Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman shared some screenshots of the form developers are having to fill out for the headset’s developer kits. I’m guessing the official ordering process for customers will be much more Apple-y when you can actually buy the device yourself next year.
Apple leaker @aaronp613 said the company pushed firmware that references two additional model numbers for the headset’s battery. I’m not aware of Apple publicly discussing other potential batteries for its headset, so I wouldn’t read too much into this just yet. But it is interesting to consider the possibility of additional batteries, even if they don’t actually come to market.
The firmware updates could be one of Apple’s steps to prep for forthcoming the Vision Pro dev kits.
The transparent PS VR2 has been shown, and here’s a special edition clear Quest Pro unit from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, posted during the launch of Threads. Since Meta’s shutting down production of these, we don’t expect to see it released, but at least it exists.
Check ‘em out on the PlayStation blog. My favorite is easily this transparent PSVR 2. Sony, please release this for real!
Developers who want to try the beta can sign up at www.unity.com/spatial. Apple has already released the visionOS SDK and it could start shipping the dev kits soon.
The other day, Vjeran discovered we still have the original Oculus Rift dev kit I brought back from Oculus HQ ten years ago. It made me nostalgic, so I decided to spruce up my story about touring their early offices to fix a little linkrot.
Then, an old photo suddenly caught my eye.
No idea how long this was on display, but it had a seat of honor at the front desk. Oculus sold to Facebook one year later.
During the Fortune Brainstorm Tech event on Tuesday, Meta exec Vishal Shah said the metaverse’s “hype cycle” has come and gone — but he doesn’t believe that’s a bad thing:
We didn’t invest for the hype, we have been investing in the space for years... I’m actually pretty happy that there was both a hype and a trough of disillusionment last year, it was tough to live through that, of course, ourselves. But now we have our heads down and built, because that’s what it takes to build something difficult to iterate and do it.
[Fortune]
Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth was asked that question in an AMA he held over Instagram Stories on his profile on Thursday evening. His response:
The metaverse term is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the term. It does lack definition because we haven’t given it full definition yet.
He also argued that it’s similar to how people were trying to define the internet in the 90s (and said that the internet is still hard to define).
I don’t completely agree with that characterization — the metaverse feels much more nebulous to me than the internet ever did — but I am curious if the concept of the metaverse eventually goes on to be something more widely understood.
And Boz doesn’t seem worried, saying that “I think new technology is always like this.”
