With the early 2024 release of Vision Pro quickly approaching, Apple is steadily updating its products to prepare for the new headset.
In addition to an upcoming spatial capture feature on iPhone 15 Pro, Apple also says its latest AirPods Pro wireless earbuds (2nd-gen, now with USB-C) will support lossless audio with ‘ultra-low latency’ to ensure that what you see and what you hear are closely synchronized for an immersive experience.
What Apple is calling a “groundbreaking wireless audio protocol” is powered by the H2 chip in the AirPods Pro 2 and Vision Pro. The specifics of the protocol haven’t been divulged, but the company says it will deliver 20-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio with a “massive reduction in audio latency.”
Image courtesy Apple
Low latency in XR is important because a headset’s visuals need to be as low latency as possible in order to keep users comfortable. Having audio that’s just as responsive (in order to keep sight and sounds in sync) sometimes comes at the cost of quality. The audio protocol Apple is now touting seems designed specifically to maintain lossless audio while also keeping latency as low as possible.
The AirPods Pro 2 have been out for a while, but when the company revealed its latest phones earlier this month with USB-C connectors for the first time, it also took the time to release the refreshed version of the Airpods Pro 2, now with USB-C as well.
This is also when we saw the first mention of the new low latency audio protocol; though considering that the original AirPods Pro 2 (with lightning connector) also has an H2 chip, we certainly hope it will also support the new protocol. As for the non-Pro version of AirPods—which only have an H1 chip—it isn’t clear if they will get support. We’ve reached out to Apple for more clarity on which devices will be supported.
Unity, makers of the popular game engine, announced earlier this week it’s getting ready to levy some pretty significant fees on developers, causing many to rethink whether it makes more sense to actually go with the main competition, Unreal Engine from Epic Games. It seems Epic isn’t wasting any time to help transition those creating projects for Apple Vision Pro.
According to Victor Lerp, Unreal Engine XR Product Specialist at Epic Games, the company is now “exploring native Unreal Engine support for Apple Vision Pro,” the upcoming mixed reality headset due to launch in early 2024.
Lerp says it’s still early days though, noting that it’s “too early for us to share details on the extent of support or timelines.”
Lerp posted the statement on Unreal Engine’s XR development forum. You can read it in full below, courtesy of Alex Coulombe, CEO of the XR creative studio Agile Lens:
During Vision Pro’s unveiling at WWDC in June, Apple prominently showcased native Unity support in its upcoming XR operating system, visionOS. Unity began offering beta access to its visionOS-supported engine shortly afterwards, making it feel like something of a ‘bait and switch’ for developers already creating new games, or porting existing titles to Vision Pro.
As explained by Axios, Unity’s new plan will require users of its free tier of development services to pay the company $0.20 per installation once their game hits thresholds of both 200,000 downloads and earns $200,000 in revenue. Subscribers to Unity Pro, which costs $2,000 a year, have a different fee structure that scales downwards in proportion to the number of installs. What constitutes an ‘install’ is still fairly nebulous at this point despite follow-up clarifications from Unity. Whatever the case, the change is set to go into effect starting on January 1st, 2024.
In the meantime, the proposed Unity price increase has caused many small to medium-size teams to reflect on whether to make the switch to the admittedly more complicated Unreal Engine, or pursue other game engines entirely. A majority of XR game studios fit into that category, which (among many other scenarios) could hobble teams as they look to replicate free-to-play success stories like Gorilla Tag, which generated over $26 million in revenue when it hit the Quest Store late last year.
Apple’s “Wonderlust” product launch event featured the official unveiling of iPhone 15 and both Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2. While XR wasn’t a major focus of the event, Apple confirmed its upcoming mixed reality standalone Vision Pro isn’t seeing any delays to push it off its early 2024 release.
First unveiled at WWDC in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook said last night during the product event that Vision Pro is still “on track for release in early 2024.”
Vision Pro, which comes along with the very ‘pro’ price tag of $3,500, has reportedly been the subject of multiple delays in the past. The MR headset was widely thought to arrive sometime in 2022, although several successive reports maintained it was delayed multiple times since then.
With an “early 2024” launch in site, Apple seems to be making some of the right moves in the background, as the company has already opened up applications for developer units which are undoubtedly already in the hands of studios.
Meanwhile, the Cupertino tech giant also announced it’s prepping iPhone 15 Pro to take stereoscopic video which can be viewed on Vision Pro. It’s an interesting choice, as features on company’s most premium ‘Pro’ phone offerings tend to trickle down in successive generations. Here, the phone’s ultrawide and main cameras work together to create what Apple calls a “three-dimensional video.”
