” 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.
. 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.“When it comes to virtual reality and mixed reality is that you get very much the same experience at the fraction of a cost,”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.