It seems that Apple is really starting to get serious about entering the virtual reality and augmented reality business, as can be seen in a pair of hiring that the company recently made.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently hinted that projects on virtual reality and augmented reality could be in the company's future. Both technologies are interesting, but Cook believes that augmented reality has a brighter future than virtual reality.
In connection with this recent report, Business Insider discovered two recent hires that Apple made on former employees from companies with expertise in the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality.
This month, Apple hired Zeyu Li, who previously worked for more than a year at the secretive Magic Leap, an augmented reality startup. His LinkedIn profile reveals his interest not just in augmented reality and virtual reality, but also in deep learning and self-driving cars. Li is now working in Apple as a senior computer vision algorithm engineer.
For those who are unfamiliar with Magic Leap, it is currently developing a head-mounted display similar to Microsoft's HoloLens, which projects virtual objects on top of the real world.
Another hire, which was made in June, was Yury Petrov. He was a former research scientist for Apple, but previously worked at Facebook-owned Oculus, the makers of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Petrov is now back as a research scientist for Apple.
There have long been rumors that Apple has teams focused on virtual reality and augmented reality, with a report from January claiming that the secret team is working on a headset.
The team is said to be made up of hundreds of employees, some tapped from companies that Apple has acquired and some poached from companies such as the camera startup Lytro and Microsoft.
Apple was reported to have already spent several months working on its own virtual reality headset at the time of the report, but so far, the company has not revealed any details on the project or confirmed that the team even exists.
Apple could be looking at focusing more on augmented reality over virtual reality in accordance with the views of Cook, with the Apple CEO thinking that virtual reality fosters antisocial behavior as users are only able to enter virtual reality by themselves through the headsets that they wear. In comparison, users on augmented reality are still able to interact with each other as they are still able to see the real world.
