AR And VR

The future of gaming is AR and VR, and browsers are the bytecode of software development.

Apple has officially announced the new product the Apple vision pro. Its an AR headset, that will cost around 3500$. What’s more interesintg than the price tag is that Apple is betting high on AR and not on VR. This is a different take from meta’s quest 3 which is a VR headset.

First, let’s understand what’s VR and AR.

Vitual Reality (VR)

VR is a technology that let’s you access different world from a hardware device.

Virtual reality is meant to be the future of real estate, leisure, economy and so on. Basically, VR is trying to give people a whole new reality which is not the physical world. From meta’s quest 3 one can access one of this virtual realties and that is “metaverse”.

Metaverse is what meta tries to show as the future of reality as we know, where everyone would be interacting with each other (hopefully) using the quest 3. Here a good point to note would be that when you wear VR headset you won’t be able to see what’s happening in the “real” world. It will be a completely immersive and “real” experience for the user.

Augmented Reality (AR)

AR is the other side of the coin which tries to “enhance” your current perspective of real world.

AR tries to build a new world on top of the real world. You can think of it this way, if the real world is a software than AR is the new minor/major update to it. In Order to br able to interact with the real world you need a hardware that continuously does the proccesing of the real world around you and adapting it’s software accordingly.

A good example for AR would be Pokémon Go. Its a minor patch to the real world which added Pokémons to our reality. And the user interacts with this “enhanced” reality with their mobile phones.

Apple’s vision pro uses AR to “enhance” the real world around its user. It let’s you interact with the world around you.

A point to note would be that in AR the user does not looses its ability to view the “real” world in real time, this is not possible in VR where the user is completely teleported to a new reality

So what?

While, VR has its own kind of potential and applications (who wouldn’t like to escape reality once in a while), but the amount of possibilities and potential AR has against VR is very brutal to be fair.

You see that VR is just one of the world that can be fit into an AR app. What I mean by this is that while meta’s quest 3 does offer a new reality I.e. the metaverse, but that’s all it will be able to do add more and more and more virtual worlds. This is not the case with Apple’s vision pro, what it does is very unique in itself (to augment reality), but it can also extend this behavior to VR.

This means that metaverse can be just an app on Apple’s vision pro and you could still access hundreds of VR worlds. Well, this is a very powerful feature that Apple bets on and thus chose AR against VR.