Market Reality: Samsung & Microsoft Dip into the Mobile AR Galaxy, with (Respectively) New Hardware & AR Apps
The augmented reality industry had enough twists this week to surprise even M. Night Shyamalan.
Specialist Company Search Results
News: Google Leads Another $28 Million Funding Round into Neuron-Reading Technology at CTRL-Labs
It may sound like deja vu, but neural interface startup CTRL-labs has closed a $28 million funding round led by GV, Google's funding arm, for technology that reads user's nerve signals to interpret hand gestures.
News: North Cuts Employees After Slicing Price of Focals Smartglasses
A week after reducing the base price of its Focals smartglasses by nearly 50 percent, wearables maker North is now reducing its workforce.
News: How to Watch the Microsoft Mobile World Congress Event Rumored to Reveal HoloLens 2
We already know that Microsoft has something big planned for later this month, and now we have details on how to watch the company's big reveal.
News: Magic Leap & Three UK Power 5G Augmented Reality Fashion Show at London Fashion Week
While AT&T is gradually showing off the powers of its 5G technology in the US via the Magic Leap One, another major wireless company is doing the same in the UK using the world of fashion.
News: Apple Rumor Mill Cranks Back Up with Reports of Next iPhones Using New Camera Sensors for AR
While the betting lines on iPhones with depth-sensing, rear-facing cameras in 2019 have already been established, a new report adds some certainty to the notion that the iPhone will get new AR superpowers later this year.
News: New Intel RealSense Camera Adds Inside-Out Tracking to AR/VR Headsets, Robots, & Drones
Intel's RealSense family of depth tracking cameras has a new addition with a different set of sensory capabilities.
News: Former Google Augmented Reality Engineering Lead Takes Over Facebook's Portal Hardware Team
It looks like Facebook really likes Google's augmented reality leadership talent, as the social media giant has hired away another employee from the AR and VR team at Mountain View to lead its team for a product that brings Facebook's AR platform into homes.
News: RealMax Returns to CES with Production Model of Qian AR Headset with Industry-Leading Field of View
Last year at CES, RealMax blew away the AR headset competition with a prototype AR headset surpassing 100 degrees field of view.
News: ThirdEye Shrinks Its Smartglasses Package with Next-Generation X2 Model
Augmented reality wearables maker ThirdEye Gen, Inc. has officially released what it claims are the "smallest mixed reality glasses" in the X2, which will be available for hands-on demonstrations at the company's CES 2019 booth this week.
Market Reality: Magic Leap Prescription Lenses Arrive, Niantic Challenges Devs with Real World, & Blippar Goes Under
Mixed reviews of Magic Leap One aside, it would be hard to deny that Magic Leap has had a big year. And the AR unicorn isn't coasting to the finish line, with a number of new apps dropping and prescription frames finally arriving to bring relief to those who wear eyeglasses.
News: Snapchat Virtually Restores London's Big Ben with Holiday-Themed, Location-Based AR Lens
The city of London is getting a holiday gift this season, but it's not the kind you unwrap, since it's completely delivered in augmented reality.
News: What Huawei's Rumored Mobile OS Means for the US Market
Huawei has been in a losing battle with the US government for around ten years, with the last year being the spike of Huawei's problems. Because of US pushback against some Chinese-based smartphone manufacturers due to security concerns, Huawei is hoping to limit its dependency on US-based companies, and recent rumors of Huawei's very own mobile operating system may be the first step.
News: ModiFace Applies Its Augmented Reality Tech to Nail Polish with Fingertip-Tracking Feature
French cosmetics giant L'Oréal isn't wasting any time putting its new subsidiary, ModiFace, to work. On Thursday, the company launched a new tool that enables a photo-realistic augmented reality simulation of nail polish shades and textures to be accurately displayed on a user's fingers in real time.
News: Travelocity Transports Roaming Gnome into Augmented Reality with Its Mobile App
In the latest example of non-tech companies taking on augmented reality marketing, online travel site Travelocity has added an AR version of its Roaming Gnome mascot to its mobile app.
News: Snapchat AR Lenses Jump from Mobile to Desktop with Snap Camera App
For the entirety of its existence, Snapchat has lived on mobile, but in its quest to lead the augmented reality industry, the company is now bringing those mobile AR experiences to desktops.
News: Snapchat Ships Amazon Visual Search as Its Next Step Forward in AR Evolution
Snapchat has officially unveiled its Visual Search service for Amazon (teased a month ago), a tool the company began testing on Monday.
News: Magic Leap Releases Helio Experiments Demos, Finally Gives Us the Infamous AR Whale
You want whales? Ok, you'll get whales! That seems to be the unspoken message from Magic Leap via its latest update in the form of several new experiments posted inside its Helio app.
News: Google-Backed Ubiquity6 Raises $27 Million for AR Cloud Platform & Spatial Browser
Less than a week after debuting its AR Cloud platform in public with a multi-user installation of more than 100 participants, Ubiquity6 announced on Tuesday that it has closed a Series B round of funding totaling $27 million.
News: Nokia's Snake Game Slithers into Augmented Reality via Facebook AR
If you're a part of Generation X or a Millennial, there's a good chance that the first mobile game you played was Snake on an old school Nokia phone. Now, you can relive that nostalgia of monochrome and push buttons in augmented reality with the Facebook Camera.
