In one early marketing image, a woman is shown wearing the headset while dressed in very chic clothing and lounging in an upscale living room. As many viewers were quick to point out during Monday’s event, the headset looks like a pair of designer ski goggles. In keeping with its usual playbook, Apple is leaning on its design, hardware and marketing chops to convince people to spend thousands on the device. And there are already a long list of challenges the company must overcome, including a high price tag ($3,500) and an unproven market littered with rivals who have so far failed to achieve mainstream success. The new headset, which blends both virtual reality and augmented reality, is Apple’s most ambitious – and riskiest – new hardware product in years.

An image of tech evangelist Robert Scoble wearing Google Glass in the shower had such a profound impact on the discourse around the product that then-Google CEO Larry Page once joked to him: “Robert, I really didn’t appreciate the shower photo.”įor Apple, the stakes are high to avoid similarly embarrassing visuals. Silicon Valley has struggled with the optics of other gadgets people wear on their face, too. Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the annual WWDC23 developer conference with the announcement of the new Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. The new Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Jin Cupertino, California. He looked as though he would fly away at any moment. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus (later acquired by Facebook), was widely mocked and memed in 2015 after being shown on a Time Magazine cover wearing a black headset with his legs bent, arms raised and head tilted up. Over the past decade, headsets have developed a reputation for being bulky and strange looking. But behind this speculation is a more serious potential problem: even Apple may struggle to make VR headsets look cool. Some industry watchers have suggested that Apple CEO Tim Cook and others may have made a conscious choice to avoid seeing silly pictures of themselves with headsets turned into memes online. Even reporters who got early access to try on the device were asked by the company not to take pictures of the experience. When Apple unveiled its ambitious and very pricey new mixed reality headset earlier this week, executives ticked through a long list of impressive specs, teased big name partnerships and showed off a perfectly produced promo video.īut there was one thing Apple’s execs did not do during the keynote presentation: wear the device.

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