What Can Agency Businesses Gain from Apple Vision Pro? A VR Industry Expert Shares His View
Apple evangelists often hail the company as the innovator that changed digital products forever. Still, its critics will quickly point out that Apple takes existing products and tweaks them to perfection.
The story feels familiar with the Vision Pro mixed reality headset – similar products are available at the moment, but they’re hardly household items. And the whole VR adoption wasn’t helped by the launch of Metaverse, which was quickly ridiculed for its cartoonish graphics and legless avatars.
So does the Apple Vision Pro have a chance? We asked Jerko Škorić, COO of Delta Reality, a fast-growing agency specializing in mixed and virtual reality. With clients like Samsung, Microsoft, and Disney, Delta Reality knows a thing or two about what is real in virtual reality.
While Jerko argues that Meta is still the market leader, he admits that this is a far cry from the mass adoption achieved by the smartphone fifteen years ago.
“The problem lies in the fact that the technical leap for consumer-ready headsets is scientifically and financially intense. Many companies have failed or given up on research and development. New chips, screens, batteries, computer vision – the entire hardware development process takes a long time, and too long to meet investor expectations”, says Jerko.
But unlike Meta, Apple has a huge advantage there: “The Vision Pro is different because it’s rumored to be in secret development for the past ten years. We know that Apple is vertically integrated in hardware and software development, and that’s why, in our opinion, they currently have the best device on the market. Apple is also an experience-first company, which works in their favor in this regard.”
“There is a use case for Vision Pro in an agency environment,” says Jerko, but adds that the steep pricing could make it more suitable for a corporate setting rather than mass-market consumer adoption.
“One key use within agencies could be to augment multitasking capabilities. Given the nature of agency work, where employees often juggle multiple tasks and projects simultaneously, a device like Vision Pro could be helpful. Its integration with the existing Apple ecosystem would allow seamless access to a multitude of apps and services simultaneously, facilitating productivity by creating virtual additional screens”, says Jerko.
In practice, project or account managers, who typically manage multiple projects or accounts at once, could leverage Vision Pro’s features to easily switch between tasks, view multiple datasets concurrently, and keep track of various communication threads more efficiently.
But should agencies go out and spend thousands of dollars on the set? Not so fast, says Jerko: “The most substantial benefit of Vision Pro in an agency setting would likely be realized by those already heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem.”
But if you’re already using Apple products at your agency, it may be helpful to look into it: “It’s clear that Apple is emphasizing the integration with their current ecosystem as a major selling point. This is a testament to the potential of Vision Pro to serve as a powerful tool in the professional sphere”, concludes Jerko.