(Photo by Liu Zhankun/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images)
Apple's much-rumored AR and VR headsets will arrive in 2022 and 2023, according to a new report from The Information, which gives a much longer time frame than analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who said the first version was coming in mid-2020. I think The Information is right, and one of the reasons is 5G.
Phone-based AR and VR had a quick boom and bust over the past few years, with Samsung's Gear VR and Google's Daydream both abandoned as it became clear they were too heavy, uncomfortable, proprietary, and battery-hungry. Standalone mobile VR devices, so far, have barely held on, suffering from the same problems. VR's one area of success so far, if you can call it that, has been in PC gaming, where battery consumption isn't a relevant question.
Why Apple's AR Headset Needs 5G
5G is poised to change that, letting manufacturers build much lighter, more responsive headsets.
The key technology is split rendering, which offloads a lot of the AR and VR processing power to the cloud. It streams a lot of your augmented and virtual reality content from a server rather than rendering it on-device. That would let a standalone headset, or an attached phone, go light on its processor, and thus its battery, relying on its 5G modem to do most of the work.
Today's 4G networks don't have low-enough latency or high-enough reliable, sustained transfer speeds to do this trick. That means 4G phones and headsets had to do a ton of processing on the phones and headsets, which made them heavier, more complex, and more battery-hungry than a cloud-based headset would be.
Apple doesn't mind making accessories dependent on your phone, but it's also smart about battery drain. Having a phone rendering AR for hours at a time really taps out the battery in both your headset and in phones Apple is trying to avoid making thicker. Remember, battery chemistry isn't advancing particularly quickly; as devices get more powerful, they need to learn how to do more with less power. Streaming, rather than entirely computing the AR experience, gets around a lot of the power-consumption issues.
If the headset is phone-dependent, we also need to think about the connection between the headset and the phone. That's likely to be some form of 802.11ad, or WiGig, a high-speed, short-range networking standard that's been kicking around for a few years. WiGig functions at similar frequencies to the millimeter wave forms of 5G, so we're probably going to see it integrated into more devices as 5G becomes more common.
An Apple AR headset might not be standalone; it might, for instance, rely on an 802.11ad short-range connection to stream data from a phone with a high-speed 5G connection and 3-5ms latency. That would make for a much lighter, simpler headset than we've seen so far.
Okay, So Now We Need Those Networks
In the US, we are nowhere near having 5G networks that could support these experiences. To get the low latencies you'd need to stream AR and VR to Apple's standards, we're going to need standalone 5G networks that don't rely on 4G to establish connections, as the current ones do. That already bumps us to the end of 2020.
To get the massive bandwidth we'll need to stream high-resolution AR and VR experiences, we need networks with at least 100MHz of clear 5G spectrum each. That means either millimeter-wave, which will take years to build out because the teeny little cells only have 800-foot radiuses, or, in the US, it means C-band mid-band, which will probably be auctioned in 2020 for 2021 network launches.
Let's throw another factor into the mix: Apple has an at-least-three-year contract with Qualcomm right now to deliver modems for the 2020, 2021, and 2022 iPhones (and maybe more) as Apple ramps up its own modem unit with the staff it hired away from Intel's failed consumer 5G projects.
So you see how this is all saying 2022 or 2023? By 2022, the current 5G standards chaos will have settled a bit. 2022 is the first year when Apple might have its own integrated networking hardware, which could be integrated much more tightly with Apple's other silicon than Qualcomm's discrete modems can be, allowing for super-compact and power-efficient glasses. And 2022 is the first year when Apple will be able to assume most Americans will be able to hook up to broad, powerful 5G networks giving them augmented reality outside their homes.
Apple would need new processors and screen technologies for these headsets, too. I'm not an expert on those, but I'd agree from what I've seen in the industry that we haven't seen the right ones yet. We're close, but we aren't quite there.
So, I agree with The Information here. Apple doesn't like to release products before their time. The time for this one is a ways away.