Magic Leap's legal battle against Nreal has taken an intriguing turn this week, as Magic Leap set a date to discuss the matter with Nreal. But a new partnership struck by Nreal adds another wrinkle to the duel between the two AR wearable makers.
Augmented reality plays a key role in the evolution of adjacent technologies, such as 5G connectivity and brain-control interfaces (BCI), and the business news of the week serves up proof points for both examples.
Before smartglasses makers can dream of taking smartglasses to mainstream consumers, they must first determine the right mix of form, function, and price that will drive customers to buy into what they're hoping to sell.
Developers and enterprise customers chomping at the bit to get their hands on HoloLens 2 may not have to wait much longer, as Microsoft passed one of the remaining hurdles needed to release their new tech into the wild.
During the recent Augmented World Expo (AWE), we had a chance to try out the Lenovo ThinkReality A6 AR headset. Unfortunately, the experience was all downhill from there.
In recent weeks we've talked about the growing trend of smartglasses makers moving the brains of their devices to smartphones, and now a veteran of the space has joined that movement.
To borrow from the canon of Game of Thrones, what is dead may never die. And while the Meta Company that we knew this time last year is no more, the patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company lives on.
This week, the recurring theme in augmented reality can be summed up fairly succinctly: content is king.
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.
This week, inside sources divulged details of how Apple nearly acquired Leap Motion, twice. Otherwise, companies offering or working on augmented reality technology had more successes than failures to talk about.
Augmented reality is becoming a slam dunk for sports entertainment, as leagues, their teams, and their broadcast partners have been quick to adopt AR.
A week after the L.E.A.P. Conference, our cup of Magic Leap news continues to floweth over, with the company's content chief giving us some insight into the company's strategy, and Twilio sharing what its virtual chat app looks like.
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.
It is almost indisputable that smartglasses and head-worn displays are the future of augmented reality. However, at this precise moment, they are still a very niche market.
Cited by many listed on this year's NR30 list as the most important event in the last 12 months, last year's release of ARKit catapulted Apple CEO Tim Cook to the top of Next Reality's rankings. This week, we dug deeper by explaining why he's at the top of the list of NR30 Mobile AR leaders.
Despite the launch of ARKit a year ago, and ARCore this year, a true killer app has not arrived for either platform, that's according to the head honcho for one of the leading development environments for 3D applications.
This week, we're beginning to see the wide ranging impacts of some of the early iterations of augmented reality hardware and software.
Contrary to popular belief, augmented reality apps have been available for a while now. I remember using the Layar app (still available for iOS and Android) to explore nearby businesses and landmarks with varying success via an early-generation Android handset.
With the reveal of Magic Leap's developer documentation last week, many questions have been answered—and several new ones have been raised as well. But since the Magic Leap One (ML1) isn't simply called the "Leap One," these are questions that the company probably has no interest (at least for now) in answering. Understandably, Magic Leap wants to keep some of the "magic" under wraps.
Another piece of Magic Leap's mysterious story has been uncovered thanks to a new patent application revealed on Thursday, March 15.
Getting an insider view of the goings-on at Magic Leap is hard to come by, but occasionally, the company lets one of its leaders offer a peek at what's happening at the famously secretive augmented reality startup. One of those opportunities came up a few days ago when Magic Leap's chief futurist and science fiction novelist, Neal Stephenson, sat for an extended interview at the MIT Media Lab.
As the calendar year (and, for many companies, the fiscal year) comes to a close, it appears 2017 may stand as the new high-water mark for investment in augmented and virtual reality technology.
When a firm like Techstars believes that augmented reality is an attractive industry to invest in, there's a high probability that it's right.
ARKit is a marketer's dream. By providing tools for creating augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, AR apps can now be deployed easily alongside just about any campaign. As expected, we now have ARKit apps pushing wares ranging from automobiles to tequila.
When Apple announced their ARKit platform in June, they immediately staked the claim to the largest augmented reality hardware platform, with millions of iPhones and iPads compatible with iOS 11 becoming AR devices this fall.
If you're a developer in the augmented and mixed reality space, there's a high probability that you're intimately familiar with the 3D application and game engine Unity. In May, at VisionSummit 2017, Microsoft announced that 91% of all HoloLens applications have been made with the software. But there's a section of Unity that you may not be familiar with, which has become very important to augmented, mixed, and virtual reality (known collectively as XR, for "extended reality") — Unity Labs.
Coming up at the end of May is the world's largest conference and expo dedicated to all things augmented and virtual reality, the Augmented World Expo, more commonly known just as AWE. And this year, a few of us from NextReality are going to be there.
Even if your cat drives you a little nuts, don't worry, because a new study says that cats pose no risk to your mental health.
Thanks to the steady increase in quality of smartphone cameras, it's easier than ever to take amazing photos or video without thinking twice. If you've been to a concert in the last five years, you undoubtedly know what I mean. But it turns out that using your camera as a new set of eyes might actually be ruining your ability to remember events on your own, rather than helping you to hold on to the good times.
Being in your twenties is tough. You're not a child anymore, but also not quite a full-fledged "adult" yet. Sure, you do adult things like cook asparagus sometimes, but you're also sweating about securing enough likes on your social media posts.
This week on the Steampunk Research and Development Podcast, our guest is Joey Marsocci, better known to the world as Dr. Grymm. He's a full-time, professional Steampunk maker, and is the owner and operator of Dr. Grymm Laboratories. He's written several books and has worked as a designer at companies such as Hasbro and Disney. In fact, he worked with Disney to design the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea attractions for both Paris and Tokyo Disney parks.
No matter what age you are or what kind of life you've lived you can put your story out there by writing an autobiography. Every life can be interesting if written about in a well formulated, and honest manner.
The rapid advance of Lens Studio as a platform for easily developing augmented reality experiences is just one indicator that immersive computing is becoming the norm.
As if teasing its own smartglasses weren't enough, augmented reality gaming developer Niantic gave gamers a glimpse of how 5G speeds can revolutionize how they play mobile games in the near future.
After facing reports of financial troubles over the past month, Magic Leap came out swinging this week with a big push for the enterprise segment of AR, including a repackaged Magic Leap 1, a suite of enterprise apps, and updates to Lumin OS and its supporting development ecosystem. Oh, and its AR headset managed to win a starring role in the marketing juggernaut for the forthcoming Star Wars movie.
Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz doesn't engage in tweetstorms often, but when he does, those tweets are bold, exceedingly confident, and there's usually a strong takeaway regarding what the company is or isn't doing. But on Thursday, Abovitz's latest tweetstorm sent an unusually flustered message: We promise, the magic we're telling you about it better than anything you've seen on video.
If you've contemplated what's possible with augmented reality on mobile devices, and your interest has been piqued enough to start building your own Android-based AR app, then this is a great place to to acquire the basic beginner skills to complete it. Once we get everything installed, we'll create a simple project that allows us to detect surfaces and place custom objects on those surfaces.
In the tech world, when you're a small startup going up against the Goliaths and their massive marketing budgets, you're forced to find and produce something almost magical to help your product stand apart from the rest. And that's exactly what Occipital Inc. has done with their Bridge headset.
If the rumors are right, Microsoft has decided to cancel the second version of the HoloLens, and they will instead move onto version three of their mixed reality headset. In the latest report, Thurrott's Brad Sams states that the expected release date of this new Windows Holographic device wouldn't be until 2019, a long two years away for those of us putting full effort into HoloLens app development.
Pokémon GO made waves as the first augmented reality game to gain popular adoption. In fact, it was so popular that it only took a few days to uncover some the benefits and serious issues with combining physical and digital worlds.
