There were many rumors linking Apple to an important product in the field of augmented reality. The company has been experimenting with this technology on its tablets and mobile phones for some time now, but that seems to be just a taste of what’s to come.
So it says in The Information, where they have revealed that Apple is preparing its first major product, an augmented reality helmet, by 2022. A year later this product will be refined and we will have the augmented reality glasses with us that some analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo had predicted for mid-2020.
Apparently, we have to be much more patient about this than the above data, and if we listen to the information sources, these augmented reality glasses will arrive three years later.
This seems to reflect the complexity of a technology that Microsoft, for example, has been promoting for some time with its Hololens. The second version of the advanced augmented reality helmet HoloLens 2 recently came onto the market with a very entrepreneurial approach, both through Microsoft’s own marketing and the price ($3,500).
Apple is already developing their first product, the Augmented Reality helmet codenamed N301, which is similar in format to Autonomous Reality glasses like the Oculus Quest.
This helmet will have the ability to offer both augmented reality and virtual reality experiences and uses external cameras to map the user’s environment, as well as a high-resolution internal screen to overlay virtual objects in the real world.
It is anticipated that we will have development kits available in 2021 so that companies interested in developing augmented reality experiences or games can do so from that time and combine it with the launch of this first hardware product in 2022.
As they emphasize in The Verge, Apple’s plans for augmented reality seem particularly ambitious. Tim Cook has already talked about this technology by comparing it to smartphones and explaining that “Augmented Reality is so big, so gigantic” and seems to have massive acceptance of this technology.
Apple has already demonstrated the relevance of augmented reality with the announcement of ARKit in WWDC 2017, and since then the nods in this area have been numerous. This development kit has allowed developers and users to experiment with various projects on their mobile screens and iOS-based tablets, but it seems increasingly clear that Apple wants to go further in this segment.