With the appearance of iOS 11, Apple announced the AR Kit of the augmented reality developer platform, and its ambitions surfaced.
Recently, according to foreign media reports, Apple acquired a German eye tracking glasses manufacturer SensoMotoric Instruments.
Founded in 1991, SMI has a long-term technical presence in mobile eye tracking and enhancement and virtual reality, according to its website. Hardware products are used in augmented reality applications, visual science, brain mapping and neurology, early childhood. Closedness detection, psychology, sports, etc.
SMI's current technology tracks and records real-time images of glasses wearers up to 120 times per second. This technique reduces input delay and reduces motion errors when the perception of motion does not match the change in viewing angle.
Prior to this, Apple has acquired five VR/AR related technology companies.
1, Flyby Media
In 2016, Apple acquired augmented reality company Flyby Media to strengthen its virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) teams. The core of Flyby Media is the space-aware platform (V-Fusion), which can use mobile devices to enhance people's understanding of their surroundings, so that people can truly see and understand the real world. The company used to be an Apple technology vendor to help develop Apple iPhone-specific products and integrate them with the Maps Connect project.
Flyby Media's technology is closely related to computer vision, helping the system see and map its surroundings, essential for driverless cars and augmented reality. They have worked with Google and their image recognition technology helped Google develop "Project Tango", an Android-based tablet with sensors and cameras that map indoor environments.
2, Metaio
In 2015, Apple acquired Metaio, an augmented reality company founded in 2003, which focused on the development of a “Thermal Touch†system (hot touch system), but it will take another 5 to 10 years for the technology to mature. Users can convert any physical surface into a virtual electronic touch screen through glasses with augmented reality such as Google Glass or a normal camera.
The imagination of this technology is very broad. For example, with this system, users can convert ordinary physical desktops into chessboards and use virtual chess pieces to play chess. Users who like shopping can click on the products in the physical album to automatically link to the merchants. Shops; designers can project their own designs into the real world and watch their effects.
In addition, Metaio has a large developer community with more than 1,000 customers and more than 150,000 users in 30 countries around the world.
3, Faceshift
Faceshift focuses on facial motion capture technology, making virtual characters closer to human expression. Founded by Zurich scholars Thibaut Weise, Brian Amberg and Sofien Bouaziz, Faceshift was first isolated from a laboratory at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In the field of games, Faceshift allows the character's expression to change in real time with the human expression, creating a more realistic game experience; in film production, it can make animated characters more suitable for human expression; Faceshift is not limited to these, It also provides facial recognition systems for businesses.
4, PrimeSense
In 2013, Apple acquired Israel's 3D sensor maker PrimeSens. PrimeSense started out as a 3D sensing software and camera system. After that, it smoothly transformed into a chip manufacturer and became the technical partner of Microsoft's first generation Kinect, which made PrimeSense attract a lot of attention.
The mobile chipset developed by PrimeSense is suitable for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, and the chip and corresponding software can be used for many purposes such as identification and indoor space mapping.
5, Polar Rose
In 2010, Apple acquired the Swedish facial recognition technology company Polar Rose for $29 million. The Swedish startup had only 15 employees at the time, and the facial recognition program they developed could be applied to Facebook photos.
They developed an application called Recognizr. In Recognizr's demo video, you can see that when Recognizr recognizes a person's face, he can display the person's profile, including his YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google Pisaca, Flickr, and more.
In addition to the acquisition of the above related technology companies, Apple also recruited a number of related experts, such as Microsoft Hololens engineer Nick Thompson, Virginia Tech's top virtual reality technology researcher Doug Bowman (Doug Bowman).
A few years ago, when Apple quietly acquired these technology companies, we could only roughly speculate on its ambitions on VR and AR. However, with the appearance of iOS 11, Apple announced its own augmented reality developer platform AR Kit, its platform ambition surfaced.
The AR Kit supports Unity, Unreal, and SceneKit, with motion tracking and features such as plane, lighting, and range estimation. It tracks the environment around the iPhone and iPad, allowing the device to sense how it moves within the room.
Arkit also automatically analyzes the room layout, detects the horizontal planes such as the desktop and the ground, and places virtual objects on these levels. At the same time, it captures and calculates the total amount of light in the captured scene through the camera to apply the correct lighting conditions to the virtual object. Make it easy for AR game developers or filmmakers to create their own work.
Perhaps because of plans to launch AR Kit on more than one billion iPads and iPhones worldwide, Cook directly calls AR Kit the world's largest AR platform. As the saying goes, no sound is already, and it’s amazing.
Nowadays, various news broke out that Apple has embedded AR into iPhohne 8, to achieve 3D sensing, and there has also been news that Apple has secretly developed AR glasses. For these news, Zhi Tiger is not surprised. Because of the many years of technical harvesting, it is natural to develop the corresponding AR products. Coupled with Cook's admiration for AR technology, these messages should be implemented to varying degrees.
However, according to Apple's low-key and conservative style, even if it develops AR glasses, it will not be arrogant. Perhaps it is still based on Apple's mobile phone at the beginning, so that mobile phones provide information and function calculations for glasses. After the technology and products are matured, the products that are as epoch-making as the iPhone generation will be launched.
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