Augmented Reality

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. Non-fungible tokens, perhaps the hottest segment of the blockchain tech industry at the ...more

The rapid advance of Lens Studio as a platform for easily developing augmented reality experiences is just one indicator that immersive computing is becoming the norm. But one layer above the technology tools are the users, the real stars of any platform. Without passionate u ...more

With the list of available mobile apps for moviegoers constantly expanding and improving, seeing a film at your local theater has never been better. With the right apps for your iPhone or Android phone, you can research movies, find out if showings are sold out, reserve seats, ...more

While Apple and Samsung have started integrating depth sensors into the iPad Pro and Galaxy smartphones, more advanced AR experiences are arriving for standard smartphone cameras on Android devices. Earlier this month, Niantic began rolling out updates for Pokémon GO that add ...more

It feels like just yesterday Apple unveiled iOS 13 to the world, introducing game-changing features like system-wide dark mode and enhanced editing tools in Photos. But WWDC 2020 is rapidly approaching, which means iOS 14 is as well. As it turns out, we don't need to wait for ...more

I have spent a good portion of this year traveling between cities and various emergent technology conferences and events. Most of these events have been really good, but in terms of augmented and mixed reality, the Augmented World Expo, in its eighth year running, definitely s ...more

This week's Game Developers Conference came at just the right time for Magic Leap, a company that was riding a wave of bad news from legal troubles and rumors regarding Magic Leap One. The event was the ideal backdrop for the company to unveil its Creator Portal and SDK, with ...more

During its third-quarter earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that "AR is going to change everything." At Amazon, that change occurred in the form of a new tool that could truly democratize AR development. At Apple, that change looks to manifest itself in how future iPhones ...more

After announcing another massive round of funding to the tune of $502 million, Magic Leap is adding another powerful weapon to its creative arsenal: John Gaeta, the man who helped develop the iconic Bullet Time effect for The Matrix series of films. Gaeta made the announcemen ...more

Augmented and mixed reality experiences attempt to break us out of windowed computing experiences and allow us to place software anywhere in the room. But that software doesn't have to take a rectangular form—theoretically, the web doesn't have to restrict itself to a page in ...more

On Monday, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft revealed two new apps for the HoloLens apps. The apps, Microsoft Remote Assist and Microsoft Layout, will be available to HoloLens customers as a free preview for a limited time starting on May 22. Remote Assist ...more

If you're standing in a foreign city, surrounded by signage in a language you don't understand, you won't suddenly be able to read it. But with a clever feature in Google's Translate app, your smartphone can. The app began as Word Lens, an augmented reality (AR) project by Qu ...more

Users of Epson's smartglasses can now tell their devices to "talk to the hand" when it comes to passwords and authentication. The Moverio BT-300 smartglasses now support PalmID, a biometric authentication platform from Redrock Biometrics, for device unlocking. Using the front ...more

Google, Facebook, and Huawei have made an investment in nurturing the future of augmented and virtual reality through $6 million in contributions to the opening of a new center at the University of Washington. The UW Reality Lab at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science ...more

The US Department of Education has put together a competition called the EdSim Challenge with a $680,000 purse to facilitate next-gen education. The event calls upon augmented and virtual reality, as well as video game developers, to bring immersive simulation concepts to prep ...more

Smartglasses maker Vuzix has emerged with the first hardware powered by the Snapdragon XR1 chip, roughly nine months after Qualcomm introduced the chipset designed to drive augmented reality wearables at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara. On Monday, at the Mobile World ...more

A funny thing happened on the way to the release of the virtual reality epic Ready Player One — augmented reality grabbed a major piece of the spotlight. Specifically, Microsoft's HoloLens. It all started last week when the film's director, Steven Spielberg, was quoted in an ...more

After dipping its toes into the AR cloud arena last year, Ubiquity6 is now jumping in with both feet this year. Late last year, the startup launched Display.land, a social network for sharing and editing 3D digital scans of real-world locations. Now, the company is expanding ...more

While Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat are still working on their first-generation AR wearables, startup North is already preparing to bring its second-generation smartglasses to the world in 2020. On Tuesday, North announced that Focals 2.0, which will feature a lighter, slimme ...more

After opening up its Spark AR platform on Instagram for all creators, Facebook is already expanding the platform's capabilities on its Snapchat killer. On Monday, the company released version 76 of Spark AR Studio, which brings support for two new AR effect options for develo ...more

