Akonia acquired by Apple
Apple confirmed it acquired the Longmont, Colorado-based company Akonia Holographics. “Apple buys smaller companies from time to time and we generally don’t discuss our purposes or plans,” the iPhone maker said in a statement.
The company was founded in 2012 by a group of holography scientists and had originally focused on storing holographic data before shifting its efforts to creating displays for augmented reality glasses, according to its website.
In augmented reality, digital information is superimposed on the real world like in the popular game Pokemon Go. Mobile phones use their camera system to do this on the phone’s screen, but major tech firms are racing to create glasses that display digital information on clear lenses.
Akonia said its display technology enables “thin, transparent smart glass lenses that display vibrant, full-color images with a wide field of view.” The firm has a portfolio of more than 200 patents related to holographic systems and materials, according to its website.
Akonia also said that it raised $11.6 million in seed funding in 2012 and was seeking additional funding. It was unclear if that funding ever materialized or who the investors in the company were.
The purchase price and date of the acquisition could not be disclosed, though an augmented reality industry executive said the Akonia team had become “very quiet” over the past six months, implying the deal may have happened in the first half of 2018.
Apple has a history of buying smaller companies whose technologies appear years later in their products. In 2013, Apple acquired a small Israeli company called PrimeSense that made three-dimensional sensors. The iPhone X, released last year, used a similar sensor to power facial recognition features.
Last year, Bloomberg reported that Apple was developing augmented reality glasses that could ship as early as 2020. Apple declined to comment on its plans or products.
But last year, the company released augmented reality apps for its iPhones and iPads, and CEO Tim Cook called AR a “big and deep” technology development.
“This is one of those big things that we’ll look back on and marvel at first,” Cook said of augmented reality on a conference call with investors last year.
The Akonia acquisition is the first clear indication of how Apple could handle one of the most daunting challenges in augmented reality hardware: producing sharp optical displays thin and light enough to fit into everyday frame-like glasses with images bright enough for outdoor use and suitable for mass manufacturing at a relatively low price.
Augmented reality headsets on the market today, such as Microsoft Corp’s HoloLense and startup Magic Leap’s Magic Leap One, use tinted lenses and are intended for indoor use. Both are also intended for software developers testing the technology and cost several thousand dollars.