In a previous tutorial, we were able to measure vertical surfaces such as walls, books, and monitors using ARKit 1.5. With the advent of vertical plane anchors, we can now also attach objects onto these vertical walls.
Now that the augmented reality cat is out of the bag, Magic Leap is beginning to open up a bit more about how of some of its work came together in the years and months leading up to the Magic Leap One's release earlier this month. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a behind the scenes video of how the ethereal music-meets-AR app Tónandi was produced in collaboration with Icelandic music group Sigur Rós.
Have you been noticing SpaceX and its launches lately? Ever imagined how it would feel to launch your own rocket into the sky? Well, imagine no longer!
Snap Inc.'s dedication to augmented reality has expanded the world lenses in Snapchat to our own Bitmojis. While it's great to see our characters interacting with real environments, we haven't seen them connect to other Bitmoji in AR space. That all changes with "3D Friendmojis," a lens from Snapchat that lets you stage scenes between your Bitmoji and a friend's.
Samsung's big reveal of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ at Mobile World Congress revolved around its "reimagined" camera and augmented reality capabilities.
Casey Hudson, the one-time project director for games like Star Wars: The Knights of the Old Republic and the original Mass Effect trilogy, has announced his return to his former home, Bioware as the General Manager. Of course, that also means he is leaving his role at Microsoft Studios as Creative Director, where he was reportedly working on both Xbox One and HoloLens projects.
Free beer and AR? What could be better? Amstel, a Dutch beer brand, has launched an innovative sampling campaign using an AR app called "Snatch." Snatch is a treasure hunt gaming app, and if you win the game, your prize is 10,000 free pints of Amstel beer, redeemable at Mitchell & Butler pubs.
Developers are really having a field day with Apple's ARKit, announced last month. Since it's release to developers, videos have been appearing all over the Internet of the different ways that developers are getting creative with the ARKit using iPhones and iPads.
The Gorillaz have launched a new app in promotion for their new album Humanz that allows you to "[s]tep inside the hallowed halls of the Gorillaz house" through the power of augmented reality.
A group of researchers from Stanford University and Princeton University has put together the largest RGB-D video dataset to date with over 1,500 scans of over 700 different locations across the world, for a total of 2.5 million views.
Merge VR, a company mostly known for its virtual reality experiences, is moving into and creating an augmented reality experience that combines an iPhone or Android smartphone, a set of goggles to put your phone in, and a box about the size of a Rubik's Cube which looks more akin to the Lament Configuration seen in the Hellraiser film series. When used in concert with the smartphone and goggles, the toy cube, called Holo Cube, becomes one of many AR experiences.
Today at the Unite '16 conference in Los Angeles, Unity's Timoni West and Amir Ebrahimi showed off its new virtual reality authoring and world editor, EditorVR, using the HTC Vive. Coming in December to Unity is a version of its editor that works inside a VR headset, which will change the way developers interact with the worlds they build—even if they aren't building for VR.
Augmented reality allows for all kinds of experiences to happen just about anywhere, and that creates some incredible potential for entertainment. While games like Pokémon GO take you out into the world, one crowd-funded game wants to keep you inside—to scare the crap out of you in your own home.
Although professional sports has been no stranger to emerging technology, it still seems hard to think about how a football player might benefit from strapping on a VR headset. While it won't do much in an actual game, many athletes can improve by using virtual reality as a training tool.
Keyboards and mice work fine for computers, but in a holographic environment you'll want to do more than just point, click, and type. While we can still benefit from these input devices, complex hand-tracking methods are necessary for the evolution of mixed reality user interfaces.
Want to actually catch 'em all? Pokémon GO has long-teased the opportunity to hunt for Pokémon in the real world through augmented reality, but few have had the opportunity to actually see it in action.
Magic Leap, the virtual-reality software group backed by Google, just released a teaser video on their YouTube channel. In a word, it's amazing.
