Vision Pro: Will Apple succeed where Facebook failed?

Part I in series regarding Apple Vision Pro, exploring the question: 

Will Apple change the world of videography, again?

When Facebook acquired Oculus for $2B in 2014, I did some thinking beyond the press release. Oculus was a gaming device. Facebook wasn’t a games company, a hardware company, nor a content company… what could be their long play with this deal? 

 My take back then was that it wasn’t about being the next Xbox or Playstation, watching NBA games courtside, nor hanging out with friends in a virtual club, all of which was kind of the narrative Zuck himself was pushing.  I had a nice diagram of capabilities and value propositions for the newly expanded Facebook ecosystem. Surely, there was some way to knit Facebook’s core competences into a strong, unique, defensible new branch of business. Surely, with all the talent at Facebook, there would be a systems-oriented strategy, and this vision would guide further acquisitions to make a stronger FB, right? 

I thought with Oculus, a good next move would be to enable immersive experience capture, and immersive sharing. People use Facebook to share what they did and where they went. I guessed (with no research) that people might want to extend their travel photography into 3D landscapes and video clips, not to create a ‘metaverse’ but to enable more engagement with their own stories in reality. This might help their friends really immerse in that Cancun vacation world, not just see a snapshot. Perhaps that would really bring the Likes.  I thought FB would try to complete that scenario with capture. 

I was wrong. Zuckerberg stuck with his virtual hangouts, he over-invested in pushing the Metaverse; Zoom has been the big winner; Facebook is not a leading content streaming platform; the business world has rolled onward remotely using Teams and Zoom and Google Meet and Webex, not Facebook.  And Zuckerberg’s primary revenue model is still making ad revenue from people who are still sharing traditional pix and video on IG and FB, but people under 50 are using other platforms, and Apple’s privacy-forward settings have hurt Facebook’s often-creepy ads business. 

Since that Oculus acquisition, more immersive capture has been enabled by others, with options from complicated GoPro rigs to simple 360 cameras. I’ll give a little credit to both Facebook and Snap for stretching their ecosystems into capture.   Snap made a couple versions of Snap Spectacles for users to shoot a short video snippet or image, and post it/send it directly to their Snapchat friends.  Facebook partnered with Luxottica to make Ray-Ban Stories, classic Wayfarers with hidden cameras.  How has that turned out? The Snap product is a novelty; the Ray-Bans are still selling. They’re not much better than using a phone. But at least with Snap it’s using hardware in a way that reinforces the main user experience of the core business.     

Meta, and Facebook, on the other hand, seem to have ignored an opportunity.  They don’t seem to have this figured out. Meta Quest is still a gaming device struggling to find relevance with the core social network business.  Meta headsets’ cameras (so far, as of Quest 2) don’t allow rendering a high-fidelity image— just a grayscale, which is enough to enable the gesture recognition for controlling a game. Meta is also less concerned with the editing experience. I imagine that like today, they would rather their users upload everything to their cloud thoughtlessly; and later, Meta’s machine learning will edit the highlights and play it back to them, no doubt at the right time to boost engagement metrics, as their model demands.

Meta is not ignoring the needs of immersive video creators completely. They just seem to be just ignoring the millions of people who use their platforms today. Meta has a site with learning resources for Meta Quest Creators, including a case study in how someone recorded and edited a documentary for consumption using a Quest headset. It’s freakin’ onerous. It’s professional-grade technical. It’s not just cinematography, it’s IT, it’s almost VFX. Whatever it is, it’s not consumer-ready. Even after all this, Meta has at least 80% of the worldwide VR headset market. It’s just 80% of a niche.

Now that Apple is officially in the game with a don’t-call-it-VR  headset, I figured I’d revisit my initial speculation. Is  a new world of videography about to crack open?

I’m curious what others think.