Apple Vision Pro: Startup Platform Of The Future?

How much of, like, the hard interesting stuff Apple did is with the hardware in the Vision Pro versus the software?

You need to understand the real world in order to augment it. Technology of a self-driving car, but on a headset.

This is maybe where founders should sort of pay attention.

Is this a good opportunity for startups?

There's all kinds of new interactions that I think we have not figured out yet. What really truly takes advantage of this platform?

The dream has always been to get to something like this.

Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. And as you can see, it's not just any other day in tech. There are some new platforms that are coming up right now. You might have seen other places where there are reviews. We're not doing reviews today. We're going to talk about what these platforms might mean for founders and people who want to build things for a billion people. We actually have an expert at the table right now, don't we?

We do. Diana, who's a group partner at YC, before she worked at YC, she's been working in AR and VR for 10 years, since the dawn of the Oculus, before VR was a mainstream thing. In fact, her grad school research was in computer vision, so she's been interested in this from way before it was a thing other people were following. Diana, do you want to talk about your startup that you did which was an AR/VR startup? A really early pioneering one?

Yeah. We went through YC with a startup called Escher Reality. What we were building was a augmented reality SDK for game developers so that they could build multiplayer experiences and AR games and build the code once so that it would work on any platform, so between not just iOS and Android mobile device. But the dream has always been to get to something like this, or that, or that, so the developers would write the code once and work across all devices.

And what happened to your startup?

So what happened is this took a lot longer (laughs) to come to market. That's one thing. The other thing that ended up happening, we ended up getting acquired by Niantic, the makers of Pokemon Go. So I ended up heading a lot of the AR platform over there at Pokemon with Niantic. And we ship actually a lot of this AR SDK into a lot of games, so millions of players are running our code, which is really cool.

So if you've ever played Pokemon Go, you've literally used code that Diana wrote.

And I'm so excited with this platform coming in, and we can go dive deeper into it.

Okay, should we take the headsets off so we can, we can talk?

Yeah. (laughs)

Let's do it.

So it's been a long road. You've seen this technology basically evolve over the course of a decade. What's, uh, you know, why AR? Like, th- that's one of the big things here, you know. Previous platforms may be really focused on VR and the gaming aspect. Uh, Hololens from Microsoft seemed to try to do the AR thing. What's going on with, uh, the Apple Vision Pro, you know. Why is this important? Why are we talking about this?