‘Apple is working on expensive VR glasses with a compact design and high-end screens’

Apple’s ambitious AR glasses project would run into difficulties. The company would therefore first want to market pricey VR glasses.

Apple VR glasses appear earlier than AR glasses

It usually writes well-informed Bloomberg based on its own sources. They argue that Apple’s AR project has been delayed. Instead, the company is now focusing on a VR headset, which Apple does not expect huge sales from due to the high price.

You put this virtual reality device on your head, so that you end up ‘in’ a virtual 3D environment, as it were. This can be a godsend for games, watching videos and communicating with each other. Such VR headsets have been around for some time. Apple would plan to release these VR glasses in 2022 and directly compete with companies such as Sony, Facebook and HTC.

With the glasses, Apple uses a different strategy than we are used to. Instead of making a product simple and accessible to a large audience, it is intended for a relatively small market. Therefore, Apple would expect to sell “one headset per day in an Apple Store,” which equates to about 180,000 copies per year. This puts the VR glasses in the same category as the pricey Mac Pro.

This is how Apple’s VR glasses will work

The VR glasses would be codenamed ‘N301’ and equipped with Apple’s most powerful and advanced chip to date. The screens in the headset are said to be of a much higher quality than competing VR headsets. To keep the device cooled, a fan would be built into the headset.

Nevertheless, the glasses must be a lot smaller than we are used to from competitors. Apple would have come up with a compact design, which also includes people with glasses. They can put their contact lenses in the glasses, so that they are placed over the VR images. To keep the weight as low as possible, a soft and light material would be used.

In addition to the glasses, Apple is also working on external cameras, according to Bloomberg. These are used to register hand movements, so that the user can influence things in a game or other software. Think of typing on a virtual keyboard.

The augmented reality options of these VR glasses would be a lot more limited. With AR, you put a digital layer over the real world, as it were, such as a Google Maps route that is drawn on the road for you. The ‘AR glasses’ we have been hearing about for some time would have been postponed because this technique needs more time to get really good. So to be continued.

Also read: Apple Glass: the 8 most important rumors about Apple’s AR glasses