Apple’s RealityOS has appeared in a trademark filing with a deadline two days after WWDC, Apple’s yearly developer conference.
The filing was spotted by Vox Media’s Parker Ortolani. The listed applicant is ‘Realityo Systems LLC’, a company with no other public presence. Apple has in the past used the shell company ‘Yosemite Research LLC’ to file macOS update names, 9to5Mac reports – and Realityo Systems LLC is registered at the same address.
The existence of realityOS, or rOS, was first reported by Bloomberg all the way back in 2017. In 2021 Bloomberg, The Information, and supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo released reports claiming Apple is preparing to release a premium headset for VR and AR with high resolution color passthrough. Recent notes from Kuo claim this headset will weigh significantly less than Meta’s Quest 2, feature dual 4K OLED microdisplays, and use a new chip with “similar computing power as the M1 for Mac”.
In January iOS Developer Rens Verhoeven spotted a new platform “com.apple.platform.realityos” in the App Store app upload logs. Apple’s existing operating systems include iOS (com.apple.platform.iphoneos), iPadOS, watchOS (com.apple.platform.watchos), macOS, and tvOS.
In February, “award-winning git repository surgeon” Nicolás Álvarez spotted Apple committing code to its open source GitHub repository referencing ‘TARGET_FEATURE_REALITYOS’ and ‘realityOS_simulator’ – the latter likely a feature to allow developers without the headset to test building AR or VR applications. Álvarez said Apple quickly force-pushed the repo to try & hide the change, suggesting making this public was a mistake.
The week before last, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported Apple recently ramped up development of realityOS and previewed the headset to the board of directors. Gurman is sticking by his earlier reporting that the product will be announced this year or early next for a release in 2023.
WWDC 2022 is scheduled for June 6, one week from now. Given the filing deadline date, could Apple be planning to finally unveil the headset, or at least its operating system?
