To me the most fascinating, and definitely most important, thing about the newly announced Apple Vision Pro is that they are aiming to connect people who are wearing with people in the same room who are not wearing, by showing the eyes of wearers to non-wearers when the wearer is in XR mode.
This produces a categorical difference, in a social sense, from previous VR efforts, since a characteristic feature of VR until now, which I believe has been the greatest factor in preventing mass adoption, has been the way it isolates wearers from non-wearers. After all, most consumers, other than dedicated gamers, do not want to be separated from other people when they are in the same room.
All information appliances that have achieved mass adoption, from phones to tablets to televisions to computers, allow us to remain aware of each other when we are in each other’s physical presence. This leads me to think that the Vision One is the first VR device that can speak to the general consumer.
Of course the price is very high now, and that is clearly deliberate. It makes sense for Apple not to do a large scale rollout until the second or third generation, so it can do iterative tuning within a limited market.
But the direction that Apple is aiming toward in the VR space is the first one which makes sense to me for a general audience.