Following the surprise release of Magic Leap's SDK on Monday, March 19, Unity, Unreal Engine, and Mozilla followed up by announcing official partnerships with the company.
Augmented reality is beginning to leak out into the mainstream world. This is thanks, in part, to ARKit and ARCore. These releases turned the current smartphones owned by millions of Apple and Android users into AR-capable machines. And while there are definitely some awesome use cases for mobile AR, the real future in AR is headworn.
Most of the animated characters and animals we've seen in augmented reality are still fairly basic in terms of visual fidelity. And because many are still impressed by simply seeing 3D figures properly scaled and tracked alongside real-world objects, this approach has worked ... so far.
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.
There are some pretty incredible museum exhibits out there all over the world, but with a limited budget and travel options, it's hard to hit all of the museums we might want to. Luckily, there is Apple's ARKit.
Apple has sprung a massive AR following since the announcement of their ARKit, with users waiting to see what exactly the tech giant will do next.
At the end of June, Unity 2017.1, the newest version of the popular 3D development engine, went live. And with that release, it brought out some very cool new features like Timeline and Cinemachine, to name a few. Now, for those of us that develop with Unity and follow the beta program closely, these features are not new at all. What is more likely the case is that we have spent a good deal of time using these features for a few months and even possibly helped iron out a few bugs.
Upskill, an enterprise software developer for industrial augmented reality applications, recently received an influx of funding and a major vote of confidence from two of their top customers.
Today, December 7, it was officially announced that Magic Leap has found their replacement for the recently departed Brian Wallace. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has tapped Brenda Freeman, former EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of National Geographic Channel, as their new Chief Marketing Officer.
We've heard a bit about Google Daydream—the new smartphone-based virtual reality platform that is supposed to provide a markedly better experience than Cardboard—but don't really know what it'll look like. Engadget claims we could find out in just a couple of weeks, since Android Nougat is already out, a necessary component of Daydream.
Augmented reality allows for all kinds of experiences to happen just about anywhere, and that creates some incredible potential for entertainment. While games like Pokémon GO take you out into the world, one crowd-funded game wants to keep you inside—to scare the crap out of you in your own home.
Keyboards and mice work fine for computers, but in a holographic environment you'll want to do more than just point, click, and type. While we can still benefit from these input devices, complex hand-tracking methods are necessary for the evolution of mixed reality user interfaces.
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the demand for virtual and remote collaboration, and Microsoft has a solution that may serve as the catalyst for more such apps for augmented and virtual reality in the near future.
Not content to merely assist surgeons via the HoloLens, Medivis has expanded its augmented reality suite to Magic Leap One with an app for medical students.
Coming soon to an Android device near you: Diminished Reality! What's Diminished Reality? A lot like Augmented Reality, really, but with one big difference: Where AR giveth, insinuating virtual elements into a live representation of the real world, Diminished Reality taketh away, hiding actually-existing objects within a live feed.
A new demo has given a hint about what's going to be possible in the world of mixed reality, thanks to Apple's ARKit.
Sony has upped the ante for the promotion of Smurfs: The Lost Village, which was released on April 7 in the US, with a mixed reality experience via Microsoft's HoloLens.
The worlds of augmented reality and virtual reality are closely linked in many ways. That means it's smart for AR insiders to keep a close on new developments in VR. If you have been paying attention, you know that Oculus CTO John Carmack is one one of the most important thinkers in the VR space.
Occasionally, a not-so-great movie also does something so right that you have to forgive some of its sins and give it a little love. Such is the case with the latest film from Keanu Reeves, Replicas, which takes a HoloLens-style device and gives us a look at how future research labs might use that kind of augmented reality device, sort of.
Google and Apple are working to enable augmented reality content for the web, but startup 8th Wall has managed to launch a web AR platform that works on mobile browsers now.
It doesn't matter how cool or groundbreaking a particular technology is, if it doesn't offer the promise of big returns on investments, you'll have trouble drawing interest from both Silicon Valley and Wall Street. That's why we're increasingly seeing existing augmented reality players doing everything they can to focus in on revenue generation, which was the message coming from Snap Inc. this week.
Enterprise augmented reality software provider Upskill has raised $17.2 million in its latest round of funding, led by new investors Cisco and Accenture.
Any sufficiently cool new technology will be immediately repurposed to do something even cooler. Such is the case with Apple's iPhone X and its Animoji feature, which has led to something completely unanticipated: Animoji karaoke.
In the first part of this series, we looked at the surface detection that is provided by the ARKit. We looked at how it worked and covered some of the tools that could help us determine what is not working; when it doesn't. Now let's take this to the next step.
Ever since Facebook announced Spark AR at the 2017 F8 Developer's Conference, the social media giant has been looking for ways to implement its mobile augmented reality camera platform in the lives of everyday users.
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.
Fresh off of shipping version 2019.1 in April, Unity has already dropped the beta of 2019.2, and it has a bunch of new AR Foundation toys to test.
Apple's in-house music identification app Shazam has been quiet on the augmented reality front since officially joining Cupertino's finest last year, but a new promotion gives AR enthusiasts an occasion to raise a toast.
Just because augmented reality is the technology of the future doesn't mean it can't reach into the past of computing.
While these days it is better known for the cross-platform gaming sensation Fortnite, Epic Games also makes Unreal Engine, one of the top development environments for 3D content and, in turn, augmented reality and virtual reality experiences.
Another massive piece of the mysterious augmented reality puzzle known as Magic Leap fell into place on Wednesday as AT&T announced that it will be the exclusive launch carrier for the device.
When it comes to mass adoption, augmented reality is still primarily a mobile world, so Google is pitching its own ARCore flavor of mobile AR to the education and marketing segments.
Looking to inject a little more processing juice into your HoloLens? Unity can fix you up with the Standalone Universal Windows Platform Holographic Emulation.
If two hands are better than one, then two hand-tracking SDKs must be better than one as well. After uSens announced its Hand Tracking SDK at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara on Thursday, ManoMotion unveiled the latest version of its own SDK. Both technologies give apps the ability to track hand gestures with just a smartphone camera.
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.
Why would Magic Leap, a company preparing to launch its first augmented reality headset this year, need a developer for iPhone and iPad apps? It's not as crazy as it sounds.
While the consensus among some in the augmented reality community is that the Microsoft HoloLens is the best device available at present, it also remains the most cost-prohibitive option, with the development edition costing $3,000.
Apple CEO Tim Cook's most recent tech prophecy is that "AR will change everything." And now, that includes Apple's own website.
Just days after the launch of Google Poly, the marketplace for 3D virtual objects that developers can use for augmented and virtual reality apps, SketchFab, the current leader in the space, is firing back with a major enhancement to its platform.
Two companies behind a number of augmented reality devices have joined forces to develop a 3D depth-sensing camera system that will facilitate computer vision capabilities for augmented/virtual reality experiences and more.
