This article was originally written by Sootoo123
Author / Qiao Zhibin
As early as 2016, when the industry called the "first year of VR", there were already rumors that "Apple is about to launch its own VR or AR devices", but 6 years later, until the end of WWDC 2022 this month, Apple's VR/AR devices still did not show its true face.
Interestingly, the "breaking news" about Apple VR/AR has always presented a spirit of "repeated defeats, repeated defeats", the listing time from 2018 to the end of 2022, every year has been guessed over and over again, and seeing that 2022 is about to pass the halfway point, the industrial chain has not been substantially revealed, and the "listing time" of Apple VR has been "postponed" to 2023.
Even recently, foreign "enthusiastic netizens" even made a set of concept videos called "macOS reality" to imagine the UI interaction for Apple on VR/AR products. In the concept video, a highly technological CG animation depicts that after wearing Apple's headset device, every place in the space becomes an interactive screen, which greatly improves the user's graphics operation experience.
It can be said that the revelations about Apple VR have always been "only heard, not seen". However, Apple VR can get so widespread attention, not only because of Apple's strong brand appeal, but also because it can project the general dissatisfaction of the industry with the development status quo of the VR field today.
VR companies rely on Apple to break the news to "continue life"
Today's VR industry has stepped out of the "VR first year" of 2016, but in recent years, Meta, HTC, Steam and other companies have begun to embark on a steady growth path under the construction of the VR ecosystem. Especially in 2021, the explosion of the concept of "meta-universe" has injected new fuel into the growth of the VR industry, IDC data shows that in 2021, the global augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) headset market increased by 92.1% year-on-year, and shipments reached 11.2 million units, which is the largest shipment growth since 2016, of which VR headset shipments reached 10.95 million units.
However, behind the bright and beautiful sales growth, there is a difficult scripture in every house. The main reason behind it is still that the overall scale of the VR market is too small, in contrast, in 2021, the global smartphone shipments reached 1.3548 billion, the tablet shipments reached 168.8 million units, the PC shipments reached 348.8 million units, and the market share was tens or even hundreds of times the gap, making vr companies limited revenue, it is difficult to offset the continuous investment of enterprises in technology, marketing and other aspects, and fall into a situation of profit difficulties.
In foreign markets, thanks to Facebook's sale of Quest 2 at a price below cost ($299), it has promoted the popularity of VR devices in the consumer market and made it an absolute hegemon in the global VR market share. In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta, which is to borrow the spring breeze of the "meta-universe", so that its VR industry has ushered in a 351.4% growth, and the market share is as high as 75%.
However, the "meta-universe" concept dividend brought by the name change is not lasting, in the 2021 annual report released after the name change, Meta's Reality Labs (reality lab, mainly developing VR headsets, AR glasses and virtual world) financial year operating losses of up to $10.19 billion, not only let people question the development prospects of the VR industry, but also let The Meta stock price plummet by 26.44% in one day. Even so, Meta expects a "significant increase" in operating losses in 2022, with Reality Labs losing nearly $3 billion for the Q1 2022 period, a 62% increase in year-over-year losses.
While Reality Labs was losing money, Mark Lukovsky, the core executive who developed the VR/AR operating system, announced his departure in November 2011, after which Meta had to notify reality Labs employees, the department involved in the development of VR and AR devices, to stop working on the new operating system.
In order to improve the loss situation, Meta also revealed its "fangs" to developers. In April, Meta announced that it would offer some commercialization tools to specific users, allowing them to sell virtual products on Horizon Worlds, such as fashion accessories or pay-per-view services that provide paid access to specific content to other users. However, it is worth noting that Meta charges developers who sell virtual products a commission of up to 47.5%. Ironically, Meta founder Zuckerberg has publicly denounced Apple's App Store share of 30% and helped "metaverse" creators avoid Apple's App Store sharing fees.
Compared with foreign markets, domestic VR companies are smaller in scale, with pico, which ranks second only to Meta in the global market share, and its market share is only 6%. VR companies such as Pico, HTC, NOLO, and Yingchuang Quli have not yet embarked on the road of stable profitability, and in the daily communication with relevant people, they all expressed their expectation that consumer electronics giants such as Apple will join the VR track and open up VR products in consumer cognition through the influence of the brand.
