Decades ago, Japan rocked the automobile industry with its revolutionary manufacturing and car quality, but today that title seems to be moving over to Elon Musk's electric car company Tesla. Nevertheless, Japan isn't done innovating mass-produced hardware.
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.
As a frequent collaborator with Qualcomm, it would be kind of weird if Nreal didn't have something new to unveil at this week's Snapdragon Summit.
After talking up the Magicverse for the past year and adding new capabilities to Lumin OS to accommodate it, Magic Leap appears to be inching ever closer to actually launching its cross-platform flavor of the AR cloud while introducing a new tool for its development community.
Homemade Halloween costumes that exhibit the maker's creativity are always better than off-the-shelf versions. It turns out that the same is true with virtual costumers.
Indian startup Dimension NXG is launching augmented reality headsets into India's consumer market with a bold idea: focusing on immersive computing in education on the high-end. The plan is to give a new kind of AR headset to schoolchildren in remote Indian villages, starting from class 5 (age 10) until graduation.
After adding dual cameras to its camera glasses, Snap is finally taking full advantage of the depth-sensing abilities of newer iPhones as well, extending the use of its new 3D Camera Mode.
When it comes to building luxury cars, Bentley certainly knows what it's doing. However, when it comes to building an AR app, Bentley is looking less Continental GT and more Geo Metro.
After teasing what smartglasses powered by Snapchat might look like with two product cycles of camera glasses, Snap has now added augmented reality capabilities to its third take on Spectacles.
The longer it takes Apple, Snapchat, Facebook, and other tech giants to build their own version of augmented reality headsets and smartglasses, the longer runway of practical experience Microsoft gains with the HoloLens and its sequel. The latest example: AR cloning.
Many popular apps automatically share your personal data. While I have accepted a certain amount of data collection from Google, to know companies such as Facebook perform this without my consent bothers me. After some researching, I've found a great solution, and it doesn't require root.
Sports technology company Form is testing the waters for augmented reality wearables with a product aimed at a very specific user group.
Perhaps it's a coincidence that the Vuzix Blade smartglasses look like the sunglasses that a police officer would wear, but a new partnership with an AI software company makes the wearable a perfect fit for law enforcement.
It looks like Microsoft will finally make good on its promise to bring Minecraft to augmented reality, as foreshadowed via a HoloLens demo in 2015.
You can almost detect the collective breath-holding of the augmented reality industry as it waits for Apple's inevitable entry. A new Apple wearable built with augmented reality technology is likely the device that will finally make the smartphone take a backseat.
As the opening act to the grand unveiling of the long-awaited HoloLens 2 at Mobile World Congress Barcelona on Sunday, Microsoft showed off the standalone Azure Kinect time of flight sensor, which also happens to supply the improved human and environmental understanding capabilities of the next-generation augmented reality headset.
The augmented reality industry had enough twists this week to surprise even M. Night Shyamalan.
Snapchat made augmented reality selfie effects famous, with Facebook copying the feature across its mobile apps. Of course, others have followed, but their face tracking apps often pale in comparison to the original.
Among the many partnerships mentioned early on in the life of the Magic Leap One, by far one of the most talked about has been the comic book app from Madefire.
Among a crowded field of AR cloud companies aiming to power the future of augmented reality by creating a world of persistent holographic content that lives in a cloud, accessible across devices and accounts, Ubiquity6 is hoping it has found a way to differentiate its platform.
After joining Google and Huawei in underwriting the UW Reality Lab at the University of Washington in January, it appears Facebook is already seeing a return on its donation.
Mixed reviews of Magic Leap One aside, it would be hard to deny that Magic Leap has had a big year. And the AR unicorn isn't coasting to the finish line, with a number of new apps dropping and prescription frames finally arriving to bring relief to those who wear eyeglasses.
Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic has been preparing its flavor of AR cloud, the Niantic Real World Platform, to bring more realistic and interactive augmented reality experiences to mobile apps. And now the company is looking for a few good developers to help execute its vision on the platform.
After weathering an executive departure and reports of a failed sale to Apple, Leap Motion is getting back to the business of pushing the envelope for augmented reality development and interaction.
Despite funding difficulties that forced Meta to place employees on temporary leave in September, the augmented reality headset maker is reminding enterprise companies that it remains a viable option for visualizing and working with 3D design models.
In their first head-to-head major contract clash, Microsoft has emerged victorious over Magic Leap, as the US Army has awarded a $480 million contract to the HoloLens maker.
The augmented reality smartglasses future that Snap founder Evan Spiegel has teased for so long may be closer than many realize.
This week, Next Reality released the fifth and final set of profiles on the NR30 leaders in augmented reality, with this chapter focusing on the influencers in the industry.
The latest business move by Magic Leap could result in a significant boost to its spatial computing platform's performance and headset design.
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 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.
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.
While many of you were off surfing and lounging on some sandy beach or trying to figure out how to balance work with sky-high summer temperatures, I've been talking to all the companies that make augmented reality what it is today.
The availability of space for filming immersive content has just gotten bigger with the launch of Innovation Studios by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
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.
Augmented reality headset maker Meta Company unveiled Meta Viewer, its first software application, during its keynote at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, at Google's I/O developer conference, the company announced a huge update to its ARCore augmented reality toolkit that matches the latest features of ARKit, and surpasses Apple's AR platform via support for shared experiences.
On Monday, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft revealed two new apps for the HoloLens apps.
At its F8 developers conference on Tuesday, Facebook announced new tools and features coming in a new version of AR Studio, including the integration of 3D content aggregator Sketchfab's Download API.
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.
