Summary: New story?
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research company, held an online "Spring Update" event.
Overall, the event is divided into two main parts: the launch of the new flagship model "GPT-4o", and the provision of more features in ChatGPT for free.
OpenAI unveiled its new flagship model "GPT-4o" at the event, which "can perform inferences on audio, visual, and text in real-time." According to reports, the new model enables ChatGPT to handle 50 different languages while improving speed and quality.
In terms of technology, this conference is still quite shocking, and some people think that it will accelerate the application of AI.
And just at this time, it is planned to introduce OpenAI's large model technology in the iPhone this year. With this deal, Apple will be able to offer a "chatbot" powered by ChatGPT as part of the AI capabilities in iOS18.
This can't help but be reminiscent of whether the next MR and Apple conferences will stimulate the fruit chain.
Apple-related events
Mark Gurman, a well-known Apple whistleblower, revealed on Monday that Apple is ready to sell the VisionPro headset in countries and regions outside the United States to boost shipments of such products.
Retail store employees from all over the world have flown to Cupertino for a four-day VisionPro training course, which began last week.
Apple held a similar training course before the launch of the VisionPro in the United States, covering how to demonstrate to customers and answer customer questions.
Apple has not yet announced the exact launch date of the VisionPro in other countries and regions, but people familiar with the matter said that the company plans to bring the VisionPro to the international market for the first time after the WWDC24 Worldwide Developers Conference.
This year's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference will take place June 10-14.
In addition, according to the website of the China Quality Certification Center, Apple's headset product VisionPro has passed China's 3C certification. The applicant for the certificate is Apple Inc. of the United States, and the manufacturer is Likai Precision Technology (Kunshan) Co., Ltd.
For Apple, especially the MR market, there is an unknown scoring period, mainly because of the previous 30,000 MR cost performance problems.
However, some media have recently said that it seems that the MR direction has found a real application scenario, and for the XR industry, if VisionPro can really fully tap the potential of the B-end market, it will undoubtedly push up the dimension of XR market development again.
And this is exactly what Apple is currently doing, some time ago Apple officially announced several major areas of VisionProB applications, covering medical health, education and training, design collaboration, etc. Starting from the fields of medical care, education, design, especially the medical and health field, it has been the direction of XR exploration for many years.
MR industry chain
Apple's first device, VisionPro, was released, defining "spatial computing as a general term for "AR/VR/MR", marking the beginning of the commercialization of a 3D computer ecosystem based on spatial computing.
The core logic of Apple MR:
1. The difference between MR and AR and VR: VR equipment cannot see the outside world, suitable for watching movies and games, AR is augmented reality and can see the outside world, MR is a combination of AR and VR, and you can choose to turn on two modes.
2. Display, silicon-based OLED: The screen of VR and MR products has undergone an iteration from LCD to Fast-LCD, and then uses LCD+MiniLED as a backlight scheme, and now the silicon-based OLED screen used by Apple for the first time has an 8K resolution path and a brightness of up to 3500 nits (Fast-LCD brightness is about 1000 nits), and it is self-luminous.
3. Chip: The main processor of Apple VisionPro is M2 chip, which is priced at about $110-120; The secondary processor is mainly used for visual graphics processing, about 50-60 dollars; ROM from Kioxia and Samsung, priced at about $20-25, and RAM, mainly from companies such as Samsung, costs around $30; WIFI and Bluetooth are supplied by Skyworks and Broadcom at around $7 and $2-3, respectively; The PMIC (Power Management Chip) is supplied by Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics at an overall cost of less than $5.
4. Interaction: including VST (camera perspective), camera, sensor (eye tracking sensor, face tracking sensor, torso tracking sensor, gesture tracking sensor, IMU sensor, etc.) and vibration motor.
5. Optical components: In the past, the optical devices used in VR equipment were mainly Finier lenses, which are developing towards the Pan-cake route, and the companies that can make Pan-cake products include Yangming Optics, Goertek, AAC Technology, O-film and Sunny Optics
6. Structural parts: including heat dissipation modules, sealing tapes, foams, shells, connectors, batteries and packaging, etc.
7. Testing and assembly: The core difficulty of MR assembly is testing, most of the test equipment is custom-developed, and the main testing links include Pan-cake testing, silicon-based OLED inspection, IPD focus detection, optical coating testing, and optical and facial tracking testing.
In addition, according to the expectations of the industry chain, the second-generation MR is expected to be launched at the end of 25 or early 26, and the price is expected to drop by 30%-50% with the cost reduction of MicroOLED and other links; Combined with comfort optimization, camera/diopter adjustment upgrades, and AI additions, sales are expected to increase to millions or even tens of millions of units, and core manufacturers may be expected to usher in flexible growth!