Therefore, Apple's launch of VR products has become a wind to meet new developments in the eyes of the industry, and even if it is just a rumor, it can eat a traffic password that constantly "awakens" the attention of the entire VR industry.
As smart hardware, we very much want to see Apple repeat the success of the Airpods product line in TWS headphones again. In September 2016, Apple officially released its first TWS headset - Airpods, with a true wireless design, a storage box with its own charging function, and functions such as opening the lid, instantly detonated the TWS headset market, and the global shipment volume increased from 0.09 billion units in 2016 to 310 million units in 2021, and the market size increased by more than 30 times in 5 years.
In addition, unlike the current situation that Meta's VR products cannot enter the domestic market, the possibility of Apple's VR products entering the domestic market is much higher than the former, which not only brings an important driving force for the growth of the overseas VR market, but also allows the domestic market to inject growth momentum.
High threshold for content production VR ecology is difficult to see improvement
So, what is the reason why Apple is still reluctant to step into the "meta-universe"?
The first thing that can be ruled out is the problem of the industrial chain. As we all know, the domestic smart hardware manufacturer - Goertek Co., Ltd., is not only a solution provider for Apple's AirPods product line, but also a solution provider for VR devices such as Meta Quest2 and Sony VR, and can currently provide one-stop solutions including VR/AR product design, research and development and manufacturing.
According to the performance report released by Goertek, the company achieved revenue of 78.221 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 35.47% year-on-year; Achieved a net profit of 4.275 billion yuan, an increase of 50.09% year-on-year, mainly due to the company's VR virtual reality, smart wearable and smart wireless headsets and other product sales revenue growth.
As we all know, Apple is a company that pays more attention to the "completion" of innovation than the innovative attributes of products. Although Meta has eaten three-quarters of the global VR market with Quest2, in Apple's eyes, these are "semi-finished products" in VR scenes.
But for now, VR is good enough as a content consumption, but in terms of content production, it still lacks a sufficiently efficient way. For example, the "disaster" of the VR world of entering text through a virtual keyboard, even though it is now possible to enter through speech recognition with an accuracy of up to 98%, users still have to check 100% of the input content to avoid ambiguity.
In terms of space exploration, although VR has been able to use SLAM function to achieve movement in a limited area, and even some VR devices can achieve omnidirectional system positioning, compared with the boundless, limited virtual space, and limited dimensional somatosensory interaction of the virtual space of the meta-universe, it is obvious that it is impossible to completely eliminate the vertigo during movement, which brings limitations to the mobile space.
At present, the content production that can be achieved in VR is the artistic creation realized by artists in the 3D space created by VR. For those developers who develop VR software, they usually create content on a PC and then put it on the VR platform for testing.
Although the VR audio-visual entertainment experience has made great progress under the iteration of hardware technology and the ecological synergy of various platforms, VR products cannot be linked to productivity, and will always be only non-rigid consumer goods, and eventually can only become marginal products in the field of electronic consumer goods.
Apple stepped into the metaverse "undecided" without panic
In the view of Speedway Network, although Apple does not move on the VR device, it is only a matter of time before it enters the door of the meta-universe.
In fact, as early as the beginning of the month, before the WWDC was held, some developers dug out the relevant words "realityOS" in the system code of Apple devices, and speculated that it was an exclusive operating system built for VR or AR devices.
Not only that, Apple also registered the trademark "RealityOS" at the beginning of the year, which further convinced people that Apple's VR/AR terminal devices are getting closer and closer to the market.
But as mentioned earlier, the reason why Apple has never stepped into the "meta-universe" is that it still has to solve three problems.
Looking back at Apple's innovation, from the original Apple I to the "family bucket" of today's iPhone, iPad, Mac and other product lines, every great success is behind the major innovation in interactive technology.
