Extended Reality Sparks Limited Excitement

Whatever you want to call it: virtual, augmented, mixed or extended reality has never really lived up to its hype. The often-clunky headsets are as far from mass adoption as they are from being fashion accessories and aside from gaming, no one has really figured out what to use them for. That is, until yesterday, when Apple’s announcement of the long-awaited Vision Pro headset breathed new life into the entire category.

But while Apple is betting a lot on “spatial computing”, as would like us to call it, to become the next big thing in tech, consumers aren’t quite as enthusiastic about the still nascent category. In a survey conducted across 29 countries in April/May 2022, Ipsos found that just 50 percent of the 21,005 respondents felt very or somewhat positive about using virtual, augmented or extended reality devices or applications in their daily lives, with most highly developed markets in Europe and North America showing even less excitement.

This goes to show how many skeptics Apple will have to convince if it really wants to make extended reality the next computing platform. But if anyone can do it, it’s Apple, the company that turned AirPods, which were widely ridiculed at launch, into a must-have accessory.