Apple has temporarily halted its project to develop an augmented reality headset and disbanded the project team, claims DigiTimes. The company may not yet consider the time ripe for such a headset.
DigiTimes bases its message on information from sources in the supply chain industry. Those suppliers, including Taiwan’s Quanta, would have previously received requests for ar headset delivery and seen prototypes, but it would have involved small-scale R&D production. Apple would have now halted the project.
The company is said to have shifted its research & development activities to projects that are more likely to lead to actual products, it claims. The team working on the headset was said to have disbanded in May. DigiTimes has a mixed history of Apple rumors. The site has proven to have good resources within the Taiwanese tech industry, but is also sometimes wrong with rumors.
Avi Bar-Zeev is known to have left Apple in January. He is one of the creators of Microsoft’s HoloLens and joined Apple in 2016 to lead the ar team. In the past, well-known Apple watchers Ming-Chi Kuo and Mark Gurman already reported on Apple’s plans to release an ar headset. They reported that the company had developed several prototypes and was aiming to release the headset as an iPhone accessory and provide it with rOS, the reality operating system. Surprisingly, a report by Ming-Chi Kuo from March of this year still spoke of the start of mass production for Apple’s ar headset in the spring of next year.