Why a mixed reality device from Apple may be a game changer for immersive experiences
Remember the iPhone?
I stumbled across a video posted online the other day showing a line of people who had been seated outside an Apple store in Dallas, TX all night. The video is a news story on a local channel and opens on a what looks to be a teenager at the front of the line.
“Number one,” he says, grinning. He had been there for a while.
Then the camera cuts to a woman in the car, who has just arrived. She has $100,000 in cash. They were there for one reason. To buy an iPhone. The kid wanted one. The woman wanted to buy every one in the store.
It must have only been a few months earlier that Steve Jobs, then chief executive of Apple, stood on stage at a San Fransisco conference wearing a black turtle neck and announced something rather audacious. "Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone," Jobs said.
Last month, it was 16 years ago that the first iPhone was unveiled to the world. It stood apart from what had been on the market at the time. Remember when cellphones had actual buttons? Looking back now they were super ugly - but then the 2000s isn’t known for its taste.
By contrast the iPhone stood apart. It looked simple by comparison to the efforts above. It looked futuristic and bold. It had a multi-touch display with no physical keyboard, and iPhoneOS, a proper mobile operating system, meaning you were effectively running a mini computer in your hands. And people liked it. From 2008 to 2022 it is estimated 2.2 billion iPhones have been sold.
But what you might not remember is that when it was released, the first iPhone was pretty shite.
Last month, I was messaging with an old university friend who had posted about that launch of the first iPhone. It also had no third-party apps whatsoever, and had a few GB of memory.
The first iPhone didn’t have a search function so you couldn’t type in a contact’s name to find it. It also didn’t have the ability to record video via its camera. So that friend of mine and a friend of his founded a company doing just that. A couple of college kids from New Zealand made it possible to make a video with an iPhone.
When he first showed me what you could do with said phone, I was 23 or so and a bit impressed. But an iPhone was expensive and looked more like a status thing rather than a reason to chuck out my Nokia 6310. My friend was more right.
But it was still enough to set off a that revolution in communications that Jobs talked about, one that people didn’t really see coming.
Which is bringing me to my point. For the past year or so all the rumours have been about when Apple is going to launch a product in the immersive space - one that might have a similar effect for the VR/AR space that the iPhone had for telecommunications. What might this company do to revolutionise the way ordinary customers think about communication, entertainment, business in a digital world you can step inside of?
While the company hasn’t officially announced that it is making a play for the industry, its now CEO Tim Cook said in an interview last year that it had a vision for it. Apple has been hiring for positions, particularly in its Music and Fitness apps for content that might make those experiences more enveloping.
Now, it appears there are two impending products that it plans to release.
A Bloomberg report points to a headset product, seven years in the making, that plans to replicate the iPhone operating system - in 3D.
The sheer number of companies betting that the above experience is what is coming next is a little staggering. The bet is that people won’t mind putting on a headset of some kind. Currently that is still not a seamless process. It is also very hard to look cool with a headset on. The bet is that people won’t mind forking out hundreds, and in Apple’s case US$3000 for such a product. And the bet is that the uses for such a product are ubiquitous enough to make some money.
We don’t yet know what the Apple headset - rumoured to be called “Reality Pro” - will look like. However, many designers are already having a go at it.
So, if you cast your mind back to the dark days of plastic buttons on cellphones, when we thought phones were just for calling, texting, playing Snake 2. Or Snake 1. If you cast your mind back to when the iPhone was launched the company it didn’t realise that taking videos with your phone might be an interesting proposition. Fast forward to now where hundred-billion dollar companies have been built on the back of what was then a blind spot for one of the most innovative companies in the world. Maybe that’s sort of where we are now with this kind of technology. We are fumbling around with plastic buttons, waiting for a college kid to take the ball and run with it. Well, that sort of already happened a little while ago - he sold his company to Facebook for US$4 billion.
So will people line up overnight outside a Dallas TX store? Will that same kid be number one? Will that woman who, for some reason, took out $100k cash to buy phones. I’d take that bet.
Oh, but it turned out the store only allowed one phone per customer. So the kid was pretty happy with himself. The woman less so. And it looks the kid (Marc Rebillet) is a musician currently on tour so go check him out!