Apple and Sony team up to make Vision Pro more attractive

With the Apple Vision Pro widely considered a flop, Apple looks like teaming up with Sony to make it more attractive by adding PlayStation VR2 hand controller support.

Billions and billions of dollars have been pumped into VR development by Big Tech companies and, so far, all they have in return for it is billions and billions of dollars of debt and a few million headset sales. Of course, this is a long game, and when it all eventually takes off, those that have spent the money will be in the best position to reap the rewards. Or that’s the idea anyway.

Apple is the latest high-profile inductee into the VR Debt club. Everyone says that the Vision Pro is a technical marvel, but it’s too expensive, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough compelling software for it to make a difference. Bloomberg’s all things Apple guru, Mark Gurman, reckons that it’s only sold half a million units worldwide since it went on sale at the start of the year. Admittedly that is $1.75bn in revenue, which is a lot of money. But measure that against the multi-billion dollar cost of its development, and it’s a poor return.

To add to the issue, reports also say that those that have bought it don’t use it much. This seems to be common across the industry, with Meta having the same trouble with its Quest line. VR headsets are a holiday season novelty; played with, marvelled at, and then put in a drawer and mostly forgotten.

What they need is better software. What they need in the current market is games, frankly, and Apple is linking up with Sony to solve one of the big achilles heels it has in making that happen.

Achilles’ wrists?

Steve Jobs famously didn’t like video games and Apple’s history with the genre can be described as checkered at best. But that man Gurman again reports that Apple and Sony are working on addressing one of Vision Pro's big blind spots: hand controllers.

Vision Pro relies on eye movements and hand gestures for control, which is all well and good when navigating an EPG or a spreadsheet, but is not anywhere near precise enough for gaming. So it turns out that Apple approached Sony earlier this year with the goal of being able to pair its PlayStation VR2 hand controllers with the Vision Pro headset. These will provide the 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) precision needed to reliably control elements within Apple’s virtual worlds. 

Development work has been ongoing for months, coupled with reaching out to games developers asking if they would support the controllers within Vision Pro titles. There were a few things that needed to be ironed out, not least of which is that Sony does not sell the controllers as stand alone units and is going to have to decouple production and distribution of them from the VR2 headset. This may have been what delayed any announcement hitting before the holiday season sales uptick.

Gurman and others expect an announcement soon, though, maybe for the first anniversary lunch date in the new year or around CES.

Too little too late (again)

Of course, the controllers alone will not be enough to restore the Vision Pro’s reputation for being a virtual white elephant. But they may help future iterations of whatever Apple does with the technology blossom. And if the company decides to commit to developing games for the visionOS platform, effectively offloading the development costs of hand controllers to Sony helps it keep more cash in hand for blandishments to the games community. It needs to build an entire ecosystem from scratch here, from developers to marketing, and that costs money.

But if all that fails, there has at least been a bit of pragmatic thinking in all this. The VR2 controllers apparently can also help navigate the Vision Pro UI, scrolling via the thumb stick or D-pad and using a trigger to replace a finger pinch to click on an item. So, while paying $3500 to navigate spreadsheets floating in front of your eyes might seem a bit much at the moment, at least future iterations of Apple devices should be able to accept inputs from physical controllers if the users want to access real world precision with virtual certainty.

tl;dr

• Apple is reportedly collaborating with Sony to integrate PlayStation VR2 hand controller support into the Vision Pro headset, addressing its limitations in gaming precision.
• Despite generating $1.75 billion in revenue, the Vision Pro has only sold about half a million units since launch, making its return on the multi-billion dollar development investment appear low.
• Users of the Vision Pro, much like those with Meta's Quest line, are reportedly not utilizing the headsets frequently, indicating a need for more compelling software and gaming titles.
• The integration of PS VR2 controllers could enhance navigation and control for the Vision Pro, allowing for future developments that cater to gaming and improved user experience.