What does it mean when a software company obsessively focused on innovating the way we use our mobile devices to see and communicate with the world adds virtual voice agents? Possibly e-commerce magic, with a powerful layer of augmented reality.
In our last ARKit tutorial, we learned how to measure the sizes of horizontal planes. It was a helpful entryway into the arena of determining spatial relationships with real world spaces versus virtual objects and experiences.
With fears over the COVID-19 pandemic subsiding, live concerts are returning. And Doritos wants to send music fans to a few of them via an augmented reality promotion.
The NFT space is moving so fast that if you're not already engaged, you've probably already missed several history-making events.
At first glance, it may not sound like there's much value in doing a crossword puzzle in augmented reality, but The New York Times has managed to revamp the pastime as an immersive game.
The true crime genre has long been popular on television and more recently on podcasts with shows like Serial.
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.
The business world is currently figuring out how to deal with the coronavirus crisis, with many offices opting to work remotely for at least the next few weeks as a safety precaution. Predictably, this has thrown remote meeting software back into the spotlight, especially augmented reality solutions.
We've been predicting the rush of augmented reality wearable makers from China for a couple of years, and now it looks like it's in full swing, with one of the most promising entrants coming from startup Pacific Future.
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.
With Google taking on the sidewalks with augmented reality walking navigation for Google Maps, Apple has its sights set on the road.
For those who thought the action in Pokémon Go was a bit too pedestrian, Father.io wants to recruit you for a multi-player, first-person shooter that unfolds on the streets of your own city.
Pottery Barn has teamed up with Google to create 3D Room View, a new mobile app to allow all wannabe interior designers (like me) to pick out the perfect couch, table, or whatever, and then overlay it onto a spot in his or her house.
Designing for mixed reality, especially for the HoloLens, can present unique challenges. Dong Yoon Park, a Principal UX Designer at Microsoft with a passion for typography, recently gave a talk to the Windows Holographic Users Group Redmond (WinHUGR) about the pitfalls he ran into trying to convert what started out as a 2D iOS app 5 years ago to the newer 3D Holographic frontier with Unity.
With the release of the HoloLens, Microsoft has put itself in both a great position while giving the competition a serious target to aim for. This is normally the case for anyone that is first to the market with a new idea, and now we've finally got a good competitor HoloLens coming. Stereolabs, a company known for its impressive 2K stereo camera, will be entering the mixed reality head-mounted display space with a Developers Kit as soon as early-2017.
While the rest of Big Tech is still moving relatively slowly on augmented reality smartglasses, Snap continues to supercharge its own experimental AR wearable called Spectacles.
The US Department of Treasury isn't generally known for being on the very edge of technology innovations (see the current hubbub around crypto), instead usually waiting until certain tools have been battle-tested in the mainstream or enterprise sector.
The experience of actually using the HoloLens 2 can be difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't had a chance to directly interact with the device in person and be blown away by its immersive capabilities.
Chairish, Inc. is the latest furniture retailer to bring augmented reality into its mobile stores, adding features for users to visualize products in their homes.
Augmented reality software developer Maxst has made the move into hardware with Revelio, their new untethered AR smartglasses. These stereoscopic glasses feature an Octa-core processor, 2 GB of memory, a 40-degree field of view, and a 720p display, and they do not require being connected to a phone or computer.
Data visualization has many applications in virtual and mixed reality, since a third dimension literally adds important depth to the represented information. A new app called HoloFlight is a good example of this, combining flight-tracking data and the Microsoft HoloLens to surround you with a look at every plane in the sky.
When you want to leave someone a quick message, you often write it down on a sticky note and paste it to the relevant location. Alternatively, you call to leave a voicemail. Holo Voice Memo lets you do both at the same time by leaving an audio clip on a physical object in the room so anyone with a HoloLens and the app can play it back.
We've experienced the HoloLens, learned a lot about the Meta 2, but almost nobody knows exactly what to expect out of Magic Leap's mixed reality headset. Thanks to a patent dug up by Quartz (which we saw first on Tech Insider), we now might have a better idea.
