Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
It’s no secret that Apple’s been quietly trying to build an augmented reality headset. Over the past several years, Apple has hired, acquired, attempted to patent and repeatedly talked up the idea — Apple CEO Tim Cook called AR as big an idea as the smartphone, and reportedly had 1,000 engineers working on the tech in 2017.
But despite repeated rumors that Apple is getting ready to produce such a headset — Bloomberg, CNET and reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo have all suggested Apple’s aiming to produce it in 2019 and ship it in 2020 — it’s only today that we’re seeing what appears to be explicit confirmation from Apple itself that an AR headset is being tested inside the company.
It comes to us in the form of this screenshot from iOS…