Distinguishing genuine product leaks from hoaxes and misunderstandings can be a tricky business at times, with the track record of the leaker a key clue. But even with a solid record, reports of a Reality Pro front display to show the facial expressions and eye movements of the wearer seems a little… out there.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman seems convinced this is real, repeating it in his latest report based on multiple inside sources, but Apple commenter John Gruber believes it is a misunderstanding of a joke …
Reality Pro front display reports
One of Apple’s concerns about the product category is that, while augmented reality immerses you in the real world as well as a digital one, virtual reality cuts you off from it. CEO Tim Cook is on record as expressing this concern, so this much is true.
What is uncertain is Apple’s solution to this problem: adding a front display, visible to those around you, which displays your eyes. Whether this is video of your actual eyes, from cameras inside the headset used for eye-tracking, or simply an avatar-style representation of them, has never been specified.
The original source of the claim was The Information, almost exactly a year ago.
The feature that ultimately sold the industrial designers on the project was a concept for an outward-facing screen on the headset. The screen could display video images of the eyes and facial expressions of the person wearing the headset to other people in the room.
These features addressed the industrial design group’s worries about VR-induced alienation—they allowed other people in a room to interact and collaborate with a person wearing a headset in a way not possible with other VR gear.
Bloomberg echoed this:
The product will have a curved screen on the front that can outwardly show a wearer’s eyes.
Up to and including its most recent report, yesterday:
In an attempt to keep headset wearers engaged with the real world, the device will have an outward-facing display showing their eye movements and facial expressions. Apple regards this feature as a key differentiator from enclosed VR headsets. One person familiar with the device says the exterior screens allow people to interact with a headset wearer without feeling as if they’re talking to a robot.
John Gruber says this is a joke
John Gruber has long suggested this is a misunderstanding, and that the Reality Pro team merely joked about the idea.
My understanding is that there is no front-facing screen, but that Apple’s team had long joked about such an idea, and perhaps someone who heard the joking mistook the idea as real and passed it along to Ma.
He says today that he still believes this to be the case.
I’ll stick with my previous understanding that this is an internal joke that has been taken as real; that it would look goofy, not humane; and that even if it didn’t look goofy, it would make no sense to add the financial cost of an outward-facing display to an already-expensive device, and even less sense to incur the battery-life drain of powering that external display on an already-battery-life-constrained device.
9to5Mac’s Take
Gruber was once used by Apple to leak information the company wanted to be known, but didn’t want to directly reveal. There was a time when a simple “yup” or “nope” from Gruber was gospel.
That hasn’t been the case for years, however, and Gruber says he has no more information on Reality Pro than anyone else. It’s also worth noting that in the same post he first cast doubt on the display, he did the same for the tethered battery (albeit acknowledging it wasn’t entirely impossible), which is now believed to be accurate.
But I have to say I had exactly the same thought when I first heard the external display report – that it didn’t make sense, and seemed unlikely to be true – and nothing I’ve heard since has changed my mind.
On the flip side, perhaps Apple has found a way to make this unlikely-seeming feature make sense, so I’m willing to be proven wrong. But I know where my money would be! How about yours? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Photo: Nora Hutton/Unsplash
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