Next Reality Features
News: AR Headsets with Larger Displays from WaveOptics Could Arrive Next Year
Augmented reality headsets with larger eye boxes than any device currently available could make their way to market by the end of next year if current timelines hold true.
News: Illumix Emerges from Stealth with $8.6 Million in Funding to Build a Mobile AR Gaming Platform from the Ground Up
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.
Market Reality: Magic Leap, Microsoft & Movie Theaters Reveal Big Money Plans for AR
In any business, there are a number of questions companies must answer in order to get customers to buy a product or service. The same holds true for companies selling augmented reality headsets.
Apple AR: New Demo Shows Off the Possibilities of Location Based Gaming
The world of gaming has never been cooler thanks to Apple's ARKit. From AR arcade games to giant god battles to Pac-Man, we've seen our fair share of awesome and innovative games.
News: Google Gains Ground in Remote Video Race with Virtual Video Backgrounds in Google Meet
As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, so, too, does the demand for video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.
News: Google Arts & Culture Drops AR Synth Exhibit That You Can Play
Museum curators typically frown upon visitors touching paintings, sculptures, and artifacts, but not when those exhibits are displayed in augmented reality.
News: Occipital Acquires Paracosm in a Bid to Transform Even the Largest Structures into Virtual 3D Objects
As interest in augmented and virtual reality continues to grow, so does the need to bring objects from the real world into virtual space. With that, there's also now an increased need for solutions that bypass the time-consuming process of producing handmade 3D models.
Market Reality: Google Adds AR to Search, AWE Turns 10, & Nike Makes AR Part of Its Sales Strategy
As the Augmented World Expo (AWE) prepares to open its doors to AR developers and enthusiasts, we sat down with founder Ori Inbar to talk about AR's growth over the past decade, and what the future may hold.
Market Reality: Microsoft's HoloLens 2 Team Speaks, Apple AR Glasses Update, Matterport Lands $48 Million
While the long awaited HoloLens sequel is scheduled to arrive later this year, Apple may force Microsoft to share the AR wearables spotlight, if reports of the company's first entry into smartglasses territory end up coming to fruition.
News: Owlchemy Labs ARCore Experiment Lets Android Users View a Friend's VR Experience from Their Smartphone
Google subsidiary Owlchemy Labs has cooked up an experimental ARCore mobile app that enables smartphone users to follow along with their VR friends as they play games in a head-mounted display.
Market Reality: Outlook for Augmented & Mixed Reality Remains Favorable
With many of the companies working in augmented and mixed reality focused on the Augmented World Expo, the finance side of the industry has been relatively quiet.
News: Meta Delays Shipments of Developer Kits Until the End of the Year—& That's a Good Thing
The future for the Meta 2 augmented reality headset will have to wait. While shipments were supposedly on their way out back in June, Meta revealed today that they need a bit more time to provide the best possible experience—and that's really for the best.
News: Cornell Researchers Use Augmented Reality to Craft 3D Printed Objects in Real Time
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.
News: Magic Leap Lands a New Investor from Europe's Media Sector
On Monday, German newspaper and digital publisher Axel Springer announced its role as the latest company to invest in Magic Leap. This is just the latest in a series of investments the augmented reality company has garnered from the likes of Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba, Legendary Entertainment, Warner Bros., and others amounting to almost $2 billion in overall funding.
Apple AR: JigSpace Shows You How Things Are Made Using AR
JigSpace, a company that uses 3D renderings to give instructions, showed off a fun new way to learn how things work using Apple's ARKit. The video released shows the anatomy of a range of things, including an espresso machine, an Archer Hb Plus chair, and the manual transmission of a car. Not to mention, they also used ARKit to show a 3D how-to of removing an iPhone's SIM card.
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.
News: Smartglasses Startup North Begins Delivering First Focals Shipments, Announces Series of New Pop-Up Stores
Just over two months ago, smartglasses startup North opened the doors at its two brick-and-mortar retail locations in Toronto and New York and began accepting orders for Focals. On Thursday, the company announced that those initial customers can get ready to pick up their wearables, as the first shipments have now arrived in stores.
News: CyberPong Updates the Classic Game for VR on the Vive
Pong, one of the simplest video games ever created, has managed to evolve in some crazy ways over time, from the original basic 2D version and colorful Breakout sequel, to the PlayStation game with power-ups and 3D graphics, and now Cyberpong VR—a virtual reality game on the HTC Vive—where you act as the paddle instead of just moving it into place with a controller.
News: Magic Leap CEO Revealed Future Vision for Product Days Before Launch in Bonkers Sci-Fi Speech
Just days before the release of the first image of the Magic Leap device, the company's CEO, Rony Abovitz, knew that the biggest moment of his life was about to unfold the following week. But instead of hunkering down in the Florida-based confines of the company's skunkworks, he instead decided to deliver a speech to the public about, what else, the future.
News: From Immersive Comics to Interactive Music, Here's What You Can Expect to Do with Magic Leap One
The year is 2018. You just received your own Magic Leap One: Creator Edition. What now? Rewinding back to today, we know of one specific app that will be available for Magic Leap's device, along with two others that could be tagged as highly likely. Paired with Magic Leap's own experiments and demonstrations, we can get a sense of what the playground for this new toy will offer.
