This time last year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his company were faced with an erosion of its user base that cratered its stock price. This year, on the strength of Snapchat's AR camera effects, the company has reversed course. And that's why Spiegel tops the NR30, our annual list of the leaders in the AR industry.
With Android 10 hitting the streets (at least for those mobile devices that get quick updates) and the public release of iOS 13 dropping on Sept. 19, Google is releasing an update on Thursday to ARCore that adds some fantastic new benefits to its cross-platform capabilities.
Imagine sitting on your patio, scrolling through your phone's photos, reminiscing about the past. Now imagine being able to see those photos floating in the air, at the exact vantage point from where they were taken a year ago.
Ever since Facebook announced Spark AR at the 2017 F8 Developer's Conference, the social media giant has been looking for ways to implement its mobile augmented reality camera platform in the lives of everyday users.
The art of emoji — the next level beyond the simple text-based emoticons we used once upon a time in the not so distant past. We rely upon emojis so much in our always-connected world of today simply because they help portray emotion into our typed out words. They've not been around very long, but have taken the world by storm just as quickly as they made their first appearance in our society.
With the new navigation gestures in Android 10, you reclaim a lot of screen real estate that used to be occupied by the back, home, and recent apps buttons. But there's still a small bar on the bottom edge of the screen, and in most apps, it still sits atop a black background. Thankfully, an easy hack will give you true full-screen without breaking the new gestures.
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.
The first thing you'll always have to do before getting your customization game on with most phones is to unlock the bootloader. Doing so opens the true potential of the device, allowing you to root, install TWRP, Magisk, custom ROMs, and other mods. No matter your wants or needs, there's no way around it — the bootloader must be unlocked to modify the system.
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.
Smartglasses maker Vuzix rushed out of the gate to be the first company to announce hardware powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 for augmented reality wearables, but now the company is buying time until the product is ready to ship.
With the upcoming Memorial Day weekend serving as the unofficial start of summer, Pepsi is turning to Instagram to help sell its soft drinks to quench the thirst of beachgoers and BBQers.
In the wake of Apple and Google pitching augmented reality to schools, McGraw-Hill is stepping up its own augmented reality efforts for education.
Fresh off of shipping version 2019.1 in April, Unity has already dropped the beta of 2019.2, and it has a bunch of new AR Foundation toys to test.
After announcing at Google I/O 2019 that augmented reality content would come to Search, Google revealed how it would make that happen with the latest round of updates to ARCore.
Because of the way Android is laid out, you automatically lose a portion of the top and bottom of your screen thanks to the status and navigation bars. The thing is, you don't always need the navigation buttons. By hiding them, you can enjoy more of your Galaxy S10's big, beautiful display.
Location-based gaming company Niantic knows its business model is inextricably tied to the outdoors, so it is in its best interest to help preserve that environment to give players a place to play.
After launching its first augmented reality title for Angry Birds on the Magic Leap One, Rovio has doubled back to the platform that made its franchise famous.
As Magic Leap continues to spread its influence in the US with the help of wireless carrier AT&T, the augmented reality startup is also working its way into East Asia.
Smartglasses maker Vuzix has emerged with the first hardware powered by the Snapdragon XR1 chip, roughly nine months after Qualcomm introduced the chipset designed to drive augmented reality wearables at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara.
After years of waiting, Microsoft has finally updated its industry-leading augmented reality device, the HoloLens.
If you've ever wanted to barge into Jerry Seinfeld's apartment like Cosmo Kramer, you can now do so without having to book a ride on the Peterman Reality Tour.
Apple's in-house music identification app Shazam has been quiet on the augmented reality front since officially joining Cupertino's finest last year, but a new promotion gives AR enthusiasts an occasion to raise a toast.
The story of Meta and its Meta 2 augmented reality headset isn't over, there's a new development that could impact its ultimate fate.
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.
Augmented reality gaming company Niantic Labs is now instigating conflicts between Pokémon GO players, but it's not as bad as it sounds.
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.
The last time The Weather Channel showed off its broadcast augmented reality, the internet couldn't stop talking about how immersive the presentation looked, despite being shown on a 2D display.
A new augmented reality cloud platform from German startup Visualix is working to give enterprises the capability to scan their own warehouses, factories, and stores and create maps for augmented reality navigation.
Snapchat has officially unveiled its Visual Search service for Amazon (teased a month ago), a tool the company began testing on Monday.
The first mobile augmented reality app out of the gate with support for Magic Leap One Creator Edition is Thyng, who is planning to release the headset version of the app later this year.
The latest sponsored augmented reality experience on Snapchat from a movie studio might be its scariest — and perhaps most popular — yet.
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.
While we've seen Snapchat apply sky segmentation to AR content, the makers of the Blue Sky Paint app have applied similar capabilities to create and share airborne art.
For years, Skype has been synonymous with video calling and messaging. However, as the industry moved toward encryption and privacy, Skype usage was discouraged by experts due to its murky encryption. To combat this, Skype has introduced true end-to-end encryption.
The long, long, loooong wait finally ended this week for the augmented reality community as the Magic Leap One was finally released. The Florida-based company has loomed over the industry for years promising something big, and now the AR cat is finally out of the bag. Now we get to see if it will live up to expectations, but early reviews are a bit skeptical.
Google's ARCore team is staying busy, as evidenced by yet another update of its augmented reality toolkit.
Online shopping giant Shopify literally cannot wait for ARKit 2.0 to arrive via iOS 12 this fall to implement its latest augmented reality feature.
Another massive piece of the mysterious augmented reality puzzle known as Magic Leap fell into place on Wednesday as AT&T announced that it will be the exclusive launch carrier for the device.
The roster of handsets supporting Google's augmented reality toolkit now includes 46 Android models as well as support for ARKit-compatible iPhones and iPads.
While it has been slower to arrive than a walker limping through thick Georgia mud, location-based augmented reality game Walking Dead: Our World finally has a confirmed launch date: July 12.
