The Financial Times has reported that Apple has secretly assembled a large team of experts for its virtual and augmented reality projects. They have built prototypes of headsets that have the potential to rival Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s HoloLens.
The secret unit has hundreds of staff members with the right set of skills as well as targeted former employees from companies that are working on next-generation headset technologies including Microsoft and camera start-up Lytro, according to people familiar with the initiative.
Apple has been building prototypes of possible headset configurations for several months now as well as a valuable collection of patents related to technology that could be used for reality-altering gear.
Even though California-based Apple has not commented on the VR reports, Chief Executive Tim Cook showed an obvious interest during a quarterly earnings call when he answered a question on VR from an analyst. Cook said;
“I think it is really cool and has some interesting applications.”
AR vs. VR
Augmented Reality (AR) is the blending of virtual reality where real life users are able to interact with virtual contents in the real world and are able to distinguish between the two. On the other hand, Virtual reality (VR) is all about the creation of a virtual world that users can interact with. Users would find it difficult to tell the difference between what is real and what is not.
Early this month the Consumer Electronics Show gadget fest in Las Vegas was abounded with altered realities in almost every field from sex and sports to sales and space exploration.
While video game players have been the natural early targets of VR, the technology is now being put to use for education, medicine, sports and more.
Finally, Apple declined to comment on any VR initiative.