A report from Karl Guttag at the end of 2022 suggested that Limbak, a Spanish company that makes lenses for VR headsets, had been acquired by a behemoth. This was shortly followed by this Tweet from Brad Lynch:
Karl Guttag has broke the story that a “large US company” has acquired the lens design company responsible for the optics inside Lynx and SimulaVR
— Brad Lynch ? CES 2023 (@SadlyItsBradley) December 30, 2022
This acquisition will not affect the progress of those two productshttps://t.co/Bd8ygGFpB3 pic.twitter.com/vsNKz0dmsb
So, it seems more than likely that Apple has joined Meta and Snap in the 2022 sweep of VR and AR technology purchases.
What We Say
Where there is smoke, there is fire, and where there are billions being spent by Meta on VR and the metaverse there are other companies making sure that they are not left behind.
There are legitimate things to get excited about in the metaverse: AR in education, training, and medicine; digital twins in the enterprise; the integration of digital and physical spaces with AR. However, neither Meta, Snap or Apple is really interested in creating enterprise or business cases for these products. So, they are jockeying for position. What that means is anybody’s guess.
Meta has sold millions of Oculus headsets. No one had ever sold millions of VR anything before that. At least not at the level of quality and application that you find in Oculus. For the generations that are growing up indispensably connected to mobile devices and social media, there are few biases or prejudices against VR and AR. Whether they fully embrace the vision of the big tech companies, like Meta and Apple, remains to be seen. It’s just not worth dismissing it as folly or a flight of a fancy. Too much money is betting against that being true.
