Apple this month added Jaunt VR founder Arthur van Hoff to its AR/VR team, according to van Hoff's updated LinkedIn profile that was first noticed by Variety.
Van Hoff is now working as a senior architect at Apple, with no other detail provided. His company, Jaunt VR, created VR capture hardware, including a $100,000 3D VR camera, the Jaunt One.
Rumors of troubles at the company started in 2018, and in October, Jaunt VR let go of much of its staff, pivoting from VR hardware to augmented reality. Jaunt is now focusing on building a platform for the scaled creation of AR content.
At the time, van Hoff said he would be leaving Jaunt by the end of 2018, and it appears he ended up at Apple instead. It's not clear specifically what he's doing at the Cupertino company, but given his expertise in AR and VR, he's likely joined Apple's augmented and virtual reality efforts.
Prior to founding Jaunt, van Hoff was CTO of Flipboard, software and services CTO at Dell, and an engineer at TiVo.
Rumors have suggested Apple is working on developing a set of AR smart glasses, which could be released as soon as 2020. Apple also has other AR/VR prototypes in the works, and there have been mixed rumors that have also pointed towards the possibility of some kind of virtual reality hardware product in the future.
