Why is Apple getting ‘spatial’?

An obscure term recently used by the world’s most valuable company in a product introduction, probably in hopes that it inspires, rather than answers, questions.

This month, Apple unveiled its first headset for what most people would call augmented reality, virtual reality or, if you prefer, mixed reality. But none of those words are uttered in the nine-minute video about the device on Apple’s website. Instead, it refers to “spatial computing,” a “spatial operating system,” “spatial experiences” and “spatial audio.”

There’s a reason Apple has eschewed the established terminology in favor of more obscure phrasing. And it’s not because its device is doing something drastically different from headsets like Meta’s Quest Pro or Microsoft’s HoloLens, according to Marcus Collins, an advertising executive and the author of “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do and Who We Want to Be.”

When it comes to spatial computing, Collins said, “no one knows what that is, and that provides Apple the opportunity to define it.”

Collins used an NFT as an example: If someone tells you about “a digitized receipt of membership,” he said, you might ask follow-up questions like: What is that? How does it work? But if someone simply says, “I’m launching an NFT,” you might refer to what you already know about nonfungible tokens and be more likely to say, “No, thanks, I’m good.”

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It’s not the first time Apple has strategically renamed a category. Before the App Store, for instance, people didn’t talk about apps; they talked about “software programs.” Nor is it the only tech giant to try the strategy. In 2013, Facebook used “graph search” to describe its version of, well, search. (It didn’t become widely accepted.) Jim Prosser, a communications consultant who has led teams at Twitter, SoFi and Google, said the intended audience for “spatial computing” might be investors and the news media more than consumers.

“They are pitching a product to people,” he said. “For tech press, industry analysts and investors, they’re pitching a concept.”

The concepts of VR and AR have some baggage, including decades of sci-fi connotations, products by other companies that have not sold well, and in the case of Google Glass, a derisive nickname for its users.

So are we heading into the era of “spatial computing”? As with all new buzzwords, that’s not ultimately up to corporate marketing arms. It’s up to people who might use it.

“We decide what is acceptable, what’s not acceptable,” Collins said. “That’s how culture works.”