Vision Pro: With Apple’s headset arriving in Europe, will VR ever become mainstream?

To get a sense of the general interest in the Vision Pro, Apple’s high-tech and expensive virtual reality headset – which finally launched in the UK and Europe on Friday – where better to head than an Apple Store?

In the past, people would camp outside Apple branches all night, desperate to get their hands on the tech giant’s latest products.

When I went to its central London branch on Friday morning, there was only a small group, mostly men, waiting for the doors to open.

This is partly because people these days prefer the convenience of pre-ordering.

But perhaps it also tells us something about the question that still looms over the VR headset market: Will it be able to escape the realm of tech enthusiasts and become truly mainstream?

Apple’s plan for a product revolution is to position it as a product you can use to do the things you already do—but better. Home videos become 3D, and panoramas stretch from floor to ceiling, 360 degrees around you. Apple keeps reminding me that it calls this “spatial content.” No one else does. But many people lament the price of the Vision Pro— A whopping £3,499.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, has been watching Apple’s approach closely. It has been working on VR for a long time. At a recent demo of the Meta Quest 3, which will be available in the UK from 2023, the team was very keen to talk to me about “multitasking” – having multiple screens running at once. In the demo, I had a web browser, YouTube and Messenger in a row in front of me. “We’ve always done this, but we’ve never really talked about it,” a Meta employee told me.

And In her latest adA man wears a Quest 3 to watch video instructions while building a crib. It may not be the most interesting concept, but it shows how much Meta wants people to see its technology.

Apple and Meta are the big players but the VR market is crowded — there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different headsets already out there.

But what unites them all is that none of them have managed to break into the mainstream.

So far, the Vision Pro is only on sale in the US — and research firm IDC expects fewer than 500,000 units to be sold this year.

Meta, which has been in the market longer, has not released Quest sales data either but it is believed to have sold around 20 million units worldwide.

Virtual reality devices are still far from being as widespread as tablets, let alone mobile phones.

And it gets worse — many of the devices sold are being abandoned, said George Gigiashvili, an analyst at market research firm Omedia.

“This is largely due to a limited flow of engaging content to maintain engagement,” he said.

But a lack of content certainly leads to lower interest — and thus lower incentive for developers to create that content in the first place.

“It’s a chicken and egg situation,” Gigiashvili told the BBC.

Alan Boyce, founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Pro will have to “be patient” as more content arrives.

And here’s where the Quest 3 wins for him – it already has a “robust library” of games, and can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Pro.

IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says we shouldn’t be too quick to write off Apple’s new product’s slow start.

“There’s always the expectation that Apple with every product will sell millions of dollars right away, and there’s always the comparison with the iPhone,” he said.

But the reality is that even the iPhone took some time to find its feet — and gain a significant number of buyers.

According to Melissa Otto of S&P Global Market Intelligence, the iPhone only became popular when the App Store “started filling up with apps that added value to our lives.”

“When people start to feel that their lives are better and more comfortable, that’s when they’re ready to take that step,” she said.

There’s another factor to consider here as well: the physical experience of using the headset.

Both Apple and Meta use so-called “pass-through” technology to enable so-called mixed reality — a blend of the real and computer-generated worlds.

By using cameras on the outside of the headset, users get a live, high-definition video feed of their surroundings — meaning they can wear them while doing things like walking or exercising.

But strapping a pound of something to your face is not natural at all. Overall, the headphones are lighter than before, but I can’t imagine wearing any of them for hours at a time—though one of my colleagues says he often does.

Many people, myself included, have experienced VR sickness, the feeling of nausea when in virtual reality. This has improved dramatically as technology has advanced, and is much less dangerous – but any experience that involves moving with a controller instead of your feet will still take some getting used to.

Most VR experiences now include all sorts of settings to avoid this problem, such as the ability to “teleport” between locations. Sony’s VR game Horizon: Call of the Mountain solved this problem by letting you move by moving your arms up and down—it may sound silly, but it goes some way to tricking your brain and avoiding nausea.

Regardless of what the experts say, the companies themselves seem optimistic about their products and their strengths.

It’s no secret that the long-standing ambition of the tech giants here is for mixed or augmented reality to become the norm. Meta, the owner of Facebook, has rebranded itself after its grand plan for us all to inhabit a virtual world called the Metaverse — working, resting and playing there, presenting ourselves as digital avatars of our regular selves. That all seems to have cooled down a bit for now.

But they’re right that one day something will replace our phones, and that something will probably be a virtual reality headset. Eventually, I expect these things to start looking more like glasses and less like giant ski goggles… if not brain implants (I kid you not).

“I think the devices that look the way they do today are not devices intended for the mass market. They are too heavy and too strange,” Gigiashvili said.

This is where competitors have focused their efforts, with Viture and XReal producing sunglasses with built-in high-resolution displays.

Melissa Brown, Meta’s head of development relations, told us she “absolutely believes” the Quest 3 could one day replace smartphones. But the next day, Meta’s PR team reached out with a more measured response from Mark Zuckerberg, who said, “The last generation of computing is not going away… It’s not like when we got phones, people stopped using computers.”

And based on what I saw at the Apple Store on Regent Street in London, the UK won’t be packed with people walking around wearing Vision Pros or Quest 3s.

The first customer I spoke to had just walked in to buy a charger and was a bit surprised by the applause from Apple employees when he walked in.

But during the two hours we spent there, many people walked out, smiling, carrying large white bags with the Apple logo on them. The question remains: How many can be persuaded to do the same?