Over the past week, practically every major tech company working on augmented reality has held their quarterly earnings calls with investors, and each addressed or at least mentioned the role of AR during their prepared remarks. However, Facebook's earnings call had some of the spicier commentary on the technology.
It's already been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions in the augmented reality industry, with WaveOptics and Ubiquity6 among the notable companies acquired. Two of the more active M&A players, Snap and Epic Games, continued their respective buying sprees this week with major deals supporting their AR strategies.
The close of the second quarter of 2021 brought about a flurry of merger and acquisition and financing activity in the augmented reality industry, headlined by the acquisition of Ubiquity6 and JigSpace's new multimillion-dollar funding round.
We're still basking in the afterglow of the HUGE Snap Partner Summit last week, where Snap made Snapchat a much stronger augmented reality platform while also unveiling the AR smartglasses version of Spectacles. This week, we got a peek at how Spectacles AR started and got our hands on Lenses from Lego and Disney featured during the keynote.
Sure, Microsoft has mostly marketed its HoloLens headsets towards enterprises and developers, but we learned this week that, like every other tech giant, the company is working on a consumer-grade AR wearable. Speaking of consumer smartglasses, Apple made another strategic investment this week that has implications for Apple's AR future.
Apple's augmented reality teases just keep on coming from the halls of its Cupertino labs. The latest comes in the form of an invitation to Apple's next public-facing event.
The augmented reality industry has grown steadily over the past four years, but now it is on a collision course with uber-popular non-fungible tokens technology, with Looking Glass and music artist Reggie Watts among the latest to strike while the iron is hot.
The Lens Studio creators have published more than 1.5 million AR effects to Snapchat. One of them is Audrey Spencer, who shared her story with us and provided her insights into Lens Studio as a storytelling device. Meanwhile, Snap has added new capabilities to the platform to stoke more creativity from its creators.
Amazon has joined the ranks of film and TV studios using the power of augmented reality to engage fans looking to go behind passive screen viewing.
For the average consumer, augmented reality is a fun way of dressing up photos and videos for social media. However, AR is also gaining momentum as a medium for storytelling, particularly in sharing powerful messages.
In 2018, Niantic unveiled its in-development augmented reality cloud platform for smartphones, the Niantic Real World Platform. A demo showed Pikachu and Eevee cavorting in a courtyard, darting in front of and behind potted plants and people's legs as they walked through the scene. This would be the future of Pokémon GO.
We know our Null Byte readers would like to see some iPhone-hacking scenarios on the site soon, but until we get some of those up, we understand that some of you actually use an iPhone as your primary phone. If that's you, and you would like an easier way to get information from point A (your iPhone) to point B (your computer) and vice versa, there's an all-in-one tool that can help.
Since its launch in 2009, Google Apps Script has given creative thinkers the ability to perform light-weight application development within GSuite. Based on JavaScript, you can build your own simple tools that will increase your efficiency and productivity.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has practically guaranteed that the virus, along with the phrases "social distancing" and "flattening the curve," will rank among the top search terms of 2020. USA Today combined the phrases in its latest augmented reality experience, which quizzes your knowledge in the best practices of social distancing.
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.
Part of the fallout from the canceled Mobile World Congress is that a range of products, ideas, and designs slated for reveal in Barcelona are now being showcased without the framing and context of the massive tech gathering.
After the lackluster update that was iOS 13.3.1, we beta testers were in need of some excitement. Thankfully, Apple delivered the goods with iOS 13.4 developer beta 1, introducing fun new features like fresh Memoji stickers and a new Mail toolbar. Of course, that update was for developers only, so we public testers are thrilled that Apple just released the first public beta today.
It's time to make some more room at the augmented reality cosmetics counter. This week, social media giant Pinterest unveiled "Try On," a virtual make-up visualization tool running on its Lens visual search tool.
Google pushed a new kind of augmented reality walking navigation to the mainstream last year, and now startup Phiar is hoping users will use its AR app in the same way for driving navigation.
People fundamentally distrust magicians. And they should. The illusions they proffer are just that, illusions meant to astound rather than tangible interactions and results that have weight and meaning in our real world. Our lizard brains know this, and, no matter what the outstanding feat of "magic" presented, we nevertheless hold fast to our survival-based grip on the truth: we just saw simply "can't be real."
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.
While consumer-grade smartglasses are the holy grail for tech companies, smartglasses maker Vuzix knows where its bread is buttered, and that's in the enterprise segment.
It looks like Pokémon GO players may get a surprise gift from the game's developer, Niantic, this holiday season.
In a stunning end-of-year twist to the Magic Leap versus Nreal legal saga, the China-based startup is now filing a motion against Magic Leap.
While Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat are still working on their first-generation AR wearables, startup North is already preparing to bring its second-generation smartglasses to the world in 2020.
After opening up its Spark AR platform on Instagram for all creators, Facebook is already expanding the platform's capabilities on its Snapchat killer.
Some people believe that art makes artists immortal, and now one of the best known performance artists on the planet is working on taking that immortality into the realm of augmented reality.
The Pixel's "Flip to Shhh" feature may not be groundbreaking, but it is useful. Third-party apps are copying it for other phones because it's so convenient. But it's not enabled by default and it's fairly hidden in the settings. So to take full advantage of your Pixel's feature set, you should learn how to use Flip to Shhh.
Wearables startup North has made a smart move to get its Focals smartglasses into the hands of more consumers.
The landscape of the augmented reality space is broad, diverse, and constantly shifting, perhaps more so than any other vertical in technology. At the same time, major players are attempting to standardize various hardware designs and delivery methods, while still others are rushing to claim their piece of virtual property through AR clouds and application stores.
If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?"
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.
Augmented objects in the classroom are closer than they appear. Within celebrated the close of summer with Wonderscope's unveiling of a fourth installment in its iOS app, titled Clio's Cosmic Quest.
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.
The venture arms of Samsung and Verizon Ventures, along with Comcast, are among the strategic investors backing startup Light Field Lab and its glasses-free holographic displays in a $28 million Series A funding round
Now that some of the best-known beauty brands are leveraging augmented reality to market and sell products, the rest of the market is beginning to catch up — fast. The latest competitor to add AR to its arsenal is direct sales makeup company Younique.
With Google taking on the sidewalks with augmented reality walking navigation for Google Maps, Apple has its sights set on the road.
Sports technology company Form is testing the waters for augmented reality wearables with a product aimed at a very specific user group.
In the technology space, there are certain brands you grow to depend on. Whether it's due to a long, multi-decade track record of success, or new innovations that blow you away, some tech names accrue a rare kind of brand equity with users that's difficult to earn.
The era of AT&T and Magic Leap has quietly entered a new phase that ramps up the mainstreaming of the cutting edge augmented reality device.
