News and Updates from Next Reality: Page 3

Magic Leap has had a rough couple of years, highlighted by high-profile executive departures, lawsuits, troublesome patent shuffles, and massive layoffs.

While Apple introduced new AR features for iOS 15 and Object Capture for Reality Kit 2 during the WWDC 2021 keynote, updates for ARKit were curiously absent in the official presentation.

One of the more exciting augmented reality announcements Apple made during its WWDC keynote on Monday came in the form of Object Capture, a new 3D scanning feature coming to macOS Monterey.

When we got our first look at US Army soldiers testing Microsoft's modified HoloLens 2 last year, it still looked very much like the commercial edition, with some additional sensors attached.

The last few weeks were fairly busy in the realm of augmented reality and remote meetings developments. Most of that activity was generated by some mammoth announcements from Snap and its Spectacles AR smartglasses, and Google, with its Project Starline experimental holographic video conferencing system.

The march of Amazon to insert itself into nearly every retail arena continues with the e-commerce giant's latest move to launch its own brick-and-mortar beauty salons.

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.

The world of Lego is timeless primarily because everyone, regardless of age or background, can build a wide variety of amazing things with the simple component blocks from the classic toymaker.

Last week, Snap powered through a mountain of important software and (shock!) hardware updates, as well as a few very big business partnerships.

The big day for Snap that resulted in the debut of brand new augmented reality Spectacles smartglasses is turning into a big week.

Throughout Thursday's virtual Snap Partner Summit, Snapchat's parent company made a profound statement: If you use Snapchat, you're a creator.

During the Tuesday launch of Google I/O, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, pulled off a Steve Jobsian "one more thing" move near the end of his keynote address that was simply stunning.

Facebook Reality Labs just experienced its first major executive exit since the pandemic began. Hugo Barra has announced that he's stepping down from his position as vice president of VR at Facebook.

Sure, Microsoft has mostly marketed its HoloLens headsets towards enterprises and developers, but we learned this week that, like every other tech giant, the company is working on a consumer-grade AR wearable. Speaking of consumer smartglasses, Apple made another strategic investment this week that has implications for Apple's AR future.

The experience of actually using the HoloLens 2 can be difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't had a chance to directly interact with the device in person and be blown away by its immersive capabilities.

In recent years, the tech innovation space has been dominated by the US and Asia, with Europe weighing in, but still being mostly lauded for its art history and architecture.

Apple has a sterling reputation when it comes to managing its supply chain; it's where CEO Tim Cook proved his mettle to succeed Steve Jobs. Now, the company has made a strategic investment with a supplier that will be crucial to its future plans for AR wearables.

The future of the HoloLens 2, according to Microsoft, is all about enterprise use cases.

Thanks to the grandest of puns, May the 4th is Star Wars Day. And what better way to pay tribute to the space opera than with the augmented reality superpowers of Snapchat.

There's already some fierce competition between Snap and Facebook in the AR space, but it's about to heat up even more, with Snap snatching up a 3D mapping startup that could add some new AR capabilities to its arsenal.