Author | Jin Wang
Produced by | Zinc Industry
In 2006, Apple submitted a patent for a head-mounted display, which was later speculated Apple AR glasses.
In the next fifteen years, Apple missed the turmoil in 2016, missed the second wave in 2020, and will also miss the "metaverse" in 2021.
This In the past fifteen years, Apple has been leisurely engaging in mergers and acquisitions, developing patents, and promoting applications, but no hardware products have been released.
Just before WWDC2021 this year, Apple will release it at this conference. News about AR glasses is still endless. Recently, there is news that Apple AR glasses may be released next year.
Now, it seems that it is not difficult to get an Apple AR glasses together. Apple is still unwilling.
01
“The VR battle of machine manufacturers
At the end of 2015, the second year after Facebook acquired Oculus, Xiaomi was established. A laboratory for discovery.
Lei Jun revealed at the 2016 annual meeting, “We decided to set up a small team to build the Xiaomi Exploration Laboratory, with an initial focus on new directions such as virtual reality and intelligent robots, laying the next step for Xiaomi’s development. .
Obviously, Lei Jun originally wanted to invest in VR as a strategic project in the next stage. At that time, several new Internet car-making forces were still dubbed by the industry as the "Three Idiots" in car-making. Unexpectedly, Xiaomi's investment in VR for several years did not yield results. Instead, it turned to building cars and ushered in a wave of overestimation in the market.
In 2016, Xiaomi did make two VR glasses, a 49 yuan toy version of VR and a 199 yuan official version of VR. However, these were still early VR boxes similar to Google Cardboard, so A toy VR that needs to be plugged into a mobile phone and highly relies on the computing power of the mobile phone.
In fact, in 2016, known as the first year of the domestic VR industry, many mobile phone manufacturers were crazy about it. Not only Xiaomi, almost all domestic mainstream mobile phone manufacturers launched VR products this year. vivo released vivoVR at the Water Cube in November, and Huawei released HUAWEI VR as early as April this year.
Among them, HUAWEI VR, which supports 2K resolution, 95° field of view, and 0-700 degree myopia adjustment, later announced a sale price of 599 yuan, three times that of Xiaomi VR.
When mobile phone manufacturers entered the VR field, almost all they released were “VR boxes.” Such devices, which relied heavily on mobile phones, gave them an advantage in product research and development. However, at that time, such devices had limited software and hardware capabilities. There are many problems:
On the one hand, there is a lack of content. When Xiaomi released the official version of VR in 2016, it recruited only more than 200 developers and only a few 30 device applications;
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On the other hand, the hardware experience of the VR box itself is very poor. Even when used to watch movies, there will be problems such as delay, screens, and dizziness, let alone the gaming experience.
As a result, the device itself had almost no user experience at all, and it became the first wave of products used to educate the market.
Despite this, Xiaomi VR still shipped hundreds of thousands that year due to its low price. In terms of volume, it can be regarded as the first wave of concept dividends in the VR field.
Li Shuxin, the CEO of Moxiang Technology, which later manufactured VR for Xiaomi, and was in charge of Tencent’s VR team, revealed in an interview with the media, “ At that time, a qualified all-in-one VR machine would basically cost around 3,000 yuan. This was obviously not the positioning of Xiaomi, which was still pursuing cost-effectiveness at that time, and it was not within the acceptable range of the mainstream audience of mobile phone manufacturers.
What Xiaomi can truly call an entry-level VR product is the Xiaomi VR all-in-one machine released in conjunction with Oculus in May 2018. Lei Jun said at the time that Xiaomi and Oculus had been cooperating on research and development for a year and a half before they had this product. product.
It is worth mentioning that in January 2017, former Xiaomi Vice President Hugo Barra resigned from Xiaomi and returned to Google. He was responsible for the Facebook VR business including the Oculus team, and Xiaomi and Oculus This cooperation was also directly promoted by Hugo.
Although it was jointly developed by two leading Internet companies, and although Lei Jun praised the device’s “unparalleledness” at the press conference, the Xiaomi VR all-in-one machine is, after all, the product of Oculus’ low-profile product Oculus Go. For the domestic version, the configuration of 3DoF 2K could only be classified as 3DoF 2K, while the basic configuration of the mainstream PCVR at that time was more than one level higher than this product.
Because of this, just one year later, The Oculus Quest released by Oculus directly revolutionized the life of Oculus Go.
The year Oculus Quest was released, there was another more representative "mobile VR" entry.
In September 2019, shortly after the release of OculusQuest, Huawei released a VR device called HUAWEIVRGlass. This VR device uses a 3-segment folding optical path design and weighs only 166 grams. Due to " The thin, light and short structural design is recognized by everyone as the true form of VR glasses.
However, as a VR device at the same time as Oculus Quest, in addition to being miniaturized and portable, it is difficult to say that HUAWEIV R Glass is the best among similar products. As for other advantages, the 3DoF benchmark is still the Oculus Go from a year ago. The FOV is only 90°. The split design still requires an external mobile phone, and the mobile phone models supported by this product are still very few.
At the press conference, Huawei He Gang always emphasized the same "lightness and compactness". He did not mention the viewing angle and degree of freedom of this product. He only mentioned the innovation in product structure design and the difference between OculusQuest and VIVEPro. Mentioning the differences in game ecology between the two,
It was not until November this year that Huawei released the 6DoF game set of this product again, which complemented the device with a 6DoF game controller and visual model. Groups, custom safe zones, and PCVR assistants have long been standard features for VR products, allowing this device to barely keep up with mainstream products.
