Right off the back, Apple VR? Is Apple ready to push into the VR game by buy­ing Fly­by Media?
Just so you know back in the Steve Jobs days, Apple had attempt­ed Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty head­sets and the like but pushed it aside because it was still not up to par. The tide has changed with increased com­pe­ti­tion in the space from the likes of Sam­sung with Gear VR, Facebook’s Ocu­lus Rift, Mag­ic Leap (jobs at Mag­ic Leap), as well as sig­nif­i­cant efforts from Google and Microsoft.

If you don’t know Fly­by, they’re a com­pa­ny that was key in the devel­op­ment of two things we’ve spo­ken briefly about in the recent past, the first being machine vision, and the oth­er is Google’s Project Tan­go. The com­pa­ny has devel­oped tech that allows mobile phones to “see” the world around them. So Fly­by is tak­ing the IP, branch­ing its capa­bil­i­ties and spread­ing it across the con­sumer spectrum.

I’m not going to get into what Flyby’s app is capa­ble of doing because it’s a gim­mick, but I assure you the tech behind the app, which is a very “inter­net of things” is the sole rea­son for Apple’s inter­est. The hard thing is for machines to know what it’s look­ing at and cat­e­go­rize it, well Fly­by has got­ten the atten­tion of the big players.

Accord­ing to Crunch­base, Fly­by Media found­ed in 2010 by Cole Van Nice and Oriel Bergig had raised $13.78 mil­lion in out­side invest­ment from Chart Ven­tures Part­ners and CNF Investments.
The team had capa­bil­i­ties in the areas of large-scale simul­ta­ne­ous local­iza­tion and map­ping, indoor nav­i­ga­tion, sen­sor fusion, image recog­ni­tion and 3D track­ing. If you take this with the Fina­cial times report stat­ing Apple has been build­ing pro­to­types of poten­tial head­set design schemes for sev­er­al months now and the fact Apple just hired Doug Bow­man an AR/VR guru; well bring on the VR dogs of war.

You should know by now “Apple buys small­er tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies from time to time, and we gen­er­al­ly do not dis­cuss our pur­pose or plans.” But this isn’t their first acqui­si­tion of a aug­ment­ed real­i­ty com­pa­ny. They snatched up AR start­up Metaio last year, as well as motion- cap­ture com­pa­ny called Faceshift. Don’t for­get 2013’s buy of motion-sens­ing com­pa­ny PrimeSense.

Hon­est­ly who knows what Apple is up to but it appears they are build­ing a VR team. Com­pe­ti­tion is high but the VR mar­ket is in its infan­cy. We just have to wait and see who we’ll give our hard earned dol­lars to in order to escape real­i­ty for anoth­er real­i­ty; repeat­ing the cycle into infin­i­ty because of the over­whelm­ing advertisements.