One of the least known, the mice we use widely today, is actually Apple popularizing it across the board. In 1967, Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse, but the early mouse structure was complex and lacked a suitable graphical interface, which was not smooth enough to use. Jobs then approached a local industrial design firm called IDEO, which debuted in Lisa in 1983. In 1984, with the advent of the first Macintosh computer, the graphical user interface + mouse interaction method began to be adopted by more people as a more productive input method.
Since then, Apple has launched many well-known excellent interaction designs, such as the iPod's classic ring wheel interaction, the "reinvented" mobile phone's capacitive screen iPhone, and then to the iPad and Mac gesture operation, Apple watch pressure control (now replaced by long-press operation), Touch Bar replaced the traditional function keys... It can be said that Apple has stood at the forefront of leading the logic of interaction every time.
Therefore, if Apple wants to enter the "metacosm", it must have a "trilogy": first, it must first solve the problem of input efficiency.
To this end, Apple first launched ARKit for AR scene processing at WWDC in 2017, marking the beginning of Apple's related development of three-dimensional technology in layout space. The iPhone X released in the same year was equipped with a 3D structured light module that can capture the depth of the face for the first time, and opened up related attempts from the 3D modeling of the face.
Starting in 2020, Apple has joined LiDAR (lidar) for the first time in the two high-end product lines of iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro. Through LiDAR, users can use it to capture the depth information of the scene, and realize more accurate AR scene recognition capabilities.
Not only that, in 2020, Apple also announced at WWDC that some AirPods product lines will support "spatial audio" technology, which not only provides surround sound effects similar to panoramic sound, but also can calculate the distance between the device and the headset through "calculating audio" to achieve "listening to the position", which is also the only way to achieve immersion in hearing in addition to vision.
But the deeper level is apple in 2017 first launched the A11 Bionic (A11 bionic) chip, so that the chip has neural network computing power, although the NPU design is not Apple's first, but compared to the Android mobile phone market, manufacturers can not fully call the NPU full capacity, Apple's "soft and hard combination" can develop all the performance, can process AI operations with higher energy efficiency, for "computing vision" and "computing audio" to provide a computing power foundation.
It can be said that Apple has carried out a more in-depth layout in terms of vision, hearing, 3D capture, computing power, etc., but today, there is still a lack of a more mature solution to connect all these technologies.
However, at this year's WWDC, we saw some clues in the update of iOS 16, such as the capture of documents directly through the call camera and one-click translation, conversion, and the input method, which realizes the input mode of dictation and keyboard simultaneous typing, improving the efficiency of input and modification, which may provide technical reserves for vr or AR devices to quickly enter information later.
Ecological common development is a core value
Looking at all of Apple's product lines, it is inseparable from the linkage with other products, and this "continuity" of opening up the software and hardware ecology not only brings a more coherent user experience, but also makes the product have a higher user stickiness.
Apple is a technology company focused on consumer electronics, and ultimately it is necessary to generate revenue and profits by selling products. However, in the demonstration of the "macOS reality" concept video, it has almost become a comprehensive replacement for Apple's existing product line, which seriously encroaches on existing products and is obviously not what Apple wants to see.
Therefore, Apple's VR/AR devices are obviously not the "subversives" of existing forms of products, but through the linkage between products, find out the "way of coexistence" and achieve common pull between products.
Finally, after "everything is complete" in software and hardware, it is also necessary to have enough attraction in the content ecology to effectively drive revenue growth in order to allow Apple to take the first step of the "meta-universe".
At present, Apple has Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Arcade and other subscription services, plus App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay and other services, constitute the moat of Apple's software ecology, and its 2022Q1 is as high as 72.6%, the industry's top gross profit margin, an increase of 2.5% year-on-year, an increase of 0.2% month-on-month, and has also become an important part of Apple's profit.
These content ecosystems are currently expected to be applied in VR or AR products, and the prosperity of Apple's ecology will also drive the VR/AR content industry to prosperity.
Finally, Apple, as one of the world's most marketing technology companies, will be more reasonable control of the user's desires, perhaps in Apple's view, now take the first step of the "meta-universe", there is still too much uncertainty, it is better to use more energy for precipitating products, and when the revolutionary interactive technology matures, it will finally usher in a comprehensive outbreak.
The so-called "a few steps slower, a few degrees deeper".