Apple is best known for its game changing new product launches. The arrival of the iPod was instrumental in transforming how the world interacts and consumes music, while the launch of the iPhone marked the start of the smartphone era. It has also helped tablets and later smartwatches become must-have accessories thanks to the iPad and Apple Watch.
And this week's announcement that the company will sell a $3,499 (£2,800) mixed-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, from early next year, has been seen by some as a new iPhone moment.
The US technology giant's first foray into mixed-reality headsets – which it has termed "spatial computing" – has been seen by some as the impetus for a new revolution in wearable technology.
But can it really succeed where so many others have failed?
The history of mixed, virtual and augmented reality goggles is littered with the corpses of failed projects past. "We've seen a variety of augmented reality and virtual reality products that have been loudly hyped and failed to live up to their promise," says Mar Hicks, a historian of technology and professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Much of the problem has been finding a use for this technology that people actually want, or even need. The immersive and interactivity augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) provide have tended to lend themselves most obviously to the gaming industry.
"For the past 20 or 30 years, or since the late 80s, or early 90s, there's been this vision about virtual reality," says Sylvia Pan, professor of virtual reality at Goldsmiths, University of London. Some attempts came to market, like Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which claimed to be able to present "stereoscopic" three dimensional (3D) graphics while playing games. But the Virtual Boy suffered from being too expensive, too clunky, and not effective enough. (A second attempt at "stereoscopic" 3D, through the company's 3DS handheld games console, was downplayed by the company when promoting the console.)
"There was a hype in the early 2000s, but it gradually came down," says Pan. In 2013, the excitement started once more with Oculus's Kickstarter campaign. OculusVR, a VR headset firm, was set up by Palmer Luckey, a retro game modder – tinkering with classic video games to inject new life into them.
As well as being a video game fan, Luckey was a tech obsessive. He amassed what he called the largest private collection of VR headsets in the world. By 16, he was making his own. Eventually, he felt confident one of his prototypes was good enough to make it to market. In August 2012, he launched a crowdfunding campaign under the OculusVR company umbrella.
The Kickstarter aimed to raise $250,000 (£160,200 at the time) in crowdfunding for the headset, which promised to bring an immersive gaming experience. In the end, it raised 10 times that amount.
Oculus was a rare success story in the early days of VR headsets' relatively recent history – so much so that it was bought by Facebook (now Meta) in March 2014 for $2bn (£1.2bn at the time). The acquisition of Oculus brought big tech into the game, and Meta continues to be a major player in the area as it builds a new virtual world called the metaverse.
But while Meta's move into VR appears to have helped the technology become more mainstream, the backing of a major technology company doesn't always mean success.
Ten years ago, Google launched Google Glass, its attempt at augmented reality. Glass wearers would see the world with a graphical layer of digital information atop their field of view. But the product flopped. The eyewear was considered unstylish, hard to use and many people objected to the built-in camera for users to record the world around them. Perhaps most unkindly of all, the most enthusiastic wearers came to be termed "glassholes".
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