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.
The HoloLens has made enough of an impact on the healthcare industry for Microsoft technology partner Medivis to convince investors to pledge $2.3 million in funding for its surgical platform.
Reading the augmented reality news lately has felt a bit like reading a John Grisham novel, as the business side of things has dripped with legal drama.
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.
Intel's RealSense family of depth tracking cameras has a new addition with a different set of sensory capabilities.
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.
Last year at CES, RealMax blew away the AR headset competition with a prototype AR headset surpassing 100 degrees field of view.
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.
The augmented reality industry has a bright future built on innovation and growth, but that doesn't mean we can't look back at the close of the year to see what the industry has accomplished from a business perspective.
Any app on your iPhone could potentially listen in on your conversations and use that information to target you with tailored ads. Although most companies, including Facebook and Apple, have come out and vehemently denied these claims of spying on consumers, who's to say they're telling the truth? The only way to be sure you're safe is to take matters into your own hands.
Augmented reality optics maker WaveOptics has just infused its operations with a fresh round of funding to facilitate its objective of bringing consumer-grade smartglasses at a $600 price point to market in 2019.
In recent years, many software publishers have tried to sell the business community on remote meetings via VR, but if social media chatter is any indication, it hasn't taken off in a big way just yet. However, for some, the notion of holding remote meetings using augmented reality, a medium in which you're still directly tied to the real world and not closed off in a blindfold-style VR headset, might be the better solution.
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.
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.
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.
Last week, Twilio showed off how avatar-based chat communications will work on the Magic Leap One, and now a new startup has unveiled yet another way that augmented reality telepresence and remote collaboration can take place on the device.
Snapchat has officially unveiled its Visual Search service for Amazon (teased a month ago), a tool the company began testing on Monday.
Apple often cites its tight integration of hardware and software for its success. Startup Illumix is looking to do the same thing for AR gaming by building an AR platform for its apps.
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.
If you subscribe to notifications for Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz's Twitter feed, you'd think everyone in the world already has a Magic Leap One. Alas, that is not the case, but those not within the geographic areas of Magic Leap's LiftOff service now have a loophole through which they, too, can join the "Magicverse."
Look, we all like getting things for free. That's why we can stomach things like advertisements and optional purchases in freemium apps and games — we're willing to pay for our mobile experiences in every way but currency. Although freemium seems to be the model for the future of iPhone entertainment, it looks like a different scheme might win out in the end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some of the big guns developing augmented reality technology fired shots at their competitors with announcements and leaked plans this week.
Users of Epson's smartglasses can now tell their devices to "talk to the hand" when it comes to passwords and authentication.
Microsoft's Monday keynote introduced the fourth generation of the company's Kinect sensor during Build 2018 in Seattle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
