Enlarge / Product photography of the Google Glass wearable. (credit: Google)

Google's head of operating system and software platforms for augmented and mixed reality devices, Mark Lucovsky, has left the company after months of turmoil for the company's mixed reality projects and staff. He publicly announced his departure in a tweet on Monday:

I have decided to step away from my role at Google, where I was Senior Director of Engineering, responsible for OS and Software Platform for AR and XR devices. The recent changes in AR leadership and Google’s unstable commitment and vision have weighed heavily on my decision.

It's unclear exactly which leadership changes he's referring to, but it seems possible or even likely that he's talking about the recent departure of Clay Bavor, who had led Google's XR work since 2015. Bavor left the company in March of this year.

Google was one of the pioneers of mass-market AR when it piloted Google Glass with developers in 2013, but things have been rocky of late. The company killed Glass, brought it back as an enterprise-only product, then killed it again . Rumors swirled that the tech giant was working on a new AR product called Project Iris , but it was reportedly canceled this year amidst a wave of company layoffs.

Enlarge / Inside the Steve Jobs Theater building at Apple's headquarters. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's 2023 Worldwide Developer Conference is just a few days away—it kicks off with a keynote on Monday, June 5. That keynote will be livestreamed (we'll liveblog it, too), and it's expected to be a doozy.

The WWDC keynote isn't always the most exciting for non-developers, as it usually focuses on iOS updates rather than exciting new hardware. There have been exceptions, though, and next week's event will surely be one of them. Apple is expected to finally unveil its rumored mixed reality headset, which has taken a long and winding path to market.

That will be the main focus, but there will be interesting new developments on the iPhone, Mac, and Watch. Here's what to expect from the WWDC keynote next week.

Enlarge / Apple's first promotional image for WWDC 2023. (credit: Apple)

Apple will host its 34th annual Worldwide Developers Conference at its Cupertino, California, headquarters from Monday, June 5 through Friday, June 9, the company announced on Wednesday.

The conference will kick off with "a special all-day event," inclusive of the customary keynote presentation and the platform State of the Union talks. The language on Apple's website suggests that like last year, some or all of those will be presented in prerecorded video form rather than as a live on-stage presentation.

After that first day, Apple will likely host various panels on how developers can work with the company's developer toolkits and APIs to support new and old features across the various Apple platforms.

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  A woman uses Google Glass Enterprise Edition in a marketing image for the product. [credit: Google ]

This week, Google announced that it has stopped selling Google Glass Enterprise Edition, marking another end-of-life for the Glass product that was originally meant to start an augmented reality revolution.

First launched to a limited audience back in 2013, Glass was supposed to be a revolutionary new computing platform. The headset offered users a head-up display and a built-in camera, allowing them to see a small amount of information and capture images of their environment.

While some tech enthusiasts took to it, it was also widely mocked for its geeky appearance, limited functionality, and potential role in violating the privacy of people around the user. The criticism was so fierce that the term "Glasshole" was sometimes used to describe people who wore it.

Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images )

A new report in the Financial Times claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams overrode design team objections to move forward with a new mixed-reality headset before designers believed the technology was ready. That said, the report isn't detailed enough to provide a nuanced picture of what's going on inside the company.

Here's the picture it does paint: A once-influential industrial design team is losing agency as executive departures and other factors have led to the team reporting to the company's operations chief instead of a top-level design executive.

We've written quite a bit about the gradual departure of famed design chief Jony Ive, who was a close collaborator with former CEO Steve Jobs. In addition to Ive, though, Apple also lost Ive's successor, Evans Hankey .

Enlarge / The Meta Quest Pro at a Best Buy demo station in October 2022.

The next Meta Quest headset, planned for launch this year, will be thinner, twice as powerful, and slightly more expensive than the Quest 2. That's according to a leaked internal hardware roadmap presentation obtained by The Verge that also includes plans for high-end, smartband-controlled, ad-supported AR glasses by 2027.

The "Quest 3" will also include a new "Smart Guardian" system that lets users walk around safely in "mixed reality," according to the presentation. That will come ahead of a more "accessible" headset, codenamed Ventura, which is planned for a release in 2024 at "the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market."

That Ventura description brings to mind John Carmack's October Meta Connect keynote , in which he highlighted his push for a "super cheap, super lightweight headset" targeting "$250 and 250 grams." Carmack complained that Meta is "not building that headset today, but I keep trying." Months later, Carmack announced he was leaving the company , complaining that he was "evidently not persuasive enough" to change the company for the better.

Enlarge / Former Apple hardware engineering leader Dan Riccio. (credit: Apple )

A couple of weeks ago, Apple announced that longtime hardware engineering chief Dan Riccio will step down from his role to focus entirely on a "new project" within the company. According to yet another report at Bloomberg based on sources with knowledge of Apple's plans today, the project Riccio has focused his energies on is Apple's upcoming augmented reality, virtual reality, or mixed reality headset.

Development of an AR headset at Apple seems to have hit a snag or two under current project lead Mike Rockwell, though the report does not outline exactly which obstacles have emerged. While Rockwell will remain in charge of day-to-day work on the project, Riccio will have "ultimate oversight" over the company's AR/VR efforts, which are said to involve "well over a thousand engineers."

Riccio had already handed top-level management of most current consumer products like the iPhone to an executive named John Ternus, who Apple announced will replace Riccio as the head of hardware engineering overall. The latest news indicates that he has also handed development of new camera and display technology to Johny Srouji, the executive who spearheaded the design and engineering of Apple Silicon .

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Enlarge / The "Sword of Damocles" head-mounted display, the original augmented reality headset, circa 1968. Augmented reality has gotten a lot more mobile in the past decade. (credit: Ivan Sutherland)

A new report in The Information corroborates and expands upon an earlier Bloomberg report claiming that Apple is preparing to launch a high-end VR headset as early as next year, citing unnamed people with knowledge of the product.

Among the new revelations is that the new headset will feature two 8K screens (one for each eye) and that Apple has considered a steep $3,000 price point.

The headset (which the report says is codenamed N301) will be able to display rich 3D graphics at that resolution, thanks both to an ultrafast M1 chip successor and because Apple will liberally use an already-known VR technique that involves using eye-tracking to render objects in the user's periphery at a lower fidelity than what the user is focusing on.

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