The Relentless, Halting March of Immersive Tech
The excitement around Apple’s entry into the Mixed Reality space is palpable. There’s a buzz of expectations that this will be the turning point for XR things to finally land a solid product market fit. If anyone can do it, Apple can. Right?
But even though Apple has market-making superpowers, the eventual breakthrough success of XR will rely on more than just one company’s dominance.
If the last 30-year history of immersive tech’s relentless but often halting march of progress provides any clue, we are on the right track, but we’re not there yet.
Two things have contributed friction to the adoption of XR: a misalignment between tech maturity and use cases, and issues around social adoption of wearable tech. Together, these friction points have created a situation where solutions are presented, people get excited, some adoption occurs, and things stall. It’s happened over and over and will likely continue, even with an Apple product in the mix.
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I’ve been attracted to ideas about mixed reality since I was in High School. There was a brief and wonderful moment in the 1990s when virtual reality made its commercial debut. I never actually tried a 90s VR headset–I was just a kid–but the idea behind this technology had punctured the zeitgeist and I was excited about it. I did manage to find a book called *Virtual Reality* (heavy on primitive 3d graphics) and it set my imagination free to run wild with all the possibilities.
There were concurrent themes around Cyberpunk and the emerging World Wide Web happening in those days as well. Snow Crash and The Matrix painted dystopian visions for what a life spent “plugged in” would look like, and for the most part, we were on board and ready for it.
And then nothing really happened.
The VR headsets of that day were pretty basic: clunky hardware and visuals, and limited use cases. It’s not surprising looking back that this effort fizzled.
Except at the time, the primitive hardware and visuals were state of the art. Even if it wasn’t actually that good, we wanted to believe and we settled for a proof of concept.
And we have been jumping from mixed reality POC to POC ever since.
In my professional career, I’ve seen or been party to creative pitches using The Minority Report as a reference more times than I’d like to admit. In a way, the floating UI that Tom Cruise operates serves as a marker for all things interactive and experiential. A sort of wish for where we might end up. Fed this kind of inspiration, driving our eagerness to live in a connected world, we continue to chase solutions and use cases.
We had the will, but not the way. The relentless march halted.
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For a while in the 2000s, things were quiet. VR had hit a wall based on the tech of the time, and the use cases stopped.
More than a decade later, Google Glass came onto the scene and we had a new vision for augmented reality. This is how it happens — technology continues to evolve during these lulls, and eventually, entirely new things are possible.
Google Glass felt very futuristic, an entirely new category of device in an era where the smartphone was still new. But Glass kind of came and went, its commercial failure was attributed in part to the high cost, but there was also an immediate stigma about wearing a camera in a social setting. Too bad for Google, but to my mind, Glass actually fought the first battle for the social acceptance of AR. Disruption is practically heralded as a core value in tech, but the road to disruption has casualties. Maybe humans needed to reject the idea of persistent wearable AR first along the road to everyone eventually embracing it.
In this way, the halt after Google Glass was due to social rejection more than it was a technological limit. But it was a halt nonetheless, and for a while, I wasn’t aware of anything happening in immersive tech, mixed reality or otherwise.
As a retrospective, I’m missing plenty of specifics, but to my mind, AR and VR trajectories are kind of pitted against each other. They run in alternating, parallel tracks of development and adoption. And so with the lull following Google Glass, VR was back up to bat.
The Oculus Rift signaled the next beginning of an era, but the device was heavy, large, expensive, and tethered to a computer — not an ideal use case. Then Samsung Gear VR made things really easy. You could push spherical images, videos, or games onto your phone, put your phone into a Gear VR, and be ready to go. I first encountered this magic working in architecture, where we were visualizing 360° renderings in VR. A simple phone placed into a headset was enough to unlock a truly immersive experience. There was even a cardboard version, thanks again Google.
Things became even cooler for me personally when we used Microsoft Hololens to stand up geospatial renderings over a construction site. Project owners were making better decisions earlier in the process by visualizing the design in situ. In this way, I found my personal preference in AR. The blend of the real world and digital content is where it’s at, as far as I’m concerned.
In those days we spoke in whispers about Magic Leap, a real glass-based AR solution shrouded in secrecy.
But to be honest, for me, the hero of mixed reality has been Snap. Their AR filters and Lens Studio et. all is a triumph of user creation enablement through an innovative product. Brilliance.
At the same time AR was rising via social media filters on Snapchat and Instagram, VR seemed to be barely fighting for a chance. The HTC Vive offered a more powerful experience but required a tether to a computer. Some amazing VR experiences were created but there was a limited audience because there were few headset owners out there.
IMAX endeavored to get into the game on the assumption that VR needed to be destination-driven: People would go to a place to do VR. They created their own extra-wide headset and licensed content with a vision of retrofitting every multiplex in America, but the premise of social VR doesn’t really work. It’s kind of like Karaoke but you do it alone, one at a time.
The struggle to find a product-market fit affects AR, too. We still don’t have a mature glass-based AR headset. In every case, the field of view is too small, but even forgiving that, there are real challenges in delivering a realistic focal depth in AR.
Eyeballs compress in different ways to see different depths of field and delivering digital content that sits right for the eye at all times is hard. That’s why a passthrough device like Vision Pro is considered easier to do first.
Glass-based AR does have some success stories, but they are limited to specialized use cases. Allowing for both the field of view and spatial depth issues, AR today is excellent as an industrial, technician-based solution. Google Glass, Microsoft Hololens, and other innovators like Mira have found success in this space, where the more glamorous entertainment-based use cases have faltered.
This is important because these use case-specific solutions offer a functional benefit that succeeds despite the tech and social limitations. That’s one way to drive progress. In a similar way, phone-based AR has succeeded because the use cases are fun and disposable moments of delight–not trying to do too much.
So we’re here today, having come so far, and the elephant in the room is Apple Vision Pro. Is Apple’s timing right? Is the tech mature? Will it be socially acceptable to be seen wearing one of these, and if so will people be willing to interact with you while you’re plugged in? I don’t know the answers but I doubt this is the final break point. If, on the other hand, this moment is treated as a step towards getting to a bold and immersive future, maybe we’re on the right track.
But it’s not like Apple exists in a vacuum. And I actually want to love on Meta for a minute to wrap things out.
I can’t help feeling some admiration for Zuckerberg for being such a leader in this race, and for embracing a hacker mentality about it. Horizon Worlds is truly a playful space, and the games marketplace is full of fun and innovative experiences with lots of scrappy developers pushing the standard mechanics. (In my home, we’re pretty into Gorilla Tag, which was bootstrapped by a solo developer in Unity, and has incredible, fresh movement mechanics.) The flexibility of the Quest publishing ecosystem means that innovation can thrive even as the tech continues to mature. Nobody thinks Meta Horizon World or the Workrooms variant will replace the way we play and work, but that’s okay because they’re positioned as a stepping stone.
And I don’t doubt that Apple will help the wide-scale adoption of immersive technologies in our daily lives. But seeing an Apple Vision Pro being worn out in the wild will require some adjustments to social norms.
We’ll get there eventually.
