 4.5%). Furthermore, the negotiators are requesting that Apple put an end to a month-long hiring freeze.
“Since the management has decided to ignore our demands and concerns despite their perfect legitimacy, the 4 unions of Apple Retail France are calling for a strike on the 22nd and 23rd September,” the CGT Apple Retail said in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
“We remind management that it is not these movements that harm the company, but rather its denial in the face of the discomfort of its employees,” it continued (translated from the French original text).
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For context, during the announcement of the company’s Q3 financial results last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said he was happy to report an all-time revenue record in Services, driven by over one billion paid subscriptions, and “continued strength” in emerging markets thanks to robust sales of the iPhone. Last year, Apple reported a revenue of $394.33bn.
According to a union spokesperson, workers can mobilise in three quarters of the country’s Apple stores. They will not prevent customers from shopping, however buyers will “need to be patient.” Union officials do not rule out more strike actions the following weekends if Apple’s management does not budge from its position.
The iPhone 15 will feature the EU mandated shift to USB-C charging — which some of our reporters are more than happy about. Other than that, it is far from revolutionary and more of a slightly updated phone — although it does feature the brand new A17 Pro chip. Among the more notable upgrades are a customisable action button, a titanium body for the pro range, and a next-generation automatic portrait mode for the camera.
Unity, makers of the popular game engine, announced earlier this week it’s getting ready to levy some pretty significant fees on developers, causing many to rethink whether it makes more sense to actually go with the main competition, Unreal Engine from Epic Games. It seems Epic isn’t wasting any time to help transition those creating projects for Apple Vision Pro.
According to Victor Lerp, Unreal Engine XR Product Specialist at Epic Games, the company is now “exploring native Unreal Engine support for Apple Vision Pro,” the upcoming mixed reality headset due to launch in early 2024.
Lerp says it’s still early days though, noting that it’s “too early for us to share details on the extent of support or timelines.”
Lerp posted the statement on Unreal Engine’s XR development forum. You can read it in full below, courtesy of Alex Coulombe, CEO of the XR creative studio Agile Lens:
During Vision Pro’s unveiling at WWDC in June, Apple prominently showcased native Unity support in its upcoming XR operating system, visionOS. Unity began offering beta access to its visionOS-supported engine shortly afterwards, making it feel like something of a ‘bait and switch’ for developers already creating new games, or porting existing titles to Vision Pro.
As explained by Axios, Unity’s new plan will require users of its free tier of development services to pay the company $0.20 per installation once their game hits thresholds of both 200,000 downloads and earns $200,000 in revenue. Subscribers to Unity Pro, which costs $2,000 a year, have a different fee structure that scales downwards in proportion to the number of installs. What constitutes an ‘install’ is still fairly nebulous at this point despite follow-up clarifications from Unity. Whatever the case, the change is set to go into effect starting on January 1st, 2024.
In the meantime, the proposed Unity price increase has caused many small to medium-size teams to reflect on whether to make the switch to the admittedly more complicated Unreal Engine, or pursue other game engines entirely. A majority of XR game studios fit into that category, which (among many other scenarios) could hobble teams as they look to replicate free-to-play success stories like Gorilla Tag, which generated over $26 million in revenue when it hit the Quest Store late last year.
Apple’s “Wonderlust” product launch event featured the official unveiling of iPhone 15 and both Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. While XR wasn’t a major focus of the event, Apple confirmed its upcoming mixed reality standalone Vision Pro isn’t seeing any delays to push it off its early 2024 release.
First unveiled at WWDC in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook said last night during the product event that Vision Pro is still “on track for release in early 2024.”
Vision Pro, which comes along with the very ‘pro’ price tag of $3,500, has reportedly been the subject of multiple delays in the past. The MR headset was widely thought to arrive sometime in 2022, although several successive reports maintained it was delayed multiple times since then.
With an “early 2024” launch in site, Apple seems to be making some of the right moves in the background, as the company has already opened up applications for developer units which are undoubtedly already in the hands of studios.
Meanwhile, the Cupertino tech giant also announced it’s prepping iPhone 15 Pro to take stereoscopic video which can be viewed on Vision Pro. It’s an interesting choice, as features on company’s most premium ‘Pro’ phone offerings tend to trickle down in successive generations. Here, the phone’s ultrawide and main cameras work together to create what Apple calls a “three-dimensional video.”
Apple today announced its iPhone 15 lineup of smartphones, including the iPhone 15 Pro which will be the company’s first phone to capture spatial video for immersive viewing on Vision Pro.
While Apple Vision Pro itself works as a spatial camera, allowing users to capture immersive photos and videos, I think we can all agree that wearing a camera on your head isn’t the most convenient way to capture content.
