HOW APPLE CAN SUCCEED IN MAKING
AR GLASSES ‘A THING’
These details provide a tantalizing glimpse
of the possibilities Apple might enable with
its own smart spectacles. Naturally, however,
Apple will want to learn from the mistakes
Google made with Glass – including the
device’s relatively poor battery life of just
2-5 hours, its rather inelegant design and
the lack of killer applications. Fortunately,
though, by offloading much of the heavy lifting
to a connected iPhone, it looks like the Apple
glasses can avert many of these problems.
It will, for example, streamline the amount
of technology that Apple needs to pack into
the casing of the eyewear itself, thereby
putting less pressure on the onboard battery
and giving Apple more flexibility with regard
to design. Even the potential problem of
insufficient app support looks halfway solved,
given the public’s increasing familiarity and
software choice with ARKit. The headwear’s
apps can serve as extensions of established
iOS apps in much the same way as early
Apple Watch apps.
All of this suggests that with its AR glasses,
Apple can effectively “hit the ground running”
in a way that Google never quite managed with
its Glass offering. However, with many details
about Apple’s AR headwear still unclear, it’s an
exciting time for Apple fans to compile “wish
lists” of exactly what they would like to see in
the wearable. One Apple fan, Joseph Keller
of iMore, has already made such a list – and
it makes an exciting read while we wait for the
actual glasses to be unveiled.