Apple’s AR glasses project has a leader and a team

Apple is staffing up as it is reportedly developing new products for augmented reality technology, where digital images and/or audio are layered on top of natural sights and sounds. Think: Games, entertainment, apps, maps, etc.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman takes a dive into Apple’s AR efforts so far and reports:

• Apple has “embarked on an ambitious bid to bring the technology to the masses,” including glasses, which are “further down the road,” and some possible iPhone features in the meantime.
• Former Dolby executive Mike Rockwell is leading Apple’s push, reporting to the company’s head of hardware engineering, Dan Riccio. Rockwell, who joined Apple in 2015 after eight years at Dolby, also used to be the CTO of Avid, the video-editing software firm.
• Other Apple AR team members include Fletcher Rothkopf, who worked on the Apple Watch; Tomlinson Holman, who created the audio format THX; and some vets of projects like Facebook’s Oculus and Microsoft’s HoloLens.
• Apple has also made some tuck-in acquisitions in the area. And has an office in New Zealand.

Perhaps most interesting in the short term will be the sort of AR features Apple decides to introduce in the iPhone.

For example, Gurman reports some potentially forthcoming iPhone photo features, such as “the ability to take a picture and then change the depth of the photograph or the depth of specific objects in the picture later.”

It’s also easy to see Apple adding simple AR features similar to Snapchat filters — who wouldn’t want to face-swap over FaceTime? — and even potentially opening the capabilities up to developers.

An Apple rep declined to comment.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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