Tim Cook sees some ‘interesting applications’ around VR, but Apple has already filed headset patents, hired a VR expert and funded 360-degree music videos

Apple boss says virtual reality is 'really cool' – but what will he do with it?

Apple is mulling its options for virtual reality, judging by comments made to analysts by its chief executive, Tim Cook, after his company’s latest financial results.

Asked by one analyst whether virtual reality is “more of a geeky niche or something that could go mainstream”, Cook plumped for the latter scenario. “No, I don’t think it’s a niche,” he said. “It’s really cool and has some interesting applications.”

He’s not the first big-tech CEO to be seduced by the technology. In January 2014, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg tried an Oculus Rift headset for the first time.

“Wow, that was pretty awesome,” he said, according to a later profile by Vanity Fair. So awesome, in fact, that he went on to buy the still-prototype headset’s manufacturer Oculus VR for $2bn.

Tim Cook’s “pretty cool” suggests that Apple isn’t about to follow suit with a multibillion move into VR. But the company is clearly taking the technology seriously – and not just as an uninvolved observer.

Apple has been dabbling in VR for some time, in fact. For example, in 2015 the company commissioned 360-degree videos for U2, The Weeknd and Muse, under its Apple Music banner.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Weeknd’s 360-degree music video.

It even sent a branded bus kitted out with Oculus Rifts to U2 gigs so that fans could try their video out. Apple’s partnership for these projects with Vrse.works, the VR company founded by the film-maker Chris Milk, has given it first-hand experience of the process of producing VR content.

Apple is also investing in research into virtual-reality technology. Just this month, it hired one of the leading US experts in VR, Doug Bowman, who had spent the last five years at Virginia Tech University researching “three-dimensional user interface design and the benefits of immersion in virtual environments”,

There are already researchers poking around VR within Apple. In 2008, it filed for two separate patents in the US, which were granted in 2013 and 2015 respectively.

The first was for a “goggle system for providing a personal media viewing experience to a user” including “3D media”:

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Apple’s patent for a ‘goggle system’ for personal media viewing. Photograph: USPTO

The second was for a “head-mounted display apparatus for retaining a portable electronic device with display” – a headset into which a smartphone would slot, much like Samsung’s Oculus-powered Gear VR, with a separate remote-control held in the hands:

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Apple’s patent for a headset that could be used for VR. Photograph: USPTO

Apple’s research and experiments around virtual-reality content and hardware have been going on for a while, then. Meanwhile, its App Store is providing it with more insight into the current generation of VR apps made by other companies.

Milk is also founder of Vrse, which has its own app on iOS, for example, while startup Littlstar has released its 360-degree videos app for iOS and Apple TV. Google Cardboard is available for iPhone already, while the official Star Wars app has a “serialised virtual reality experience” called Jakku Spy within it.

Other experimental apps include Insidious VR, Sisters: A Virtual Reality Ghost Story and Legendary VR. DinoTrek VR Experience gets you running with the dinosaurs, while photography company Carl Zeiss even has its VR ONE Cinema app for watching videos in a virtual cinema.

(Few of these efforts are iOS-only, it should be said: Google’s own exploration of VR with its Cardboard project means most are available on Android too. Some, like the Sundance Film Festival’s new Sundance VR app, are Android-first.)

Apple has a ringside seat to see how quickly these apps catch on, and what that might mean for its own VR ambitions – adding that information to its own experiments with 360-degree videos through Apple Music.

Even if Apple holds back, iOS will still become an important platform for virtual reality thanks to two other services: Facebook and YouTube. Both added features for 360-degree videos in 2015 – YouTube also launched a separate “VR video” format – and see their mobile apps as the main way people will watch these videos.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of YouTube’s first “VR video” films.

Apple can afford to bide its time, see how popular 360 and VR videos are in these apps, and monitor sales of headsets like the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (and others) as they come out.

The company can also tinker behind the scenes with the related technology of augmented reality (AR), having bought mobile-AR startup Metaio in 2015. With plenty of hype around AR devices like Microsoft’s Hololens and companies like Google-backed Magic Leap, Apple already has a foot in both camps.

Apple may decide not to throw its weight behind VR and/or AR, though. In 2015, Cook was cutting in an assessment of Google Glass headsets – and by extension, devices designed to be worn on the face.

“We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we’ve always believed,” Cook told the New Yorker.

In the same article, Apple’s design boss, Jony Ive, described the face as “the wrong place” for wearable technology, as the company focused its attention on the wrist with its Apple Watch.

“This isn’t obnoxious. This isn’t building a barrier between you and me,” said Cook about the latter device – a comment that may seem hard to square with his view a year on that virtual reality is “really cool”.

Then again, from phablet-sized smartphones and stylus accessories to streaming music, this would not be the first example of Apple criticising a tech trend before later embracing it.

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