Vision quest

Apple finally reveals its XR hardware as Meta scrambles to hail the arrival of a revised Quest

Just as expected, Apple’s entry into the world of extended reality (or XR, encapsulating both VR and AR) diverges from the path trodden by the likes of Meta and Valve. However, rather than presenting something that gets closer to the construction ideal of a pair of spectacles, the company’s Vision Pro hardware, unveiled at its WWDC event in June, turns out to be almost as obtrusive as any other headset we’ve been invited to strap to our faces in recent years.

And it has to be: in order to deliver the kind of performance required to facilitate its unique feature set, the Vision Pro headset is loaded with more technology than has ever been crammed into such a device, with Apple’s M2 silicon working in concert with its new R1 chip, which is designed specifically to process input from the hardware’s sensors, mics and 12 individual cameras. It needs so many of the latter partly because of the system’s control interface, which eliminates additional physical controllers in favour of parsing movements of your head, hands and eyes.