Apple Hires NASA Augmented Reality Expert For Team Working On AR Smart Glasses And Future iPhones

Apple has hired augmented reality expert Jeff Norris from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab for the company’s AR smart glasses team, Bloomberg reports.

The report comes after it was revealed Monday Apple hired four NASA engineers for its self-driving venture, Project Titan.

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Norris, who founded the Mission Operations Innovation Office at JPL, is now a senior manager on the AR team headed by Mike Rockwell, a former Dolby Labs executive, sources told Bloomberg. The group is allegedly working on augmented reality glasses and AR features iPhone models.

Norris, who worked at JPL since 1999, founded the JPL Ops Lab, NASA's premier facility for development of human-system interfaces for mission operations, according to his website. He was also “Principal Computer Scientist and lead of multiple projects focused on human system interaction with a recent emphasis on virtual and augmented reality.” Norris also worked on NASA projects, including providing headsets to scientists on the ground so they could experience live views on Mars and provided Microsoft Hololens headsets to astronauts onboard the International Space Station.

Apple AR Glasses Rumors

Apple has been recently dropping clues on its AR projects. Besides the hiring of Norris earlier this year, Apple reportedly teamed up with German optics company Carl Zeiss to work on a pair of AR smart glasses which could be announced as soon as this year, popular blogger Robert Scoble revealed in January. A Zeiss employee allegedly confirmed the partnership during CES 2017 to Scoble.

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Apple allegedly boosted its efforts into making a pair of augmented reality glasses that could replace smartphones in the future, a Financial Times report said last month. The company is said to be allocating more resources in its AR plans.

Apple also reportedly has 1,000 engineers in Israel working on augmented reality for the iPhone 8, which is expected to launch this September. The company has also made numerous AR-related acquisitions, including Prime Sense, a 3D sensing company, German AR company Metaio, and RealFace, which focuses on facial recognition.