- General
- April 9, 2019
- 5 minutes read
Apple Hires Jaunt Founder Arthur Van Hoff
image: Apple Apple has made a significant hire in the VR space, recruiting Arthur Van Hoff, a founding executive of Jaunt,…
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| image: Apple |
Apple has made a significant hire in the VR space, recruiting Arthur Van Hoff, a founding executive of Jaunt, a VR content startup valued at $625 million according to PitchBook and backed by the likes of Sky, Alphabet’s GV, Redpoint, Axel Springer, The Madison Square Garden Company, and Disney. Arthur Van Hoff’s LinkedIn profile indicates he joined Apple in April as a ‘senior architect’.
He has previously held roles at Box, Flipboard, Redpoint Ventures, Dell, TiVo, Marimba, and Sun Microsystems. He founded Jaunt in 2013 and served as its CTO until late last year. A move to Apple could indicate efforts on Apple’s still-unannounced and rumored AR headset. Some reports predict the company could launch an augmented reality headset by next year.
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| image: Apple |
Jaunt itself recently made a major strategy shift, switching focus from VR to AR. Apple itself has released a new suite of products — a credit card, a new video subscription service, a game subscription service, and a news subscription service — as of recent so it may not be so surprising if it gets to debut an AR headset soon (its competitor Microsoft recently debuted a new AR headset — HoloLens 2).
Apple also recently hired Sam Jadallah, a former Microsoft executive and CEO of now-shuttered smart lock startup Otto. This could also signal plans to enter the smart home market, one that its smart speaker — the HomePod is closely related to.
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