If Apple wants to disrupt eyewear, it has to help people see
Apple may have realized that it needs to do more than add cameras, speakers, and AI to a pair of frames if it wants to disrupt the eyewear market. It needs to help people see.
Think about it.
Glasses were already a breakthrough
Eyewear is an innovation that already happened, thanks in part to Arabic scholar, Ibn al-Haytham.
Hundreds of millions of people across the planet today already wear spectacles, which let people who can’t see well see better. The audience of people who can’t see so well was already so huge that Apple decided to make it possible to insert your own lenses into the Vision Pro. But what seemed to be a necessary convenience is also emerging as a strategic need, because the biggest innovation eyewear already brings is letting people see.
Right now, visionOS does this to some extent by turning your reality into a video game, boosted by all the powerful tools and technologies you’ll discover in Apple’s spatial computing experiences. It does this but doesn’t let you see.
It may already be possible
I think it will be a while until anyone comes up with a machine intelligence lens/camera arrangement designed to test a person’s eyesight before offering up prescription level visual correction that uses video cameras, eye displays, and image correction to help people see.
I also think that if any company were to figure out how to offer something like this it would be an entity at the scale of Apple. We know these things are theoretically possible.
Startups like Ixi have developed working prototypes of smart glasses that use eye-tracking and liquid crystal tech to instantly adjust the lens prescription based on what the wearer is looking at.
There are also systems like Eyebot which can perform rapid AI-driven vision tests to generate prescriptions.
Apple thinks bigger than Meta
Apple’s huge focus on visionOS, health, and developing solutions that make a difference to people’s lives all lend itself to pursuing some way to bring such technologies to market at scale as it follows its paths in AI and AR.
Across the weekend we learned that Apple’s Meta-competing smart specs won’t ship until 2027. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says, as expected, these will likely host cameras, microphones, speakers, AI integration and health features with the intelligence provided by a paired iPhone.
Gurman also talked about the design of these glasses, repeating his earlier claims of four models, including Wayfarer-like and also oval glasses in brown, blue, and black at a cost of around $200 to $500 each.
Why the Apple Watch analogy is revealing
All well and good, but Gurman also claims Apple hopes to disrupt the glasses market to the same extent it transformed the watch market with Apple Watch. That’s a huge ambition.
Apple turned the watch market upside down with Apple Watch. How did it achieve this? The hints in the name as even though Apple Watch introduced a horde of useful features, the one thing it also did was continue to tell the time.
That, after all, is the innovation that made watches popular in the first place.
What I am saying is that to truly disrupt the eyewear market Apple must ensure it also does the one thing people wear glasses for, which is vision correction. Will Apple be able to achieve this by 2027? What will it need to put in place if it does?
What would real change look like?
Reading between the lines I’ve a feeling next year’s Apple smartglasses won’t deliver on this need yet. Bloomberg says they will be confined to features such as photo and video capture, AI assistance and the provision of contextual information to help the wearer.
Those technologies are pretty remarkable as I think we’ll also get spoken directions and spoken accessibility tools, including built-in language translation, image identification and other great features.
Together, that means these spectacles will be able to help guide people with limited or no vision to better navigate and interact with the world around them through audio.
That’s great – but I believe that for Apple to find a way to truly disrupt the market it will need to develop a tech to help improve visions. Doing so would represent real disruption as it cleaves closely to what people already use glasses for – vision correction. Can Apple do it with cameras, AI, and small displays?
If it can’t do it now, it will do in future. The ambition it has for the category demands it.
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