Tim Cook: “We are high on AR for the long run.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been talking a lot about Augmented Reality these days, highlighting its pros compared to the widely used Virtual Reality platforms. Now, going by a Bloomberg report, it seems like Apple is entering a new space of wearable digital glass segment that also supports augmented reality.
According to the report, Apple is working on a pair of glasses with Augmented Reality support, that can be connected wirelessly to iPhones and other Apple products.
Tim Cook interest in augmented reality was seen during the quarterly investors meeting where he was quite vocal about the future of augmented reality based devices and the need to cache on the market.
“AR can be really great, and we have been and continue to invest a lot in this,” Cook said in a July 26 conference call with analysts. “We are high on AR for the long run. We think there are great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity.”
Going by the report, Apple has conducted discussions with possible suppliers for the ambitious glass project which is still at the very nascent stage. It is believed that Apple has placed the order for a small quantity of near-eye display from a supplier for testing.
The near-eye display will show images and other details on the field of vision of the user and by all probabilities also use augmented reality.
Bloomberg says, at the moment, Apple is not going to produce the glass in large scale. If they find the prototype worth manufacturing, they might launch the new Apple product in the market by 2018.
Over the years, Apple has purchased a number of patents related to AR and VR. Also, recently they had hired people who are experts in these fields. Recently, Apple had announced an AR mapping system for iPhone. All this is pointing towards the continuing effort of Apple to create a team of specialists through acquisitions and hiring.
Apple had acquired motion capture specialist Faceshift, machine learning and computer vision start-up Perceptio, German AR firm Metaio and former Google collaborator Flyby Media in recent time.
By venturing into wearable digital glass segment, Apple is trading on dangerous waters as an earlier attempt made by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. by launching Google Glass had miserably failed and the search engine giant had to scrap the project after its highly publicized launch in 2012.
The reasons for the failure of Google Glass was its cost and privacy issues over video recording and its awkward appearance.
Augmented reality “is going to take a while, because there are some really hard technology challenges there, but it will happen in a big way, and we will wonder when it does, how we ever lived without it,” Cook said last month. “Like we wonder how we lived without our phone today.”