Apple Vision Pro Is Perfect For Lucrative Military Contracts. Apple…

The “Pro” part of “Apple Vision Pro” isn’t just there to justify the massive $3,500 price point of Apple’s new face computer. It’s also a signal that Apple is attacking one of the most lucrative markets for high-end VR headsets: the military. Another signal that just appeared: Apple has acquired an augmented reality company with military contracts, according to The Verge.

The military and specifically the Air Force is a massive market for high-end augmented and virtual reality devices because dome-type simulators for training pilots cost between $2,000 and $4,000 to run per hour. That’s still cheaper than flying an F-35 in real life, and it comes minus the risk that a hotshot Top Gun rookie will crash a $78 million aircraft, but it remains ferociously expensive.

The cost in VR?

“When it comes to virtual reality and mixed reality is that you get very much the same experience at the fraction of a cost,” says Varjo CEO Urho Konttori. “Instead of thousands of dollars an hour, it’s going to be like maybe a couple of hundred.”

Varjo makes high-end VR headsets for military contracts and 25% of the Fortune 500 starting around $2,000 each. The “couple of hundred” dollars per hour cost of simulations is mostly not hardware, though: it’s contextual cost in personnel, space, software, and all the other bits and pieces the military needs to set up, run and evaluate virtual training sessions.

Apple Vision Pro looks ideal for that purpose, with specs likely higher than the top-end Varjo headsets (we’ll know for sure upon launch and when Apple provides all those specs). Plus, it comes with a full spatial operating system that accepts games built in Unity natively, which means 70% of all mobile games are ready for Vision Pro One.

(70% of mobile games are built in Unity, according to CEO John Riccitiello.)

But it’s not just about individual pilots and individual training. More important in many cases is squadron and combined forces training. That’s critical for real-world benefits on working together in chaotic wartime conditions, in the air, at sea, and on the ground.

“Some of the simulation systems can have like tens of thousands of people simultaneously in a digital combat environment, which is basically replacing the kind of military exercises people used to be doing,” Kontorri told me in recent interview.

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Since the military is already accustomed to using first-person shooter games like Call of Duty and Ghost Recon for training purposes, you can very easily imagine a massively multiplayer version of a Unity-built game helping dozens of pilots, soldiers, tank commanders, or naval personnel train in synced wartime simulations.

The company Apple reportedly just acquired is Mira, which has raised $17 million for building AR headsets and has multiple military contracts, including one with the Air Force and one with the US Navy. Mira’s products seem much more aligned to technician use with in-line instructions and spec sheets for mechanics, but its military connections combined with the Apple Vision One would make a compelling platform for future sharp-end-of-the-spear training.

But it won’t happen immediately.

Apple Vision One is not set to launch until “sometime next year,” which gives other VR and AR companies, including Varjo, time to prepare their responses.