Instructions about how developers should describe their apps include specific prohibition of the terms augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), extended reality (XR), or mixed reality (MR). Instead, developers should adopt the “spatial computing” phrasing that Apple has touted since the Vision Pro’s announcement in June last year.
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Apple has changed several mentions of “Apple Vision Pro” to “Apple Vision” in iOS 17.3 beta 2 code. For example, Apple now refers to “Mac, iPad, Apple Vision apps” instead of “Mac, iPad, Apple Vision Pro apps.” Apple’s website features a “Vision” product tab instead of a “Vision Pro” tab, but the gradual shift toward “Apple Vision” branding appears to add credence to the idea of Apple building a “Vision” product line.
Apple tries to rename the tech so they can act like it’s something new instead of common place technology that’s been in use for years.
Apple isn’t building a VR headset, but an iPad for your face. It’s not just a name change for no reason, but a product that is focused on a completely different use case. VisionPro has no controller, no locomotion, basically nothing of the things that have dominated VR for the last 10 years. It’s much closer to video glasses (Eye-Trek, Sony HMZ-T1, XRealAir, Rokid, …) than a Quest3. Even if the underlying tech is very similar to a Quest3, the goals are completely different.
Hololens did have quite a lot of feature overlap with what VisionPro is doing, but since Microsoft never developed that into a consumer version and didn’t manage to fix the low-FOV issues, that thing never really went anywhere. If they had continued with their WMR headsets they might have something like the VisionPro themselves, but WMR has been on life support for years and is now on its deathbed waiting to be removed from Windows.
It’s also not like Apple are the first with renaming things, Facebook tried it with Metaverse and Microsoft called theirs Mixed Reality.