Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook attends the China Development Forum in Beijing on March 24, 2024.
Pedro Pardo | AFP | Getty Images
Apple will launch its Vision Pro headset in China this year, CEO Tim Cook told Chinese state media.
In a video posted on one of CCTV’s accounts on Chinese social media site Weibo, Cook was heard responding “yes,” when asked if the Vision Pro would launch in China this year.
The iPhone giant’s sales in the greater China region fell nearly 13% in the December quarter, as Apple contends with consumer caution over spending and more intense competition in the smartphone market from a resurgent Huawei.
Cook reiterated Apple’s commitment to the Chinese market.
“I am very confident in it (China),” Cook said, according to news package posted on one of CCTV’s Weibo accounts. “I love China, I love being here, I love the people and the culture. Every time I come here, I am reminded that anything is possible here.”
In a brown shingled beach house tucked behind stalks of reed grass, J. Crew customers encounter a new shopping experience.
Just beyond a set of wood steps and a wraparound porch, shoppers can explore a series of white-paneled rooms, a boathouse and a secret lighthouse that highlight the brand’s history and some of its most popular apparel.
Inside the rooms, shoppers can browse barn jackets, rollneck sweaters and rugby shirts. Outside on the porch, bathing suits are displayed on a clothesline.
While customers can select and purchase items as they would in any J. Crew store, the beach house comes with one key difference: It’s entirely virtual.
To mark J. Crew’s 40th anniversary, the brand is launching its first immersive shopping experience Friday with e-commerce platform Obsess, which creates 3D, virtual stores for retailers that customers can access from their phones or laptops.
Derek Yarbrough, the chief marketing officer of J. Crew and Madewell, told CNBC the company is planning a series of events to celebrate the brand’s anniversary. But they tend to be in places such as New York and Los Angeles, which limits the number of people who can attend, he said.
“With Obsess, we were really looking to have an exciting activation that we could execute for a larger audience and reach more of the people who love the brand in a bigger way,” Yarbrough said in an interview. “We really wanted this to be a passport to explore the world of J. Crew … and as the team brainstormed on it, it was a little bit of a no-brainer to take the form of a beach house.”
J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew
Obsess was launched in 2017 by its CEO, Neha Singh, a former Google software engineer. It aims to transform traditional online shopping into something more immersive, so shoppers remain engaged rather than lose interest as they endlessly scroll for their next purchase.
In Obsess’ virtual storefronts, customers can create their own avatars. Depending on the retailer, they can also play games that can unlock more content, promotions or other bonuses that keep them in the virtual stores for longer, the company said.
“What our platform does is it enables brands to create that much richer and more immersive digital experience that borrows the interface from gaming,” said Singh. “Today, the experience is so generic. Other than font and color, there’s really no differentiation between brands’ digital presence, but their physical retail presence is so different. So how can we bring some of those elements into online?”
Many retailers saw the metaverse, a virtual world that offered another possible platform to sell products, as the hot new technology throughout last year. Many of those same companies have now largely forgotten it, as strides in artificial intelligence have surged to the top of business leaders’ minds a year later.
While the metaverse may be dead — for now — virtual storefronts are growing. Obsess is now powering more than 200 virtual stores that tens of millions of shoppers have visited and bought products in.
The company’s clients include American Girl, Elizabeth Arden, Dior, Ralph Lauren, Corona, Laneige, Crocs, Coach, Mattel, Maybelline, Johnson & Johnson and even NBCUniversal, among others.
The virtual storefronts allow retailers to bring a version of the metaverse to their customers, without the need for pricey headgear or other steep barriers to entry.
J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew
“Technology never stops, and it’s going to keep progressing, but it has to be something that’s user-friendly, right? And parts of [the metaverse] are not user-friendly yet,” said Singh. “We launched the company before metaverse was a buzzy topic, and it really was just about: How can we use the latest technology to actually create a better customer experience?”
