Future Vision: Peering Into Apple’s AI And AR Game Plan For The Vision Pro In The Era Of Spatial Computing

Apple always plays the long game, an industry expert told me recently, and I wholeheartedly agree. The company is always looking at the horizon and interpreting what its customers will want and need in the future.

Consider the Apple Watch and the Apple AirPod. Each faced significant skepticism when they were first released, and each went on to be a resounding success. Critics said the Apple Watch would never take off; now it’s worn by everyone from Anna Wintour to Jay-Z. They said that no one would ever pay for AirPods; over 90 million pairs were sold during the 2021 holiday season alone.

Vision Pro, Apple’s new spatial computing headset, is perfectly poised to follow this path. Many in the media have given the headset mixed reviews, but those reviews underestimate its extraordinary potential. Vision Pro is an extremely impressive supercomputer that sees what its user sees and learns from the world. It’s also a stepping stone and a portal into a new form of computing that combines groundbreaking technologies into a single wearable device.

Even though reports in media point to a reduction in the number of devices that will be available next year and pushing back the date for more consumer friendly devices, Apple will continue to work on the next computing platform and how we will engage with technology in new ways. To better understand the revolutionary potential of Vision Pro, let’s take a closer look at the device — and at how it fits into Apple’s highly successful long-game strategy.

What Is The Vision Pro, Exactly?

Apple Vision Pro is a wearable spatial computing headset. Specifically, the company says, it’s a “revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, while allowing users to stay present and connected to others.”

Vision Pro combines cutting-edge AI and augmented reality (AR) technologies with the kind of sleek, streamlined UI we’ve come to expect from generations of iPhones and MacBooks. It features a spatial operating system (the new visionOS) and a 3D user interface that makes digital content appear to be present in the user’s physical space.

Instead of handheld controllers, Apple uses gestural tracking. Behind the sleek, curved glass lens, you can browse through apps simply by looking at them. You can navigate through content by tapping your fingers or flicking your wrist. You can even control how transparent or opaque the display is, which can translate to how present or immersed you seem to be in the device.

The result is both a streamlined user experience and the most advanced piece of consumer tech ever created.

How Vision Pro Reflects Apple’s Long-Game Strategy

Apple’s blueprint is easy to sum up: Imagine the future, and then steadily build that future through iterative releases. By thinking about new ways to engage with technology and understand where consumer needs are heading, the company is able to generate its innovative visions for the future. It then executes those visions by designing highly innovative, disruptive products that the market first questions, then reluctantly accepts, then eagerly consumes.

Right now, Vision Pro is in the very early stage of raising consumer awareness. There’s still significant work to be done to get the public on board with spatial computing, and even Apple isn’t immune from this challenge.

But Apple’s goal isn’t to immediately sell a hundred million headsets. They’ve admitted that Vision Pro is still experimental, and they’ve made it clear that we’re still years away from where this technology will ultimately end up. Rather, Apple’s goal is to plant the seeds for a future in which AI and AR technologies, accessed through a spatial computing device, are part of our everyday technology.

Apple products are usually considered revolutionary in hindsight, but their model for new products is actually evolutionary. That is, the first releases tend to be transitional devices to prime the market and entice early adopters. It’s only after a few design generations that most consumers get on board

It’s also worth remembering that Apple already has all the ingredients it needs for success. It has a massive existing retail network. (The company has already announced a new App Store for Vision Pro apps.) It has a global music, movie, entertainment, and sports fitness ecosystem to complement its hardware devices, and that ecosystem segments successfully. And it has an excellent track record of entering a new market and persuading that market to wear its technologies. It also has an extensive developer network eager and ready to create content for their ecosystem.

Vision Pro doesn’t need to be a slam dunk yet. It just needs to set the stage for future success.

What Are The Possibilities Of Apple Vision Pro?

At this early stage, there are already signs that Vision Pro will be more successful than similar projects by other tech giants. The concept of spatial computing is far less confusing than Metaverse, and the Apple Vision Pro is far more buzzy than rival XR headsets like devices released in the past by HTC Vive, Microsoft, Meta, Samsung and more. It might not be something that you would wear in public yet, but the fact that you could already sets it above the competition.

