Investment in augmented reality remained robust in 2019. For the third consecutive year, we looked back on the biggest funding deals in the AR industry this week, and a familiar name came out on top.
It's the holiday season, and the tech industry is giving consumers several AR products and apps as gift-giving options.
Whether you love Motion Sense or think it's a gimmick, one thing we can agree on is that its functionality is limited. It's currently limited to switching tracks on a playlist, snoozing alarms, silencing calls, lowering the volume of alerts, and checking notifications. But a new mod will help you do so much more with it.
Following up on the initial tease over three months ago, Snap Inc. is finally letting the public get its hands on its new Spectacles 3 wearable device.
The longest-running children's television show in the United States, Sesame Street, hasn't survived 50 years without leveraging new technology along the way.
As one of the household brands in creative software, Adobe is now ready to lay its claim to the artistic side of augmented reality.
Silicon Valley-based startup 8th Wall has spent much of the last few years building a reputation for enabling AR experiences that are platform agnostic via web browsers and mobile apps. Now, 8th Wall is promising to give developers the freedom to build and host AR experiences from anywhere via a simple web browser.
Best known for its mobile phones and television sets, South Korea's LG has had a quieter presence in the US compared to the country's homegrown efforts.
Google has started to release a Go line of Android apps. These apps offer a minimalistic version of their major app counterpart. So far, we have Go versions of Maps, Photos, Gmail, and more. Who are these apps for and why would you want to use them? Here's a quick overview of Google Photos and Gallery Go.
As demonstrated by holographic experiences for the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap One, volumetric video capture is a key component of enabling the more realistic augmented reality experiences of the future.
We've got almost a full year until the next installment of Ghostbusters arrives, but in the meantime, it turns out that Sony is about to launch an augmented reality experience that will let fans use immersive computing to combat the franchise's whimsical apparitions.
At Next Reality we mostly focus on augmented reality, but that doesn't mean we're not also absolutely obsessed with virtual reality, too. If the thing that's been keeping you from diving into the deep end of VR has been clunky tethered headsets or the expensive but necessary gaming PCs, then it's time for you to try the Oculus Quest, which is currently available to buy here for less than most gaming systems on the market.
Norway-based production tools company Vizrt is putting the real into augmented reality with its broadcast AR solution that's designed to keep sports fans (and other audiences) watching.
Less than a month after launching its augmented reality Swim Goggles, wearables startup Form is preparing to add a major new feature for aquatic athletes.
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.
The company that supplied some of the technology behind the Star Wars Jedi Challenges AR playset now has its own headset to offer.
|Choose Your View: Quick Bullet Points | Detailed Descriptions Android's newest major update is a special one — it's the tenth full version of the world's most commonly used operating system. The latest release, dubbed simply Android 10 (codename Android Q), was first showcased as a beta back in March 2019, so we've been digging around in it for several months. There's one dramatic visual change, plus there are a lot of goodies in general.
Being an Android user and having friends who are in the Apple ecosystem does not need to be a pain. You can easily send high-quality videos to iPhone users, so don't feel handicapped without access to iMessage. Sending high-resolution videos to iOS users is easy with this fast video-sharing method.
For the first time in a while, the battle between Samsung and Apple is really interesting. Unlike previous years where the choice for smaller hands was limited to the Galaxy S series, this year, there's an option for Galaxy Note users. Both sides of the aisle have their best options in years with minimal sacrifices.
With HoloLens 2 (hopefully) just around the corner, Microsoft has announced that it will no longer be providing any major operating system updates to the original HoloLens.
In recent years, augmented reality has increasingly helped to take art off museum walls and bring it (virtually) into people's homes and communities, offering new perspectives on classic pieces and modern creations alike.
After debuting its virtual Pocket Gallery last year with the works of Johannes Vermeer, Google Arts & Culture has released a sequel that brings even more artists into your home via augmented reality.
For developers and makers getting started with augmented reality, Intel is lowering the barrier to entry for its RealSense line of sensors.
Game streaming has never been better. Not only can you watch your favorite Twitch streamer play, but with the new tools being added to YouTube, you can even play along with them. And now, with a solid internet connection, you can stream your Xbox One games to your phone to enjoy console games on the go.
Some investors play the short game, placing their bets on industries that show the quickest return on their investment, and, in the augmented reality space, that means the enterprise sector.
In this era of smartphones, we all know very well how easily we can get addicted to our devices. Spending hours each day doing the endless scroll through Facebook and other social media sites just because we feel like we'll miss something if we don't. Both Google and Apple are aware of this and are trying to help control smartphone addition in their own way for Android and iOS.
The recent industry whispers in augmented reality are mostly about Apple and its rumored fashion-friendly smartglasses, but one company isn't waiting for the iPhone heavyweight to enter the fray.
Right now, Apple is testing two versions of iOS. On the one hand, you have iOS 13, buggy but feature-filled. On the other, iOS 12.4. The latter just got an update to the fifth developer and public beta versions, 13 days after the release of iOS 12.4 developer beta 4.
From the first moments of booting up Harry Potter: Wizards Unite to the hours of walking you're bound to experience, one thing is clear — encountering Foundables and defeating their Confoundables is a significant plot point of the AR game. While you receive rewards each time you retrieve a Foundable, the real treasure comes from completing parts of the Registry, called "Families."
Comparing the present-day states of the consumer and enterprise sectors of augmented reality is like evaluating the merits of sports car versus work trucks. Like consumer AR, sports cars are sexy and exciting, but perhaps a bit impractical at times. On the other hand, enterprise AR is utilitarian, but it gets the job done and, in the long run, pays for itself.
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.
For all its faults, you can't say that Facebook hasn't been instrumental in connecting friends and family together, no matter where in the world everyone is. That's why one of its upcoming features — watching videos together with Facebook friends directly in Messenger — is so novel. It's just another example of the internet bridging gaps that couldn't be bridged just a short while ago.
I'm here at the annual AWE event in Santa Clara, California, and the venue is just as packed, if not more so, than last year.
Apple released the third public beta for iOS 12.4 on the afternoon of May 28. The update arrives roughly three hours after Apple published 12.4's third developer beta, and eight days after 12.4 public beta 2. At this time, it seems beta 3 is a minor update for 12.4, which itself is a small upgrade to iOS 12 as a whole. We expect iOS 12.4's shining feature to be Apple Card support.
Many of us know that you can make a few bucks from Amazon by helping the company sell its wide array of products, but now there's a very different way to make a buck with the company, and it involves 3D technology.
Talking Tom has long been mesmerizing children of all ages with his ability to repeat words and phrases and encourage touch interactions. Now, the lovable cat and his band of cuddly friends have ventured into the endless runner genre as heroes bent on saving Angela and their city from a band of mischievous raccoons.
As the industry has shifted toward OLED (including Google's own Pixel lineup), the outcry for dark mode has been louder than ever. Google heard the cries and has been working toward a real system-wide dark mode. To lay the groundwork, they are adding the feature to all their apps, including their Calculator app.
If Google hasn't already demonstrated that it is serious about augmented reality, then it made it abundantly clear at the Google I/O keynote on Tuesday.
While North has yet to add third-party app support to its Focals smartglasses, the company has been diligent as of late in its efforts to add more functionality to the bare-bones AR device.
With $100 million in grant funding already available to developers via its MegaGrants program, Epic Games is sweetening the pot with some gear for Magic Leap developers.