In fact, not only Xiaomi, Huawei, but also OPPO. , Vivo’s AR/VR hardware products have all been exposed to the public more or less, and even Coolpad, which has already fallen out of the first echelon of mobile phones, has spun off its AR business team this year, and the new brand it has established has also launched two models. AR glasses have received two rounds of financing and are expected to re-emerge.
AR/VR is still the second battlefield for mobile phone manufacturers.
02
While engaging in mergers and acquisitions, they are also brushing up on patents
Among mobile phone manufacturers, there are the most speculations about Apple’s AR products, and Apple’s AR devices are also the most difficult to produce. As a disruptor in the smartphone industry, everyone has Waiting to see what Apple can do in the AR field to "blow up the market."
However, while everyone is guessing when Apple will release AR glasses, it seems that only Apple itself is not in a hurry and is still carrying out overseas mergers and acquisitions while brushing up on VR patents.
According to incomplete statistics from the zinc industry, Apple has acquired more than 20 AR/VR related teams, and has published more than 400 AR/VR patents.
Today, these teams and patents alone are enough to put together a pair of glasses.
To this end, Zinc Industry sorted out the main progress of Apple’s AR products from three aspects:
product forecast, core technology, and software ecology
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1. Product Forecast:
Bloomberg quoted people familiar with the matter at the beginning of this year as saying that Apple is currently developing two devices. One is a VR device internally codenamed, which has the functions of watching movies, Gaming and social capabilities will be available as early as 2022; the other is AR glasses, internally codenamed, which are still in the underlying technology research stage and may be later than the original release time of 2023.
2. Core technology:
Chip,
In September this year, The Information reported that the SoC equipped with Apple AR glasses has more powerful chips than other chips currently on the market. With powerful performance, this chip is ready for trial production. Later, Apple first released the M1Pro and M1Max applied to Macbook Pro at its autumn conference in October, which directly outperformed the previous Intel chips. This also confirmed the processing used in Apple's AR glasses. The performance of the device will be more intuitively improved compared to current similar products.
Lens,
Apple acquired Akonia Holographic, an AR glasses lens manufacturer, in 2018. Before being acquired by Apple, the company already owned more than 200 patents, among which, the company used the name HoloMirror technology has better performance in color saturation and viewing angle. In addition, Apple also applied for a patent in December 2018 for using an array of microlenses to change the viewing angle of the imaging system.
“Camera,
In March 2020, Apple’s new iPad Pro added a LiDAR lidar to enhance the AR application experience and achieve precise spatial positioning. According to foreign media predictions , this "camera" is likely to appear on Apple's AR glasses again.
Gesture recognition,
In 2013, Apple acquired PrimeSense, a 3D motion capture team that developed the world's smallest 3D sensor. According to patents published by the U.S. Patent Office in 2021, Apple has applied for a patent through the company for eyeball and gesture tracking through 3D mapping technology. Through this patent, AR glasses can have gesture recognition functions. At the same time, Apple has also We also applied for a patent for predicting the position of objects in front of us through gaze point data.
Facial recognition,
Apple has previously acquired facial recognition technology teams such as Faceshift, Emotient, RealFace, Regaind, and Perceptio. In fact, Apple released it as early as September 2017 When iPhone Based on this, Apple also applied for a patent for identifying AR device gamers through FaceID.
Spatial positioning,
Apple has previously acquired teams such as WiFiSLAM, FlybyMedia, and Indoor.io. In Apple’s AR/VR patent pool, there are also projects such as restoring 3D sound fields based on spatial audio positioning, Technology patents for spatial positioning and simultaneous positioning of multiple people through ultrasound.
3. Software Ecology:
Apple’s layout in AR/VR software can be said to be the clearest and largest. In 2017, Apple released ARKit, an AR software development tool that supports Unity and Unreal engines, at WWDC2017. At this year's WWDC2021, Apple has updated this tool to the fifth version ARKit5. In addition, it has also released new AR functions such as ARMaps, ObjectCapture, and RealityKit2.
Apple officials stated that there are currently more than 10,000 iOS applications that support AR.
According to Zinc Industry, Apple has been accelerating its layout in terms of content and patents in the past two years. In 2020, it spent US$100 million to acquire NextVR, which provides VR live broadcast services, and in the same year it acquired NextVR. Spaces, a VR team spun out from DreamWorks Animation.
According to incomplete statistics, in 2021 alone, Apple won 90 patents.
03
Cook doesn’t like Metaverse
Conjectures about Apple’s AR have never stopped, especially after Cook repeatedly talked about AR, people became even more I am convinced that Apple is bound to release an AR glasses. As for when it will be released, it is only a matter of time.
This year, there is another "new concept" closely related to AR/VR - the metaverse. Facebook changed its name to Meta, Microsoft expressed its commitment to the enterprise metaverse, Nvidia launched the Ominiverse platform, and domestic leading Internet manufacturers are also launching Take a trip to the metaverse.
However, in September this year, Cook was interviewed by Time magazine. When asked whether the AR that Apple is focusing on is the metaverse, Cook said, "We Just call it augmented reality
Obviously, Cook doesn’t like the metaverse, but this does not affect Apple’s crazy investment in the AR field.
After the previous experience. After the fierce battle, mainstream mobile phone manufacturers have more or less deployed some products on the AR/VR track, but until now, there is still no XR product that can be called a cross-generational one. After some adjustments, the team either retained or rebuilt its structure and prepared for the battle again.
The next battle may really determine the final ranking and fate.