Apple’s Mixed Reality headset will most likely be unveiled at WWDC 2023. After years of conjecture, it appears that the corporation is finally ready to discuss this new product area that it is poised to enter. While we’ve heard a lot about this upcoming device, Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told GQ that he was wrong about the importance of AR glasses and how this technology could improve our lives in the future.
“If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection,” Cook states. “It could empower people to achieve things they couldn’t achieve before. We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it, and all of a sudden, we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it.”
When we consider the potential features of Apple’s Mixed Reality headset, this comment makes even more sense. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman earlier stated that Apple’s headset would provide a virtual reality-like FaceTime experience. The one-on-one conversation will “realistically render a user’s face and full body in virtual reality.” It allows two people to communicate and feel as if they are in the same room. Additional users will be represented by an icon or a Memoji.
While AR/VR offerings are still waiting for a breakthrough moment, GQ reminds Apple’s CEO of a comment he made about Google Glass, in which Tim Cook said at the time that he didn’t think people would want to use an AR glass because it would be intrusive and not provide a good user experience; he now says:
“My thinking always evolves. Steve taught me well: never to get married to your convictions of yesterday. To always, if presented with something new that says you were wrong, admit it and go forward instead of continuing to hunker down and say why you’re right.”
Surprisingly, Apple’s own headset appears to be less than perfect as well. According to rumours, it will have terrible battery life, and the operating system will take some time to evolve.
