Here's a site dedicated to comparing headsets. This is what they have posted on the Vision:
The Immersed Visor is an unreleased PC-powered VR headset. Features 102° FoV, 6 DoF tracking.
vr-compare.com
Seems to be a tad out of date - I read the screen resolutions last night.
Here's the thing - to get features, you have to maintain "membership". Look at the FAQs - if you don't pay the membership fee, you don't get any new features. Hey - what happens with the VP? Apple is known to support and add features, free, for years.
Which has a lifetime once-off offer if you buy the founder's model... and you kinda need a paid subscription to iCloud for a lot of the AVP feaures, becaue you can't direct-load things like Photos etc... so...?
You said it can run apps. They say there won't be an app store, but there will be an SDK for individual side loaded applications at an undisclosed later date.
Yes, so it will be able to run apps.
They say it has a chipset that can allow it to stand alone. Runs "Immersed" that can connect to your laptop/PC or be a stand alone browser. A browser - is one app. And to be honest, I'm not really sure what Immersed can really do.
Immersed:
https://immersed.com
It seems to be what the rest of the sites says - it's 5 monitors displaying form a compute device. It's not close to what the VP can do by itself by a long shot yet. In fact, seems to have the ability to run on the VP.
5 monitors from A computing device, or 5 monitors from a variety of computing devices at once.
Also, it's collaborative work spaces, groupware whiteboarding etc.
The AVP is a lightweight duty paradigm, shipping in heavyweight goggles.
This system seems to be a lightweight duty paradigm, shipping in lightweight goggles.
The fundamental problem with the AVP, in my opinion, is that it can't go high end enough in its utility (because it's only iPad hardware), to justify the weight and bulk which matches that of heavyweight duty wired or wireless tethered headsets.
You can't share it with anyone else. It's specific to you.
In the same way the AVP is effectively bound to a single user.
They say "like your work laptop" which is pretty funny. Work laptops can be shared.
Based on what I'm seeing here, the marketing is confusing. The business plan is flawed. They have some work to do. It will be interesting to see if it truly gets released and how it does.
Do you think Apple is selling enough AVPs to have covered the R&D and manfacturing costs for it? Or, is the rest of the company subsidising it, so does the AVP have a viable business plan on its own? Visor is hardware from a company that is presumably already successfully selling a software platform that they were offering on other companies' hardware.
The really interesting thing, is these are a better pairing with a Mac, than an AVP is. I imagine just like the iPad today is more like the Surface that existed when the iPad launched, than it's like the original iPad, AVP will end up being more like this than it's like itself today.