A few weeks ago, Apple announced that longtime chief engineering engineer Dan Riccio will step down to focus entirely on a “new project” within the company. According to another Bloomberg report based on sources with knowledge of Apple’s plans today, the project on which Riccio focused his energies is Apple’s next augmented reality, virtual reality or mixed reality headset.
The development of an AR headset at Apple appears to have encountered an obstacle or two with current project leader Mike Rockwell, although the report does not describe exactly what obstacles have arisen. While Rockwell will remain in charge of the daily work on the project, Riccio will have “final oversight” over the company’s AR / VR efforts, which are said to involve “well over a thousand engineers”.
Riccio had previously delegated the high-level management of most current consumer products, such as the iPhone, to an executive named John Ternus. Apple announced that Ternus will replace Riccio as head of general hardware engineering. The latest news indicates that he also delivered the development of a new camera and screen technology to Johny Srouji, the executive who led Apple Silicon’s design and engineering.
Apple is reportedly working to do with monitors the same as it did with processors: developing its own high-quality components that would replace those that Apple purchases from other vendors like LG or Samsung.
But, despite these other moving parts, AR is a priority in terms of new product development. Apple CEO Tim Cook said earlier that he believes AR has the potential to be a watershed similar to the iPhone for Apple, and an expected rivalry with Facebook in that space has been a trend in the recent privacy dispute between the two tech giants.
Last week, The Information quoted several sources close to Apple to say that Apple is working on an ultra-high-end 8K VR headset that could cost $ 3,000. So far, most of Apple’s publicly visible work on XR has been on AR, not VR. Cupertino has been continuously developing ARKit, a developer API that allows the creation of AR experiences using cameras and sensors on iPhones and iPads.
Apple also talked about VR occasionally. Although Cook says he believes AR is the most transformative technology, there have been talks from developers and documents about VR support on the company’s metal graphics API, and the company worked with Valve to add support for SteamVR headsets for Macs around launch of the iMac Pro.
It’s too early to say what Apple’s first headset would look like. Although The Information calls it a VR headset, it also supports high quality recording from around the world and showing it to the user, so AR is probably still part of the plan. It is possible that Apple will rely on some evolution of its SteamVR support as it develops tools for developers to do VR experiments as well, and it is also possible that this expensive headset is intended primarily for use by developers and professionals.
In any case, Riccio is now in charge of taking future XR projects out of the lab and taking them to users’ homes. The report on the VR headset said that we could see this first model in 2022.