The hype around augmented reality has risen to a fever pitch over the past two years, and if this week's selection of business news stories are any indication, the din is about to get down right deafening.
This week, the recurring theme in augmented reality can be summed up fairly succinctly: content is king.
If you salivate at the idea of waking up to the Jarvis-powered smart window from the opening minutes of Marvel's Iron Man, then connected home appliance maker CareOS is here to make your playboy billionaire philanthropist dreams come true.
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.
To combat their poor coverage in rural areas, T-Mobile spent nearly $8 billion on 600 MHz spectrum in 2017, which was converted to LTE Band 71. With such a low frequency, the signal can travel further, providing LTE speeds to more Americans. But your phone also has to support this frequency, and so far, only a handful do.
This week, at its developer's conference, Samsung took the wraps off a new tool from Wacom that bestows the S-Pen with AR powers, as well as its own entry to the AR cloud market called Project Whare.
When OnePlus announced their partnership with T-Mobile and the deal the magenta carrier is set to offer, mouths dropped. But as usual, this deal comes with some caveats. The bulk of these will hurt the folks who love to root, something a large portion of the OnePlus community enjoys doing.
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.
Two companies armed with web-based augmented reality tools, Vertebrae and Shopify, are ready to help online retailers boost their sales.
Apple often cites its tight integration of hardware and software for its success. Startup Illumix is looking to do the same thing for AR gaming by building an AR platform for its apps.
For the augmented reality hardware industry to progress towards the consumer segment, display technology needs to get better. Investors recognize that, and they are showing AR display makers the money.
While Magic Leap has gained attention for its ability to raise capital, the company (now with an actual product on the market) still faces an uphill climb against the titans of the industry.
By now, you already know that the Magic Leap One ships with an array of apps to immediately get you accustomed to operating in your new spatial computing reality. The first one we're going to focus on is Screens, an app we told you about previously, but only now have managed to try for ourselves.
It doesn't matter how cool or groundbreaking a particular technology is, if it doesn't offer the promise of big returns on investments, you'll have trouble drawing interest from both Silicon Valley and Wall Street. That's why we're increasingly seeing existing augmented reality players doing everything they can to focus in on revenue generation, which was the message coming from Snap Inc. this week.
Magic Leap's recent flurry of patent applications prompted us to look around for any trademark movements from the company, and it turns out that the Florida-based company has been quite busy.
On Friday, audio giant Bose emerged as the latest, and perhaps the most surprising company to announce that it's planning to release augmented reality smartglasses.
HMD (the company currently making Nokia-branded phones) only released one flagship device last year, with the rest of the phones falling in the mid-range and entry-level tiers. However, at Mobile World Congress 2018, HMD announced their ambition to become a top five smartphone maker in 3–5 years. Meeting this goal will require penetration in all markets — especially the United States — and it looks like Nokia will get the ball rolling early this year.
Samsung's big reveal of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ at Mobile World Congress revolved around its "reimagined" camera and augmented reality capabilities.
BlackBerry's focus on secure software and their new partnership with manufacturer TCL are two of the biggest factors in their recent resurgence. Last year, the company announced two new devices — the KEYone and the BlackBerry Motion. The KEYone has been available for a while, but after months of waiting, BlackBerry announced the Motion will hit US shores in a few days.
In 2017, major breakthroughs in smartphone-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) opened up new doorways for developers and users of both Apple and Android phones. Unfortunately for Android users, the solution that Google is previewing, ARCore, currently only works on three Android smartphones. But Silicon Valley start-up uSens is stepping in to fix that with its new engine called uSensAR.
The year is 2018. You just received your own Magic Leap One: Creator Edition. What now? Rewinding back to today, we know of one specific app that will be available for Magic Leap's device, along with two others that could be tagged as highly likely. Paired with Magic Leap's own experiments and demonstrations, we can get a sense of what the playground for this new toy will offer.
If you're like me, then you're rarely just watching TV. You're probably also simultaneously following reactions on Twitter during a live airing of The Walking Dead. Or perhaps you're checking your fantasy football scores while a real game is in progress. Or you might just have the TV on in the background while you're writing an article about a new augmented reality app.