When e-commerce was born in the 1990s, Amazon led the way in its online bookstore, which featured a white background and icons of books with text describing them.
Since then, little has changed when it comes to the basic interface of online shopping.
“If you think about e-commerce, the typical sort of interface today, it’s a grid of thumbnails on a white background; whether you’re shopping for fashion, or beauty or home, it’s really all the same,” Singh said. “The interface looks like a database that really hasn’t changed in 25 years [since] it was first created.”
Shoppers headed to J. Crew’s virtual store can access a series of interactive games, including a scavenger hunt and a quiz on catalog covers, where customers will be asked to guess what year they were published.
Once they go through all the rooms and complete the quests, shoppers gain access to the secret lighthouse.
J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew
“We see actually a 10-times-higher add-to-cart rate if people engage and complete the game. So typically now in all of our virtual stores there’s some element of gamification, and it’s very kind of naturally embedded into the flow of the store,” said Singh.
“The more interesting you can make the experience and keep people engaged and give them content and give them games, the more they shop,” she said.
Some companies offer discounts or promotions as a “prize” for completing a game, which could contribute to boosted checkout rates.
Obsess said one of its customers, a luxury jewelry brand, said the average order value in its virtual store was 111% higher than on its traditional e-commerce site.
However, J. Crew’s Yarbrough said he is most excited about how long the virtual store could keep customers engaged.
J. Crew virtual beach house.
Courtesy: J. Crew
For example, on American Girl’s virtual store, shoppers spend six to 10 minutes on average per session, which is 1,000% longer than the average time spent for all shoppers on the company’s website, Obsess said.
One luxury fashion brand said the amount of time people spent in its virtual store was 74% higher than time spent on its traditional e-commerce site, according to Obsess. Overall, introducing avatars increases time spent by an average 73%, and when customers create an avatar, they’re on average 184% more likely to proceed to checkout, Obsess said.
“In today’s landscape, it’s so hard to not only get but keep people’s attention — you usually get a few seconds,” Yarbrough said. “So, if I can actually get someone to engage with an experience for several minutes or even longer, oh my God, that’s such a rich opportunity to really get someone hooked.”
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.
Nreal, a Chinese augmented reality glasses company, rebranded as Xreal. Co-Founder Peng Jin told CNBC this reflects the company’s expanded product range and international expansion.
Xreal
Chinese augmented reality (AR) glasses maker Nreal on Thursday said it rebranded to Xreal — a name it hopes will encapsulate its expansion into Europe and latest products.
Peng Jin, co-founder of Xreal told CNBC in an interview that the “X” in the new branding reflects the company is “expanding beyond what we thought was possible” and highlights new AR applications. The company, whose products are already sold in the U.S., U.K., China, Japan and South Korea, is planning to launch into European markets in the third quarter of the year.
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Augmented reality refers to technology that allows digital images to be imposed over the real world and represents an area of current investment for the world’s largest tech companies, from Apple to Meta. It is a key technology in the so-called “metaverse.”
Xreal makes two models of a headset that looks like sunglasses — the Xreal Air and Xreal Light — which run the company’s own operating system, called Nebula. Like Apple with iOS on iPhones, developers can make apps for Nebula that people can then use via Nreal headsets.
When people put on their headsets and open an app, they will see a large version of that content in front of their eyes. But Nebula is only available for Android devices, limiting its appeal. On Thursday, Xreal announced a new piece of gear called Xreal Beam, which it describes as an “iPod-shaped device” that can connect, wired or wirelessly, to smartphones, gaming consoles and PCs.
This will allow someone with almost any device to use the headset. One of the key areas Xreal is targeting is gaming. For example, you could connect Xreal Beam to a gaming console, such as PlayStation, and then play a game on a massive virtual screen within your glasses rather than on a physical TV.
Since its commercial launch last year, Xreal said it has sold 150,000 products globally. Jin did not give specific numbers, but said Xreal is looking to “double or triple” its sales in the coming year.
