A forgotten Apple patent reveals the original idea for the Vision Pro

A forgotten Apple patent from 2008 suggests that the company has been working on the Vision Pro for a very, very long time. Spotted by Macworld’s Dan Moren while he was browsing the Internet Archive, the old article only shows one diagram from the patent but it looks extremely similar to the display panel of the Vision Pro.

The device is also described as a wearable display with intelligent sensors that can “simulate the experience of being in a virtual environment.” It even mentions that the sensors would be able to track head and eye movements. While the tech Apple wanted to put inside it at this point must have been quite different from the product we have now, it’s surprising just how similar the shape and design of the headset are.

It’s well-known that Apple and many other tech companies file patents like there’s no tomorrow, so when people saw this back in 2008, there was a good chance they thought that it would never happen. But there are plenty of long games played in this industry — Meta’s Orion project, for example, is already 10 years old, and it’s still a fair few years away from becoming a consumer product.

The patent doesn’t necessarily mean Apple was developing the Vision Pro way back in 2008, however. It could have been more of a thought experiment at that point and patented for potential future uses. If it did consider making the device, it wouldn’t have taken much research to realize that achieving the size, weight, and cost goals would have been practically impossible at that time.

As for the future of this product, rumors have circled about both a 2nd-generation Vision Pro and a lower-end version of the current device. We don’t really know what Apple is working on right now or which it’s planning to release first but, either way, weight and price are where consumers most want to see improvements.