Image courtesy Apple
Apple seems to feel the same way. Today during the company’s iPhone 15 announcement, it was revealed that the new iPhone 15 Pro will be capable of capturing spatial video which can be viewed immersively on the company’s upcoming Vision Pro headset. The base versions of the phone, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, won’t have the spatial capture capability.
Details on exactly how this function works are slim for the time being.
“We use the ultrawide and main cameras together to create a three-dimensional video,” the company said during its announcement. But it isn’t clear if “three-dimensional” means stereoscopic footage with a fixed viewpoint, or some kind of depth projection with a bit of 6DOF wiggle room.
Given that the iPhone 15 Pro cameras are so close together—not offering enough distance between the two views for straightforward stereo capture—it seems that some kind of depth projection or scene reconstruction will be necessary.
Image courtesy Apple pro
Apple didn’t specifically say whether the phone’s depth-sensor was involved, but considering the phone uses it for other camera functions, we wouldn’t be surprised to find that it has some role to play. Curiously, Apple didn’t mention spatial photo capture, but ostensibly this should be possible as well.
While users will be able to watch their immersive videos on Vision Pro, Apple also said they’ll be able to share the footage with others who can watch on their own headset.
While the new iPhone 15 lineup will launch on September 22nd, Apple says the spatial capture capability won’t be available until “later this year”—which is curious considering the company also said today that Vision Pro is “on track to launch in early 2024.” Perhaps the company plans to allow creators to access the spatial video files for editing and use outside of Apple’s platform?
Today, big tech companies including Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, announced the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), which is dedicated to promoting the standardization and development of a 3D file protocol that Apple says will “help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences.”
NVIDIA has been an early supporter of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD), stating last year it thinks Pixar’s solution has the potential to become the “HTML of the metaverse.”
Much like HTML forms a sort of description of a webpage—being hostable anywhere on the Internet and retrievable/renderable locally by a web browser—USD can be used to describe complex virtual scenes, allowing it to be similarly retrieved and rendered on a local machine.
Here’s how the alliance describes their new OpenUSD inititive:
Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.
“Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”
Housed by the Linux Foundation affiliate Joint Development Foundation (JDF), the alliance is hoping to attract a diverse range of companies and organizations to participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD actively. For now it counts Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA as foudning memebers, with general members including Epic Games, Unity, Foundry, Ikea, SideFX, and Cesium.
“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s VP of the Vision Products Group. “Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.”
Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR standard, launched a similar USD initiative in the past via its own Metaverse Standards Forum. It’s unclear how much overlap these initiatives will have, as that project was supported by AOUSD founders Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA in addition to a wide swath of industry movers, such as Meta, Microsoft, Sony, Qualcomm, and AMD. Notably missing in the Metaverse Standards Forum was support from Apple and Pixar themselves.
We’re hoping to learn more at a long-form presentation of AOUSD during the Autodesk Vision Series on August 8th. There are a host of events leading up to SIGGRAPH 2023 though, which goes from August 6th – 10th, so we may learn more at any one of the companies’ own presentations on USD.
Apple Vision Pro is coming next year, not only making for the Fruit Company’s much awaited first XR headset, but also spurring a resurgence in public interest (and likely investment) in the XR space. At $3,500, Vision Pro is undoubtedly an expensive steppingstone to the company’s future augmented reality ambitions, but even if it’s ostensibly ignoring virtual reality in the meantime, it probably won’t forever.
Apple has a tendency to undervalue gaming initially, though perhaps reluctantly, eventually acknowledges its importance. Gaming in XR is considerably enhanced by fully immersive experiences and motion controllers, and Apple will probably start feeling the pressure of that demand from gamers and developers alike when it kicks off a consumer headset sometime down the road, causing them to relent (if only just).
What is Vision Pro?
Like many, Apple is investing in AR today because the headsets and glasses of tomorrow have a good chance of supplanting smartphones and becoming the dominant mobile computing platform of the future. Long considered the holy grail of immersive computing, all-day AR headsets represent a way of interacting with new layers of information in daily life which would span everything from turn-by-turn directions to gaming applications—like Google Maps directions floating on the street in front of your car or a city-wide version of Pokémon Go.
Granted, Vision Pro isn’t yet the sort of device you’ll take out to the park to catch a random Zubat or Rattata—it’s very much an indoor device that Apple envisions you’ll use to sit down and watch a virtual TV screen or stand up in place to have an immersive chat with a work colleague. But as an opening gambit, Apple’s initial pitch of Vision Pro has been fairly telling of its strategy for XR.
In the ‘one more thing’ bit of the WWDC keynote, Apple lauded Vision Pro’s AR capabilities thanks to its color passthrough cameras, impressively responsive UI, and, from our hands-on with the headset, rock-solid hand-tracking. The company focused almost entirely on the work and lifestyle benefits of AR, and much less on the comparatively more closed-off fully immersed capabilities of virtual reality.
