Wagner James Au has been in the VR space for a long time and he makes a good point here. The “metaverse” is not a thing—at least not in Apple’s vision.

For me the big reveal is Vision Pro has little or no VR capabilities—instead, the overwhelming focus is on displaying photos, video, and audio in an AR space. Even the rumored ultra-realistic avatars are not really avatars per se, but volumetric models of the individual user, called a “persona”.

Relatedly, there’s little or nothing in VisionPro that smacks of the Metaverse as it’s properly defined—no immersive shared virtual world, no highly customizable avatars, no virtual economy of user-generated, etc. But then that shouldn’t be a surprise: Apple CEO Tim Cook has never been a booster of the Metaverse concept.