It’s the AR and social/connected-focused stuff that I find intriguing about Vision Pro versus competitors. The lack of support for “full room VR” is something I find to be a fascinating vision statement (pun intended), and I kind of want to see how hard Apple pushes this one. Not everyone has empty rooms for full room VR at home and an AR focus is an accessibility focus. To some respects, IF Apple can work to hold onto its principles here (and I don’t know any other vendor that could; Microsoft tried to some extent with HoloLens, but that’s also why Microsoft never had the guts to see HoloLens as a consumer product); IF Apple can stick to this: it can send a message to game developers that they need to pay attention to our cluttered lives and environments, and to the people around us.

That isn’t to say that I don’t find value in full room VR and clearly there’s a market there between Valve and Occulus sales figures. I just think that there’s a larger audience with cluttered rooms and roommates and pets and it should be a challenge to game developers especially to build immersive experiences without full immersion graphics. Some of my most immersive experiences were text based games, this could be a good challenge!

Many of us the only way we will likely get to experience full room VR is places where we can rent empty rooms by the hour. That’s fun and there’s a niche for that. That’s not accessible in our homes. (That’s not accessible to a diverse cross-section of humanity when you throw in all the differently abled we are physically, including but not limited to the motion sickness many feel in full room VR.)

I admire Apple seeming to be trying to make a political statement with this limitation that certainly isn’t a technical limitation. I hope it doesn’t fall on deaf ears. As a developer myself, I understand there’s a lot of cool excitement to build the ultimate immersive laser tag experience, but a lot more people are going to have a chance to play whatever the AR/MR equivalents to Angry Birds will be that makes use of the weird location of your bed in your apartment and the way your sofa blocks half the room and the way your roommate likes to stand by the fridge and mock you when you game. I think Apple sees that and is challenging developers to think about that. That’s something I find exciting about the Vision Pro in ways that I appreciate but am not excited about the latest Quest or Index or whatever else in this space.