The technological world is holding its breath due to the opening presentation of Apple's worldwide developer conference (WWDC), today from 19:00 in Spain, which the company describes in its invitation to the press as '"special event".
This call, which every year is used to present the new operating systems that will be released in the autumn, this time comes very loaded. Although it is not officially a date to announce new products, everything points to the fact that it will be one of those appointments in which you can see the birth of a device that drives a new category: augmented reality glasses that even a name has been leaked, Reality Pro, something that will only be confirmed or denied on the stage of Apple Park in Cupertino (California).
Apple's viewer is not the first to offer augmented reality, a mix of augmented reality and virtual reality. There are more manufacturers, such as Oppo, TCL and Lenovo, that already have devices on the market, but this technology has not yet become popular. Will Apple manage to lead this category and propagate it? The challenge is not at all simple. The technical complexity of the new widget and its predictable high cost may make it an item only within the reach of minorities or a professional audience, but the company led by Tim Cook easily breaks into the league of products that everyone aspires to have.
Some of the leaked features of the visor is that it is a device similar to ski goggles, with two screens, one for each eye, which will offer the best image reproduction technology, Micro LED , and with a very high resolution (4K, the same as big screen TVs) for its small size, which will make the pixels indistinguishable. Its brightness will reach very high peaks of 5,000 nits. It would be a complex product to manufacture, with several external and internal cameras, and with an unusual curved base plate. All this portends a price that could exceed $3,000 and a higher amount in other currencies, including the euro.
Faced with challenges such as the technological one, which Apple may well have solved, and the price one, which is difficult to solve, the Cupertino company has an important card to play with: an ecosystem that integrates all its products and in which software and hardware they work perfectly together. The expectation is that the new operating system for the glasses, called xrOS, will include everything that its sibling products already have: apps, video calls, productivity, video games, movies, music, education... an endless list.
It has been 15 years since Apple registered its first patent on augmented reality glasses. Since then, many more have been recorded. It's a technology in which Cook believes passionately. "One day we will look back and not understand how we lived without her. Like many things nowadays. Can you imagine living your life without swiping through photos and without pinching to enlarge them? Or don't have internet or maps?", emphasized the manager in an interview with La Vanguardia in September.
The price may be one of the factors that slows down a wide penetration of Apple's glasses in the market, although this company is an expert in the gradual introduction of products. In its first year, the Apple Watch, the first new product introduced by Cook eight years ago, only sold 10 million units worldwide. It only took four years to sell more than the entire Swiss watch industry.
The biggest load of news at a WWDC is the news of the operating systems of each product line, with a marathon of explanations that are usually carried out by its vice president, Craig Federighi. This time, with the risk of a very long presentation –Bloomberg predicts more than two hours–, this part will not be spared. There are also indications that there will be new Macs. The glasses could arrive like the Apple Watch, at the end of an event, with a phrase that the company's co-founder, Steve Jobs, used to introduce an important surprise: "One more thing" (one more thing).
Tim Cook had the opportunity to pronounce it when he presented the Apple Watch eight years ago. Then Apple played with the weight of its history, in the same De Anza auditorium in Cupertino where Steve Jobs had presented the Macintosh in 1984. The famous ad for that computer that had everything the rest would have in the future ended by saying “ on January 24, Apple Computer will present the Macintosh. Then you will see why 1984 will not be like 1984", in an allusion to George Orwell's novel, which drew a future world with omnipotent power, Big Brother, which symbolized IBM.
Make no mistake, if the current CEO of Apple presents augmented reality glasses under the heading one more thing (one more thing), have no doubt that it will not be, just, one more thing.
