Apple grand plan for VR may involve iPhone and iPad Pro
If there is one thing that is certain about Tim Cook is that he’s neither love, nor hate Virtual Reality, but he certainly has a sweet spot for Augmented Reality, and a plan to get there might have already been in the works for some time.
Apple and Microsoft have taken starkly different approaches towards VR and AR, with the latter being the one given ultimately more focus, due to a wide scope of consumer applications.
Let alone the market of casual gaming (i.e. Pokemon Go, Ingress), AR is a niche market that has yet to flourish. 3D supportive hardware has yet to be powerful enough and portable enough to fit the requirements of more complex and useful applications, such as the ones dreamed about since 2013 when Apple bought AR company PrimeSense 3D, and then later in 2015, AR company Metaio, with plans on integrating the technology in iOS 10, to produce consumer-focused AR applications.
Early concepts showed renderings illustrating how AR would allow to get information from local, brick and mortar establishments that would pop next to the actual storefronts, directly in the viewer’s field of view, on an iPhone or iPad.
By this token, it’s not impossible that Apple may be planning to approach the AR market in the usual fashion, with a slow, careful planning, to ensure that, no matter who implements this technology first, on a large scale, Apple will come out as the one with the slickest, most user friendly approach.
Alas the roadmap is not going to be an easy one, by Cook’s own admission: “...There are some really hard technology challenges there...”, although it’s not impossible for Apple to make a viable, user-friendly and pocket-sized version of Microsoft HoloLens, a device with a considerably wider scope than Google Glass, but with a long road ahead before achieving any significant prospect of viability with mainstream consumers.
While it’s likely that Microsoft may have the upper hand on AR and VR, and a greater head start, Apple surely has the marketing expertise and a deep understanding of consumers, with a lot more resources typically spent on focus groups, and real-world research. This may very well be Apple’s advantage in a category that Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicts it will become a $117 billion market by 2020.
The proof is in the unveilings, as Microsoft has spent quite a lot of time talking about VR and AR, even throughout the Surface Studio and Microsoft Surface Book i7 announcement. This can only means that the market of AR may already working its way to mainstream acceptance, and may be gaining it sooner than we think, but not too soon for Apple to do something about it.
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