But the future that Vision Pro suggests is even more exciting. As the headset becomes more widely available and accepted, it will open us up to new ways of experiencing reality.

For our personal lives, Vision Pro will bring more immersive forms of entertainment, such as video games that aren’t limited to the boundaries of a display and TV shows that surround you in the action. It will also open up more immersive forms of communication, like FaceTime calls where the other participants are arrayed life-size around your room.

For the workplace, Vision Pro promises to be transformative. It will offer new tools, like more dynamic video communication and enhanced multitasking capabilities, to help remote workforces collaborate. Since it places few limits on the size of the user’s field of view (Apple describes it as “an infinite canvas”), it will be useful for highly visual industries. It will likely also create new applications and use cases as it evolves, including in fields like education and healthcare.

More broadly, Apple’s headset will propel the field of sensory design forward. No longer will we need to type or even speak into our devices; instead, we’ll direct them with our natural gestures and eye movements. The result will be a better understanding of human perceptual experience and more advanced multisensory technologies.

Vision Pro will also bring new advancements in immersive design. Museums, which already embraced virtual reality (VR) technology during the pandemic, are likely to use technologies like Apple’s to enhance their visitor experiences. Art galleries will be able to push the boundaries on exhibitions, and performers will be able to create all-enveloping concerts, theater experiences, and more.

Lastly, Vision Pro will pave the way for new knowledge delivery systems, information management systems, and even new data types. Take, for instance, the neural radiance fields (NeRF) used to render its 3D scenes from 2D images. In less than three years, NeRF has gone from being a research project to underpinning a major consumer device.

The just-released software developers kit (SDK) for Vision Pro suggests further technological possibilities like Visual Search, which can not only scan and identify objects in your surroundings but also interact with hard-copy text by translating it, copying it into documents, and more. And this is likely only the beginning of the machine learning and spatial computing innovations we’ll see Apple leveraging in the next few years.

AI And XR Are The Long Game

With new products in AR, VR, and AI coming out every month, it might not seem like the sector is following Apple’s model. But the recent advancements we’re seeing in AR, VR, and XR (called XR in the aggregate, for Extended Reality) are also part of a long-game strategy. In many cases, the technologies underpinning the top platforms have been in the works for years.

The very first VR technology was the 1950s Sensorama, a device that displayed stereoscopic 3D films with body tilting, stereo sound, mechanical wind, and even aromas. By the 1980s and 1990s, NASA was debuting various VR systems, some of which offered early haptic feedback through head-mounted devices and gloves.

We’ve come a long way since then, but XR companies are still benefiting from an iterative approach. When companies regularly release new product versions, they do more than just generate hype; they also gain valuable input from users, creators, and developers. This helps them refine their understanding of XR’s limitations and zero in on its most exciting possibilities.

Apple’s approach to Vision Pro is following the same model. The company has already set up the world’s largest AR-platform, with thousands of AR apps available on the App Store. Now, the responses to this first version of Vision Pro will help Apple see exactly which AR capabilities to optimize in its next-gen headsets.

It’s a long game, in other words, that drives both present-day adoption and future innovation.

New Realities On The Horizon

We’ll know more about the initial success of Vision Pro once it becomes available in early 2024. But even then, we’ll still be several years out from seeing the full picture.

For now, consider how many Apple products are already in your household. Do you have an iPhone, a MacBook, and a pair of AirPods? Perhaps a family iPad and Apple TV as well? Adding a spatial computing device to the mix might seem unlikely now, but most of us forget that these other devices once seemed equally unlikely — and that Apple’s vision has proven time and again to be clear-sighted.

Today, we stand on the threshold of technologies that are likely to change our perceptions of not only spatial computing but also the world as a whole. It’s not a stretch to imagine that spatial computing technology could usher in a screenless, post-smartphone future, or that that technology could be as ubiquitous in ten years as smartphones are now.

And who better to usher in this change than the long-game experts themselves? With Apple’s laser focus on transformation, it’s safe to say we might all be seeing each other through a Vision Pro lens sooner than we think, despite delays. How we engage with tech is changing and spatial computing is an evolutionary technology that will be accelerated by revolutionary technologies like AI and AR.