I have long said for the past decade that Virtual Reality goggles/headsets and Alternate Reality googles/headsets are a nowhere project. Dead on Arrival. A nice novelty to make people say "ooohh" and "ahhhh", but not really something worth anything other than future tech waste.
Let's get into it.
When Palmer Lucky threw out the Oculus Rift in 2016 with the Oculus Team, so many people viewed it as a revolution in tech and immersion. I had tried it by then, to be clear. I even played one of it's launch games, EVE Valkyrie. I want to take this moment to note that after 20 minutes of playing this game, I became almost violently ill and motion sick.
I do not get motion sick from anything. I have ridden almost every roller coaster in Ohio and taken multiple helicopter rides from my time in the military. I have played literally every form and genre of video game I think ever made. This was the first time a video game actually hurt me physically and mentally and made me stop playing.
That was my awakening. Put the price aside (temporarily), and my realization is this new tech that I am the target market for is completely unusable by someone like me. How many other people get motion sick from jut using a VR headset? How many people can't even put the headset on for a variety of different reasons?
Let's go back to price. VR Headsets have always bee prohibitively expensive for the average consumer. The Oculus headset released at $600 and you needed an extremely powerful computer at the time to get it running. The typically cost of said computer was between $2,000 to $2,500 when you accounted for all of the hardware and software. So, only tech-bros and hyper-consumers with $2,700 or so laying around were going to be able to afford this headset. This is, of course, not including the games or software needed to get it to do something interesting.
I think the incredible joke of all of this is VR and AR have tapered off and the mass market penetration has not really happened. Now that Meta owns the Oculus tech and rebranded it as "Quest" devices, the price did eventually come down to $300, but the sales did not increase. No one knows what to do with it. Make games? Sure, that happens but it has always been a trickle and not a facet turned on. Even Meta (formerly Facebook?) has had to cut tens of thousands of jobs in the last year in their VR departments because the market penetration simple is not there.
Enter Apple.
Apple apparently released a new headset that is AR and for the low price of....$3,500. Literally unaffordable to anyone that would use it for anything other than enterprise reasons. It also has a 2 hour battery life, so any usage you could have for a serious business call is out of the window unless it's plugged in.
Who. Is. This. For?
Normally, the tech sector looks at Apple to make something mainstream. They have a decent track record of it as well. Smartphones with the iPhone. Tablets with the iPad. Smartwatches witht he Apple Watch. No one likes to talk about their failures though. Apple Maps. Apple Pippin. The Firewire cable. It goes on. Apple does miss sometimes. We are looking at a miss and a complete misread of the market and political climate. People in my generation and below are more concerned about housing and fair working conditions along with the dangers of climate change.
No one wants to puts hundreds of dollars of kit on their head to go to work and pa for the privileges to do it.
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