News: Magic Leap Shows Off New Software Demo, Teases Release This Summer
After weeks of teasing what many hoped might be a live, on-device demo of Magic Leap software to go along with the hardware glimpse we got last month, it turns out that all we got was a bit of new demonstration video footage.
News: Unity 2018.2 Release Continues Optimization of 3D Content Performance for Mobile Devices & Desktops
On Tuesday, Unity released the latest version of its 3D engine, which brings improvements to the Scriptable Render Pipeline that the company introduced earlier this year.
News: Rémy Martin Distills Art Through Augmented Reality App to Promote Its Cognac
Another branding team has stepped up to the bar to order a tall glass of augmented reality for its marketing campaign, this time through a mobile app for Rémy Martin VSOP Limited Edition cognac.
News: Microsoft Applies for Another Patent to Enlarge Field of View in AR Displays
Based on its continued research, it appears Microsoft recognizes that the next HoloLens needs a wider field of view (FoV). Based on a recently-revealed documentation, the company's research team has found another way to accomplish that objective.
News: Escape Room Experience Comes to Mobile via Futuristic 'The Lockdown' Augmented Reality Game
Escape rooms, those real world puzzle games that challenge teams to solve a mystery and gain their freedom from a locked room, are all the rage right now. But augmented reality games such as The Lockdown could make them obsolete.
News: Vuzix Smart Glasses Getting a Major Upgrade in 2019 with Light Engine from Plessey
While Vuzix is beefing up the processing power of its next-generation smartglasses with the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1, the company will also give its devices an upgraded display engine.
News: Scope AR Merges Its AR Workflow & Remote Assistance Functions into One App
Enterprise augmented reality software maker Scope AR is bringing the powers of its two productivity apps together like the Wonder Twins into the form of a single app.
News: Snapchat Adds Sound Recognition to Its Augmented Reality Arsenal
As Facebook, Apple, Samsung, and others offer augmented reality selfie effects and content that challenge its platform, Snapchat has continued to innovate with its augmented reality capabilities.
News: Essential Phone 2 Reportedly Canceled, Rubin Looking to Sell
The Essential Phone was undoubtedly one of the most underrated phones of 2018. It launched with buggy software and camera problems, but the company worked diligently to push out updates. Many Android enthusiasts were anxiously waiting for the Essential 2 release later this summer. Unfortunately, news today from Bloomberg indicates that Essential will not release a phone in 2018.
News: Kinect Graduates from Gaming to Enterprise with Project Kinect for Azure
Microsoft's Monday keynote introduced the fourth generation of the company's Kinect sensor during Build 2018 in Seattle.
Dev Report: Occipital Brings Apple Metal Support to Bridge Engine as It Leaves Beta
Following San Francisco-based Occipital's successful Structure Sensor Kickstarter campaign, the release of its Bridge AR/VR headset, as well as a string of technology and company acquisitions, the company has built a rather strong name for itself in the AR community. And now, with the first public release of its Bridge Engine on Thursday, the company continues to expand the features its platform has to offer, with hopes of bringing in more developers to utilize it.
News: Sherwin-Williams Uses Augmented Reality to Take the Guesswork Out of Paint Color Selection
Do you see a red door and wonder if it might be a good idea to paint it black? You could "ask Ask Sherwin-Williams," or, better yet, you could just ask the new augmented reality features in the retailer's mobile app.
News: Facebook Camera Can Now Change Your World into an AR Paint Canvas
For social media platforms like Facebook, augmented reality represents a whole new art form with which users can express themselves online. Now, Facebook is giving those users a new brush.
News: Social VR Startup vTime Lands $7.6M to Launch Augmented Reality Version Later This Year
One of the earliest players in the social virtual reality space, vTime, has just landed $7.6 million in new funding, which the company says is partially earmarked for developing and releasing an augmented reality version of its platform later this year.
News: Startup YOUAR Demos Persistent, Cross-Platform AR Experiences via ARKit & ARCore
Another AR cloud candidate has emerged in YOUAR, a startup that has developed a new system that enables persistent augmented reality experiences on iPhones and Android devices.
News: Google Leads $14.5 Million Funding Round for AR Cloud Startup Blue Vision
The augmented reality cloud and multi-user experiences are shaping up to be one of the hotter areas of augmented reality, and now Google is the latest entity to back these emerging branches of AR.
News: Apple's WWDC Invite Tells Us That 2018 Edition Will Be All About Augmented Reality
Historically, Apple loves to drop hints about its major upcoming events through clues included on its invitations. Those invites usually require a good bit of deciphering to connect the dots, but in the case of Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 invite, the topic is immediately obvious: it's augmented reality.
News: iOS 11.3 Beta 5 Released with Mostly Under-the-Hood Improvements
Apple released the fifth build of the iOS 11.3 developer and public beta on Monday, March 12. The update comes exactly one week after the March 5 release of beta 4, which mostly introduced bug and stability patches. At this time, this new beta appears to do much of the same.
News: Snap Inc. Planning Smartglasses Version of Spectacles for 2019, Report Says
What many thought was inevitable, based on recent hints, has been revealed to be in the planning stages: Snapchat is working on smartglasses. The surprising information came out on March 2 in a report that also claims Snap Inc. is planning to release version two of its Spectacles product in the third quarter of 2018.
News: Amazon AR View Video Reveals Android Version of Augmented Reality Shopping Feature
If the end of every year is focused on new iPhones, then February, which coincides with Mobile World Congress, is often when we get new Android news, and this month is no different.