While I think Apple throwing their hat in the ring with a super-high end device is great for the market and should light a fire under Meta (and everyone else's butt), I think that the idea that Apple has a super-advanced technology lead isn't totally true for those that have been paying close attention to the XR space.

I mean yes, Apple is the best hardware company in the world, and they've assembled/polished best in class hardware and most importantly, have been willing to commit to the volumes for production for bleeding edge parts (eg, companies like eMagin have been demoing 4K micro OLED display for years [1] but no one's ever committed for an $X billion order - already we're seeing the "Apple" effect though as suppliers now have customers to chase [2]).

Meta's FRL has been working on pinch-and-release click for years with a haptic EMG controller that while bulkier, I think would actually be a more satisfying experience: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2021/3/inside-faceboo... Meta has also been working on next-gen displays (focused on varifocal displays/fixing vergence acommodation conflict) for years. I still think that Doug Lanman's 2020 EIS Plenary presentation is one of the best technical talks of recent memory, and highly recommend watching it to anyone interested in displays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQwMAl9bGNY - Tested had a good demo video of what they have in the labs last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6AOwDttBsc and you can read about their DeepFocus work from back in 2018: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2018/12/introducing-d... or see their Half Dome prototypes going back the same time period: https://tech.facebook.com/reality-labs/2018/12/introducing-d...

You can go down anywhere down the stack, from spatial audio and custom HRTFs [3], haptics [4], avatars [5], FRL (or whatever it's called now) has done it all [6] but most of the cool stuff has only trickled into the market while Meta has focused on selling $300 consumer headsets and despite obstensibly being a "software" company has never figured out how to build a platform beyond a barely passable VR game launcher. Reading the visionOS docs [7] has been a breath of fresh air and is much more impressive to me than the hardware (which is great, but the biggest accomplishment on that end IMO was committing to launching such a high price-point to reach a baseline experience they were happy with; also their passthrough appears SoTA).

Still, I'm most excited that this will give the "courage" to others to launch high-end consumer experiences. Let's see true retina-resolution (60PPD+) varifocal HDR displays and actually seamless passthrough.

(Funny note, looking through old notes, back in 2015, I expected 4K/eye displays to be in an HMD by 2020, which was far too optimistic. [8])

[1] https://www.uploadvr.com/emagin-4k-oled-microdisplay-steambo...

[2] https://www.oled-info.com/tags/oled-microdisplays

[3] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/09/facebook-reality-labs-rese...

[4] https://www.xrtoday.com/mixed-reality/what-is-meta-doing-wit...

[5] https://theinnerdetail.com/meta-will-soon-let-you-to-make-ph...

[6] https://research.facebook.com/research-area/augmented-realit...

[7] https://developer.apple.com/visionos/learn/

[8] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/k08jnu4t4qwerd0ln10w8/Virtual...