Facebook and its Oculus subsidiary have been open about their intentions to bring AR wearables into the mainstream for some time now. Nonetheless, when Oculus talked about its AR plans at the Oculus 6 keynote presentation on Wednesday, it still managed to surprise its audienc ...more

Wearables startup North has made a smart move to get its Focals smartglasses into the hands of more consumers. On Wednesday, the company launched a new Focals Showroom iOS app that leverages the TrueDepth FaceID camera on iPhone X, XR, XS, XS Max, 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max s ...more

With Microsoft taking direct aim at enterprises for its HoloLens 2 with a $3,500 price tag, one startup is betting that business will be willing to pony up for glasses-free 3D displays as well. After shipping its Looking Glass Standard (previously called the HoloPlayer One) 8 ...more

Microsoft is adding another important piece to its growing immersive computing arsenal by putting its newest Mixed Reality Capture Studio in the center of the movie business: Hollywood. Following the Mixed Reality Capture Studios in Redmond, Washington, San Francisco, and Lon ...more

If building with Lego blocks in AR appeals to you, rest assured that an app is on the way for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. We were tipped off to Lego's dip into AR development because the software was briefly demoed at the ARKit unveiling at WWDC and at Google's Pixel ...more

More platforms and more tools to make content for those platforms. It seems like the Dev Report —Next Reality's breakdown on the latest information on tools and processes to make augmented reality experiences — is going to be coming out on a much shorter cycle. Microsoft and ...more

When iOS releases in the next few weeks, consumers on both iOS and Android operating systems can expect to see more AR ads in the mobile web browsers thanks to Vertebrae, an advertising platform for immersive media. Next month, Vertebrae will be able to distribute web-based A ...more

We watched the first piece of public-facing content Magic Leap has released so you don't have to, and, well, you didn't miss much. To be fair, the company's new video show, called Magic Leap Live, isn't designed to entertain. Instead, it's meant to educate and inform develope ...more

On Wednesday, Scope AR, makers of Remote AR, the augmented reality video conference calling and remote assistance solution, announced that the app is finally available for HoloLens. Next Reality had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO/CTO of Scope AR, Scott Montgomerie, ...more

If it had come out just a week earlier, around April 1, no one would have believed it. But it's true, Leap Motion has developed its own prototype augmented reality headset, and it looks pretty wild. On Monday, April 9, the company unveiled Project North Star, a device that th ...more

Virtual reality headsets are all the rage these days, and among the menagerie of tech companies gunning for the top spot, there's one mysterious startup that is ahead of the game—Magic Leap—and you can tell just by watching their latest demo video of their product in action. V ...more

Apple just announced its new iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max models. This year, the 15 and 15 Plus models have a lot in common with the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, but there are still some pretty incredible features that the Pro lineup sports that th ...more

With the global COVID-19 pandemic preventing Pokémon GO players from venturing into the real world, developer Niantic has adapted the game for trainers to play in a socially-distanced manner. Likewise, with the annual Pokémon GO Fest, typically an exclusive gathering of playe ...more

With Avatar, Facebook's personalized stickers for use on its social and messaging platforms, those who aren't on Facebook or have otherwise dumped the social network may feel left out. Whatever your reasons for shunning Facebook may be, there are other ways, each with its dis ...more

The camera system on the iPhone has never been better. Apple's iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max sport some of the best shooters on the market. But no level of quality makes up for the fact that shady apps can access your cameras for nefarious reasons. You can take control of ...more

Last December, Google unceremoniously killed off Google Glass Explorer Edition with a final software update, leaving the Glass Enterprise Edition 2 as the only remaining AR wearable from Google. Now, Google is making it easier for enterprise customers and developers to acquir ...more

Google pushed a new kind of augmented reality walking navigation to the mainstream last year, and now startup Phiar is hoping users will use its AR app in the same way for driving navigation. The company is currently inviting the public to sign up for its private beta launch, ...more

We're a few weeks away from the fireworks associated with New Year's celebrations, but that doesn't mean you can't start a little early — in augmented reality. The team at Weta Workshop, recently released a small immersive game called Boosters that they created for a little o ...more

We have seen Kickstarter-launched wearables before, but this one is particularly unique and may even have you blinking a bit in wonder when you see how it functions. Startup GWD Bio-Intelligence has just launched pre-sales for its HiiDii glasses, a device that allows the user ...more

