Apple announced its Vision Pro augmented reality (AR) headset today. It’s supposed to be available in 6-9 months, but clever entrepreneurs should start thinking NOW about what kinds of products and businesses they can create to take advantage of this technological inflection point. And make no mistake, this headset is a BIG DEAL. It will kill a lot of existing apps and websites and leave an opening for innovators to replace them. So, in this article, I describe 23 different startup business ideas that you can run with in order to profit from Apple’s new AR platform.
1. Flip Cup App
“Flip Cup Free” was a popular app back in 2010 when the iPhone was still new. An augmented reality version of flip cup would probably be even more popular.
2. ThriftingID
Thrifting (for fun and profit) is an increasingly popular hobby in the U.S. The antique and thrift store industry generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue annually, and eBay alone facilitated $74 billion in total transactions in 2022.
Create an app that allows a user to touch or point to objects in a thrift store and then use GPT-4 and Langchain to identify the item and pull up the prices for the 3-5 closest comps from eBay and/or Facebook marketplace.
3. Sous-chef
How many times have you found a delicious-looking recipe on Google only to have your own attempt result in a slightly burned entree that doesn’t look or smell quite as you expected? If you’re anything like me and tens of millions of other Americans, quite often!
Create an app that doesn’t just give you a recipe but actually guides you through it. The Vision Pro headset has tons of cameras in different positions so it will be possible to use something like OpenAI’s GPT-4 to analyze images of your food as you prepare it and provide you with live feedback as needed. For example, “chop that onion a bit smaller” or “you can be a bit more vigorous with your stirring of that soup”.
4. Tour Guide Development Agency
Whether you already run a software development agency or you just know how to code, you could go to state parks, national parks, and historic monuments and pitch them on creating custom augmented reality tour apps for them.
5. Poker
Play virtual poker with your friends using augmented reality and an empty kitchen or coffee table. Poker was one of the first apps on the original iPhone app store so there is good reason to believe this would be a success. Even if Apple includes a Poker app when the headset first ships, you could probably still create a profitable variant that generates $1 million or more in profit within a couple months if you create a more specific niche version of the app (such as a Texas Holdem app).
6. Level
Not sure if your picture is hanging level on the wall? Just use the augmented reality “level” app that uses the numerous cameras on the Vision Pro headset to calculate and visualize the angle at which your frame is hanging and how much (if at all) it deviates from being level.
7. Daily Prank Social App
Create an app that allows you to send requests to your friends who also have Vision Pro headsets. If the friend accepts, then each of you can leave one augmented reality virtual “poop” hidden somewhere in the other person’s house each day for them to discover at an unexpecting moment. It’s all the fun of the 💩 emoji, but even better because it’s 3D!
8. Fish Tank
Is your apartment boring? Turn one of your walls into a virtual fish tank. You can even choose the type and number of fish in your tank and give them names. Based on the early popularity of the “Koi Pond” app in 2009, I think this would probably be a big hit.
9. Green Thumb
Create an app that uses GPT-4 together with augmented reality to teach anyone to garden. The app can identity each plant, recognize whether it needs more or less water (or other nutrients), and give the user instructions on anything that they should do for the plant.
Gardening is a hugely popular hobby, and there are millions of wannabe gardeners who currently feel they lack a green enough thumb to actually succeed at gardening. So the market opportunity is huge. You could even tie the system into an ordering system so that, for example, if a plant needs more nitrogen, the app could recognize that fact, tell the user, ask the user if they would like to place an order for a recommended nitrogen-enriched soil supplement, and then place the order if the user agrees.
10. Wallpaper app
This is sort of like the virtual fish tank app I suggested earlier, but it just lets you redecorate your apartment or house with any type of wallpaper or paint that you want.
11. Catacomb Courier
Endless runner games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run were popular 10 years ago, and they are still popular today. Create an augmented reality version of an endless runner game (such as a courier running through underground catacombs) with the runner’s left-right and up-down motions determined by hand swipes/gestures which are recognized by the headset’s cameras.
12. Healthy Doggo
Create an AR app that identifies whether or not your pet dog appears to have any issues. For example, are they limping with a likely back left foot injury? Are their nails too long? Is the dog rolling around trying to itch its back (a possible sign of fleas)?
The app could be monetized like Google Maps is, through sponsored recommendations to local businesses (in this case, groomers and veterinarians). The app could also be a paid app (e.g. a $1 monthly subscription) or it could even be used as a free lead generator for selling pet insurance.
13. Piano Teacher
Create an AR app that highlights keys (and possibly also displays sheet music at the same time) to teach people how to play songs on the piano.