HTC is heading in a strange direction lately. Instead of releasing just one flagship in the spring season, they released two top-tier phones, with one having last year's specs and both having last year's design. They were also supposed to manufacture both the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, but Google was unimpressed by the HTC-made Pixel 2 XL and looked to LG for the bigger device. Now it seems, HTC isn't finished yet.
Google announced a partnership with Movies Anywhere that allows you to connect your iTunes, Amazon, and Vudu movie library with Google Play Movies. In other words, movies you purchase from any of these online retailers will be available for playback in the Google Play Movies app after a little setup.
If competition in the augmented reality space was a spectator sport, then ARKit, ARCore, and HoloLens dominate the prime-time broadcasts on ESPN.
Nvidia has emerged as the indisputable leader in chips for Level 3 and even more advanced driverless applications, catching some of the world's largest semiconductor makers and automotive suppliers by surprise.
You may not have heard of visceral leishmaniasis, onchocerciasis, or lymphatic filariasis, and there is a reason for that. These diseases, part of a group of infections called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), impact more than a billion people on the planet in countries other than ours. Despite the consolation that these often grotesque illnesses are "out of sight, out of mind," some of these infections are quietly taking their toll in some southern communities of the US.
Every Tuesday, Next Reality will give readers a rundown of the augmented and mixed reality news briefs from the preceding week that we didn't cover already. This way, you'll never miss anything of importance in the Next Reality landscape, and will always know what's going on with new augmented and mixed reality tech and applications.
Somewhere around 600–800 million people in the world are infected with whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), an infection they got from ingesting soil or water contaminated with feces of infected animals or people containing the parasite's eggs.
The largest and arguably most widely known event of its type, especially in the US, the Sundance Film Festival is an annual celebration of independent film—ones made outside the Hollywood system. This year, a new type of experience appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in an installation called "The Journey to the Center of the Natural Machine." This mixed reality presentation offered the user the newest type of storytelling in a long and important line—continuation of the species kind of im...
When the time comes to replace your car, you most likely have a checklist of criteria that you would like on the new one. Your car is possibly the most expensive possession you have—or the second-most expensive, after your home—so you want to make sure that you are not only getting what you want, but that you are getting the best deal possible.
The future of augmented and mixed reality offers many possibilities, mostly because we're still figuring out everything it can do. While Meta is open to exploration, they've spent a lot of time thinking about what the future of this technology will be.
Using a technology we like to call "Hive Computing," several Android apps allow you to contribute idle processing power to help further scientific research. This basically means that when you're not using your phone or tablet, it can join forces with other idle devices to form a supercomputer that scientists can use to potentially make a world-changing breakthrough.
It's that time of year again, folks. Each fall, Google debuts a new device alongside the latest iteration of its mobile operating system—but this year marked the release of three new Nexus gadgets.
This year's I/O was all about bringing Android into the future and onto new devices. On top of announcing the upcoming "L" release of its mobile OS, Google showcased Android Wear, Android Auto, and Android TV.
Recently, Sprint announced a partnership with Harman Kardon to deliver exclusive sound FX technology to their variant of the HTC One M8. The joint effort between the two companies is both to entice customers to switch to Sprint as well as improve the overall audio quality coming from the already extraordinary BoomSound speakers. But while this is great for new and existing Sprint customers, it does leave the rest of us out in the cold.
After much hype and even more leaks, the HTC One M8 has finally been unveiled at the company's New York release announcement.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 was just officially announced at Mobile World Congress. The new flagship device will be available worldwide beginning April 11, 2014, including all major U.S. and international carriers. With over 200 million Galaxy devices sold to date, the S5 doesn't stray too far from the trend, at least not aesthetically. We've still got a high-grade plastic shell with perforated back covers, and four color choices at launch. Our highlights of the release event are as follows.
There's nothing like buying an awesome new gadget, but it leaves you with one problem (besides an empty wallet)—what do you do with the ones you already have? There are plenty of ways to put your old gadgets to use, but if you'd rather get rid of them, you may as well get something out of it, right? Here are five places where you can recycle your electronics and replenish your cash stash.
There are times when leadership is tested. This is one of those times. As government and business leaders around the world are grappling with the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, the real-time responses to the crisis from many leaders have been great and, at times, less-than-optimal.
