Rivalry between Meta and Apple enters virtual reality

Months after Apple unveiled a change in privacy settings what threatened Facebook’s advertising business, the social networking company rebranded itself as Meta and shifted its focus to virtual reality.

Now, less than two years later, Apple may be threatening Meta’s business in that field as well.

Apple on the 5th unveiled its new mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, in one of its most ambitious product launches in years. At the start of the company’s annual developer conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook introduced the Vision Pro, a $3,499 device that combines virtual reality and augmented reality, as a revolutionary”, with the potential to change the way users interact with technology.

O new apple productdue out early next year, puts Apple in direct competition with Meta, which has been developing headsets for years.

Four days before the WWDC conference, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to top Apple’s expected handset announcement by promoting the Meta Quest 3. Meta’s new headset promises improved performance, new mixed reality features, and a sleeker, more comfortable design, at a much more affordable price (US$499) than Apple’s product.

Each new era of consumer technology seems to be shaped by heated rivalries. Apple’s competition with Microsoft (MSFT) was fundamental to the era of personal computing. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” against Google over smartphones. Now Apple and Meta can establish the defining rivalry of the VR/AR era.

The two companies have had a strained relationship even before Apple entered the market. They competed for news and messaging features, and their CEOs traded blows over data privacy and app store policies. In February last year, Meta he said which expected a loss of US$ 10 billion (about R$ 48 billion) in 2022 because of Apple’s move to limit how apps like Facebook collect data for targeted ads.

But the rivalry looks ready to reach a new level.

Meta has so far been the dominant player in the headset market. However, virtual and augmented reality remains a nascent market with little consumer adoption. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Meta had just 200,000 active users on Horizon Worlds, its VR socializing app. Furthermore, in 2023, the American consultancy IDC esteem that just 10.1 million AR/VR headsets will ship globally from the entire market, far short of the tens of millions of iPhones Apple sells each quarter.

Morgan Stanley analysts called Apple’s Vision Pro a “moonshot project” effort after its announcement on Monday. They say the product “has the potential to become Apple’s next computing platform” but that the company has “a lot to prove” before the headset launches next year.

“We are always happy when more people join us to build the future,” said Sheeva Slovan, spokeswoman for Meta’s Reality Labs unit, in a statement to CNN .

uncertain market

Apple and Meta could end up racing to see not just who can get consumers to choose their product, but whether any one of them can get millions of customers to embrace this new wave of technology.

Apple seems to have the upper hand on several counts, with its overly loyal customer base of two billion devicesimpressive hardware, and access to hundreds of stores where consumers can potentially try out the device.

“To this day, all of this seems to be pre-game, the build-up to the moment when Apple takes the product into the public consciousness and lets people know that these technologies are real, that they are not just a gimmick,” Eric opined. Alexander, founder of VR music experience app Soundscape.

The iPhone maker also appears to be marketing its device differently. Apple chose not to focus on the term “virtual reality”, nor did it show legless disembodied avatars inhabiting a virtual world, as Meta did early on. Instead, Apple has enhanced the headset’s potential to integrate more seamlessly with users’ real-world lives through augmented reality, a technology that can overlay virtual objects onto live video of the real world.

“I don’t think Apple sees itself competing with Meta,” said Julie Ask, principal analyst at US research and consulting firm Forrester. Zuckerberg is betting “everything on the virtual world, and that’s not what Apple is about. Apple is saying that it doesn’t think people want to be disconnected from the real world, that it wants to improve the world consumers are in.”

The Quest 3 headset that Meta announced last week is also a mixed reality headset with augmented reality capabilities, so it seems likely that Meta could approach Apple’s approach in the future. However, a demo video that Zuckerberg posted on Instagram seems to imply that the device is still largely focused on gaming.

Many analysts say the biggest hurdle to the adoption of mixed reality headsets is ensuring that there is a wide range of potential uses and experiences available from the devices.

While the Meta has introduced features that allow users to play games, explore virtual worlds, watch YouTube videos, train, chat with friends, and more, it still hasn’t convinced most consumers that the device is worth it.

Apple’s announcement at WWDC appears to be aimed at ensuring that the large base of developers in its ecosystem will help create compelling new experiences for the device ahead of its launch.

For Alexander, developing new AR and VR apps requires a significant investment, not to mention hands-on time, so it may be a while before a full range of experiences are available for Vision Pro. The lack of controllers and other accessories can also make it difficult to create certain types of applications, such as games, for the new device.

Still, at Monday’s event, Apple showcased Disney features like Disney+ and game company Unity that will be available on the device from the start, in addition to the iPhone maker’s existing suite of services.

Apple’s Vision One “is not a device that I’m going to buy and then think about what I have to buy,” said Forrester expert Ask. “It’s a device with a very intuitive interface, a place to watch my Apple TV, movies and stuff. It’s not something we buy and then don’t know what it’s for”.

Tom Forte, an analyst for DA Davidson, compared the launch of the Vision Pro to the introduction of the iPhone after the BlackBerry, an unfavorable comparison that would likely make Zuckerberg blush. But he noted that the Meta headset seems less likely to fade into irrelevance as the BlackBerry did.

“BlackBerry proved that there was a market for smartphones and had built dominance, but it didn’t make apps,” Forte recalled, adding that the iPhone introduced the idea of ​​having a variety of different use cases for a device. “In some ways it’s like the iPhone where we’re going to need to see the ecosystem develop over time for this to be successful.”

But, if Apple succeeds in driving widespread adoption of mixed reality headsets, Meta could still benefit by extension, being the choice because of price, according to the same analyst.

Incidentally, Meta’s stock rose slightly on Tuesday following Apple’s announcement.