Vision Pro: As Apple headset arrives in Europe, will virtual reality ever become mainstream?

To get a sense of public interest in the Vision Pro, Apple’s very high-tech and very expensive virtual reality (VR) headset, which finally launched in the UK and Europe on Friday, where better to go than to one of its own stores?

In the past, people have camped outside Apple branches overnight, so desperate were they to get their hands on the tech giant’s latest product.

But 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 today prefer the convenience of pre-ordering.

But perhaps it also tells us something about the question that continues to weigh on the VR headset market: will it ever escape the realm of tech aficionados and become truly mainstream?

To market its product, Apple wants to position it as something you use to do what you already do, only better. Home videos become 3D, panoramic photos stretch from floor to ceiling, 360 degrees around you. Apple keeps reminding me that it calls this “spatial content.” No one else does it. Many are sold on the Vision Pro’s price tag, which is £3,499.

Facebook owner Meta has been following Apple’s approach closely. The company has been in the VR space for a long time. During a recent demonstration of the Meta Quest 3, which is due to be available in the UK in 2023, the team was keen to talk to me about “multitasking” – the ability to use multiple screens at once. In one demonstration, I had a web browser, YouTube and Messenger lined up in front of me. “We’ve always done this, but we’ve never really talked about it,” one Meta employee told me.

And in its latest ad, a man wears a Quest 3 to watch video instructions while building a crib. It may not be the most exciting concept, but it shows how Meta wants people to view its technology.

Apple and Meta are the two major players, but virtual reality is a crowded market: there are already dozens, if not hundreds, of different headsets on the market.

But what unites them all is that none of them have really managed to reach the general public.

Until now, the Vision Pro has only been sold in the United States. Research firm IDC predicts that it will sell fewer than 500,000 units this year.

Meta, which has been on the market longer, also doesn’t release sales data for the Quest, but it’s estimated to have sold around 20 million units worldwide.

Virtual reality headsets are nowhere near as ubiquitous as tablets, and even less so than cell phones.

And it’s getting worse, said George Jijiashvili, an analyst at Omdia, a market research firm, because many of the devices sold are being abandoned.

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

But of course, the lack of content leads to a decrease in interest – and a decrease in the motivation for developers to create that content in the first place.

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

Alan Boyce, founder of mixed reality studio DragonfiAR, warned that early adopters of the Vision Pro would have to “be patient” as they wait for new content to arrive.

That’s where the Quest 3 wins out for itself: it already has a “robust library” of games, and it can perform virtual desktop tasks just like the Vision Pro.

According to Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst at IDC, we should not be too quick to underestimate the slow start of Apple’s new product.

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

But the reality is that even the iPhone took a while to find its feet – and a large number of buyers.

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

“When people start to feel like their lives are getting better and more convenient, that’s when they’re ready to take the leap,” she said.

There is, however, another factor to consider here: the physical experience of using a headset.

Both Apple and Meta use so-called “passthrough” technology to enable what’s known as mixed reality, which is the blending of the real and computer-generated worlds.

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

But strapping a half-kilo helmet to your face is not a particularly natural thing. In general, helmets are lighter now than before, but I still can’t imagine wearing them for hours – although a colleague says he does this often.

A fair number of people, myself included, have experienced VR sickness, which is when being in virtual reality makes you feel nauseous. This has improved dramatically as technology has evolved and is now much less of a problem, but any experience that requires you to move around 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, like the ability to “teleport” from one location to another. Sony’s VR game Horizon: Call of the Mountain solved the problem by letting you move around by swinging your arms up and down. It may sound silly, but it tricks the brain and prevents nausea.

Whatever the experts say, the companies themselves seem optimistic about their products and their respective strengths.

It’s no secret that the tech giants’ long-term ambition is to make mixed, or augmented, reality a normal reality. Facebook owner Meta has rebranded itself after its grand plan to have us all live in a virtual world called the Metaverse, where we could work, rest, and play, and present ourselves as digital avatar versions of ourselves. It all seems to be flying under the radar for now.

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

“Devices that look like they do today – I think we know it’s not a consumer device. It’s too heavy, it’s too bulky,” Jijiashvili said.

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

Melissa Brown, Meta’s head of developer relations, told us she “absolutely” believes the Quest 3 could one day replace the smartphone. But the next day, Meta’s PR team received a more measured response from Mark Zuckerberg, in which he said that “the last generation of computers is not going away… it’s not like when we had phones, people stopped using computers.”

Judging by what I saw at the Apple Store on Regent Street in London, the UK isn’t about to be flooded with people walking around in Vision Pros or Quest 3s.

The very first customer I spoke to had just picked up a charger and was a little taken aback by the applause from Apple staff when he walked in.

But during the few hours we spent there, several people left with big smiles and big white bags of apples. The question remains: how many more people can be convinced to do the same?