The Apple keynote presentation today presented three things that provide a clear road map to augmented reality glasses. And the features paint a diabolical picture of preparing for Apple Glass.
I’ve said before that Apple is really good at training its developers: for seeding new concepts and letting them play out over the course of years.
And with what they announced today, they’re preparing their army of developers to do the following:
- First, prepare “bite-sized” pieces of content, ready for a future display in Apple Glass. These pieces of content will appear in App Clips (a super small version of an app without the need to download that app) and new widgets for your phone’s home screen.
- Second, encourage developers (and their customers, such as retail stores), to place thousands of AR markers. Through new Apple-specific QR codes (and through NFC and other ways to ‘tap’), users can scan a code and bring up these App Clips.
- Finally, prepare users for AR experiences through the use of spatial audio via their new Air Pods Pro.
Taken together, Apple is doing something diabolical:
- While others are trying to build AR Clouds, Apple will have a highly incentivized group of retailers, tourism locations, restaurants, coffee shops and others who will WANT to place markers in their locations
- Letting their developers create the kinds of widgets that are a natural fit for the display of Apple Glass
It may be a year or two before Apple Glass comes to the market. But once they do, they will already have tens of thousands of locations ‘hooked up’ for AR experiences, they will have thousands of apps which are ‘widget ready’, and they will have experience from their first AR wearable: Air Pods.
A clear indication of where Apple is headed. And one of the key things? Not once have they mentioned augmented reality. (They just don’t care. While Snapchat does).
Expect to see more of the same in the days and years to come.
