Apple’s newly announced virtual reality headset promises to blend the real world with video and audio, ranging from immersive FaceTime video chats to watching films and shows on a huge virtual movie screen. But even the company that pioneered the modern smartphone may not have great expectations for its $3499 device at a time when rival Silicon Valley giants such as Meta and Microsoft have struggled to make VR go mainstream.

“Apple’s headset is both experimental and expensive,” says , a historian of technology at Virginia Tech. “The same was true for many other eventually successful devices, including the iPhone, but those technologies were opening up new spaces, whereas Apple is entering well-trod ground where others have failed.”

Apple’s Vision Pro headset presented at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on 5 June is designed to deliver blended reality experiences for many familiar apps made by Apple, Microsoft and other companies that mix virtual and physical spaces for work and entertainment. The headset also provides a “see-through” experience that shows the wearer’s eyes and allows for interaction with other people in the physical world even while the wearer is interacting with virtual experiences. It even creates a digital persona to replicate the appearance of the wearer for use in FaceTime conversations and other experiences.

Scheduled to become available for purchase in early 2024, the headset is connected by a woven cable to a pocket battery that supports up to 2 hours of use and supposedly runs almost silently and at a comfortable temperature. It also contains a new Apple computer chip called R1 that processes information from 12 cameras, five sensors and six microphones in an attempt to eliminate sensor lag. The headset can be controlled solely through the wearer’s visual gaze, voice and small hand gestures such as pinching and flicking motions.

Silicon Valley has been trying to make some version of XR – the catchall phrase for virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality – go mainstream for decades, says , author of the book Making a Metaverse That Matters. Apple’s Vision Pro headset is technically a mixed reality device that enables wearers to access immersive virtual experiences while still seeing the outside world.

Part of the challenge for XR headsets has been the steep cost, along with the physical discomfort and awkwardness of using bulky headsets. But another significant issue that has been overlooked by many tech companies involves the many people who experience which is like motion sickness, says Au.

Free newsletter

Sign up to The Weekly

Sign up to newsletter

Despite having so far, Meta has struggled to keep VR users returning to the virtual experiences available in its previously touted . Shortly before Apple’s headset announcement, Meta CEO his company’s upcoming Quest 3 VR headset that also offers a mixed reality experience.

Meanwhile, Microsoft had sold just 300,000 units of its HoloLens headset as of late 2022 while similarly failing to gain traction for its own .

Virtual reality and other XR headsets failed to gain significant traction even during the pandemic when millions of people stayed closer to home – global by more than 12 per cent between 2021 and 2022. “The base of VR users remains small and is still almost wholly in video games and other forms of entertainment,” says Vinsel.

Given that backdrop, Apple has projected sales of less than 100,000 units of its headset and total production of potentially just 300,000 headsets, according to . If the headset doesn’t sell well even based on those modest goals, Apple could still “present it as a prototype or as an early adopter thing” and market it primarily for business customers, says Au.

Apple’s headset development has cost the company more than $1 billion per year, according to . But as the world’s largest company and profits of almost $100 billion in 2022, the company can afford to bet on a multibillion dollar VR experiment even if it completely fails.

“They could throw a billion dollars at research in VR and not even notice it,” says Au. “That’s like the change of their couch.”

Using a mobile phone while driving is dangerous. Trying to catch Pokémon at the wheel could be even worse. According to a new analysis, the mobile game Pokémon Go may have contributed to nearly 150,000 traffic accidents, 256 deaths and economic costs of $2 billion to $7.3 billion in the first 148 days after its introduction to the US.

These figures come from extrapolating the effects of Pokémon Go on Tippecanoe county in Indiana to the whole of the US, so should be taken with a pinch of salt. However, even in this locale, there was a substantial increase in traffic accidents following the game’s launch. The researchers say they were able to attribute 134 crashes, two of them fatal, across the county to Pokémon Go between July and November 2016, out of a total of 286.

“We used the most conservative assumptions that were supported by the data. We are quite confident of the extrapolation and, if anything, we are understating the effect,” says at Purdue University, who carried out the study with colleague John McConnell, also at Purdue.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality app that adjusts a person’s surroundings through the lens of their smartphone camera. A player at the right location can see cartoony creatures called Pokémon, as well as finding PokéStops where they can restock supplies or Gyms where their Pokémon can battle those of other players.

Clusters of crashes

Because battles at Gyms take so long, it is essentially impossible to be driving and also battling. However, PokéStops can be used quickly and so someone might be able to top up their supplies while still at the wheel. Faccio and McConnell’s analysis found that traffic accidents in Tippecanoe county were clustered around PokéStops but not Gyms, suggesting aspects of the game were leading to dangerous driving.

This clustering allowed the pair to make the association to Pokémon Go, but it is likely that other apps are just as bad. Up until 2011, the had experienced a 25-year decline. This has since reversed and some have suggested that mobile phones are to blame, but they were widespread well before the upturn. Could apps be the problem?

In 2008, Apple’s App Store had 800 apps with 10 million downloads. By 2011, this had shot up to 500,000 apps and 18 billion downloads, and has continued growing at a rapid pace. Chatting on a mobile phone while driving is distracting enough, but people using apps may have just been enough to reverse the trend.

Though the figures seem shocking, the study’s methods seem reliable. “The statistical analyses they performed appear to be sound, correctly applied and actually statistically significant,” says at the University of Michigan.

However, he is sceptical about how applicable the findings are for a wider geography or population. “I believe these results for Tippecanoe county, Indiana, are accurate and probably reliable. But I am not so sure that this county is very representative of the rest of the country,” he says. For example, the county is mostly rural with a major urban area and a major university that has many young, inexperienced drivers. “To claim to be able to estimate larger financial effects for the country is not necessarily supported by the data they analysed,” says Schoettle.

Reference: SSRN,

Do it yourself

The knowledge cliff is nigh