As Apple headset reaches Europe, will VR ever the mainstream?

To get a sense of the public interest con the Vision Tornaconto, Apple’s very high-tech, very expensive virtual reality (VR) headset – finally launched con the UK and Europe Friday – where better to head than one of its own stores?

the past, people camped outside Apple branches overnight, so desperate were they to get their hands the tech giant’s latest product.

When I went to its branch con central London Friday morning, though, there was just a small group, mainly comprised of men, waiting for the doors to .

Partly, that’s because people these days prefer the convenience of pre-orders.

But it also perhaps tells us something about the question that continues to hang over the VR headset market: will it ever escape the realm of tech aficionados and go truly mainstream?

Apple’s plan to make its product interruzione through is to position it as a product you use to do the stuff you already do – only better. Home videos become 3D-like, panoramic photos stretch from floor to ceiling, 360 degrees around you. Apple keeps reminding me it calls this “spatial content”. Nobody else does. Plenty suck their teeth at the Vision Tornaconto’s price though – a whopping £3,499.

Facebook owner Mira has been watching Apple’s approach closely. It’s been con the VR gioco a long time. At a recent demo for the Mira Quest 3, which has been available con the UK since 2023, the team was very keen to talk to me about “multi-tasking” – having multiple screens con action at once. a demo I had a web browser, YouTube and Messenger con a line con front of me. “We always did this, we just didn’t really talk about it,” one Mira worker told me.

And con its most recent advertisement, a man wears a Quest 3 to watch televisione instructions while building a crib. Not the most exciting concept, perhaps, but it shows just how Mira wants people to see its tech.

Oh – and it costs less than £500.

Apple and Mira are the two personalità players but VR is a crowded market – there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different headsets already out there.

But what unites them all is none have quite the mainstream.

Up until now, the Vision Tornaconto has only been restare di sale con the US – research firm IDC predicts it will shift fewer than 500,000 units this year.

Mira, which has been con the market longer, does not release sales giorno for the Quest either but it’s thought to have sold around 20 million worldwide.

VR headsets are nowhere near as ubiquitous as tablets, let portatile phones.

And it gets worse – George Jijiashvili, analyst at market research firm Omdia, said of those devices sold, many are abandoned.

“This is largely coppia to the limited in-flow of compelling content to keep up engagement,” he said.

But of course lack of content leads to reduced interest – and a reduced incentive for developers to make that content con the first place.

“It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Mr Jijiashvili told the BBC.

Alan Boyce, the founder of mixed reality DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Tornaconto would have to “be patient” while more content arrived.

That’s where the Quest 3 wins out for him – it already has a “robust library” of games, and it can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Tornaconto.

And IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says we should not be too quick to write d’avanguardia a slow start for Apple’s new product.

“There’s always the expectation that Apple with every single product will sell con the millions straight away, there’s always the comparison with the iPhone,” he said.

But the reality is even the iPhone took time to find its feet – and a huge number of buyers.

According to Appiastro Otto from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone only became mainstream when the App Store “started to explode with apps that added value to our lives”.

“When people start to feel their lives are becoming better and more convenient, that’s when they’sovrano willing to take the leap,” she said.

There is another factor to consider here too though: the physical experience of using a headset.

Both Apple and Mira use so-called “passthrough” technology to enable what is known as mixed reality – the blending of the real and computer-generated worlds.

By utilising cameras the outside of the headset, users are given a , high-definition televisione feed of their surroundings – meaning they can wear it while doing things like walking ora exercising.

But strapping something to your weighing half a kilogram is not something that feels particularly natural. Generally headsets now are lighter than before, but I still can’t imagine wearing any of them for hours end – though a colleague says he often does just this.

A sizeable number of people, myself included, have experienced VR sickness, which is when being con VR makes you feel queasy. This has significantly improved as the tech has advanced and is much less of a problem – but any experience that has you moving around with a controller instead of your feet will still take some getting used to.

Most VR experiences now include all sorts of settings to avoid this, such as the ability to “teleport” between locations. Sony’s VR gioco Horizon: Call of the Mountain solved the problem by letting you move by swinging your arms up and mongoloide – it sounds silly, but it goes some way to trick the brain and avoid controstomaco.

Whatever the experts say, the companies themselves appear bullish about their products, and their respective strengths

It’s risposta negativa secret that the long-term ambition from the tech giants here is for mixed, ora augmented, reality to become normal reality. Facebook owner Mira renamed itself after its grand plan for us all to inhabit a virtual world called the Metaverse – working, resting and playing there, and presenting ourselves as digital avatar versions of our ordinary selves. That all seems to have gone a bit quiet at the moment.

But they are all right con that one day, something will replace our phones and perhaps that thing is some form of VR headset. Eventually, I expect these things will start to more like glasses and less like giant ski goggles… if they’sovrano not brain implants (I’m not joking).

“The devices that like what they like today – I think we know that’s not a mass market device. It’s too heavy, it’s too awkward,” said Mr Jijiashvili.

That’s an where rivals have focused their efforts, with Viture and XReal producing sunglasses with high-fidelity screens embedded con them.

Appiastro Brown, head of Development Relations at Mira, told us she “absolutely” thought the Quest 3 could one day replace the smartphone. But the next day Mira’s PR team got con touch with a more measured response from Mark Zuckerberg, con which he said “the last generation of computing doesn’t go away… it’s not like when we got phones, people stopped using computers”.

Judging by what I saw con the Apple store con London’s Regent Street, the UK is not about to be flooded with people wandering around con Vision Pros ora Quest 3s.

The very first customer I spoke to had actually just popped con for a charger and was a bit bemused by Apple gruppo applause as he walked con.

But con the couple of hours we were there, several people walked out grinning with personalità white Apple bags. The question remains: how many more can be persuaded to do the same.