Hot Next Reality Posts

News: Mobile AR App Octi Evolves into Social Network via Facial Recognition Tech

In a world full of augmented reality camera effects apps, one app is going in a more social direction.

News: Facebook Messenger Blasts Out Trio of Star Wars AR Effects for 'Rise of Skywalker'

While "Baby Yoda" from The Mandalorian threatens to overshadow it, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrives in theaters next week, which means it's time for Disney and Lucasfilm to ramp up its promotional strategy.

News: Qualcomm & Accenture Upgrade Event Planning with AR App for Nreal Light & Mobile

One of the hallmarks of augmented reality's coming of age is that the technology is starting to find a home in business categories that are less obvious compared to typical AR enterprise use cases.

News: Snapchat Turns Real World into AR Scavenger Hunt with Nearly Instant Object Recognition

While Snapchat is no stranger to location-based AR scavenger hunts, the app's new world-facing game adds some environmental understanding to the mix.

News: Marvel Expands Roster of Avengers Playmoji for Pixel Playground Ahead of 'Avengers: Endgame'

The marketing team for Marvel Studios is doing "whatever it takes" to make sure you see Avengers: Endgame when it hits theaters in a couple of weeks, including offering an updated set of augmented reality Playmoji for the Playground app on Google Pixel.

News: This Is Why All Augmented Reality Startups Suck

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."

News: Facebook Opens Spark AR Beta for Instagram to All Creators, Intros Effect Gallery for Browsing AR Experiences

With Snapchat making the leap into the smartglasses realm, Facebook had to find a way to try and steal its competitor's augmented reality thunder.

News: Explore the Grueling Wartime Trenches of Golden Globe Winning Movie '1917' via Web-Based AR Experience

Filmed in what appears to be a single continuous shot, war film 1917 is now the front-runner to conquer the Best Picture category of the Academy Awards after bringing home the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the drama category.

News: Apple Recruitment Video Features Augmented Reality Clues at the Center of Call for New Team Members

Whenever a new Apple event invite arrives, the entire tech industry begins tearing the invite's graphics apart in a bid to decipher what the company may be planning on releasing in the coming weeks.

Hands-On: Form Smart Swim Goggles Hit the Mark for Aquatics Athletes

Despite some of the biggest players in tech still lagging in terms of offering smartglasses options, there are nevertheless a number of smartglasses makers, including North and Vuzix, with consumer-grade smartglasses on the market right now.

News: Apple's Tim Cook, Google's Sundar Pichai, & Snap's Evan Spiegel Deliver Strategic Insights into AR in 2020 & Beyond

The words of three of tech's most important executives in the last 48 hours are providing some valuable insight into the near term future of augmented reality and the cloud infrastructures that support it.

Market Reality: Apple, Snap, & Google Execs Talk AR, Form Takes AR to the Pool, & Octi Pivots to AR Social Networking

Some of the leading big tech companies are still working in the lab on actual products, but at least some of their leadership did have some thoughts to share on the future direction of the technology this week.

News: This Viral Instagram Augmented Reality Filter Will Tell You Which Disney Character You Really Are

One Instagram creator's augmented reality homage to Disney's deep bench of animated characters has earned him fifteen minutes of fame.

News: New App Lets Your Trace Drawings from Your Phone onto Paper

Get ready to draw like Leonardo da Vinci, or, at least, trace like him. A new augmented reality app, SketchAR, is the first mobile app that uses AR to allow users trace an image on real paper. The Lithuania-based company describes their product as "an application through which the user sees a virtual image on the surface of which they are planning to trace a sketch."

News: China-Based Startup 0glasses Looks to Challenge Nreal Light with Its RealX Augmented Reality Smartglasses

Brace yourselves: Nreal Light clones are coming. Since the China-based startup wowed the crowd at CES 2019 with its consumer-centric smartglasses, a number of followers from Asia have emerged, and all with very similar aesthetics to Nreal Light.

News: Hong Kong Startup's Am Glass Wearable Offers Powerful Augmented Reality Smartglasses Alternative to Nreal Light

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.

ARCore 101: How to Create a Mobile AR Application in Unity, Part 4 (Enabling Surface Detection)

One of the primary factors that separates an augmented reality device from a standard heads-up display such as Google Glass is dimensional depth perception. This can be created by either RGB cameras, infrared depth cameras, or both, depending on the level of accuracy you're aiming for.

ARCore 101: How to Create a Mobile AR Application in Unity, Part 3 (Setting Up the App Controller)

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of programming languages and variations of those languages that exist. Currently, in the augmented reality space, it seems the Microsoft-created C# has won out as the overall top language of choice. While there are other options like JavaScript and C++, to name a few, C# seems to be the most worthwhile place to invest one's time and effort.

How To: Translate Foreign Text Live in Real Time Using Your Smartphone

Early last year, Google purchased Quest Visual, acquiring the immensely popular augmented reality translator app Word Lens in the process. While Google did put the feature on the Google Glass, they spoke more about implementing Word Lens into their Translate app sometime in the future.

News: 8th Wall, Amazon Sumerian & Trigger Team Up to Deliver Web AR Promotion for 'Jumanji' Movie Sequel

Augmented reality already seemed like the ideal technology to advertise for a movie based on the premise of being sucked into a video game world the first time around. For the sequel, how about two times the immersion?

How To: Improve Your Pokémon's Stats in Pokémon GO

In Pokémon GO, having an in-depth understanding of your Pokémon's stats and abilities is crucially important to becoming a better player. Not all Pokémon are created equal; as such, it's critical that you look at each of your Pokémon—even duplicates—with a keen eye.