Apple today announced its iPhone 15 lineup of smartphones, including the iPhone 15 Pro which will be the company’s first phone to capture spatial video for immersive viewing on Vision Pro.
While Apple Vision Pro itself works as a spatial camera, allowing users to capture immersive photos and videos, I think we can all agree that wearing a camera on your head isn’t the most convenient way to capture content.
Image courtesy Apple
Apple seems to feel the same way. Today during the company’s iPhone 15 announcement, it was revealed that the new iPhone 15 Pro will be capable of capturing spatial video which can be viewed immersively on the company’s upcoming Vision Pro headset. The base versions of the phone, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus, won’t have the spatial capture capability.
Details on exactly how this function works are slim for the time being.
“We use the ultrawide and main cameras together to create a three-dimensional video,” the company said during its announcement. But it isn’t clear if “three-dimensional” means stereoscopic footage with a fixed viewpoint, or some kind of depth projection with a bit of 6DOF wiggle room.
Given that the iPhone 15 Pro cameras are so close together—not offering enough distance between the two views for straightforward stereo capture—it seems that some kind of depth projection or scene reconstruction will be necessary.
Image courtesy Apple pro
Apple didn’t specifically say whether the phone’s depth-sensor was involved, but considering the phone uses it for other camera functions, we wouldn’t be surprised to find that it has some role to play. Curiously, Apple didn’t mention spatial photo capture, but ostensibly this should be possible as well.
While users will be able to watch their immersive videos on Vision Pro, Apple also said they’ll be able to share the footage with others who can watch on their own headset.
While the new iPhone 15 lineup will launch on September 22nd, Apple says the spatial capture capability won’t be available until “later this year”—which is curious considering the company also said today that Vision Pro is “on track to launch in early 2024.” Perhaps the company plans to allow creators to access the spatial video files for editing and use outside of Apple’s platform?
Today, big tech companies including Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, announced the formation of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), which is dedicated to promoting the standardization and development of a 3D file protocol that Apple says will “help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences.”
NVIDIA has been an early supporter of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD), stating last year it thinks Pixar’s solution has the potential to become the “HTML of the metaverse.”
Much like HTML forms a sort of description of a webpage—being hostable anywhere on the Internet and retrievable/renderable locally by a web browser—USD can be used to describe complex virtual scenes, allowing it to be similarly retrieved and rendered on a local machine.
Here’s how the alliance describes their new OpenUSD inititive:
Created by Pixar Animation Studios, OpenUSD is a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows. Already known for its ability to collaboratively capture artistic expression and streamline cinematic content production, OpenUSD’s power and flexibility make it an ideal content platform to embrace the needs of new industries and applications.
“Universal Scene Description was invented at Pixar and is the technological foundation of our state-of-the-art animation pipeline,” said Steve May, Chief Technology Officer at Pixar and Chairperson of AOUSD. “OpenUSD is based on years of research and application in Pixar filmmaking. We open-sourced the project in 2016, and the influence of OpenUSD now expands beyond film, visual effects, and animation and into other industries that increasingly rely on 3D data for media interchange. With the announcement of AOUSD, we signal the exciting next step: the continued evolution of OpenUSD as a technology and its position as an international standard.”
Housed by the Linux Foundation affiliate Joint Development Foundation (JDF), the alliance is hoping to attract a diverse range of companies and organizations to participate in shaping the future of OpenUSD actively. For now it counts Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA as foudning memebers, with general members including Epic Games, Unity, Foundry, Ikea, SideFX, and Cesium.
“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Mike Rockwell, Apple’s VP of the Vision Products Group. “Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.”
Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR standard, launched a similar USD initiative in the past via its own Metaverse Standards Forum. It’s unclear how much overlap these initiatives will have, as that project was supported by AOUSD founders Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA in addition to a wide swath of industry movers, such as Meta, Microsoft, Sony, Qualcomm, and AMD. Notably missing in the Metaverse Standards Forum was support from Apple and Pixar themselves.
We’re hoping to learn more at a long-form presentation of AOUSD during the Autodesk Vision Series on August 8th. There are a host of events leading up to SIGGRAPH 2023 though, which goes from August 6th – 10th, so we may learn more at any one of the companies’ own presentations on USD.
Apple Vision Pro is coming next year, not only making for the Fruit Company’s much awaited first XR headset, but also spurring a resurgence in public interest (and likely investment) in the XR space. At $3,500, Vision Pro is undoubtedly an expensive steppingstone to the company’s future augmented reality ambitions, but even if it’s ostensibly ignoring virtual reality in the meantime, it probably won’t forever.
