Apple CEO Tim Cook is a full-on geek when it comes to augmented reality.
Cook has raved about AR’s potential in a number of interviews the last year, but according to a PhD student at the University of Oxford, Tim actually has a great understanding of the technology. In a story shared on Reddit, the student reveals how Tim Cook dug deep into the details of the tech during a recent demo.
The redditor at Oxford said he and his supervisor were asked to do put on a demo for Tim Cook at the event held on campus. What was expected to be just a short demo, turned into a 15-minute conversation with Cook about the technology being created on the campus.
Tim demos Oxford’s AR tech
Photo: Reddit
“I was incredibly surprised about the obvious knowledge Tim had about the topic,” said the PhD student in his post. “I had expected to be asked high-level questions about what we were doing, but Tim was asking down to the gritty detail about everything, such as how the particular depth camera we were using worked.”
Apple just turned the iPhone and iPad into the world’s largest augmented reality platform with the release of iOS 11. The huge software update contains Apple’s ARKit which developers can use to create AR apps without having to create their own depth mapping technology.
Augmented reality apps have been heavily promoted ever since iOS 11’s release. Many of the apps aren’t particularly useful yet. Tim Cook seems to agree that the best is yet to come though, saying it reminds him of the early days of the App Store.
“He stopped short of saying fart apps, but he was saying that to begin with apps tended to just be novelties,” the poster recalls Cook saying. “Over time though more and more interesting and powerful things started being released. Now it’s hard to imagine a world without the AppStore and equivalents on other platforms.”
