One could argue that, at least for the moment, software development is more important to the augmented reality experience than hardware. Since a viable augmented reality headset has yet to emerge for the broader, mainstream consumer market, currently, the same devices that make texting and selfies possible are leading the charge to enable easy-to-use AR experiences.
Snapchat has officially unveiled its Visual Search service for Amazon (teased a month ago), a tool the company began testing on Monday.
You want whales? Ok, you'll get whales! That seems to be the unspoken message from Magic Leap via its latest update in the form of several new experiments posted inside its Helio app.
Less than a week after debuting its AR Cloud platform in public with a multi-user installation of more than 100 participants, Ubiquity6 announced on Tuesday that it has closed a Series B round of funding totaling $27 million.
We've seen all the Magic Leap One glamour shots, and we've even shown you a bit of what it looks like to view augmented reality on the device. But there's something else us super geeks appreciate more than anyone else: the grand unboxing!
If you're a part of Generation X or a Millennial, there's a good chance that the first mobile game you played was Snake on an old school Nokia phone. Now, you can relive that nostalgia of monochrome and push buttons in augmented reality with the Facebook Camera.
If you're not impressed with the current crop of AR content, and you're worried this may put a damper on the industry's growth, these stories should give you cause for some optimism.
After weeks of teasing what many hoped might be a live, on-device demo of Magic Leap software to go along with the hardware glimpse we got last month, it turns out that all we got was a bit of new demonstration video footage.
On Tuesday, Unity released the latest version of its 3D engine, which brings improvements to the Scriptable Render Pipeline that the company introduced earlier this year.
Last month was a whirlwind for the augmented reality industry, with the Augmented World Expo, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, and an exciting Magic Leap Twitch livestream all wrapping up before the ides of June. Now that we've had a chance to fully digest it all, we have a real sense of where the augmented reality industry is heading.
Another branding team has stepped up to the bar to order a tall glass of augmented reality for its marketing campaign, this time through a mobile app for Rémy Martin VSOP Limited Edition cognac.
Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic has offered a preview of its augmented reality cloud platform that could change the immersive content game yet again.
Based on its continued research, it appears Microsoft recognizes that the next HoloLens needs a wider field of view (FoV). Based on a recently-revealed documentation, the company's research team has found another way to accomplish that objective.
On Wednesday, June 6, the people at Magic Leap finally (FINALLY) decided to give the public a dedicated, slow, feature-by-feature walkthrough of the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition. How was it? About as good as it gets without actually getting to see what images look like through the device when wearing it.
The Augmented World Expo is winding down in Santa Clara, where Qualcomm, Vuzix, and Meta Company were among the companies making big announcements.
While Vuzix is beefing up the processing power of its next-generation smartglasses with the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1, the company will also give its devices an upgraded display engine.
Enterprise augmented reality software maker Scope AR is bringing the powers of its two productivity apps together like the Wonder Twins into the form of a single app.
As Facebook, Apple, Samsung, and others offer augmented reality selfie effects and content that challenge its platform, Snapchat has continued to innovate with its augmented reality capabilities.
The Essential Phone was undoubtedly one of the most underrated phones of 2018. It launched with buggy software and camera problems, but the company worked diligently to push out updates. Many Android enthusiasts were anxiously waiting for the Essential 2 release later this summer. Unfortunately, news today from Bloomberg indicates that Essential will not release a phone in 2018.
Microsoft's Monday keynote introduced the fourth generation of the company's Kinect sensor during Build 2018 in Seattle.
On Monday, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft revealed two new apps for the HoloLens apps.
Following San Francisco-based Occipital's successful Structure Sensor Kickstarter campaign, the release of its Bridge AR/VR headset, as well as a string of technology and company acquisitions, the company has built a rather strong name for itself in the AR community. And now, with the first public release of its Bridge Engine on Thursday, the company continues to expand the features its platform has to offer, with hopes of bringing in more developers to utilize it.
Do you see a red door and wonder if it might be a good idea to paint it black? You could "ask Ask Sherwin-Williams," or, better yet, you could just ask the new augmented reality features in the retailer's mobile app.
Modern "mad men" are buying into augmented reality for marketing, with the two latest examples being trendy burger maker Bareburger and department store chain Zara.
For social media platforms like Facebook, augmented reality represents a whole new art form with which users can express themselves online. Now, Facebook is giving those users a new brush.
One of the earliest players in the social virtual reality space, vTime, has just landed $7.6 million in new funding, which the company says is partially earmarked for developing and releasing an augmented reality version of its platform later this year.
Another AR cloud candidate has emerged in YOUAR, a startup that has developed a new system that enables persistent augmented reality experiences on iPhones and Android devices.
It turns out that the government of Saudi Arabia has managed to do something last month's Game Developers Conference couldn't — give us a few new glimpses of the Magic Leap One being worn by someone other than Shaq.
The cosmetics industry faced a rude awakening on Friday as beauty behemoth L'Oréal gobbled up ModiFace, one of the leading providers of augmented reality technology to the cosmetics industry (price details for the acquisition were not disclosed).
Just days after Bose did its best to frame a pair of glasses frames with spatial audio as "augmented reality," a patent application from Magic Leap, surfaced on Thursday, March 15, offers a similar idea, but with real AR included.
The augmented reality cloud and multi-user experiences are shaping up to be one of the hotter areas of augmented reality, and now Google is the latest entity to back these emerging branches of AR.
Historically, Apple loves to drop hints about its major upcoming events through clues included on its invitations. Those invites usually require a good bit of deciphering to connect the dots, but in the case of Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 invite, the topic is immediately obvious: it's augmented reality.
Apple released the fifth build of the iOS 11.3 developer and public beta on Monday, March 12. The update comes exactly one week after the March 5 release of beta 4, which mostly introduced bug and stability patches. At this time, this new beta appears to do much of the same.
What many thought was inevitable, based on recent hints, has been revealed to be in the planning stages: Snapchat is working on smartglasses. The surprising information came out on March 2 in a report that also claims Snap Inc. is planning to release version two of its Spectacles product in the third quarter of 2018.
If the end of every year is focused on new iPhones, then February, which coincides with Mobile World Congress, is often when we get new Android news, and this month is no different.
Location services provider Mapbox is giving developers a means for building location-based AR apps and multi-user experiences with its new Mapbox AR toolkit.
San Francisco-based 6D.ai is preparing to launch a beta of its AR cloud platform that's capable of constructing a real-time dense mesh from crowdsourced data for use in 3D mapping and multi-user AR experiences.
The once blurry and mysterious vision of Magic Leap's future is slowly coming into focus in the present, despite the company's obsessive attempts to keep any and all information under wraps until the next reveal is absolutely necessary. A new tidbit of information hints at an addition to the company's unfolding story that almost no one had accounted for: retail stores.
While augmented reality headset makers are faced with tackling numerous challenges before the category is truly ready for prime time, a start-up comprised of former Microsoft engineers may have nailed fast and precise tracking of hand gestures and full-body locomotion.
Lost among the latest laptops, smart assistants, VR headsets, and Motorola-branded gadgets that it brought to CES 2018, Lenovo has also introduced a new pair of augmented reality smartglasses.