Apple has a tendency to undervalue gaming initially, though perhaps reluctantly, eventually acknowledges its importance. Gaming in XR is considerably enhanced by fully immersive experiences and motion controllers, and Apple will probably start feeling the pressure of that demand from gamers and developers alike when it kicks off a consumer headset sometime down the road, causing them to relent (if only just).
What is Vision Pro?
Like many, Apple is investing in AR today because the headsets and glasses of tomorrow have a good chance of supplanting smartphones and becoming the dominant mobile computing platform of the future. Long considered the holy grail of immersive computing, all-day AR headsets represent a way of interacting with new layers of information in daily life which would span everything from turn-by-turn directions to gaming applications—like Google Maps directions floating on the street in front of your car or a city-wide version of Pokémon Go.
Granted, Vision Pro isn’t yet the sort of device you’ll take out to the park to catch a random Zubat or Rattata—it’s very much an indoor device that Apple envisions you’ll use to sit down and watch a virtual TV screen or stand up in place to have an immersive chat with a work colleague. But as an opening gambit, Apple’s initial pitch of Vision Pro has been fairly telling of its strategy for XR.
In the ‘one more thing’ bit of the WWDC keynote, Apple lauded Vision Pro’s AR capabilities thanks to its color passthrough cameras, impressively responsive UI, and, from our hands-on with the headset, rock-solid hand-tracking. The company focused almost entirely on the work and lifestyle benefits of AR, and much less on the comparatively more closed-off fully immersed capabilities of virtual reality.
Image courtesy Apple
Considering just how much time and effort Apple has spent talking about AR, you may be surprised to find out Vision Pro can actually play VR games. After all, like Meta Quest Pro or the upcoming Quest 3, it’s basically a VR headset with passthrough cameras—what we’d call a mixed reality headset. In fact, the headset is already confirmed to support one of VR’s most prominent social VR games.
Instead, Vision Pro is focusing on eye-tracking and hand-tracking as primary input methods, with support for traditional peripherals like keyboards and mice and gamepads filling in the gaps for work and traditional flatscreen gaming. This means many VR developers looking to target Vision Pro will need to pare down input schemes to refocus on hand-tracking, or create games from the ground-up that don’t rely on the standard triggers, grip buttons, sticks, and half-dozen buttons.
Still, many VR games simply won’t translate without controllers, which above all provide important haptic feedback and a bevy of sticks and buttons for more complex inputs. Not only that, Vision Pro’s room-scale VR gaming chops are hobbled by a guardian limit of 10 feet by 10 feet (3m × 3m)—if the player moves any further, the VR experience will fade away, returning to the headset’s default AR view. There’s no such limit for AR apps, putting VR more or less into a virtual corner.
Denny Unger, CEO of pioneering VR studio Cloudhead Games, nails it on the head in a recent guest article, saying that Vision Pro “appears to be a VR headset pretending not to be a VR headset.”
Apple’s Chronically Late Adoption
Without speculating too far about into its XR ambitions, it appears Apple is turning somewhat of a new leaf with Vision Pro. The company is reportedly departing from tradition by creating a dedicated Vision Products Group (VPG), which is tasked with spearheading XR product development. Apple typically distributes its product development efforts across more general departments, such as hardware, software, design, services, etc, instead of sectionalizing hardware development into individual product teams, like Mac, Watch, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Not only that, but the company is also publicly accepting applications for development kits of the headset and hosting a handful of ‘developer labs’ around the world so that developer can get their hands and heads into the device ahead of time. It’s a decidedly different tactic than what we usually see from Apple.
The company’s wider strategy still seems to be in play however. Apple traditionally enters markets where it believes it can make a significant impact and actually own something, making it oftentimes not the first, but in many cases, the most important Big Tech company to validate an emerging market. The paradox here is Apple is actually early to AR, but late to VR. Deemphasizing the now fairly mature VR in favor of potentially creating a stronger foundation for its future AR devices makes a certain amount of sense coming from Apple.
Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly preparing a more consumer-focused follow-up to Vision Pro that will hopefully cost less than a high mileage, but still serviceable 2008 Honda Civic. Whenever Apple pitches that cheaper Vision headset to everyday people, they’ll likely need more entertainment-focused experiences, including fully immersive VR experiences with VR controllers.
Image courtesy Apple
And while Apple still isn’t positioning Vision Pro as a fully-fledged VR headset, that doesn’t mean it won’t relent in the future like it does with many crowd-pleasing features on iOS that in many cases don’t appear until years after they’ve been available on Android. In classic Apple style, it could offhandedly announce a pair of slick and ergonomic VR controllers as a pricey accessory during any of its annual product updates, and of course pretend it’s some great home-grown achievement.
