Our resident VR expert, Luke Buckmaster, shares his insights.
This week, Apple put an end to years of speculation by officially unveiling the Vision Pro, the company’s first major new product in nearly a decade. At its annual event, CEO Tim Cook introduced the device, calling it a “revolutionary new product” that blends the digital and physical worlds to “unlock experiences like nothing we’ve ever seen.” The presentation made it clear that the Vision Pro is designed primarily as a way to replace traditional screens, offering a spatial computing experience that integrates your laptop, smartphone, and TV displays into your surrounding environment.
Interestingly, Apple carefully avoided using the term “virtual reality” during the event, despite the Vision Pro being a powerful VR headset. There are three key reasons for this omission. First, VR still carries a stigma, particularly the perception that it’s mainly for gamers. Second, Apple has not developed any exclusive VR content to accompany the device, making it hard to market the Vision Pro on those terms. Finally, Apple is positioning the Vision Pro as a spatial computing tool, focused more on innovative ways to display existing content rather than creating a whole new virtual world.
Cook and Co. didn’t exactly inspire excitement with their pitch, focusing on features like the ability to “place apps exactly where you want them” and touting Vision Pro as ideal for “writing a long email or working on a spreadsheet in Numbers.” At this point, if you’re like me, you’re probably wondering: Where’s the cool factor? Where are the Stormtroopers storming through your living room, the sword fights with ogres, the mind-blowing, impossible worlds?
I was hoping things would get more thrilling when the focus shifted to watching movies and TV shows. But instead, we were told that Vision Pro lets you “turn any room into your own personal movie theater”—a fancy way of saying it essentially adds flat virtual screens. Not exactly groundbreaking.
Watching movies on headsets, including the Vision Pro, offers an immersive experience, but it comes with limitations. Headsets can be heavy, have limited battery life, and can feel cumbersome when you want to handle snacks or share the experience with others. Additionally, the lack of widespread 3D content (which the Vision Pro touts) makes its claim about “incredible depth and crisp motion” a bit odd, given that Hollywood rarely produces 3D films anymore.
In the short term, the Vision Pro may not drastically change how we watch movies and TV. The real potential lies in how developers might leverage its capabilities for spatial and volumetric content, which could create entirely new forms of entertainment. As someone passionate about VR and AR, I believe these formats, which don’t rely on traditional 2D screens, are where the future of storytelling and immersive experiences will thrive.
Apple and Meta are gearing up for an epic showdown, and as a mixed reality enthusiast, that’s enough to spark real excitement. While the new devices themselves—particularly Apple’s US$3499 Vision Pro—are eye-wateringly expensive, what truly gets me fired up is the potential for this competition to set new benchmarks and push the entire industry forward. The future of spatial computing is still up in the air, but one thing’s clear: the tech giants are fully invested. Apple, the world’s largest tech company, is now stepping into the ring to challenge Meta, the current leader in the VR/AR space.
These two companies represent vastly different philosophies. Mark Zuckerberg envisions a “Ready Player One”-style virtual world, where VR becomes a fully immersive escape, capable of transporting us to entirely new realms. In contrast, Apple, under Tim Cook’s leadership, aims to keep us grounded in the physical world, enhancing our existing reality with digital experiences that blend seamlessly with our surroundings.
As the competition intensifies, I believe we’ll see both approaches start to converge. Zuckerberg’s immersive VR vision will inevitably shift toward some of Apple’s principles, while Apple might increasingly adopt elements of Meta’s more expansive virtual environments. In terms of entertainment, I predict it won’t be long before developers and users alike realize that what truly makes this technology shine—what will generate that ‘wow’ factor—won’t be flat-screen replications, but content that breaks free from the limitations of traditional displays.
Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Virtual reality won’t merely replace television, it will eat it alive.” If he’s right, Apple’s 3D movies and interactive spreadsheets on Vision Pro will one day seem laughably outdated. The future of mixed reality is bound to evolve in ways we can’t fully predict—but it’s clear that the content that truly defines this technology will be far more groundbreaking than what we’ve seen so far.