While Microsoft dominated the augmented reality news at this year's Mobile World Congress, a small AR startup we've covered in the past arrived in Barcelona, Spain, to unveil the next phase of its mission.
Most of today's mobile augmented reality apps focus on individual experiences, but a new entrant into the space wants to make things a bit more social.
The hype around augmented reality has risen to a fever pitch over the past two years, and if this week's selection of business news stories are any indication, the din is about to get down right deafening.
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.
Mobile augmented reality company Snapchat now has a special option for romantic message exchanging this Valentine's Day, a day which, incidentally, happens to be the first one in 116 years where Sweethearts, the original heart-shaped candy, will be unavailable for purchase.
Occasionally, a not-so-great movie also does something so right that you have to forgive some of its sins and give it a little love. Such is the case with the latest film from Keanu Reeves, Replicas, which takes a HoloLens-style device and gives us a look at how future research labs might use that kind of augmented reality device, sort of.
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.
In 2018, augmented reality went from the vague promise of interesting things in the near future to tangible developments in software and hardware, proving that immersive computing is indeed the future.
In a world where augmented reality is becoming the hero of the movie marketing, Universal Studios has decided to use the technology to reinvent the traditional movie trailer, a time-tested tactic of film promotion, in support of the forthcoming Robert Zemeckis film, Welcome to Marwen.
Ingress, the godfather of location based-AR games developed by Pokémon GO creator Niantic Labs, is getting a new lease on life via Ingress Prime, a reboot of the game built on the Niantic Real World Platform.
In the waning days of October, at the Innovation Tokyo 2018 conference, attendees got their hands on some of the new augmented reality experiences that Niantic is working on through its Real World Platform.
While these days it is better known for the cross-platform gaming sensation Fortnite, Epic Games also makes Unreal Engine, one of the top development environments for 3D content and, in turn, augmented reality and virtual reality experiences.
Augmented reality is becoming a slam dunk for sports entertainment, as leagues, their teams, and their broadcast partners have been quick to adopt AR.
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.
Snapchat has officially unveiled its Visual Search service for Amazon (teased a month ago), a tool the company began testing on Monday.
Apple's iOS 12 has finally landed. The big update appeared for everyone on Monday, Sept. 17, and hiding within are some pretty amazing augmented reality upgrades for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. We've been playing with them ever since the iOS 12 beta launched in June, and here are the things we learned that you'll want to know about.
Now that the iPhone XS is officially available for pre-order, Verizon and Apple are giving Snapchat users the opportunity to win the device through an augmented reality scavenger hunt rather than forking over $1,000 for one.
This time last year, we got our first taste of what mobile app developers could do in augmented reality with Apple's ARKit. Most people had never heard of Animojis. Google's AR platform was still Tango. Snapchat introduced its World Lens AR experiences. Most mobile AR experiences existing in the wild were marker-based offerings from the likes of Blippar and Zappar or generic Pokémon GO knock-offs.
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.
The display is one of the most critical components in augmented reality hardware, and on Tuesday, one of the companies making that component, Avegant Corp., closed a funding round of $12 million to support development of next-generation AR displays.
The fortunes of ARKit and ARCore are still in the hands of developers, who have been increasing the number of mobile augmented reality apps on the market, but perhaps not as fast as companies like Apple might have expected. But one new product is looking to literally kickstart mobile AR gaming by introducing a few key components that harness the traditional board game model.
The shifting sands of immersive computing, currently fluctuating between augmented reality and virtual reality, can be hard to navigate if you're only versed in one of the platforms. But a new series of videos from Leap Motion paints a picture of a near future world in which AR and VR will seamlessly merge together, forcing us to change the way we see both.
Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic has offered a preview of its augmented reality cloud platform that could change the immersive content game yet again.
Another entrant into the do-it-yourself AR content creation market has emerged, as Zappar has updated its ZapWorks Studio software to include features for development newbies.
Using the ARKit 2.0 announcement as its springboard, software maker Adobe is looking leap up to the level of Unity Technologies and Epic Games, the companies making the go-to tools for creating augmented reality experiences.
Google's ARCore has expanded its support to include the Galaxy S9 and S9+, which means you get access to all the cool new apps that can sense the world around them. But one of ARCore's coolest uses so far is still Pixel-exclusive: AR stickers built right into the Google Camera app. Thankfully, XDA user lofass33 has an ingenious workaround for using these stickers on your S9.
Amazon Web Service's do-it-yourself tool for building augmented reality experiences and VR has graduated from beta and is now available to all interested users.
At Google's I/O developer conference keynote on Tuesday, ARCore may have been absent, but Google did preview a potentially trailblazing augmented reality feature for Google Maps.
With all the recent activity around augmented reality, the possibilities involving immersive computing and commerce are quickly becoming obvious, and digital payments giant PayPal has no plans to sit on the sidelines
The price tag for the Microsoft HoloLens might be out of range for the average consumer's budget, but for enterprises, like BAE Systems, adopting the AR headset is yielding a return on the investment. And for those with even slimmer wallets, Best Buy just made the Lenovo Mirage, part of the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges package, more affordable.
Just weeks after being acquired by comedian turned producer Byron Allen for $300 million, The Weather Channel has tapped augmented reality studio The Future Group to integrate immersive augmented reality experiences into its broadcast content.
The NCAA College Basketball Tournament, colloquially known as March Madness, is arguably the most exciting postseason format in US sports, and the team behind Thyng want to take advantage of the annual event with AR content.
Enterprise augmented reality software provider Upskill has raised $17.2 million in its latest round of funding, led by new investors Cisco and Accenture.
It's been months since Leap Motion, the hand-tracking interface startup, announced the hiring of Keiichi Matsuda as the VP of design and global creative director based in London. Since then, Matsuda's normally active social media stream has been fairly quiet — until now.
We've seen a number of unique mashups of augmented reality with other bleeding edge technologies, but somehow it took until 2018 for someone to come up with a now obvious complement to AR: 3D printing.
Old school media stalwart Sports Illustrated is billing this year's Swimsuit Issue as the "Most Immersive Experience Ever," and it certainly lives up to that statement, as the magazine has added augmented reality and virtual reality experiences to this year's version via Snapchat and the Life VR app.
The latest cosmetics brand to launch its own augmented reality try-on tool is Cover Girl, which introduced its browser-based experience this week.
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 hosting millions of free 3D models online, Sketchfab is betting that augmented reality and virtual reality developers and creators will be willing to pay for premium 3D content.
One of the most overlooked components of talking about augmented reality and virtual reality is getting people to actually use the hardware and software associated with these platforms.