Another big reason Apple may eventually decide to un-hobble a future Vision headset is its strong hold on app revenue. Apple’s XR headsets are on the same path as its iOS devices, which means the company captures a slice of revenue from every app you buy on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Unlike Mac, which by all accounts is a second-class citizen for gaming, iOS devices seem to be getting their act together. Kind of.
In some ways the company has only just fully embraced gaming on iOS with the launch of Apple Arcade in 2019, which serves up a curated collection of high-quality games on iOS and Apple TV without any ads or in-app purchases. Still, it’s pretty clear Apple doesn’t have big gaming ambitions—it doesn’t hoover up game publishers or studios like Meta or Microsoft tend to—so if it does unharness Vision’s VR capabilities, it may do so without the same raison virtuelle d’être as Meta or ByteDance (the latter being the TikTok parent company that also owns the Pico XR platform).
Provided Apple can secure the same hefty market share with future Vision headsets as it does with iPhone today though, which is around 30%, it may be more inclined to stay competitive with more VR-forward companies. But it isn’t emphasizing VR now, or even really competing against anyone, which may be a safer bet as it ventures into some truly unknown territory. Once the ball gets rolling though, the Cupertino tech giant will have less and less excuse to not toss out a pair of VR controllers and remove some of the arbitrary restrictions it’s imposed.
When that might happen, we don’t know, but it does sound awfully Apple-like to sit on much wanted features and eventually release them with a flick of the wrist.
Apple has now opened applications for Vision Pro developer kits, which it’s sending out to app developers in effort to kickstart its first XR-specific App Store.
Vision Pro is set to launch sometime in early 2024, coming part and parcel with a load of first-party apps originally developed for iPad. This includes basic things like Safari, Photos, Music, Messages, and even an avatar support for Facetime.
Apple has been fairly mum on its list of third-party apps, listing only a few during its WWDC unveiling in June, including Word, Excel, Teams, Disney+, Zoom, WebEX, and Rec Room, its only VR game to be featured during the keynote.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Apple is couching the headset as a general computing device capable of doing most of what a laptop can do, however the $3,500 prosumer headset will need a lot more than a smattering of compatible 2D apps if it wants its first XR device to set the stage for generations of cheaper follow-ups, which will likely be aimed more squarely at regular consumers.
And while the headset emulator and software development tools have been out for a few weeks now, the Cupertino tech giant says developers looking to start creating apps with actual Vision Pro hardware can apply now.
Apple says the dev kit also includes help setting up the device and onboarding, check-ins with Apple experts for UI design and development guidance, and two additional code-level support requests so Apple can help troubleshoot issues.
Like with many hardware developer kits, there are some fairly stringent (if not entirely standard) caveats. The Vision Pro dev kit needs to be returned upon request, and also has to be stored in a private, secure workspace that unauthorized persons don’t have access to view, handle, or use. The dev kit also needs to be passcode protected and never left unattended, or removed from its home address without Apple’s prior written consent.
Again, that’s all pretty standard stuff so developers don’t lose, leak, or strip the headset down to its component parts for the glee of XR publications everywhere. We’ll likely be waiting for that last bit when it finally launches sometime in early 2024.
According to a Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman, Apple is changing things up with the creation of a new Vision Products Group (VPG), which is tasked with developing the company’s recently unveiled mixed reality headset, Vision Pro.
The report maintains that with the creation of VPG, Apple is departing from its “functional” management structure, which was introduced by Steve Jobs in the early ’90s.
Effectively, Jobs distributed the company’s product development efforts across more general departments, such as hardware, software, design, services, etc, instead of sectionalizing hardware development into individual product teams, like Mac, Watch, iPad, iPhone, etc.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
The so-called Vision Products Group is reportedly independent from Apple’s main software and hardware engineering and other departments, including its own internal versions of those teams which report to unit head Mike Rockwell.
Gurman maintains that VPG still collaborates with other parts of Apple though, including design and operations teams overseen by COO Jeff Williams, Johny Srouji’s chip unit known for the company’s M2 and R1 processors, and iOS/macOS frameworks headed Craig Federighi’s software engineering group.
Some reportedly believed the dedicated group would be disbanded, making it follow the company’s functional management structure. It has however both persisted beyond the Vision Pro’s June unveiling at WWDC and was branded to reflect that the group is tasked with creation of Vision Products, implying the team will be sticking around for multiple product cycles yet to come.
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