News: Snapchat Launches Trailer Reaction AR Lens for Tom Cruise Movie 'Top Gun: Maverick'

Usually, flying into unknown territory would mean riding into the "danger zone", but Paramount and Snapchat are taking the trip anyway with one of Summer 2020's most anticipated movie sequels.

News: Starbucks Uses Instagram AR to Promote Sustainability via Holiday Campaign

Starbucks is spicing things up ahead of this holiday season with a little augmented reality joy. This week the company launched its first Instagram filter, called Holijoy, delivered like an early Christmas gift and packing four seasonal lenses.

News: The Future of Augmented Reality Mainstream Adoption

What does mainstream augmented reality look like? I'm not talking about the stuff you see in concept videos and science fiction films. No. What does it really look like?

News: Facebook Adds Image Tracking Effects & Slider Controls to Spark AR for Instagram

After opening up its Spark AR platform on Instagram for all creators, Facebook is already expanding the platform's capabilities on its Snapchat killer.

News: Japan's VR Girlfriend Is Coming to Augmented Reality to Creep Us Out in the Real World

We already know that the connection between virtual and augmented reality is pretty tight, with tools like Unity making porting some apps between the two platforms fairly frictionless. But there are some things currently going in VR that just don't need to come to the world of AR.

News: Augmented Reality in Cars — the Companies & Tech Driving Us into the Future

While autonomous vehicles are almost assuredly the future of personal transportation, we are likely many years from seeing self-driving cars become as ubiquitous as manually-driven ones, as the auto industry has a myriad of government regulations and other constraints to contend with. Until then, augmented reality is looking like the next big thing in automotive technology.

News: Snapchat Mutates X-Men Fans via Augmented Reality to Sell Tickets for 'Dark Phoenix' Movie

Augmented reality is often likened to granting superpowers to mere mortals, but what about mutant powers?

News: Microsoft Japan Helps Godzilla Invade Real World Tokyo via HoloLens

The company behind Japan's beloved Gozilla, Japan's Toho Studios, has for years tried to give fans the sense of what a giant, nuclear-powered lizard invading Tokyo might feel like. Until now, those attempts have been limited to the movie theater, but now, with the help of the Microsoft HoloLens, Godzilla is finally getting its chance to invade the actual city, with terrified fans looking on from a safe distance.

News: PhotoBloom AR Brings Your Framed Photos to Life as Augmented Reality Videos

Taking photos that are actually printed and hung on a real wall, versus being shot and shared via a social wall, is a seemingly lost art, but PhotoBloom AR wants to change that with augmented reality.

ARCore 101: How to Create a Mobile AR Application in Unity, Part 1 (Setting Up the Software)

If you've contemplated what's possible with augmented reality on mobile devices, and your interest has been piqued enough to start building your own Android-based AR app, then this is a great place to to acquire the basic beginner skills to complete it. Once we get everything installed, we'll create a simple project that allows us to detect surfaces and place custom objects on those surfaces.

News: The Future of Augmented Reality — What to Expect This Year & in 2020

The year in augmented reality 2019 started with the kind of doom and gloom that usually signals the end of something. Driven in large part by the story we broke in January about the fall of Meta, along with similar flameouts by ODG and Blippar, the virtual shrapnel of AR ventures that took a wrong turn has already marred the landscape of 2019.

ARCore 101: How to Create a Mobile AR Application in Unity, Part 2 (Setting Up the Framework)

With the software installation out of the way, it's time to build the framework within which to work when building an augmented reality app for Android devices.

News: Kohl's Partners With Snapchat AR for Holiday Pop-Up & Black Friday Promotions

All Kohl's wants for Christmas is Snapchat augmented reality. In conjunction with a holiday pop-up hosted in New York City from Nov. 7 through Nov. 10, Snapchat ran a sponsored portal lens available to targeted Snapchat users in the AR carousel. The experience gave users the ability to virtually transport themselves to the pop-up.

News: Tale of the Tape — How Does Apple's Measure App Measure Up Against Google's Version?

Earlier this month, when Apple announced at WWDC that iOS 12 would include an augmented reality tape measure called Measure, iPhone watchers seemed impressed by the new addition to the company's AR arsenal. Well, just a couple of weeks later, on June 19, it appears that Google remembered it had its own Measure app as well.

AR Dev 101: Create Cross-Platform AR Experiences with Unity & Azure Cloud, Part 1 (Downloading the Tools)

In this series, we are going to get you to the edge of building your own cloud-based, cross-platform augmented reality app for iPhone, Android, HoloLens, and Meta 2, among other devices. Once we get the necessary software installed, we will walk through the process of setting up an Azure account and creating blob storage.

HoloLens Dev 102: How to Install & Set Up Vuforia in Unity

In this first part of our tutorial series on making physical objects come to life on HoloLens, we are going to set up Vuforia in Unity.

News: Dior Returns to Instagram AR with Virtual Makeup Effect to Promote Holiday Collection

The cosmetics brands are among the earliest adopters of augmented reality, using virtual try-on tools to preview shades of makeup before buying.

News: Apple Brings People Occlusion & Motion Capture to ARKit 3 Alongside RealityKit & RealityComposer for AR Development

Like clockwork, Apple has unveiled the latest additions to its ARKit tookit at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where ARKit first said hello to the world in 2017, as well as some new tools that take a direct shot at Unity, Unreal Engine, and others.

News: Smartphone Maker Vivo Enters Consumer Smartglasses Market with Vivo AR Glass

A company whose sole product line is smartphones might be worried about early proclamations that the smartphone is dead with the advent of augmented reality wearables.