As we know, Apple has been working for years on a mixed reality headset (mixing virtual and augmented reality) expected by 2023, but also on augmented reality glasses, the famous Apple Glass, which should arrive later. Still very mysterious, these two products are designed in the greatest secrecy by Apple engineers and the details concerning them only emerge in dribs and drabs. We’re talking about it again this week, however, because Apple is likely continuing to put things in place in terms of software for these future devices. As it happens, the name of the OS that will be responsible for powering these future AR/VR products seems to have emerged online.
Several sources have indeed spotted, both in open source code shared on GitHub and on documents linked to the App Store, the name that this future operating system would adopt: “realityOS”. As reminded The Verge, the American media Bloomberg had identified in 2017 a reference to this OS, then referred to under the diminutive “rOS”. The term “realityOS” had also been discovered in some pre-release versions of iOS 13 about two years ago now.
Apple hopes to end AirTag hijacking
A credible nomenclature at Apple… but be careful
The use of the name realityOS by Apple seems at first glance credible. The firm has been using this type of nomenclature for years now: iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, are examples. According to information gleaned by Bloomberg in 2017, Apple’s new system dedicated to AR / VR would be fundamentally based on iOS. Its development would also have been supervised, at least for a time, by Geoff Stahl – a veteran at Apple, notes The Verge.
That said, Steve Troughton-Smith, a developer who was among the first to spot the mention “realityOS” in new logs, remains suspicious. According to him this mention could simply be the “remnant of a pull-request made by someone from a fake account“. In a word, let’s remain cautious. Nothing yet allows us to confirm that realityOS will be an OS name used by Apple in the end.
“#if TARGET_FEATURE_REALITYOS”
Well then. This at least confirms it 1) has its own OS & binaries, and 2) has a realityOS Simulator https://t.co/6a25kWshXR pic.twitter.com/RyF5O5gFjg
—Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) February 9, 2022
Anyway, the latest rumors about Apple’s mixed reality headset suggest that it could count on a level of power equivalent to that of a Mac running an M1 processor. It would also be an independent product, designed to work without requiring a connection to another device … which explains, among other things, the need for an advanced operating system. An OS that Apple would call “Oak” internally for the moment.