Not that you need yet another take on Apple’s foray into “spatial computing,” but I found Scott Galloway’s reaction to be the most informative and aligned with my own. Scott argues that as humans, our brains are wired to pay special attention to facial features as cues for reproduction and survival. It’s unnatural to cover our face like this when we’re around other people.
Can you really imagine wearing these things with your kid at breakfast? Or watching a movie as a family? Or on a date? The shared in-person use case for this toy—no matter how good the in-device experience—is really hard to fathom until a decade or so when we manage to squash this level of in-device tech into fashionable glasses.
That said, as a person that’s tried out Meta’s lackluster “Horizons” meeting offering, I think the potential for a high-performing headset in a B2B context is huge in the short term. A 3D, high-resolution interaction with another human in another time zone is a game changer over a flat screen (and the current Oculus legless offering). Not to mention specialty uses in manufacturing, industrial design, and healthcare.
In modern work, meetings are massively expensive, so $4k/head to add even a fractional boost of meaningful human-to-human collaboration is probably worth it. We’ll see.