News: Snap Continues AR Buying Spree with Vertebrae Acquisition
Snapchat parent company Snap has opened up its war chest to acquire yet another company that will play a role in its augmented reality ecosystem.
Market Reality: HoloLens 2 Goes to Battle, Talespin Gets Funding for AR Training, & Nreal Light Adds Gesture Interface
The results of Microsoft's $480 million contract with the US Army are on display and users continue to test the suped-up version of the HoloLens 2.
AR Snapshots: Snapchat Pumps Out Billie Eilish, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift & the Beatles
Snapchat and its augmented reality capabilities have become a haven for music artists seeking to promote their new albums or simply amplify their art with immersive experiences.
News: Despite Recent Updates, Pokémon GO Is Still Vulnerable to Hackers
Despite a round of updates to Pokémon GO that patched and eliminated location spoofing, the game still has a difficult time dealing with the most hardcore cheaters. Like weeds on a grassy lawn, third-party bot makers still remain the biggest thorn in Niantic's side and continue to thrive despite the developer's best efforts to root them out. While the latest updates have blocked users from running modded versions of the game, like Pokemon GO++, that feature built-in joysticks to move your pla...
News: Startup Form Launches Underwater Smart Goggles for Swimmers
Sports technology company Form is testing the waters for augmented reality wearables with a product aimed at a very specific user group.
News: Apple to Unveil Stereo AR Headset Support, New ARKit Capabilities, & More at WWDC, Report Says
Over the past two years, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) has become a showcase for new ARKit capabilities. This year, it could offer more information related to Apple's long rumored augmented reality wearable.
News: Virtual Reality, Coming to a Dentist's Office Near You
I don't know anyone that likes going to the dentist—few things are more uncomfortable than having someone else's hands in your mouth. But outside of that, not only can the pain of certain procedures be unnerving, the drugs used to numb those pains can be just as uncomfortable. Not being able to feel your mouth for hours on end is a disconcerting feeling. But all that could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to virtual reality.
News: Microsoft Teases Minecraft Augmented Reality Game for Mobile at Build 2019
It looks like Microsoft will finally make good on its promise to bring Minecraft to augmented reality, as foreshadowed via a HoloLens demo in 2015.
News: Xiaomi Wearable Uses Waveguide Tech to Mount Challenge to US Smartglasses Market
As if answering Apple's major iPhone event on Tuesday, Chinese mobile giant Xiaomi held its own product launch event the following day.
News: The First Meta 2 Mixed Reality Headsets Will Begin Shipping in Two Weeks
Microsoft's enjoyed being the only mixed reality headset on the block for a little while, but the Meta 2 intends to join the party very soon. According to UploadVR, in a couple of weeks they'll begin shipping alpha versions of their headset with improved hand tracking.
News: Facebook Opens Enrollment for Spark AR Curriculum to Grow AR Creation Community
As Apple, Google, Snap, and Facebook wrestle for positioning to lure developers and creators to build augmented reality experiences for their respective tools, Facebook is looking at a learning approach for its Spark AR platform.
News: Apple Files Patent Application for Automatic AR Lens Adjustment via Proximity Sensors
One of the worst-kept secrets in the tech world is Apple's plans for consumer-grade AR smartglasses, still unconfirmed publicly and only recently corroborated through a leaked account of an internal employee meeting.
News: The Virtual Reality Developers Conference at GDC 2017 Is Underway
This year's Game Developers Conference, better known as the GDC, is underway at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, California, and lasts until March 3, 2017. More importantly for us here at NextReality, the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC)—a new GDC sub-conference geared toward augmented, mixed, and virtual reality—has begun.
News: Make Movie Magic on the HoloLens with Microsoft's New Actiongram Fantasy Contest
Want to go to Seattle and meet the Actiongram team?
News: Magic Leap's Chief Content Officer Rio Caraeff Opens Up on Walled Gardens, Data Privacy, & Blockchain
Over the years, Magic Leap's long-cultivated shroud of mystery led some onlookers to buy into the company's dream before even trying the device, while for others, the secrecy seems to have stoked the kind of resentment and overcorrecting critique usually reserved for the mighty Apple.
News: The Most Exciting Events Coming Up at Augmented World Expo 2017 in May
Coming up at the end of May is the world's largest conference and expo dedicated to all things augmented and virtual reality, the Augmented World Expo, more commonly known just as AWE. And this year, a few of us from NextReality are going to be there.
News: The Mixed Reality Continuum Shows Exactly What Lies Between Physical & Virtuality
We've explained the differences between mixed, virtual, and augmented reality through old-fashioned text and infographics, but in a rapidly-changing environment that leads to even more terms, it's best to think of all these realities in one simple way—as a continuum.
News: Niantic Primes Its Lightship AR Engine for Transformers Game, Global Launch Slated for 2021
With the tagline "More Than Meets the Eye," the Transformers franchise was pretty much preordained to have its own augmented reality game, and AR gaming pioneer Niantic has stepped up to fulfill that destiny.
Apple AR: Our World Meets Minecraft's with AR Scanner
This is one of the coolest applications of Apple's ARKit that we've seen so far. The 3D software product studio gradientspace has created a Minecraft 3D scanner using ARKit.
News: Universal Studios Japan Powers Up Mario Kart Ride at Super Nintendo World with AR Headsets
Next year, fans of Mario Kart will be able to experience the game in real life with the assistance of augmented reality.