Apple has recently been quite vocal about the importance of virtual and augmented reality technologies in the coming years. Also, the rumor mill believes that the Cupertino giant is looking to introduce these technologies with the 10th Anniversary iPhone device. Thus, to further accelerate its efforts, it is appending its rumored AR team with the addition of widely known Final Cut Pro plugin developer Tim Dashwood.
The details of Dashwood’s new employment were initially reported by Final Cut Pro community site fcp.co. He is most well-known in the developer and video editing community for building the 360VR Toolbox plugin.
This $1,000 VR plugin, which is compatible not only with Final Cut Pro but also with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, includes various filters, utilities, and tools to easily create stereoscopic 3D videos. It also enables you to use your VR headsets to monitor 360-degree videos in real-time while editing. It is compatible only with Mac and was a great set of tools for producing VR content.
In addition to this plugin, he also released a handful of other handy tools for video editors as well. Dashwood launched Smooth Skin, an app which automatically detects and smoothens the faces in your videos. A similar tool called ‘Secret Identity’ uses Apple’s facial recognition technology to detect a person’s face and replace them with pixels to hide the identity. And finally, a suite of tools for the editors to seamlessly carry out their work.
Dashwood’s addition to Apple brings along a glum news for existing video editors employing his toolkit to produce their VR content. It means that 360VR Toolbox would not be receiving any future updates and feature additions. Thus, Dashwood has now decided to make his application suite available to anyone as a free download. This doesn’t only imply to 360VR Toolbox, but other apps namely smooth skin, secret identity and editor essentials as well.
The information on Dashwood’s hiring by Apple is currently very bleak. It is currently unknown whether he has been on-boarded to work on the upgradation of Final Cut Pro, support Cupertino’s augmented reality team, or some other position within the company. Also, we’re completely in the dark about the company’s AR and VR efforts.
We’re only second guessing the feature or hardware that the company may be working on. The former might still come this year but corresponding hardware is not expected to arrive until a few years – especially from Apple. It is currently believed that iPhone 8 may bring along a few AR-focused features with the inclusion of 3D depth-projection sensors in the front camera. There have also been rumors around the inclusion of a vertical dual-camera setup in the next iPhone as well.
