$Apple (AAPL.US)$ The company may have restarted its lightweight Augmented Reality (AR) glasses project. Renowned technology journalist Mark Gurman revealed that Apple has quietly launched a project internally codenamed 'Atlas', researching existing smart glasses products on the market and preparing to follow Meta Platforms into the smart glasses field.

The "Atlas" program includes collecting feedback from Apple employees on existing smart glasses products, which may help Apple determine which features to include in its glasses products. The program was launched last week and is led by the product system quality team of Apple's hardware engineering department.

The team believes that testing and developing a product that can win the public's favor is crucial. Therefore, they specifically sent out email invitations to some employees at Apple's Cupertino headquarters, hoping they would participate in smart glasses user research together.

When Apple considers entering new fields, it usually conducts confidential group interviews to understand people's preferences for existing products. Apple collects feedback through employees rather than customers to ensure project confidentiality.

Although recently $Meta Platforms (META.US)$ The $299 glasses launched in collaboration with Luxottica Group SpA do not have true AR functionality, but their ability to capture videos, answer calls, and interact with AI assistants still attracts a large number of users.

Apple has clearly taken note of this and plans to develop similar but smarter glasses products. Apple plans to make smart glasses as popular wearable devices as AirPods, focusing on improving battery life, sensor technology, and audio quality.

It is worth noting that in 2019, the American technology website The Information had already leaked the Apple AR glasses product codenamed N421, designed for all-day wear. The prototype looks like expensive sunglasses, with a heavy frame containing batteries and chips. The product may also include a feature where the lenses darken when the user uses the AR function, allowing others to know when the wearer is distracted.

The technical challenges faced by this product are greater than the head-mounted Vision Pro headset. It was originally planned to be launched a year after the release of Vision Pro (planned for 2022) in 2023. Apple company executives told employees in 2019 that they believed future AR glasses could replace the need for iPhones in around ten years.

However, Guellman pointed out in an early 2023 report that due to technical challenges, the follow-up product to Vision Pro – lightweight AR glasses – has been indefinitely postponed, and Apple has reduced its AR device development efforts.

In fact, Apple realized shortly after the start of the AR glasses project that creating powerful AR glasses was not feasible. Apple engineers believed that AR glasses had to replicate the performance of the iPhone while using only one-tenth of the power to prevent overheating. At that time, there was even a widely circulated joke within Apple: "Engineers working on the seemingly hopeless N421 just to make Cook happy."

Apple insiders involved in the AR glasses project stated in 2023 that if Apple really plans to launch such a product, it would need at least four more years.

Developing a successful wearable device is no easy task. While the Apple Vision Pro headset released in February this year is powerful, its high price and bulky size have made it difficult to become a mainstream product.

Apple currently plans to enhance Vision Pro to increase its appeal, develop a low-end version using cheaper components to reduce product costs, and even explore transferring some functionality and computing power to the iPhone to make the headset a complement to consumers' existing products and save the headset product.

Editor/Rocky