When filtered through the prism of the top stories of the year, the business of augmented reality 2019 was defined as much by epic failures of AR startups as it was by the promising developments that propelled the industry forward into 2020.
While Elon Musk is in Los Angeles showing off the future of personal transport via the Cybertruck, another, unaffiliated group is taking one of his most popular ideas to market, with augmented reality as a key part of the plan.
As we predicted this time last year, Magic Leap is finally moving from consumer entertainment hype to making a firm commitment to enterprise customers.
It's safe to say that we can call the annual ranking of AR investments a holiday tradition at Next Reality.
While the tech industry is hot in pursuit of mainstream smartglasses for consumers, another early maker of enterprise-focused AR hardware has apparently met its end.
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 annual Augmented World Expo (AWE) typically packs the front page of Next Reality with new products and services from companies in the augmented reality industry.
Almost half a year after we broke the story about the demise of Meta Company, there's good news for fans of the augmented reality startup — a rebirth is at hand.
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.
Despite the recent gut punch of staff layoffs, Canada-based smartglasses startup North and its Focals are likely to be in the game for a while longer.
The partnership between Magic Leap and leading South Korean wireless carrier SK Telecom took on an added importance earlier this week as the company unveiled the world's first nationwide 5G network.
The long guarded veil of mystery surrounding Magic Leap for years was finally lifted last year when the company revealed its Magic Leap One device.
As Microsoft continues to bask in the glow of its HoloLens 2 unveiling and begins ramping up the hype to launch, Nreal and Vuzix are carving out their own niches in the AR hardware landscape.
The augmented reality industry has an insatiable lust for 3D content, which makes an investment of $48 million into Matterport a no-brainer for investors.
While Apple augmented reality smartglasses are not yet official, the tech giant is ramping up its resources by appointing company veteran Frank Casanova to promote its augmented reality offerings.
The recent pitfalls and media fallout hitting Facebook hasn't stopped the social media giant from looking to the future.
If there's one company that is a fan of the TrueDepth camera on Apple's iPhone X devices, it's the popular eyeglasses retailer Warby Parker.
Augmented reality and computer vision company Blippar has a new lease on life, as previous investor Candy Ventures has completed a successful bid to acquire the assets of the beleaguered company.
In the business world, it's sometimes said that "where there's smoke, there's fire." At Snapchat parent company Snap, Inc., it appears the equivalent of smoke is executive turnover.
After entering the UK's version of bankruptcy last month, Blippar's assets are up for sale, and bidding ended today.
Despite the hype and potential of immersive computing, the augmented reality industry is showing that it is not invincible, as another AR hardware maker, this time Osterhout Design Group (ODG), is reportedly going out of business.
In the aftermath of the launch of the Magic Leap One, Magic Leap has ejected two more executives from their leadership roles.
In a move sure to stir up even more speculation about the future of Snap Inc., the company's vice president of content, Nick Bell, is leaving the company after five years.
Smartglasses and AR headset makers like Microsoft, Magic Leap, and Google (and aspiring AR wearables makers like Apple and Snapchat) need display components for their products, and LetinAR is among the companies ready to supply those components.
After a little more than a year at motion tracking technology maker Leap Motion, Keiichi Matsuda has resigned his position as vice president of design and global creative director, the company announced on Wednesday.
One of the best aspects of the Magic Leap One is the spatial audio, a feature that enhances the overall sense of immersion when interacting with virtual objects and content through the device. Now the company is aiming to boost the quality of that component by partnering with one of the leading names in high-quality audio.
In an SEC filing published on Monday, Snap, the company behind Snapchat, disclosed that Imran Khan, its chief strategy officer and a member of the NR30, is leaving the company to "pursue other opportunities."
Magic Leap has been promising to launch a developer conference for years, and now the company is finally making good on that promise. On Wednesday, Magic Leap sent out the official announcement for its first L.E.A.P. conference, which will be held in Los Angeles in October.
Last week's Augmented World Expo felt like a distant memory by this Monday, as Apple unveiled ARKit 2.0 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Certainly, this news would overshadow anything augmented reality this week as it nearly eclipsed AWE when early reports leaked of the toolkit's new superpowers.
We watched the first piece of public-facing content Magic Leap has released so you don't have to, and, well, you didn't miss much.
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.
Flying under the radar during Magic Leap's big week at the Game Developers Conference, the company settled a potentially ugly lawsuit with a former employee.
Augmented reality hardware maker Avegant has reportedly laid off between 20 and 30 employees, with founder Edward Tang returning to the CEO role at the company.
Accused of violating whistleblower and age discrimination laws by its security director, Magic Leap has taken an internal situation to the US District Court to clear its name of the allegations.
In another move that pushes Meta 2 toward becoming a legitimate workplace tool, Meta Company has partnered with Dassault Systèmes to bring augmented reality support to the latter's Solidworks 3D CAD software.
This week, saw two companies leaning on AR to prop up their financial futures. On one hand, Apple made quite a bit of AR-related news ahead of its quarterly earnings report next week. On the other hand, Vuzix launched a pre-order program for its Blade smartglasses and closed the largest financing deal in the company's history to fuel its ongoing headset production.
After Vuzix's scorching hot week at CES, the future of AR is so bright, we have to wear (smart) shades. Luckily, Vuzix is making it easier for consumers to grab a pair.
Shanghai-based Realmax is introducing the crowds at CES to the Realmax Qian, an augmented reality headset capable of a field of view (FoV) that topples anything available on the market today.
This year's CES seems particularly obesessed with VR, but augmented reality is offering a few surprises as well. One of those surprises arrived on Monday in the form of China's Rokid Glass.
Earlier this year at WWDC, Apple made a big show of featuring augmented reality as a central part of iOS moving forward. But since then, other than comments from the company's CEO, Tim Cook, we haven't seen much direct promotion of augmented reality from the company. Until now.
