That Apple is working very seriously on Augmented Reality is already a fact, especially after the launch of ARKit and its new iPhone X, in addition to the great reception that the platform has had by the developers. But this is only the first step of a much bigger project, a project that wants to bring us some AR glasses. (Augmented Reality) and that we will not take too long to see.
As published by Bloomberg, as always with information obtained from sources within the company that cannot be disclosed, Apple would already be in the process of developing glasses that could be ready for 2019 but would not reach the market until 2020. According to these sources, Apple expects this product to surpass the iPhone in success, quite ambitious expectations.
A job that started two years ago
Contrary to what Virtual Reality (VR) does, which puts you in a completely imaginary world isolating you from your surroundings, what Augmented Reality does is use the real world as a canvas and superimpose information on it. You could be in a soccer match and see live player statistics, even repeated plays, without losing detail of what is happening on the field, or a surgeon could be viewing the surgical field with information about the different organs and elements that he sees in it. The possibilities of this new technology are enormous, and what we now see in our iPhones with iOS 11 is just the tip of the iceberg.
The company started a couple of years ago creating a small team that started work on AR, but at this point that team is made up of several hundred engineers distributed throughout Cupertino and Sunnyvale, who are working on various hardware and software projects, all with RA as a common element, and who are codenamed T288. The first result of this group work has been ARKit, which has given them the opportunity to work for the first time with RA in real teams.
A new standalone device
However, the next step is much more complicated. Apple does not want glasses that use the iPhone as a screen and as an engine for AR. He assures that right now there are many products of this type and that none meet the minimum requirements to satisfy users, and therefore it is an idea that they have discarded. Apple's idea is to create glasses with its own screen, its own processor and even its own operating system, rOS (Reality Operating System). It would thus be an independent platform, although based on iOS, and would have its own App Store. How the user interacts would not yet be clear, but it would be a combination of gestures, voice commands, and touch panels.
For the creation of this new device Apple would be using the HTV Vive, and right now it would have a device similar to the Oculus Gear VR with the iPhone as a screen, but these would only be test devices that it would not market. The next step before these new Apple glasses arrive, which as we say will be for 2020, will include the release of a new version of ARKit with more tools for developers, and would happen as early as 2018.