Image courtesy Apple
Considering just how much time and effort Apple has spent talking about AR, you may be surprised to find out Vision Pro can actually play VR games. After all, like Meta Quest Pro or the upcoming Quest 3, it’s basically a VR headset with passthrough cameras—what we’d call a mixed reality headset. In fact, the headset is already confirmed to support one of VR’s most prominent social VR games.
Instead, Vision Pro is focusing on eye-tracking and hand-tracking as primary input methods, with support for traditional peripherals like keyboards and mice and gamepads filling in the gaps for work and traditional flatscreen gaming. This means many VR developers looking to target Vision Pro will need to pare down input schemes to refocus on hand-tracking, or create games from the ground-up that don’t rely on the standard triggers, grip buttons, sticks, and half-dozen buttons.
Still, many VR games simply won’t translate without controllers, which above all provide important haptic feedback and a bevy of sticks and buttons for more complex inputs. Not only that, Vision Pro’s room-scale VR gaming chops are hobbled by a guardian limit of 10 feet by 10 feet (3m × 3m)—if the player moves any further, the VR experience will fade away, returning to the headset’s default AR view. There’s no such limit for AR apps, putting VR more or less into a virtual corner.
Denny Unger, CEO of pioneering VR studio Cloudhead Games, nails it on the head in a recent guest article, saying that Vision Pro “appears to be a VR headset pretending not to be a VR headset.”
Apple’s Chronically Late Adoption
Without speculating too far about into its XR ambitions, it appears Apple is turning somewhat of a new leaf with Vision Pro. The company is reportedly departing from tradition by creating a dedicated Vision Products Group (VPG), which is tasked with spearheading XR product development. Apple typically distributes its product development efforts across more general departments, such as hardware, software, design, services, etc, instead of sectionalizing hardware development into individual product teams, like Mac, Watch, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Not only that, but the company is also publicly accepting applications for development kits of the headset and hosting a handful of ‘developer labs’ around the world so that developer can get their hands and heads into the device ahead of time. It’s a decidedly different tactic than what we usually see from Apple.
The company’s wider strategy still seems to be in play however. Apple traditionally enters markets where it believes it can make a significant impact and actually own something, making it oftentimes not the first, but in many cases, the most important Big Tech company to validate an emerging market. The paradox here is Apple is actually early to AR, but late to VR. Deemphasizing the now fairly mature VR in favor of potentially creating a stronger foundation for its future AR devices makes a certain amount of sense coming from Apple.
Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly preparing a more consumer-focused follow-up to Vision Pro that will hopefully cost less than a high mileage, but still serviceable 2008 Honda Civic. Whenever Apple pitches that cheaper Vision headset to everyday people, they’ll likely need more entertainment-focused experiences, including fully immersive VR experiences with VR controllers.
Image courtesy Apple
And while Apple still isn’t positioning Vision Pro as a fully-fledged VR headset, that doesn’t mean it won’t relent in the future like it does with many crowd-pleasing features on iOS that in many cases don’t appear until years after they’ve been available on Android. In classic Apple style, it could offhandedly announce a pair of slick and ergonomic VR controllers as a pricey accessory during any of its annual product updates, and of course pretend it’s some great home-grown achievement.
Another big reason Apple may eventually decide to un-hobble a future Vision headset is its strong hold on app revenue. Apple’s XR headsets are on the same path as its iOS devices, which means the company captures a slice of revenue from every app you buy on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Unlike Mac, which by all accounts is a second-class citizen for gaming, iOS devices seem to be getting their act together. Kind of.
In some ways the company has only just fully embraced gaming on iOS with the launch of Apple Arcade in 2019, which serves up a curated collection of high-quality games on iOS and Apple TV without any ads or in-app purchases. Still, it’s pretty clear Apple doesn’t have big gaming ambitions—it doesn’t hoover up game publishers or studios like Meta or Microsoft tend to—so if it does unharness Vision’s VR capabilities, it may do so without the same raison virtuelle d’être as Meta or ByteDance (the latter being the TikTok parent company that also owns the Pico XR platform).
Provided Apple can secure the same hefty market share with future Vision headsets as it does with iPhone today though, which is around 30%, it may be more inclined to stay competitive with more VR-forward companies. But it isn’t emphasizing VR now, or even really competing against anyone, which may be a safer bet as it ventures into some truly unknown territory. Once the ball gets rolling though, the Cupertino tech giant will have less and less excuse to not toss out a pair of VR controllers and remove some of the arbitrary restrictions it’s imposed.
When that might happen, we don’t know, but it does sound awfully Apple-like to sit on much wanted features and eventually release them with a flick of the wrist.
Apple has now opened applications for Vision Pro developer kits, which it’s sending out to app developers in effort to kickstart its first XR-specific App Store.
