Report: Apple is quietly developing a Google Glass competitor codenamed ‘T288’
Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., speaks with attendees during an event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2016. Apple Inc. unveiled new iPhone models Wednesday, featuring a water-resistant design, upgraded camera system and faster processor,… more
Apple CEO Tim Cook is openly bullish on augmented reality, the technology that overlays virtual images or data on top of the real world. He’s talked about it on Good Morning America, onstage at product launches and on multiple earnings calls.
Behind the scenes, several hundred engineers are working on an Apple-grade augmented reality headset that could launch to the public as soon as 2020, Bloomberg reports, citing unnamed sources. The project, codenamed T288, is reportedly being led by former Dolby Labs executive Mike Rockwell.
Cook himself has acknowledged the practical challenges around the project. Early AR headsets, like Alphabet's Google Glass, were limited by their battery life, screen quality and the weight of the cameras and sensors needed to process the world around them.
So far, the best example of a working AR headset is Microsoft's HoloLens, a device that costs $3,000, weighs 1.2 pounds and looks like a retrofuturistic visor from the 1980s. Ford Motor Co. uses HoloLens to help its employees design cars.
A Microsoft employee demonstrates the company's HoloLens at its 2016 developers conference in San Francisco.
“Anything you would see on the market any time soon would not be something any of us would be satisfied with,” Cook recently told The Independent.
The new headset reportedly runs a version of iOS that engineers internally are calling rOS, or the “reality operating system.” They’re experimenting with various ways people might interact with data displayed inside the headset, including voice controls, head gestures and physical buttons.
In the future, an augmented reality headset might overlay walking directions on the real world, giving people a dotted line to follow to their destination. It might bring up additional information about products and instantly compare prices online. It might even do things like block out billboards.
Earlier this year, Apple applied for an augmented reality patent dealing with how to display virtual information and interact with it. Much of its early work in augmented reality has centered around ARKit, which developers use to make augmented reality apps for the iPhone and iPad.
Alphabet President and Google co-founder Sergey Brin wears its Google Glass wearable Internet glasses while speaking at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco in June 2012. The company later scrapped a consumer version of the product.
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