While the big names in augmented reality demonstrated the breadth of opportunities in the industry's landscape this week, one new startup showed off what is possible further in the future.
After several iterations of the product, Snap is focused on making sure the world knows that its smartglasses can be fashionable.
Roughly six months after emerging from stealth, AR cloud company 6D.ai is now ready for public consumption, and it has a big name partner to help it kick off its platform.
Although early attempts at consumer smartglasses have employed trackpads and handheld or wearable controllers for user input, its the gesture control interfaces of the HoloLens 2 and the Magic Leap One that represent the future of smartglasses input.
When it comes to the business of augmented reality, companies that aren't already introducing new products or apps are focused on producing the AR technology of the future. But in the realm of real products and apps, Magic Leap continues to show off what its headset can do, this time via a new app that transports users to the ocean's depths.
Fast-food chain Jack in the Box has decided to put an augmented reality twist on the traditional sweepstakes promotion by employing the immersive powers of Snapchat.
This week, while Apple was the subject of thinly sourced reports that it had canceled development of its oft-rumored smartglasses, the Cupertino was actually laying the foundation for its AR hardware future with a new initiative focused on mentoring Chinese developers in mobile AR development.
Two years ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the F8 Developers Conference keynote with augmented reality and the introduction of Facebook's AR camera platform, now known as Spark AR.
What does mainstream augmented reality look like? I'm not talking about the stuff you see in concept videos and science fiction films. No. What does it really look like?
Anyone who has been within a block of any wireless brick and mortar store or tech conference in the last couple of years has no doubt seen banners, posters, and videos promoting 5G high-speed wireless services on the way.
By far the most significant development for AR in the coming months and years — the development that will drive AR adoption — will be our reliance upon the AR cloud.
The year in augmented reality 2019 started with the kind of doom and gloom that usually signals the end of something. Driven in large part by the story we broke in January about the fall of Meta, along with similar flameouts by ODG and Blippar, the virtual shrapnel of AR ventures that took a wrong turn has already marred the landscape of 2019.
While the long awaited HoloLens sequel is scheduled to arrive later this year, Apple may force Microsoft to share the AR wearables spotlight, if reports of the company's first entry into smartglasses territory end up coming to fruition.
The emerging narrative as CES begins is that consumer-grade smartglasses require a heavy compromise in functionality in order to arrive at a form factor and price point that appeal to mainstream customers.
While the technology companies continue to drive forward with autonomous vehicles, Nissan's vision of the future of self-driving automobiles lies in a cooperative experience between human and machine, facilitated by augmented reality.
All of the the tech industry giants, including Apple, Facebook, and Google, are working on new smartglasses and/or AR headsets, but this week, Google took a major step forward with gesture recognition technology that could make its way into AR wearables, posing a threat to Leap Motion and its hand-tracking controllers.
Occasionally, a not-so-great movie also does something so right that you have to forgive some of its sins and give it a little love. Such is the case with the latest film from Keanu Reeves, Replicas, which takes a HoloLens-style device and gives us a look at how future research labs might use that kind of augmented reality device, sort of.
The augmented reality industry has a bright future built on innovation and growth, but that doesn't mean we can't look back at the close of the year to see what the industry has accomplished from a business perspective.
The North remembers...that smartglasses are the future! Game of Thrones jokes aside, the smartglasses startup opened its doors, and we visited its Brooklyn store to get our hands the consumer-focused Focals smartglasses.
Magic Leap has already entered the realm of entertainment and enterprise, but on now it has blazed its way into a new augmented reality frontier: fashion.
This week, we continued our NR30 series highlighting the leaders of augmented reality space by profiling the venture capitalists and strategic corporate investors that sustain the industry.
In a leaked company memo, Snap CEO (and NR30 member) Evan Spiegel has made it clear that the future of the company lies not only augmented reality but also hardware that enables those AR experiences.
The shifting sands of immersive computing, currently fluctuating between augmented reality and virtual reality, can be hard to navigate if you're only versed in one of the platforms. But a new series of videos from Leap Motion paints a picture of a near future world in which AR and VR will seamlessly merge together, forcing us to change the way we see both.
At present, consumer-facing augmented reality is a mobile world, and Snapchat is making money on it through advertising partnerships.
Escape rooms, those real world puzzle games that challenge teams to solve a mystery and gain their freedom from a locked room, are all the rage right now. But augmented reality games such as The Lockdown could make them obsolete.
Augmented reality is expected to eventually change everything, and the prevailing view is that those changes will be for the better. The converse view, however, is that the technology will further erode privacy.
With all the recent activity around augmented reality, the possibilities involving immersive computing and commerce are quickly becoming obvious, and digital payments giant PayPal has no plans to sit on the sidelines
If it had come out just a week earlier, around April 1, no one would have believed it. But it's true, Leap Motion has developed its own prototype augmented reality headset, and it looks pretty wild.
Augmented reality was recently named the "Mobile Disruptor of the Year" for 2017 by Mobile Marketer, but the technology is showing no signs of slowing down as we head into 2018. In fact, the technology appears to be gaining momentum.
During its third-quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that "AR is going to change everything."
Since the very first moment I saw the iPhone X track a human face and display the results in real-time on an Animoji character, I've been waiting for the first great hack of this new iPhone feature.
Any sufficiently cool new technology will be immediately repurposed to do something even cooler. Such is the case with Apple's iPhone X and its Animoji feature, which has led to something completely unanticipated: Animoji karaoke.
Just when you thought Google Glass was dead, it turns out there may be a second life for the often ridiculed device that won't relegate it to the staid confines of factories and repair jobs.
Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk offered some insight into how hackers might seek to turn driverless cars into zombie fleets, but remained upbeat about what can be done about it.
JigSpace, a company that uses 3D renderings to give instructions, showed off a fun new way to learn how things work using Apple's ARKit. The video released shows the anatomy of a range of things, including an espresso machine, an Archer Hb Plus chair, and the manual transmission of a car. Not to mention, they also used ARKit to show a 3D how-to of removing an iPhone's SIM card.
Waymo claims in court documents filed yesterday in its lawsuit against Uber that ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick knew that former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski was in the possession of stolen documents while employed at the troubled ride-sharing firm.
Waymo revealed more clues about its future business model after it said yesterday it plans to kill its Firefly pod-like car project and focus more closely on offering driverless systems for commercially available car and truck models.
Stakeholders in the driverless industry are anxiously awaiting changes the US Department of Transportation (DOT) is making to self-driving vehicle guidelines.
Those of us who are actively developing for the HoloLens, and for the other augmented and mixed reality devices and platforms that currently exist, are constantly looking for the next bit of news or press conference about the space. Our one hope is to find any information about the road ahead, to know that the hours we spend slaving away above our keyboards, with the weight of a head-mounted display on our neck, will lead to something as amazing as we picture it.
When a new jailbreak method comes out, Apple is quick to patch the vulnerability it exploits by issuing a new iOS update. If you were to accept such an update, you'd no longer be able to jailbreak your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch unless you could roll back your firmware to a version that could be jailbroken. But Apple even takes things a step further and stops signing older iOS firmware versions, which makes downgrading next to impossible. This is where your SHSH2 blobs come into play.
