It’s no secret that Apple’s Vision Pro wasn’t the breakout hit that Tim Cook wanted it to be. There are plenty of theories as to why that might be. Maybe it’s the slightly terrifying EyeSight feature that digs right into your soul. Perhaps it’s the $3,500 price tag. We guess we’ll never know. But Apple isn’t just going to watch it die.
Apple’s grand Vision for the future of AR
Instead, it’s come crawling to Sony in an attempt to turn the Vision Pro into some sort of suicide squad gaming machine, hoping that gamers with holes burning in their pockets will pick up the slack. That shouldn’t be too difficult. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the necessary hardware. All that’s missing now, are the controllers.
That’s apparently where Sony comes into the equation, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter. Sony is well-versed in, er, less-than-successful headsets, and a team-up between the two would benefit both – saving Apple the time and money developing custom controllers for the Vision Pro.
Sony, on the other hand, might have found the perfect place to offload its expensive yet excellent Sense VR controllers. Gurman reckons Apple approached Sony earlier this year to make the Sense VR controllers work on the Vision Pro – which it’s now busy with – while Apple’s developers crack on with third-party controller support.
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It’s easy enough to throw money at Sony and fix your controller issue in a few short months. More difficult is the lack of games (aside from Pinball, of course). Perhaps it’ll do something similar for big-ticket games like Gran Turismo 7 or the Horizon series. Hey – it worked for the controllers. It’ll need to be quite the sum to get Sony on board, however.
Sense VR controller support may prove to be more than just a boon to Apple’s Vision Pro gaming ambitions, and could entice users using the headset for editing and productivity, too – offering a more refined tracking solution than Apple’s hit-or-miss hand- and eye-tracking abilities.
Expect a reveal sooner rather than later. Gurman believes that the two powerhouses were slated to announce the partnership “weeks ago” although that was postponed for reasons unknown. As for the price, that’s something both Apple and Sony are going to have to work out, considering Sony does not sell the controllers as a standalone product and instead bundles it with the PS VR 2 headset.