Apple’s entry to VR will be “a macintosh moment”, says the founder of Vrvana.
Vrvana was acquired by Apple in 2017. It was a startup working on Totem, one of the first headsets to use high-resolution color cameras for stereo passthrough mixed reality – a feature only now starting to arrive in consumer headsets.
Vrvrana founder Bertrand Nepveu told Radio Canada “I always say that when Apple goes into virtual reality, it will be a Macintosh moment”. Nepveu claims that when he left Apple in 2021, around 1000 people were working on the long-delayed headset. In November, The Information reported around 3000 people were now working on it as Apple gets closer to launch.
A Macintosh Moment
What exactly does Nepvue mean by “a Macintosh moment”? The launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984 was a pivotal moment in the history of personal computing.
While the Apple Lisa a year earlier was technically the first mass-produced PC with a graphical user interface (GUI) aimed at individuals, its high price (around $30K adjusted for inflation) rendered it essentially irrelevant. Though still expensive compared to modern PCs, the Macintosh delivered a graphical operating system at around a quarter of the price and was heavily marketed to non-technical prospective buyers, including in a famous Super Bowl ad.
The original Macintosh sold less than 100,000 units in its launch quarter but was hailed as a revolutionary user experience, successfully popularizing the idea of GUI-driven personal computers suitable for the mass market. Products like Windows 95 and the iMac eventually appealed to a true global mass market for personal computers in the 1990s, but the idea of a useful PC in your home started to take shape with the Macintosh in the 1980s.
Meta’s Quest headsets start at just $400 but are primarily driven by controllers that are essentially a gamepad split in half and are hampered by a clunky and fragmented software experience. If Nepveu’s analogy holds true, Apple’s headset could introduce a refined interaction paradigm that, while too expensive and limited for most consumers in its first iteration, sets the stage for the software experience of mass-market headsets in the coming years and decades.
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- Source: https://uploadvr.com/apple-headset-macintosh-moment-vrvana-founder/
