Apple – No Nirvana

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Vrvana unlikely to accelerate Apple’s AR.

• Apple’s acquisition of Vrvana is the best sign yet that it is intending to get involved in hardware for augmented and virtual reality, but Vrvana is extremely unlikely to be able to accelerate its time to market.
• Vrvana is a start-up based in Canada that launched a headset called the Totem which received good reviews but never shipped.
• I suspect that the device never shipped because the company could get its headset to a high-enough level of quality and reliability to make it in the marketplace.
• Its Kickstarter campaign was pulled as the company realised that its product would never meet the funding goals.
• Furthermore, the Totem headset itself looks like a lot like a DIY project and is nothing that I would ever expect Apple to ship.
• Hence, I suspect that Apple’s interest in Vrvana is more about the technology that Vrvana has used to create the Totem which includes:
  • First: the Vrvana Totem is capable of both AR and VR in the same unit.
  • It is able to do this by superimposing the real word onto the virtual which is the opposite of how almost everyone else does it.
  • Instead of having transparent lenses through which the real world can be viewed, it uses cameras to record the real world and superimpose them onto the virtual.
  • There is one camera for each eye such that depth perception of the real world can be maintained through standard stereopsis techniques.
  • Second: because the real-world images are being digitised before being mixed in with virtual images, the virtual images can be completely opaque.
  • In every other AR system I have seen, the virtual images are always somewhat translucent which reduces their ability to appear real as one can always see the real world behind them.
  • Consequently, using this set-up there is scope to mix the virtual and the real world more realistically.
• This is what I think has interested Apple as the hardware itself is clunky, cumbersome and unattractive to look at.
• The issue with implementing AR this way around, is that the user is still completely closing himself off from the real world and the head unit used is likely to be far more obstructive than a simple pair of glasses.
• Consequently, I see this acquisition as highly speculative on Apple’s part with a high probability that this technique for AR ends up being discarded.
• Given the difficulties being faced by everyone in the AR field (see here), I do not see Apple being ahead of the field nor do I think that this acquisition will accelerate its time to market.
• The net result is that while Apple is right to explore the possibilities of AR, I suspect that there is no concrete intention to launch a unit.
• I see this activity much like the vehicle or the television which were experiments that failed to stand up to the scrutiny of market reality.
• Consumer AR is likely to remain a prisoner on the smartphone for the foreseeable future where no one looks capable of effecting a prison break any time soon.