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.
With the nation facing a shortage of ventilators for COVID-19 patients and no apparent ramp-up in the production of new ones, engineers, medical resistents, and do-it-yourselfers are sharing plans for homemade versions.
While Apple's AR wearables development continues clandestinely, its mobile ecosystem is laying the foundation for the software side of its smartglasses, with Apple Arcade serving as the latest example.
This week's Apple earnings offered a report of solid performance and guarded optimism about future iPhone sales, which may be impacted later this year by issues around the current coronavirus epidemic in China.
While the big names in augmented reality demonstrated the breadth of opportunities in the industry's landscape this week, one new startup showed off what is possible further in the future.
As the year comes to a close, we've invited some of the leaders of the AR industry to take the time to look back at the progress the AR industry has made while looking forward to what's ahead in 2020. A report on the top apps of 2019 — and the decade — also offers some insights on the progress and direction of mobile AR.
It looks like Pokémon GO players may get a surprise gift from the game's developer, Niantic, this holiday season.
Apple's ARKit has built a considerable lead in terms of features over Google's ARCore, but Google's latest update to ARCore adds a capability that makes the platform a bit more competitive with ARKit.
While its competitors are concentrating on building out AR cloud platforms to give advanced AR capabilities to mobile apps, Ubiquity6 is taking a step in a different direction.
Not that long ago, touchscreen-friendly gloves were an outlier accessory, something you had to track down at a specialty brick-and-mortar store or solely online. But as the smartphone has become an integral part of our lives, so, too, has the need for fashion accessories that cater to our desire to be always connected. So now, touchscreen gloves are everywhere.
This time last year, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and his company were faced with an erosion of its user base that cratered its stock price. This year, on the strength of Snapchat's AR camera effects, the company has reversed course. And that's why Spiegel tops the NR30, our annual list of the leaders in the AR industry.
While Magic Leap doesn't yet have a consumer edition of the Magic Leap One, that hasn't stopped AT&T from building apps for mainstream audiences for the headset.
When it comes to the business of augmented reality, companies that aren't already introducing new products or apps are focused on producing the AR technology of the future. But in the realm of real products and apps, Magic Leap continues to show off what its headset can do, this time via a new app that transports users to the ocean's depths.
While a viable version of consumer-grade smartglasses has yet to find mainstream success, two more contenders emerged this week, as Vuzix confirmed that a leak of a fashion-forward design is legitmate and Vivo introduced tethered smartglasses designed to pair with its new 5G smartphone.
Anyone who has been within a block of any wireless brick and mortar store or tech conference in the last couple of years has no doubt seen banners, posters, and videos promoting 5G high-speed wireless services on the way.
To borrow from the canon of Game of Thrones, what is dead may never die. And while the Meta Company that we knew this time last year is no more, the patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company lives on.
Current-generation mobile augmented reality apps offer users numerous opportunities to punch up photos and videos with 3D content, but there's surprisingly few options for users to express themselves using virtual characters.
The Apple rumor mill is getting its first real workout of 2019, and this time the whispers are more exciting than usual.
NetBIOS is a service that allows for communication over a network and is often used to join a domain and legacy applications. It is an older technology but still used in some environments today. Since it is an unsecured protocol, it can often be a good starting point when attacking a network. Scanning for NetBIOS shares with NBTScan and the Nmap Scripting Engine is a good way to begin.
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.
Investors continue to bet on augmented reality, both for short-term returns and long-term plays. This week, Niantic reportedly picked up another round of funding from Samsung and others, based on the success of PokémonGO and the prospects for future revenue. Likewise, investors see value in WaveOptics, whose waveguide displays could make consumer smaller AR smartglasses possible within the next year.
Niantic's most successful app, Pokémon GO, has become the first app to integrate the company's Real World Platform, the developer's AR cloud technology that enables multiplayer AR, persistent content, and occlusion with physical objects.
A week after the L.E.A.P. Conference, our cup of Magic Leap news continues to floweth over, with the company's content chief giving us some insight into the company's strategy, and Twilio sharing what its virtual chat app looks like.
This week, we continued our NR30 series highlighting the leaders of augmented reality space by profiling the venture capitalists and strategic corporate investors that sustain the industry.
It is almost indisputable that smartglasses and head-worn displays are the future of augmented reality. However, at this precise moment, they are still a very niche market.
The march towards mainstream adoption of eSIM technology got a massive boost with the arrival of the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR. We're now one step closer to ditching physical SIM cards altogether. If you're on the fence about this new technology, you may be surprised by the benefits it brings to the table.
As Magic Leap prepares to ship the Magic Leap One later this year, the company is putting its focus on mentoring developers and creators to build a content ecosystem for the spatial computing platform.
Some of the big guns developing augmented reality technology fired shots at their competitors with announcements and leaked plans this week.
Now that ARCore is out of its developer preview, it's time to get cracking on building augmented reality apps for the supported selection of Android phones available. Since Google's ARCore 1.0 is fairly new, there's not a lot of information out there for developers yet — but we're about to alleviate that.
Magic Leap's recent flurry of patent applications prompted us to look around for any trademark movements from the company, and it turns out that the Florida-based company has been quite busy.
Coming into this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the common sentiment among observers was that this was expected to be the big year for augmented reality.
In 2017, major breakthroughs in smartphone-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) opened up new doorways for developers and users of both Apple and Android phones. Unfortunately for Android users, the solution that Google is previewing, ARCore, currently only works on three Android smartphones. But Silicon Valley start-up uSens is stepping in to fix that with its new engine called uSensAR.
The iPhone X was released in November 2017, and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus dropped right before it, but the hottest news right now revolves around the 2018 iPhone releases. The rumor mill regarding the iPhone X's successor started churning out speculations on names, cameras, display size, and more almost immediately after last year's devices, and there have been many new leaked details since.
The last quarter of 2017 brought us some downright excellent smartphones. Between the iPhone X, Pixel 2, and Note 8, consumers have more fantastic options than ever when choosing a new device. It's now the perfect opportunity for Samsung to set the tone for 2018 smartphones with their exceptional S9 and S9+.
If competition in the augmented reality space was a spectator sport, then ARKit, ARCore, and HoloLens dominate the prime-time broadcasts on ESPN.
While ARKit and ARCore are poised to bring AR experiences to millions of mobile devices, one company is poised to anchor those experiences anywhere in the world with just a set of geographic coordinates.
While IKEA is collaborating with Apple for its ARKit furniture app, Marxent is ready to help the rest of the interior decorating and home improvement crowd with their apps.
The large, dome-shaped LiDARs that have become a fixture on driverless car prototypes are expensive and notably ugly. And yet, these unsightly devices should remain planted on driverless cars, even when they become available in commercial fleet services across the country in a couple of years.
Cruise Automation, the driverless car startup General Motors (GM) bought for $1 billion in 2016, is readying a formidable fleet of robo-taxis for rollout in cities throughout the US. But when it comes to details about how the company plans to realize these lofty goals, it's been fairly tight-lipped.
For a company more associated with debugging computer programs, Google's parent company, Alphabet, is making a name for itself by taking on the real thing — mosquitoes.
