“We are going to start putting an entire layer of digital information on the real world.” He promised that in just a few years, mobile AR glasses would allow consumers to access these digital layers everywhere. “In the next few years, humanity is going to go through a shift,” Gribetz told the TED audience. The talk, which is still available online, describes augmented reality as a transformative technology, capable of bringing humanity together and freeing us from the isolation of the mobile phone. But the company didn’t really get much public attention until Gribetz unveiled the second version of his company’s headset during a TED Talk in early 2016. Meta was founded in late 2012, and launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for its first developer kit headset in March of 2013. Variety spoke with numerous sources, including former employees of the company as well as Gribetz himself, to find out what happened. The firm expects sales to remain sluggish this year, with a sales projection of about 11 million of the devices before gradually climbing to 67 million in 2026.īefore taking the wraps of its new goggles, Apple kicked off the event by announcing that the latest models of two high-end computer lines, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, will be powered by a company-designed chip that has already been available in less expensive Macs.The story of Meta’s demise is as much about the augmented and virtual-reality industry as it is about hardware startups, their founders, and their often futile attempts to compete with billion-dollar companies. Since 2016, the average annual shipments of virtual- and augmented-reality devices have averaged 8.6 million units, according to the research firm CCS Insight. But the iPhone wasn’t an immediate sensation, with sales of fewer than 12 million units in its first full year on the market. By comparison, Apple sells more than 200 million of its marquee iPhones a year. Although he expects Apple’s goggles to boast “jaw-dropping” technology, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said he expects the company to sell just 150,000 units during the device’s first year on the market - a mere speck in the company’s portfolio. The anticipation that Apple’s goggles are going to sell for several thousand dollars already has dampened expectations for the product. Magic Leap, a startup that stirred excitement with previews of a mixed-reality technology that could conjure the spectacle of a whale breaching through a gymnasium floor, had so much trouble marketing its first headset to consumers in 2018 that it has since shifted its focus to industrial, health care and emergency uses.ĭaniel Diez, Magic Leap’s chief transformation officer, said there are four major questions Apple’s goggles will have to answer: “What can people do with it? What does this thing look and feel like? Is it comfortable to wear? And how much is it going to cost?” Microsoft also has had limited success with HoloLens, a mixed-reality headset released in 2016, although the software maker earlier this year insisted it remains committed to the technology. The backlash became so intense that people who wore the gear became known as “Glassholes,” leading Google to withdraw the product a few years after its debut. Some of the gadgets deploying the technology have even been derisively mocked, with the most notable example being Google’s internet-connected glasses released more than a decade ago.Īfter Google co-founder Sergey Brin initially drummed up excitement about the device by demonstrating an early model’s potential “wow factor” with a skydiving stunt staged during a San Francisco tech conference, consumers quickly became turned off to a product that allowed its users to surreptitiously take pictures and video. The response to virtual, augmented and mixed reality has been decidedly ho-hum so far. Cook and other Apple executives avoided referring to the metaverse in their presentations, describing the Vision Pro as the company’s first leap into “spatial computing” instead. Photo / APīut the metaverse largely remains a digital ghost town, although Meta’s virtual reality headset, the Quest, remains the top-selling device in a category that so far has mostly appealed to video game players looking for even more immersive experiences. The Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed in a showroom on the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif., at the company's annual developers conference, Monday.
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