With the hotly anticipated Apple The Vision Pro headset will hit store shelves on Fridayyou’ll probably start seeing more people wearing futuristic glasses, which are supposed to herald the advent of the era of “spatial computing.”
It’s an esoteric kind of technology that Apple executives and their marketing gurus are trying to bring into the mainstream. It avoids other, more widely used terms such as “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” to describe the transformative power of a product that is touted as potentially monumental. iPhone released in 2007.
“We can’t wait for people to experience the magic,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday while discussing Vision Pro with analysts.
The Vision Pro will also be one of Apple’s most expensive products at $3,500, a price at which most analysts predict the company might only sell 1 million or fewer units in its first year. But Apple only sold about 4 million iPhones in the device’s first year on the market and now sells more than 200 million of them annually, so there’s a history of what initially seemed like a niche product morphing into something that becomes confusing in the way people live and work.
If that happens with Vision Pro, references to spatial computing could become as ingrained in modern language as mobile and personal computing, two previous technology revolutions that Apple played a major role in creating.
So what is spatial computing? It is a way of describing the intersection of the physical world around us and the virtual world created through technology, allowing humans and machines to manipulate objects and spaces harmoniously. Solving these problems often involves elements of augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), two subsets of technologies that help enable spatial computing, said Katie Hackl, a longtime industry consultant who now runs an app startup for Vision Pro .
“This is a defining moment,” Hackl said. “Spatial computing will allow devices to understand the world in ways they have never been able to before. “This will change human-computer interaction, and eventually every interface—be it a car or a watch—will become a spatial computing device.”
As a sign of the excitement surrounding Vision Pro, over 600 new apps will be available for use on the headset right away. according to Apple. The range of applications will include a wide selection of TV networks, video streaming services (although Netflix and Google’s YouTube are not listed), video games and various educational opportunities. On the work side, video conferencing service Zoom and other companies that provide online meeting tools have also created apps for Vision Pro.
But Vision Pro could reveal another troubling side of the technology if the use of spatial computing proves so attractive that people start looking at the world differently when they don’t wear a headset and start to believe that life is much more interesting when viewed through glasses. This scenario could worsen the screen addiction that has become ubiquitous since the iPhone’s debut and deepen the isolation that digital addiction tends to cultivate.
Apple is far from the only high-profile technology company working on spatial computing products. For the past few years, Google has been working on 3D video conferencing service “Project Starline” it’s based on “photorealistic” images and a “magic window” so two people sitting in different cities feel like they’re in the same room together. But Starline is still not widely used. Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms has also been selling the Quest headset for years, which can be thought of as a spatial computing platform, although the company has not positioned its device that way until now.
Vision Pro, on the other hand, is backed by a company with the marketing prowess and customer loyalty that tend to set trends.
While it might be considered a breakthrough if Apple were to realize its vision with Vision Pro, the concept of spatial computing has been around for at least 20 years. IN 132 page research paper On this topic, published in 2003 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Simon Greenwald argued that automatic flushing of toilets is a primitive form of spatial computing. Greenwald bolstered his argument by pointing out that the toilet “senses the user’s sideways movement, causing it to flush” and “the space in which the system operates is actual human space.”
The Vision Pro is, of course, much more complex than a toilet. One of the most attractive features of Vision Pro is its high-resolution screens, which can display 3D video of events and people, making it seem as if meetings are happening all over again. Apple has already laid the groundwork for Vision Pro sales by including the ability to record so-called “spatial video” in the premium iPhone 15 models released in September.
Apple’s headset also responds to the user’s hand gestures and eye movements, attempting to make the device resemble another part of human physiology. While wearing the headset, users will also be able to use only their hands to lift and organize an array of virtual desktop screens. looks like a scene with Tom Cruise in the 2002 film Minority Report.
Spatial computing “is a technology that starts to adapt to the user instead of requiring the user to adapt to the technology,” Hackl said. “Everything should be very natural.”
It remains to be seen how natural this might seem if you’re sitting down to dinner with someone else wearing glasses rather than occasionally looking at their smartphone.