According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman the first version of the headsets' operating system is codenamed Oak, and is already almost complete.
In his weekly Power On newsletter, Gurman also pointed to some staff reshuffles at the tech giant that he claims may point to the device’s development moving in to the production phase soon.
Gurman said that he believed that Apple has moved Yaniv Gur, an iWork executive over to its headset team.
"Before joining the headset group, [Yaniv] Gur oversaw engineering for the iWork apps (Pages, Keynote and Numbers), in addition to the Books, Notes, and News apps across the company’s platforms", Gurman wrote. He added that "the headset team already has an operating system chief, Geoff Stahl, so Gur’s appointment suggests to me that the company is developing a suite of productivity apps for the headset."
While rumors of Apple’s development of a mixed reality (MR) headset have circulated for some time, the tech giant has been circumspect about its interest in VR.
This is in contrast to Meta, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg has heavily invested in MR, as part of his long-term vision of the metaverse, which refers to a yet-to-be developed digital world that can be accessed by VR/AR headsets.
Investment in the metaverse has reportedly cost Meta $9.4 billion so far in 2022, with the company predicting that losses “will grow significantly year-over-year.”
Zuckerberg’s obsession with the metaverse has been blamed by analysts for Meta’s recent poor financial performance which forced the company last week to shed 11,000 employees, 13 percent of its workforce.
According to Pocket-Lint, Apple’s rumored headset is expected to feature more than a dozen cameras for tracking, two 8K displays, and iris-sensing biometric support. The name of the headset will reportedly either be Reality One or Reality Pro.