Apple Said To Be Working on AR Glasses With Carl Zeiss (cnet.com)

Apple seems behind Microsoft, Google, and Facebook on the nascent augmented reality space, but that could change soon. From a report on CNET: The tech titan is working with the German optics manufacturer Carl Zeiss on a pair of lightweight AR/mixed reality glasses, according to tech evangelist Robert Scoble. The project, which could be announced as early as this year, was confirmed by a Zeiss employee, Scoble wrote in a Facebook post.

Comments

Apple is behind

[The-Ixian]

Has Apple ever been first with anything?

Seems to me, Apple has always just taken what exists but then makes it pretty and sometimes easier to use.

Lately, Apple just seems to be a fashion company with a technology spin.

Re:Apple is behind

[phantomfive]

Google already tried augmented reality. How is Google glass doing these days?

Re:Apple is behind

[rwven]

I think that's really the key though. With the iPhone, they took the concept of a smartphone and made it into something that was user friendly and that people wanted to use. Same with the iPad/Tablet Computers. Previous attempts existed, but were clunky and offered (relatively) crappy user experiences.

If they can take Google's clunky concept and come up with a way to use it that is aesthetically appealing and easy to use (and live with), they could have a winner on their hands.

The real question is if they can do a proper job of it without Steve Jobs at the helm.

(Disclaimer: Not a fan of apple at all as a company and own zero apple devices. Just acknowledging the obvious.)

Re:Apple is behind

[Solandri]

Are you kidding? We had PDAs long before smartphones. They weren't klunky, and the user experience wasn't crappy. By the early 2000s, it was obvious PDAs were going to converge with phones (well, obvious to everyone except Microsoft, who completely missed the boat despite having conquered PalmOS as the PDA OS of choice). The only question was if PDAs would pick up phone features, or if phones would pick up PDA features. RIM (Blackberry) was the first company to really combine these two effectively, which is why they took an early lead in the smartphone market.

The two innovations the iPhone brought were

1. (1) a completely touchscreen interface. Given that LG actually did this before the iPhone, I don't really count this as a true Apple innovation. The Prada is evidence that the smartphone market was already heading in this direction before the iPhone, and our smartphones would still be touchscreen phones today even if the iPhone had never existed.
2. (2) an integrated app marketplace for loading third party apps onto the device. Early PDAs (like the Palm Pilot) had had the ability to run third party apps. But you had to side-load them by first downloading them onto your computer, then transfer them from the computer to the PDA. That was a klunky process. The App Store neatly streamlined that process (in the same way that iTunes streamlined getting music onto your MP3 player, leading to the success of the iPod). This was a true innovation which I give Apple full credit for - it turned your smartphone from an accessory of your personal computer, into a general purpose computer in its own right.

iEye?

[JustNiz]

iEye?

Re:Carl Zeiss

[PopeRatzo]

No points for guessing what Carl Zeiss's role is.

Carl Zeiss died in 1888, so he'll probably be working on the iTunes interface.