Tim Cook said this week that Virtual Reality was a great thing, which sparked all the rumors that the company he runs had plans to launch something in the not too distant future related to this technology. Shortly after we found out that Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), it has hundreds of people working in a secret department (well what a secret…) that focuses on this type of technology. Now we find out that they have gone one step further acquiring a startup called FlyBy Media.
FlyBy Media has developed a technology that allows mobile phones to "see" the world around them. It is important to mention that the company worked with Google in the past and that they were responsible for an application that used the ability to recognize images, something that is present in the Google project "Project Tango". But not only that, but FlyBy Media was the vision software for this project.
FlyBy, vision for mobile devices
FlyBy also created an application that allowed mobile devices scan objects in the real world, such as a shoe, a symbol, a poster, buildings, etc, and save that item in a collection of shared objects. Our contacts could send messages to those objects in something like a messaging application (in fact, it was called FlyBy Messenger) for the Internet of Things.
But what interests Apple is only the ability to see and understand the world using cameras. It seems clear that Apple will use FlyBy Media technology to create something with Virtual Reality or, what seems more likely, the Augmented reality, which is where virtual objects appear on a screen where we also see our environment in real time. As always, the downside of all this is that we will most likely get out of doubt several years from now. Well, to wait it has been said.