Palmer Luckey hasn’t been shy about his enthusiasm for Apple Vision Pro. In a new podcast interview, the cofounder of Oculus has nothing but good things to say about Apple’s $3,500 mixed reality headset and what it means for the future of virtual reality.
In fact, Palmer Luckey says Vision Pro’s external battery pack is something he once championed at Oculus:
“To be clear, that is the right way to do things,” he says. “And I was a big advocate of this at Oculus. Unfortunately, it was a battle that I lost in my waning years. And they went all in on putting all the batteries, putting all the processing in the actual headset itself and not just in the headset, but in the front of the headset itself,” he adds.
The Oculus cofounder says he worried Apple might make the same mistake to create a more elegant device, but that it’s not worth the added weight while wearing a headset.
Apple also priced Vision Pro correctly, Luckey believes, as a premium device does the most good for the fate of virtual reality.
“I think if Apple had tried to go after the low end of the market, that would have been a mistake. They are taking the exact approach that I had always wanted Apple to take and really the approach that Oculus had been taking in the early years,” he says.
Oculus, of course, was bought by Facebook which rebranded as Meta to emphasize its focus on virtual reality platforms.
Apple’s premium approach to mixed reality makes the whole category more appealing, in Luckey’s view.
“When Apple launched the Vision Pro I retweeted a tweet of my own from 2015, where I said that before VR can become something that everyone can afford, it must become something that everybody wants, and I think that’s the approach Apple is taking.”
In the interview, Palmer Luckey also shares his thoughts on how future Vision hardware could change, why the external battery is important for that, and what he expects Apple to do in the VR space going forward.
Apple unveiled Vision Pro earlier this month at its WWDC 2023 keynote address. The $3,499 AR/VR headset goes on sale in the US early next year.
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