Vision Pro is set to launch sometime in early 2024, coming part and parcel with a load of first-party apps originally developed for iPad. This includes basic things like Safari, Photos, Music, Messages, and even an avatar support for Facetime.
Apple has been fairly mum on its list of third-party apps, listing only a few during its WWDC unveiling in June, including Word, Excel, Teams, Disney+, Zoom, WebEX, and Rec Room, its only VR game to be featured during the keynote.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Apple is couching the headset as a general computing device capable of doing most of what a laptop can do, however the $3,500 prosumer headset will need a lot more than a smattering of compatible 2D apps if it wants its first XR device to set the stage for generations of cheaper follow-ups, which will likely be aimed more squarely at regular consumers.
And while the headset emulator and software development tools have been out for a few weeks now, the Cupertino tech giant says developers looking to start creating apps with actual Vision Pro hardware can apply now.
Apple says the dev kit also includes help setting up the device and onboarding, check-ins with Apple experts for UI design and development guidance, and two additional code-level support requests so Apple can help troubleshoot issues.
Like with many hardware developer kits, there are some fairly stringent (if not entirely standard) caveats. The Vision Pro dev kit needs to be returned upon request, and also has to be stored in a private, secure workspace that unauthorized persons don’t have access to view, handle, or use. The dev kit also needs to be passcode protected and never left unattended, or removed from its home address without Apple’s prior written consent.
Again, that’s all pretty standard stuff so developers don’t lose, leak, or strip the headset down to its component parts for the glee of XR publications everywhere. We’ll likely be waiting for that last bit when it finally launches sometime in early 2024.
According to a Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman, Apple is changing things up with the creation of a new Vision Products Group (VPG), which is tasked with developing the company’s recently unveiled mixed reality headset, Vision Pro.
The report maintains that with the creation of VPG, Apple is departing from its “functional” management structure, which was introduced by Steve Jobs in the early ’90s.
Effectively, Jobs distributed the company’s product development efforts across more general departments, such as hardware, software, design, services, etc, instead of sectionalizing hardware development into individual product teams, like Mac, Watch, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
The so-called Vision Products Group is reportedly independent from Apple’s main software and hardware engineering and other departments, including its own internal versions of those teams which report to unit head Mike Rockwell.
Gurman maintains that VPG still collaborates with other parts of Apple though, including design and operations teams overseen by COO Jeff Williams, Johny Srouji’s chip unit known for the company’s M2 and R1 processors, and iOS/macOS frameworks headed Craig Federighi’s software engineering group.
Some reportedly believed the dedicated group would be disbanded, making it follow the company’s functional management structure. It has however both persisted beyond the Vision Pro’s June unveiling at WWDC and was branded to reflect that the group is tasked with creation of Vision Products, implying the team will be sticking around for multiple product cycles yet to come.
If a recent Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman holds true, not only is Apple not planning to release a motion controller for Vision Pro in the future, but it may not even support third-party VR controllers at all.
When the Cupertino tech giant unveiled Vision Pro last month, it didn’t emphasize the headset’s ability to potentially support VR games, which have typically been designed around motion controllers like Meta Touch or Valve’s Index controller for SteamVR headsets.
Among Vision Pro’s lineup of content, which features a standard suite of Apple ecosystem and standard content viewing apps, the studio only off showed a single VR app, Rec Room, the prolific social VR app that supports most major VR headsets (excluding PSVR 2 for now) in addition to consoles, desktop, and both iOS and Android mobile devices.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Mark Gurman, one of the leading journalists reporting on unreleased Apple tech, maintains that Apple is neither actively planning a dedicated controller, nor planning support for third-party VR accessories.
When the $3,500 headset launches in early 2024, this would leave Vision Pro users relying on the headset’s built-in hand and eye-tracking, which admittedly worked very well in our hands-on. It’s also using Siri-driven voice input, Bluetooth and Mac keyboard support, and PlayStation 5 and Xbox controllers for traditional flatscreen games.
For VR gaming though, hand and eye-tracking lack the haptic feedback required for many game genres, meaning what VR games do come to Vision Pro will likely require overhauls to make sure hand-tracking is fully baked in.
Provided Apple sticks with its purported internal plan to not support VR controllers, that would essentially shunt development away from VR gaming and towards the headset’s AR abilities. For Apple, that’s where the ‘real’ money presumably lies.
Denny Unger, founder and lead of pioneering VR studio Cloudhead Games, explains the move as a way to provide a strong development foundation now for Apple’s AR glasses of the future, which will be both more affordable and more capable of replacing a standard smartphone than the admittedly bulky MR headsets of today.
For more from Unger, who heads one of the most successful VR studios, check out his Road to VR guest article to learn more about Vision Pro and why Apple may be launching an AR headset in VR clothing.
