Apple’s augmented reality glasses are said to be at least four years away from launch

Apple’s augmented reality glasses are still at least four years away from being released. bloombergReporting by Mark Gorman.

In a comprehensive report detailing some of the challenges involved in developing Apple’s mixed reality headset, Gurman explained that the company’s separate augmented reality glasses product has been mired in similar issues. Augmented reality glasses were the product that CEO Tim Cook and former design chief Jony Ive originally wanted to build before technical limitations reduced expectations to the current Ski-Google headset form factor with video pass-through.

It seems that Apple realized early in the development of the headset that the long-term goal of building augmented reality glasses with sufficient power was not possible. Engineers calculated that the glasses should provide the full performance of the iPhone with only a tenth of its power consumption to keep it from overheating.

Mike Rockwell, the former Dolby executive appointed to lead development of experimental head-worn devices at Apple, went on to describe the headset as laying the foundations for a future AR glasses device to secure resources. Apple’s work on the device now receives only limited resources.

said an employee working on the project bloomberg There is a running joke in the team that the company keeps working on a “hopeless” device just to keep Tim Cook happy. Despite the lack of meaningful progress on augmented reality glasses by 2019, Rockwell told more than 100 employees at an All Hands meeting later that year that Apple could introduce the glasses just a year after it introduced its first headset — a frame My time now seems impossible. .

Apple ultimately delayed any serious development of a standalone glass product for years, “all but killing the idea.” The company is now said to be at least four years away from offering any such product.