Some who watched the beautiful, highly-produced videos in Apple’s launch of the Vision Pro this week might have misunderstood Apple’s intent. Some were shocked by the price. But most of those individuals are not the target market for the Vision Pro. Not yet.
According to VRdirect founder and CEO Rolf Illenberger, “It would be drastic to say that Apple Vision Pro will replace a computer or cellphone in the immediate future. But that day will happen soon (most likely starting with those who enjoy having a second or third monitor at their workstations). This announcement serves as a welcome bridge into the world of AR and VR by a company known for creating seamless, reliable, and integrated technology. They hit a home run today.”
Illenberger continued, “Apple Vision Pro’s biggest advantage is integration into the Apple ecosystem. The all-important advantage is the ability to go from the iPhone, to iPad, to Apple Watch with a similar user experience and low barrier to entry. Familiar, yet revolutionary, as the announcement put it. That’s why the VR community has been excited for this launch. That’s where we believe the potential exists to create believers in AR and VR headsets.”
Apple’s first-generation product is perfectly seamless. That’s why Apple launched it at a developer conference. Those who will be buying and using the Vision Pro first surely saw themselves in the videos. Besides B2B (business-to-business) professionals, early users will be creatives, entrepreneurs, and executives in HR, recruiting, marketing, event marketing, high-end entertainment, design, architecture, and similar work.
Rolf Illenberger commented, “The biggest companies in the world have all spent the last three years trying to ramp up and perfect their VR strategy, using the pandemic as a starting point. Now they have a piece of equipment that matches some of those behind-the-scenes conversations and planning.”
For VRdirect, an enterprise software developer at the forefront of utilizing VR for big-business, with clients like Siemens, Nestle and Porsche, Apple’s announcement only further solidifies a business demand that already exists for much of the Fortune 500.
Illenberger predicts, “Vision Pro also makes it truly easy for anyone to build a VR environment using VRdirect thanks to the device’s ability to capture and create content—a missing piece from existing devices in the market. We expect it to be a critical piece of equipment for any B2B VR/AR strategy in the short-term. Requiring no controllers and being able to be used by gestures is a killer advantage over other headsets as well.”
Rolf closed the conversation with these comments:
“It’s not going to really matter if the first edition of Vision Pro is a flop or a success from a sales standpoint—simply because Apple knows the device and its app and content lineup are going to need a few iterations before it becomes a truly compelling B2C (business-to-consumer) product. A fair comparison might be HDTV in say, the mid-2000’s, when it was priced around the same ($2,500+) and only a few key entities were producing content for it.
“The motivation to announce Vision Pro now was to stimulate and nurture the ecosystem of app developers and content creators to invest in the new device—which was already happening once rumors about the device started to emerge several months ago. Hence, Vision Pro is already a great success for Apple. They have, once again, taken a new technology from the nerds to the cool kids.”
The Vision Pro opens many new possibilities for the use of AR and VR in organizations and education. It will lower production costs due to the integration of so much technology that now exists in a multitude of separate devices and applications. The skillsets required to produce 2-D, 3-D, and even more immersive media for use in learning will change quickly, along with the organization of the necessary talent. Think back on how different our design and development processes in the field of learning are today, compared to 10 short years ago. That explosion (more than evolution) has been nothing compared to what will come in the next five years.
Are you ready?