14. Drum Teacher
This would be essentially the same thing as the piano teacher app but for drums.
15. Kajabi but for AR
If you aren’t familiar with it already, Kajabi is an online platform that lets people create online courses. But every cooking course, flyfish lure-making course, carpentry course, piano course, and other online course teaching a physical activity would arguably be better with augmented reality. So, create a Kajabi competitor that lets people record videos and sequences of steps while wearing the Vision Pro headset and have that turned into an AR online course.
16. AI & AR Assisted Painting
Create an app that uses something like GPT-4 and Midjourney to create line sketches that you can then trace and fill in to create awesome paintings.
17. Lie Detector
Four years ago when I was still a grad student at Duke, I got to play with an app that a research team working with Microsoft’s AR headset had created. The app used the headset’s sensors to detect and amplify minute color changes in someone’s face every time their heart beat. The result was that when you put on the headset and started the app, you would see someone’s face flashing red at the rate of the heart, and a small number in the corner would display their numerical heart rate. It was an awesome app that would have been incredibly useful when playing poker or negotiating a high stakes business deal.
Create the consumer version of this app for the Vision Pro. Detect heart rate, breathing rate, and micro-expressions, and use that data to estimate whether someone is lying or not. Even just as a novelty, I think this would be an extremely popular app that could easily make someone a millionaire.
18. Virtual Pets
Create an app that lets people choose and create virtual pets. Want a Shiba Inu? You can get one for just $5. It’s personality will be AI-generated, and it will be displayed in AR, doing dog things, whenever you put on your Apple headset.
Virtual pets breed successes in each age of the internet. The original internet boom in the 90s had Pokemon. When the mobile phone came out, we got Touch Pets. With the crypto boom, we got Crypto Kitties. And you can be sure there will be at LEAST one multi-million dollar virtual pet app for Apple’s new AR headset. You could be the one that creates it!
19. Tire Changer
Create a Vision Pro + GPT-4 app that guides someone through how to change a tire on any car. Once successful, you could expand the app’s capability to also help people change their brakes and diagnose and solve any other mechanical or electrical issue with their car. Or, for those people who don’t want to do car work themselves, the app could simply be a second opinion to make sure the mechanic giving you a quote isn’t blowing smoke.
20. 3D Website Design Agency
Augmented reality headsets enable a completely different form of website to exist. A web page no longer has to be constrained to a 2-dimensional screen. Instead, it can have display elements, widgets, and controls that are 3 dimensional. There are currently ZERO software developers with the skillset to create such websites, which means you are as well positioned as anyone else to start thinking about and learning how to design such websites.
Start writing a book now on how to design 3D websites so that when the headset actually ships, you can be “The Guy” that companies go to when they need to hire a consultant or agency to help them produce a 3D AR app or website.
21. Public Fashion
Create an augmented reality app that is part social network. When anyone with the Public Fashion app is wearing their headset and sees another person with the app, the second person appears to be wearing whatever virtual accessories they chose. Virtual accessories might be shirts, hats, necklaces, watches, or anything else. You might even consider making each accessory an NFT to get the metaverse cryptobros hyped up to use your app.
22. Holodeck-Like Roll-Playing Games
If you’ve ever watched Star Trek, you probably know what the holodeck is. It’s essentially an immersive augmented reality video game played in a lasertag-like arena with other in-person players. You could essentially create that with the help of the Apple Vision Pro headset.
Here’s how it would work. You would create something like a movie set, e.g. like a pioneer village or an old western town. You would create something like a mission-oriented video game or branching movie script with characters and plot events that would tend to push game players to one of several final, predetermined outcomes. A group of 2-6 people would all come to this venue, don the Vision Pro headsets you provided, and then enter the game. The stage is real, remember. At least, it’s partly real. There are real, fake buildings. The weather and NPCs will be AI generated and then projected into the game through augmented reality. And you might even throw in a few real employees (dressed up) into the game so that some NPCs can interact physically with the players.
This would be an expensive but very cool type of experience. The only place you’d want to create this any time soon would be in the bay area where there are a lot of rich geeks.
23. Girlfriend
Create an app that lets you create a virtual AI-powered girlfriend that you can visualize and talk to anywhere you go. For example, you could create a 5 foot 2, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girlfriend that likes to read and play board games. And then you can see and talk to her and play AI board games with her.
Is it weird? Yes. Is it an inevitable and profitable idea? Also yes. I mean, just think about it. Once you get a user who create their custom AI girlfriend inside your app, they are NEVER going to stop paying for the subscription.
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