Ever since the announcement of The Walking Dead: Our World game last fall, publisher AMC and developer Next Games have been quiet about the title. Almost too quiet.
Next to things like natural disasters and disease, the specter of war is one of the only things that threatens to derail the 21st century's long stretch of technological innovation. Now a new app is using augmented reality to remind us of that by focusing on those most impacted by war — children.
Moviegoers who arrive at the theater early are no longer a captive audience for the ads, trivia, and miscellaneous content that precede the movie trailers than run before the feature presentation, as the ubiquity of the smartphone has become the preferred distraction for early birds at the theater.
Apple CEO Tim Cook's most recent tech prophecy is that "AR will change everything." And now, that includes Apple's own website.
Fans of The Walking Dead can now kill time until the series returns from its winter hiatus by raising walkers from the labels on bottles of wine influenced by the show.
If you bought your first mobile phone in the early-to-mid-2000s, there's a good chance that it was a Nokia and it had the game Snake preinstalled.
Just in time for a new season of professional basketball, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has released a new app for iPhones and iPads built on ARKit that turns your driveway into a basketball court.
One of the byproducts of the success of Pokémon Go was the viral images that made the rounds on social media of people putting Pikachus, Charmanders, and their brethren in compromising positions. Snapchat has a similar claim to fame, most recently with the inexplicable popularity of the dancing hotdog.
Advertisers must love when their commercials go viral. Take for instance the Esurance commercial where an elderly woman completely misunderstands Facebook jargon.
Augmented reality developer Blippar has created a new visual positioning service based on computer vision that is two times more accurate than GPS in urban locales.
The Sharknado franchise is, somehow, releasing a fifth movie "Sharknado 5: Global Swarming" (groan) next month. In anticipation of the film's release, the company has decided to create an augmented reality mobile game called, prepare yourself, "Sharknado: ShARkmented Reality".
Beware: After a new caucus — the Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Technologies for the 115th Congress — formed in the US House of Representatives, the government has decided to go after all mixed reality head-mounted displays. The HoloLens, Magic Leap — nothing is safe anymore.
Those of us that work with or around augmented and mixed reality have seen a powerful shift in the last year as the popularity and interest have grown in the field. With Microsoft's HoloLens release, the popularity of Pokémon GO, and the constant rumor mill known as Magic Leap, the terms augmented reality and mixed reality have started to become a part of the modern vernacular more and more each passing day.
Could the technology that powers games like Pokémon GO be used for surgery in the near future? Researchers at the University of Maryland think so.
While augmented reality is mostly in the minds of consumers in the form of Pokémon GO, AR has been popular behind the scenes, with AR companies marketing it as a tool to help business operations become more efficient. This business-to-business market is the target of the new app DOTTYAR, which "provides 3D visualization tools for augmented reality viewers."
Apple recently scored a patent (number 9,488,488) to create augmented reality maps, hinting at possible AR integration into the iOS Maps application for iPhone. Does this mean we'll be seeing super visionary projections of places in the app in the near future? Maybe.
Sky Zhou, also know as Matrix Inception on YouTube, is no stranger here on NextReality. We loved his Pokémon concept game for HoloLens, as well as his D3D Keyboard that lets HoloLens users leave notes around the house. He just can't seem to stop creating cool mixed reality apps, and he's already got another one in the works.
Earlier this week, a mysterious tweet appeared on the HTC Twitter account of a picture containing the letter "U" topped with a tiny "for" and the date "01.12.2017" at the bottom. It is a pretty solid teaser, but for a company that has had a solid year with their Vive virtual reality headset, and all of the other technological appendages they have, it seems a bit ominous for them.
When developing for the HoloLens, keeping a constant 60 fps (frames per second) while making things look beautiful is a challenge. Balancing the processing power to display complex models and keeping the frame rate where it needs is just a straight up painful process, but a solution seems to be on the horizon.
Dutch police are using a system very similar to Pokémon GO on smartphones, but they aren't walking around trying to catch little pocket monsters. The purpose of this system is to give augmented reality help to first responders who may be less qualified to work a fresh crime scene. If successful, the idea of a contaminated crime scene could be a thing of the past.
It's already been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions in the augmented reality industry, with WaveOptics and Ubiquity6 among the notable companies acquired. Two of the more active M&A players, Snap and Epic Games, continued their respective buying sprees this week with major deals supporting their AR strategies.
The Metaverse, or AR cloud, has been a sci-fi dream for decades, but only recently have companies begun to actually develop the technology to build it. With its latest funding round, Epic Games is suddenly a front-runner in this pursuit.
The race for the future of AR wearables gained steam this week with several pivotal developments. First, Apple, the subject of numerous reports and rumors regarding its purported AR headset, is reportedly eyeing an in-person unveiling of the device for later this year, rather than introduce it at its upcoming virtual Worldwide Developers Conference, which would usually be as good a time as any to make a big AR hardware announcement.
Snapchat may trail Facebook and Instagram in terms of daily active users, but a new partnership with Samsung may get those innovative AR Lenses onto the mobile devices of a lot more users.
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. At Magic Leap, the lemons are the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lemonade is a new solution for virtual meetings born out of social distancing.
The "what (blank) are you" augmented reality filters on Instagram have become so popular that more and more Hollywood giants are following the augmented reality-powered social media meme train, with the latest example coming via Snapchat.
Magic Leap and Samsung are putting their money where their augmented reality plans are, with the former acquiring an AR collaboration technology and the latter funding a waveguide display maker.
If Google hasn't already demonstrated that it is serious about augmented reality, then it made it abundantly clear at the Google I/O keynote on Tuesday.
Last week at Mobile World Congress 2019, Google put an augmented reality twist on its annual Android Partner Walk via its ARCore toolkit.
If waveguide display maker DigiLens has its way, enterprise businesses and consumers will soon be able to purchase smartglasses for less than $500 — as long as they can supply their own computing and battery power.
Hollywood has already proven that it's on board with augmented reality, with examples ranging from Avengers: Infinity War to Ralph Breaks the Internet. But one startup wants to make the augmented reality content that's being used to promote TV and film entertainment smarter.
Fresh off shipping an augmented reality game for Magic Leap, Resolution Games has farmed another $7.5 million in funding through a Series B round.
The mainstreaming of augmented reality won't happen overnight, but it's becoming increasingly clear that traditional media is leading the charge in the effort to introduce the public to immersive computing. A recent example came from none other than USA Today via its 321 Launch app.
Alongside the usual collection of holiday-themed Lenses, Snapchatters received an extra-special treat from Snapchat over the weekend—a world-spanning Easter egg hunt.
With the Super Bowl just days away, it seems appropriate to draw parallels between football and the professional sport of technology business, or, more specifically, the augmented reality segment.
Prior to Apple's earnings report on Thursday, the storm clouds were gathering as Wall Street prepared for bad news in the wake of reports of slower iPhone sales. But it turns out that those fears were mostly unwarranted. Apple managed to increase iPhone revenue during the December quarter, despite selling slightly fewer phones.
A new survey of game developers paints a somewhat less than rosy future for augmented reality gaming, but there's still some hope for its long-term prospects.
Thanks to Metaverse, it has never been this easy to create your own AR game.
While VR promises to take gamers to another world, AR has the potential to bring the game elements into your own neighborhood or home.
Anyone who knows me well is aware that I am a cyberpunk junkie. The conflict between lowlifes, corporations, and the government, flavored with dystopian future, high technology, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and noir storytelling, just does something for me.
