New hires reinforce rumors of augmented reality and autonomous car at Apple

At this point in the championship, we are almost certain that there is some Apple in augmented reality. Whether it's really those glasses or just improvements to the iPhone camera, we don't know, but they're certainly working on something. And new hires from the company corroborate this idea even more.

According to FCP.co, the developer of the 360VR Toolbox plugin for Final Cut Pro, Tim Dashwood, the newest member of the Ma team. The plugin assists in the creation of VR content in 360 and 3D, and is also compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and Apple Motion. And, since they are "all at home", the plugin that cost more than US $ 1,000 is now free.

NASA JPL

Still in the field of virtual (and augmented) reality, Apple recruited yet another big name: Jeff Norris. You may not know him, but he founded the Mission Operations Innovation Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA, where he worked since 1999. L, Norris created the JPL Ops Lab, in which many projects were executed in both virtual and augmented reality. One of his projects allowed people to work on Mars using only VR interaction, with Microsoft HoloLens.

As you told Bloomberg, Norris would now be working at Apple with an AR team, under the supervision of Mike Rockwell, who previously worked at Dolby Labs. Just as the rumors suggest, they would be focusing as much on AR glasses as on AR features on upcoming iPhones.

And since we're talking about NASA, Ma hired four more ex-employees from the American agency, but for another purpose. A few days ago, we saw official documents from the California State Department of Motor Vehicles (Department of Motor Vehicles, or DMV), suggesting that Apple would be working on an auto-navigation system (or would it be a vehicle itself?).

This time, the Wall Street Journal pointed out (closed matter to subscribers) more DMV documents, which listed the names of Apple employees who would be testing the autonomous car system.

On that list, at least four former NASA employees were found. One of them worked on the design of an autonomous vehicle created to explore Jpiter's moon "Europa". Three others worked at JPL, on projects related to motion planning algorithms and also 3D object detection.

It is funny to see how many hires can lead us to so many conjectures and rumors about Ma's upcoming projects and products. Even though we don't see something official being announced so early, there is no doubt that these big names will contribute a lot to the company.

(via 9to5Mac, MacRumors, AppleInsider)