Forget the metaverse. For $3,500, Apple offers a new way to be alone


June 8, 2023

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Remember the metaverse? No? Well, you’re not alone.

It seems but a faint memory now, but before AI mania swept Silicon Valley, the concept that everyone would soon be strapping on headsets and logging on to an “embodied internet” to do conference calls and standup comedy was center stage in the tech world — thrust there by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Yet even at the peak of its hype cycle, polls found that most Americans had never even heard the term “metaverse.” It didn’t take...

I put the question to David Karpf, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and the author of a newsletter called The Future, Now and Then, who has paid special attention to the development of headset technologies.

“I’m of two minds about this headset,” he told me. “In the near-term, I think it won’t do any better than the Oculus/Meta Quest. There simply isn’t much to do with Apple’s Goggles, and at $3,500 not a lot of people are going to buy it just to tinker around.” And yet, although he expects the Vision Pro to flop initially, he thinks its technical breakthroughs might matter a decade from now.

The full article can be found in The Los Angeles Times.