Apple Toys With AR, But iGlasses Still a Few Years Out

One of the things Apple does well is to use a platform approach to anything it brings to market. MacOS and iOS are platforms for hardware, software, and services; tvOS and watchOS are platforms in their own right. By doing this, Apple can riff on these platforms and innovate at the hardware, OS, and services level.

We are about to witness one of Apple's most interesting riffs soon in the form of augmented reality; iOS 11 brings a whole new and exciting way to merge our physical world with our digital world. What is important about this initial foray into AR is that Apple is using dedicated hardware in the form of the iPhone and iPad to deliver its first generation of AR solutions. At the moment, a smartphone or tablet is the best way to deliver AR and the apps being developed will have a real augmented reality focus.

But if you follow this market, you know there is another way being proposed to deliver AR: mixed reality. As we see in Microsoft's HoloLens, this form of mixed reality uses a set of goggles that allow a person to see the real world around them and then overlays virtual objects in their field of view.

This is an important distinction since Microsoft is not really pushing VR in the way Facebook and HTC do with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Those are closed systems and you cannot see the real world around you when in their VR applications.

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I like what Microsoft is doing with HoloLens and Intel with Project Alloy, but they still use bulky goggles that require a great deal of processing power either via a tethered solution or—in Project Alloy's case—power-hungry CPUs and GPUs embedded in the headset with relatively low battery life.

For goggles or glasses to be accepted by the mainstream public, they must be more like the glasses we have today and not in the current form of heads-up displays that make a person look like a science-fiction character.

I've seen many devices, and I still don't see either the breakthrough technology or designs that would be acceptable for consumers coming anytime soon. I believe the smartphone and tablet will be the dominant AR delivery platform for at least another three to four years or even longer.

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However, I do believe Apple has designs in the works around some type of AR or mixed reality glasses and that these represent the company's natural evolution of its mobile iOS UI. While this may be quite a few years in the future, Apple has filed patents on several glasses design and the most recent one has an AR twist to it.

Another hint that Apple is serious about some type of AR glasses comes with news that it recently acquired SensoMotoric Instruments, which produces eye-tracking technology for things like gesture controls and other AR-like functions.

If and when Apple delivers some type of glasses it would be a significant extension of its platform. The big question is when this will happen. While it's hard to predict, I think this is a 2020 product. But you can expect Apple and others to continue to acquire the proper technology to eventually deliver AR glasses that everyone will want to usu. If I read the tea leaves right, this will allow Apple to reinvent the user interface again just as it did with the Mac and iPhone UIs in the past.

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