As rival Meta pushes forward with the development of its smart glasses, Apple is lagging behind and is only now exploring the category with an internal study of the product.

The initiative, code-named Atlas, began a few weeks ago and involves gathering feedback from Apple employees on smart glasses.

Additional focus groups are planned, and the studies are being led by its Product Systems Quality team.

“Testing and developing products that all can come to love is very important to what we do at Apple,” the group wrote in an email to select employees at the company’s headquarters in California, reported Bloomberg.

“This is why we are looking for participants to join us in an upcoming user study with current market smart glasses.”

However, with Apple’s Vision Pro not becoming the mainstream product that Apple had hoped it would become, the company will be cautious with the development of its smart glasses.

 

Its stringent quality standards and adoption of cutting-edge technology may result in a potential launch date of the smart glasses, if it does decide to go ahead with the project, of at least five years from now.

Meta has succeeded where Apple is yet to find its footing. Meta’s smart glasses, created in partnership with Luxottica Group, let users shoot video, take phone calls and ask questions to an AI assistant. Meta has also previewed AR glasses that can blend the real world with digital overlays of games, text messages and apps

A partnership between Meta and eyewear company EssilorLuxottica on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses has helped the latter’s market capitalisation climb to more than 100 billion euros (A$165 billion).

 

“These new technologies will one day replace smartphones, like streaming services replaced music CDs and electric vehicles will substitute combustion engines,” EssilorLuxottica chief executive Francesco Milleri recently told the Financial Times.

While Apple is known to trial several products and axe them if it doesn’t see a future for them – it reportedly killed the electric car project earlier this year after spending a decade and billions of dollars on its R&D – it could very well do the same with its smart glasses too. Even if it does see the smart glasses project to fruition, Apple has warned investors that future products may never be as profitable as its iPhone business which make up nearly half of the company’s revenue.