All AR news and announcements from Apple Event 2021

Apple Event has just finished, and in it, Apple has announced the new iPad mini, the iPhone 13 series, and the new Apple Watch Series 7. I have watched all the event for you, so let me report all the most important moments involving AR/MR that have happened there.

Tim Cook’s entrance

Tim Cook has entered the stage when there was a background on the wall behind him that was the same as the last frame of the introductory video of the event. He looked like coming out from the video itself… it was a moment merging a virtual element to the real stage… we can say it was mixed reality... can’t we?

Tim Cook wore glasses

Tim Cook wore glasses during the whole event. This means he loves glasses, and for sure he will make AR glasses.

iPad Mini AR + 5G

While talking about the new iPad mini and its 5G connection, the presenter has said that this can be useful for remote assistance, and there was a video sequence with a guy using AR for like 20 seconds. It was fantastic seeing AR taking the stage for such a long time!

New A15 chip

The new A15 chip offers enhanced AI and image processing capabilities and these are useful to improve the text recognition and image understanding services that iPhone devices offer (Apple’s equivalent of Google Lens). Since these technologies are somewhat at the foundation of the AR Cloud, we can say that this news is somewhat related to our AR future… it’s metaversical news…

Others

I have heard somewhere in the event the words “depth map”, “camera”, “new products”, “future”. Somehow these are words that can be related also to AR glasses.

No more thing…

Tim hasn’t said “one more thing”. Shame on him. But I’m sure he thought about AR glasses at the end of the event. He thought, but was too shy to talk about them.

Commentary

As you may have understood from my sarcasm, in 80 minutes of keynote for this Apple Event there has been no emphasis at all on AR, or on related technologies. I have lost 80 minutes of my life that now I want back… just for you, so you have avoided losing them yourselves (I deserve a donation on Patreon for this, isn’t it?)

We already knew that there would have been no announcement of AR glasses, but given the AR Easter Egg in the invite, we expected at least something AR-related: some rumors talked about a new LIDAR sensor that could enhance AR tracking and object scanning, but we had not even that. For the whole event, Apple talked about photos, videos, and how there is a new cinematic video mode that auto-focuses the cameras on faces. AR and VR are still too early, and photos and videos seem to have priority for such a brand interested in providing good products for the average consumer.

We know that Apple is working on XR glasses, but it is not in a hurry and feels no need to show off what it is doing: while Facebook has already launched its smartglasses, teased Project Aria, etc… Apple is just waiting to release at the right moment to release its consumer-oriented high-quality device with a big boom. It is waiting for the technology to be ready to create a device that is worth having an Apple logo on its temples. Tim Cook has always said that he doesn’t care being the first, but he wants to be the best. And this means that we have to wait again… until the next Apple Event, hoping that something will happen.

(Header image by Apple)