Roughly six months after emerging from stealth, AR cloud company 6D.ai is now ready for public consumption, and it has a big name partner to help it kick off its platform. On Tuesday, the startup gave iOS developers the green light to begin publishing their 6D.ai-assisted app ...more

Although early attempts at consumer smartglasses have employed trackpads and handheld or wearable controllers for user input, its the gesture control interfaces of the HoloLens 2 and the Magic Leap One that represent the future of smartglasses input. A new machine learning mo ...more

The S Pen in the Galaxy Note 10 and 10+ has improved to make remote usage even easier. Controlling your phone with just the stylus is no longer a party trick, as you can now move around and take actions in both first-party and third-party apps. One of the best examples of this ...more

While Magic Leap has remained mostly silent regarding its plans for its Magic Leap One successor, the software team continues to makes strides with improvements to the device's Lumin OS and SDK. In version 0.97 of Lumin OS, arguably the biggest change is the graduation of Map ...more

Last week at Mobile World Congress 2019, Google put an augmented reality twist on its annual Android Partner Walk via its ARCore toolkit. For the uninitiated, the Android Partner Walk is a scavenger hunt for collector's pins hidden through the MWC's exhibition halls. The game ...more

Ten days after Magic Leap declared that it had selected the winners of its Independent Creators Program, the company has officially released an almost full list of grant recipients. For its first round of grants, the company filtered its submission pool of more than 6,500 app ...more

With CES in full swing, it seemed like Magic Leap would have little to announce at the major tech event, but it turns out that one of its partners has weighed in with a rather substantial update regarding the company. On Wednesday, AT&T announced that it would be expanding it ...more

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. On Monday, the company unveiled DigiLens Crystal, a reference ...more

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 researc ...more

Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic has been preparing its flavor of AR cloud, the Niantic Real World Platform, to bring more realistic and interactive augmented reality experiences to mobile apps. And now the company is looking for a few good developers to help execute its ...more

Augmented reality gaming company Niantic Labs is now instigating conflicts between Pokémon GO players, but it's not as bad as it sounds. On Wednesday, Niantic began rolling out the new Trainer Battles player versus player fight mode, starting first with players level 40 and a ...more

The team at Magic Leap just got a millennial-style boost with the announcement that financial news network Cheddar is coming to the Magic Leap One. Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg revealed the news in a surprise tweet early Tuesday morning. Don't Miss: Hands-On with Magic Leap's A ...more

In a move sure to stir up even more speculation about the future of Snap Inc., the company's vice president of content, Nick Bell, is leaving the company after five years. He's just the latest departure from the rapidly dwindling team of veteran executives at Snap. Bell was d ...more

A major obstacle to the mainstream acceptance of smartglasses is the current inability able to smoosh processors, sensors, and batteries into a pair of frames that look cool. Wearables maker Thalmic is hinting that it may have figured it all out. North is Thalmic's consumer s ...more

We've seen all the Magic Leap One glamour shots, and we've even shown you a bit of what it looks like to view augmented reality on the device. But there's something else us super geeks appreciate more than anyone else: the grand unboxing! I met Magic Leap's Enjoy representati ...more

We've spent years waiting to see what all the secretive fuss was about, and now that the device is in our hands, we can finally begin showing you images of what the Magic Leap One experience looks like. This is especially important given the fact that the vast majority of the ...more

The long and slow road toward the actual release of the Magic Leap One appears to be accelerating, with a couple of new demonstrations of how the system works revealed in this week's creator's portal updates along with the company's developer documentation. Following the much ...more

A fresh batch of developer info has been revealed on Magic Leap's Creator Portal. On Thursday evening, the normally secretive company gave the general public perhaps the closest look yet at Magic Leap One's Lumin operating system. The screenshots follow on the heels of the pr ...more

Magic Leap shows up in the weirdest places. Last week, right at the start of World Cup fever, for some reason, the Magic Leap One appeared on a Brazilian television show. Worn by show presenter Tiago Leifert, a popular television host in Brazil, not only do we clearly see the ...more

Earlier this week, we told you about the new DreamGlass augmented reality headset from Dreamworld, a company started by a former Meta executive. The device looks great, and the features sound good, but is it worth your hard-earned cash? I recently took it for a brief spin to f ...more

In iOS 12, Apple included new, Snapchat-like effects and stickers for photos and videos in Messages. While these new options are fun, they're missing something that takes away from the appeal, especially since Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and similar apps already let you do ...more