The Apple Glasses AR lenses are still at least a year away, but a new concept video has us excited for its potential.
The video by "the hacker 34" (via iMore), shows us around the rumored features of the Apple Glasses. There's basically no concrete information to go off of other than leaks, but this video does a good job of making the Glasses seem like a tangible product.
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Popping up in a card much like the one currently used for pairing AirPods, the Glasses then get introduced, with Hacker 34 giving us a breakdown of the components, which bear familiar Apple brandings like Retina for the lens displays, a LiDAR scanner like the one on the iPad Pro (and probably the iPhone 12 Pro, too) and a new kind of Apple chipset, the G-series, to run everything.
rOS, as Hacker 34 has named the Glasses' operating system, uses swipes, either on the frame or in front of you where the Glasses' cameras can see, to navigate through the heads-up display style interface, popping your into the center or back into the top right corner when you don't need them.
The iOS 14-style widgets and unobtrusive notifications make an appearance here, featuring all the usual suspects when it comes to default Apple apps. The interface also has an automatic night mode for when it gets dark out, important since you're unable to look away from a too-bright screen if you're wearing it in front of your face.
Find My iPhone and Apple Maps navigation get shown off in the video, the former allowing the user to ask Siri to display where the phone is, and set a path towards it. We're expecting Apple to reveal its AirTags trackers to the world by the end of the year, which will serve a similar purpose, but it looks so much cooler when you're doing it in first person with this concept. The Maps function works similarly, except taking you towards a geographic location with arrows overlaid on your field of view.
At the end of the video there's also a teaser for a 'Steve Jobs Edition', replacing the square frames of the normal glasses with round frames similar to the glasses worn by Apple's famous co-founder. As a final little joke, a message from Craig Federighi, Apple's senior VP of software engineering, reveals the price of the glasses as $499. This is the figure FrontPage Tech's Jon Prosser revealed.
Dates for the actual debut of the Apple Glasses range between mid-2021 and 2023. Whenever they do appear, hopefully they are as competent as Hacker 34's video makes them look.
