Apple’s mixed reality headset will mark the beginning of the end for screens as we’ve come to know them
Next week Apple is announcing their newest platform play — a mixed reality headset called Apple Glass, Glasses, or maybe View. The price tag is expected to be high and the initial use cases might be more novelty than necessity, but that’s okay, in fact it’s more than okay.
I think AR and VR will change the world forever - the Internet, how we experience entertainment, shop online, and communicate with friends and family is all going to transform. I don’t say this because I think it’s going to happen, I have so much conviction that it is, I see it as more of a time horizon issue than anything else. Like most new platforms — only the early adopters will get onboard and many will scoff at the price tag and lack of practicality, heck that’s what happened with the iPhone originally.
“The iPhone isn’t the future. It isn’t a revolutionary mobile device ushering in a new era,” (Source — The Street)
When I got my first iPhone I can still remember my parents telling me they’d never have one — that was for tech geeks like me, they just needed a phone to make phone calls. Of course now, just like everyone else I know — my parents have an iPhone, and yes, they use it for a lot more than phone calls.
I expect Apple Glasses to see similar criticism, and for years it might just be a high end toy, until it isn’t. People are spending over $1,000 on a phone from Apple, and $2,000+ on a computer — if this replaces both of them (not next week but eventually) why wouldn’t people buy it? The thing is, I just don’t see a future where twenty years from now we experience computers, entertainment, social media, all in 2D. I think the world is going to become a much more visual, interactive, and yes — 3D experience.
You can’t have a 3D experience on a 2D screen, sure you can simulate one, but that’s very different. Walk into a clothing store and compare this to their flat, 2D, eCommerce website and you’d be hard pressed to say the two are even remotely similar experiences. In the future, they absolutely can be — but we’ll have to get rid of these pesky screens we’ve put just about everywhere.
Your phone screen, your laptop screen, that fancy curved desktop monitor, oh and that TV you had mounted on your living room wall — gone, all gone. We will be donning glasses and experiencing digital content in AR and VR, and sure not next week, but sooner than I believe most people think.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Apple releases their first mixed reality headset and poof — the trend takes off. Instead, just like they’ve done in the past with products like the iPhone and Watch, they’re planting the seed. It’s not hard to imagine a not-too-distant future where Apple, Meta, and Google all have mixed reality headsets and are competing for a growing market.
An exciting road lies ahead. Now it’s up to all of us to decide where on the adoption curve we land — you don’t have to be an early adopter, that can be prohibitively expensive. Heck, you don’t need to be in the early majority, but eventually, just like the telephone, the TV, the Internet, and the iPhone — you’ll be there, it’s just a matter of time. And this time all those screens you’ve come to know and love - they’ll be but a distant memory.
