Tim Cook laid out the playbook for Apple's next big thing

Apple is the most valuable company in the world, and it makes a lot of profit, but its long-term future depends on it coming up with a new product, a new "one more thing."

The Apple Watch, which has been selling poorly for Apple, isn't going to do it.

Apple needs a new platform. And Apple CEO Tim Cook knows it. That's why he's been dropping hint after hint that Apple's next major technology initiative is augmented reality — basically, integrating software into the real world. 

What is AR?

Microsoft

"It is a visual technology that interprets the world for you," Research Vice President at Gartner Brian Blau told Business Insider. "If you think about augmented reality in that sense, it could be the next big grand computing platform. That has been the long-term promise." 

AR is a close cousin of virtual reality. For now, augmented reality means you can hold up your phone and, for example, identify landmarks, discover a hidden Pokemon, or magically translate signs using your device's camera. 

The end game of augmented reality is a pair of computer glasses or perhaps a contact lens that can superimpose computer graphics into the real world seamlessly.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has talked about augmented reality essentially every time he's been called on to make public remarks recently. 

"This is something you know it's coming," Piper Jaffray managing director Gene Munster told Business Insider. "The only other times they've talked like this is before the iPhone came out, they started to indicate they could do something in the phone market. Before the Apple Watch came out they talked about wearables and the wrist being a better option."

"It's pretty rare that Apple has been this clear that something is coming," Munster said. 

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If you parse Cook's most recent comments on AR, given at an event in Utah in October, he seems to lay out Apple's strategy for attacking this market, according to analysts and people in the AR industry. 

'Three meals a day'

Cook said about AR:

"It will be enabled in the operating systems first, because it’s a precursor for that to happen for there to be mass adoption of it. I’d look for that to happen in the not-too-distant future. In terms of it becoming a mass adoption [phenomenon], so that, say, everyone in here would have an AR experience, the reality to do that, it has to be something that everyone in here views to be an 'acceptable thing.'

...

I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day, it will become that much a part of you, a lot of us live on our smartphones, the iPhone, I hope, is very important for everyone, so AR will become really big.

...

AR is going to take a while, because there are some really hard technology challenges there."

Here's what Cook is signaling: 

• Adding key AR building blocks, like the ability for a camera to identify objects, into iPhone software and Apple apps in the near future. 
• Adding AR-specific hardware to the iPhone, like a 3D sensor. This could come from Primesense, a company Apple bought in 2013, and would allow the device to understand its surroundings even better than a basic camera. 
• Opening up the platform to developers, so that programmers can make augmented reality apps without dealing with the complicated computer vision and physics algorithms currently being developed by people at Apple and other companies with Ph.Ds.
• Releasing an AR-specific product, perhaps a pair of glasses, when the technology is ready. It will be able to take advantage of all the AR apps already developed for iPhone. 

'Enabled in operating system first'

"We believe Apple could embed early AR features in iOS 11," the version of iOS expected to be unveiled next June, UBS analyst Steven Milunovich wrote last week in a note distributed to clients.

There are already signs that Apple has experimented with integrating some headset-related features into its iOS operating system. In 2015, it purchased Metaio, a company that had developed a mobile AR browser as well as a whole suite of AR tools. 

Last month, developer Steve Troughton-Smith uncovered some interesting features currently included in Apple's iOS. 

 These features seem to have been abandoned for the time being, Troughton-Smith told Business Insider. 

"I think the kind of VR you build for something dumb and simplistic like Google Cardboard is very different from what real VR needs. I imagine they got to the point where they realized they were going down the wrong path if they want to do this seriously," Troughton-Smith said.