VisionPro: No IPhone for Augmented Reality, but a Curiosity for Insurance

Earlier this month, Apple released the VisionPro, a headset that filters the world through a customizable interface for the wearer. Use cases abounded, including… setting timers! Scrolling through social media! Sitting at a desk and typing! All things that are currently impossible with current hardware. (This is sarcasm.)

Apple has a history of applying its design and marketing acumen to form factors that exist and opening up a new market for it among consumers. In the same way that the iPhone repackaged the BlackBerry idea for the non-executive, VisionPro is an attempt to evolve the early entries into the augmented reality computing market by Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens.

Twenty years post-iPod and 15 years after the iPhone, however, those attempts hit differently. The videos of VisionPro use came off more disconcerting than exciting. It’s hard for us to put our phones down for sure, but at least we have the option. Strapping data feeds to my face seems more like a punishment than an enhancement to my daily life. Put another way, the “iPhone effect” of bottom-up consumerization of tech leading to enterprise adoption seems severely curtailed.

But for P&C insurance, this kind of computing device holds a lot of promise. The ability to ingest all the information in your field of vision for property inspections and claims adjusting goes a long way toward streamlining those processes and reducing errors. It’s already being leveraged in this way by IMA Insurance, using the HoloLens device.

Another use case to watch is for training those same inspectors and adjusters, especially as the industry deals with staff turnover with those crucial workers. Farmers Insurance has experimented with VR training in the past. It stands to reason that being able to drop trainees into actual cases for training purposes, or have an even wider, more granular view for an anonymized training module, would be very helpful in creating workers ready on day one.

Maybe the VisionPro offers technology upgrades that would make it an improvement over Microsoft for insurance applications. At this point it’s too early to tell.

At the same time, I find the decade-plus attempt to introduce augmented reality (or Apple’s new term for it, “spatial computing”) on the consumer side to represent a fascinating sea change in the path for new technologies from the home to the enterprise. For most of the century, tech has filtered up from the consumer/employee to the enterprise. People wanted to get their email on their iPhones, and work on their iPads, so the enterprise made it so rather than deal with workarounds.

That worked because the installed base of iPhones and other smartphones was so large, though. At more than $3,000, most employees are not going to be early adopters of VisionPro or similar devices. That price represents a very luxurious household expense, but a relatively small capital expense for an enterprise. If consumer technology is currently at a saturation point, where there’s not much space for a new “killer device” to break in at a wide scale, we may start to see the enterprise leading the way in getting people used to the latest gizmos and gadgets.