He also revealed the company is looking to raise money. CNBC reported that Xreal fundraised $100 million in 2021 — which at the time valued the company at $700 million — followed by $60 million from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba last year. Xreal has some high-profile backers that include Nio Capital, the investment arm of electric carmaker Nio, as well as venture company Sequoia Capital China.
Augmented and virtual reality are drawing interest from some of the world’s biggest technology companies. Meta has pinned its future to such innovations, while Apple is reportedly working on its own virtual reality headset and gaming giant Sony last year released its second virtual reality headset called PlayStation VR2.
Jin said the competition will help expand the market.
“When you have companies like Sony or even Apple start investing in the space it brings more attention to this general direction, it will draw more talent,” Jin told CNBC.
But Xreal operates in an interesting space. Its headset can be used with consoles like the PlayStation, so that people can play a game on a huge virtual screen rather than a TV.
This is not a direct competitor to the PSVR 2, which immerses players as if they were in the actual game. But it does pose questions about whether companies may move to block Xreal’s device in the future, a risk not lost on Jin.
“I’m not saying these companies will not one day decide to build their own AR glasses and decide to block us. I m not saying that’s not going to happen. But there’s so much more to gain than just blocking us,” Jin said.
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Why is it so hard to build a metaverse avatar — a visual representation of ourselves in the digital world — that walks on two legs?
“I think everyone has been waiting for this,” said a cartoonish digital version of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, unveiling his new avatar legs and jumping up and down at a virtual-reality event Tuesday. “But seriously, legs are hard. Which is why other virtual reality systems don’t have them either.”
Early avatar models introduced by Meta, as well as Microsoft, have been ridiculed for appearing as legless, waist-up bodies floating around their virtual worlds.
That’s in part because tech companies have been eager to show off their progress in building out virtual-reality environments while still working on the technical challenges of making avatars more human-like and realistic. Meta renamed itself from Facebook last year in hopes of jumpstarting its corporate transformation into a provider of metaverse experiences for work and play.
Zuckerberg described legs as “probably the most requested feature on our roadmap” and said they will be available soon on Meta’s Horizon virtual-reality platform. He said the challenge is perceptual, involving how the brain — taking in images seen though a virtual-reality headset — accepts a rendering based on how accurately it is positioned.
Legs are harder to render accurately because they’re often hidden from view.
“If your legs are under a desk or if your arms block your view of them, then your headset can’t see them directly,” he said.
Zuckerberg said the company has been working to improve how its artificial intelligence systems track and predict where legs and other body parts should be moving.
Facebook parent Meta unveiled a high-end virtual reality headset Tuesday with the hope that people will soon be using it to work and play in the still-elusive place called the “metaverse.”
The $1,500 Meta Quest Pro headset sports high-resolution sensors that let people see mixed virtual and augmented reality in full color, as well as eye tracking and so-called “natural facial expressions” that mimic the wearer’s facial movements so their avatars appear natural when interacting with other avatars in virtual-reality environments.
Formerly known as Facebook, Meta is in the midst of a corporate transformation that it says will take years to complete. It wants to evolve from a provider of social platforms to a dominant power in a nascent virtual-reality construct called the metaverse — sort of like the internet brought to life, or at least rendered in 3D.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described the metaverse as an immersive virtual environment, a place people can virtually “enter” rather than just staring at it on a screen. The company is investing billions in its metaverse plans that will likely take years to pay off.
VR headsets are already popular with some gamers, but Meta knows that won’t be enough to make the metaverse mainstream. As such, it’s setting office — and home office — workers in its sights.
“Meta is positioning the new Meta Quest Pro headset as an alternative to using a laptop,” said to Rolf Illenberger, founder and managing director of VRdirect, which builds VR environments for businesses. But he added that for businesses, operating in the virtual worlds of the metaverse is still “quite a stretch.”
Meta also announced that its metaverse avatars will soon have legs — an important detail that’s been missing since the avatars made their debut last year.
