Could this be the year wearing light-up smart goggles goes mainstream?

Apple, Meta and others have spent billions of dollars betting that virtual reality headsets will be the future. This could be the year they finally win the battle for our eyeballs, writes Andrew Griffin

The obsession with getting onto people’s faces and into their eyeballs isn’t new; the first virtual reality headset was developed in 1968 (Business Wire)

In recent years, technology companies have been trying desperately to get onto people’s faces. From their beginnings decades ago, there has been a clear belief among the inventors of Silicon Valley that people want some kind of information projected onto their eyes. They have often been wrong: probably the most notable augmented reality hardware is the Google Glass, most famous as a kind of cautionary tale.

And then there’s the two most famous virtual reality headsets – Apple’s Vision Pro and the Meta Quest. But what exactly is Apple’s “vision”? And what’s the destination of Meta’s “quest”? These two tech giants appear equally stuck in the kind of crisis that comes with the onset of maturity. To be blunt: what are they, and what are they for?

The obsession with getting onto people’s faces and into their eyeballs isn’t new. The first virtual reality headset – according to Guinness World Records – was the “Sword of Damocles”, developed in 1968. It took its name not from its import as the pioneer of VR, but from its physical weight: it was so heavy that it had to be suspended from the ceiling above its wearer, like the mythical sword.