“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,” Tim Bajarin writes for PC Magazine. “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,” Bajarin writes. “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,” Bajarin writes. “I believe the smartphone and tablet will be the dominant AR delivery platform for at least another three to four years or even longer. 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…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last November, “Imagine what could be done with AirPods coupled with a pair of Apple Specs. The sky’s the limit!”
VR, I think, has some interesting applications, but I don’t think it’s a broad-based technology like AR. Augmented reality will take some time to get right, but I do think that it’s profound. We might… have a more productive conversation, if both of us have an AR experience standing here, right? And so I think that things like these are better when they’re incorporated without becoming a barrier to our talking… You want the technology to amplify it, not to be a barrier. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, October 13, 2016
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