Augmented Reality

If you've been to the doctor enough, you know that the medical staff can make a variety of mistakes from time to time. They're human and that's normal, but errors in the medical field can often have significant negative impacts. At Boston's 2016 HoloHacks event, a team of deve ...more

The Microsoft HoloLens has a good amount of content available, but it's fairly limited in terms of what you can customize. You can access a built-in library of holograms, but if you want to create your own you have to do that with code. Developer Jasper Brekelmans decided to ...more

Augmented and mixed reality developer Arvizio is working on a suite of software solutions for enterprises that will extend HoloLens capabilities as a full-fledged collaboration and conferencing tool. The company will demonstrate its Mixed Reality Studio suite to attendees at t ...more

Many new developers are diving right into the Microsoft HoloLens, but augmented and mixed reality are fairly big subjects in terms of learning. There's a lot to cover and, unfortunately, very few places for someone brand new to Windows Holographic to begin lessons. Daily—and ...more

If you've seen, heard, or even tried the latest virtual reality headsets, you've probably heard about something called "room scale." It's why the HTC Vive suddenly usurped the reign of the Oculus Rift while no one was looking, and it's exactly where Oculus hopes to catch up. H ...more

Tricking your eyes into seeing 3D images isn't all that hard in movies or even in virtual reality, but when you start projecting holograms into the physical world, you run into some difficult problems. Microsoft obviously figured them out with their HoloLens, but how? The proc ...more

Location services provider Mapbox is giving developers a means for building location-based AR apps and multi-user experiences with its new Mapbox AR toolkit. Mapbox AR provides developers with 125 million locations, business information from Foursquare and Factual, and live l ...more

With its new Sponsored Lens debuting on Snapchat on Friday, McDonald's is attempting to give potential customers a virtual pick-me-up. The promotion features a 3D Bitmoji, an animated avatar crafted in the user's likeness. That character sneaks a slurp from the super-sized vi ...more

A developer has previewed a pair of potential applications built on ARKit that can be triggered by Alexa, the resident voice assistant of the Amazon Echo. The demos come courtesy Scott Finkelstein, manager of web technologies at Adelphi University. In the first video, Finkels ...more

In a video released Tuesday, Microsoft arguably began to position the HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality as the future of education. A smart tactic meant to coincide with their other education-related announcements made on the same day. In an effort to take back the classroom ...more

The Easter Bunny is about to get his first experience with mixed reality. Virtual Reality Los Angeles (VRLA) will host its third annual expo in April, and this year's attendees will get to experience a fun Easter egg hunt sponsored by AfterNow and VRLA, in partnership with mix ...more

Our brains do a magnificent amount of work to process visual stimuli, but they aren't difficult to fool. Optical illusions can trick our minds into believing what we're seeing is real, even if it's not—and virtual and mixed reality technologies take advantage of this little lo ...more

Eventually, even the most private company has to file its patents and unveil its tightly-held secrets, and Magic Leap is no exception. The US Patent and Trademark Office recently published a treasure trove of Magic Leap patent applications that appear to provide more details ...more

If DroneBase's new AR platform inspires even half the creativity among its users as Minecraft did with its community, then drone pilots are about to enjoy acres of blocky worlds to explore among the clouds. That new platform is called AirCraft, and it's available as a beta fe ...more

Avegant Corporation has begun shipping display development kits based on its light field technology that other companies can use in their augmented and mixed reality devices. The light field displays are capable of multiple focal planes, which give virtual objects a realistic ...more

Lowe's Home Improvement has been an early adopter of augmented and virtual reality in their business practices, so it was a bit of surprise that their name was absent from the ranks of companies launching ARKit apps last week. The retailer has returned order to the universe w ...more

Germany-based Pupil Labs has jumped into the UX and control deep-end with a range of products that allow the user to add eye tracking to not only their existing augmented and virtual reality head-mounted displays but computers as well. This type of technology can add a new dep ...more

Alright, fellow HoloLens code wranglers, load up your word processor because it's time to spruce up your résumés. According to a report by Variety, Netflix is looking to hire a new Senior Software Engineer — and Windows and HoloLens were mentioned as an end point. Netflix is ...more

Forget 3D movies. Warner Bros.' newest patent shows off designs for a mixed reality movie-going experience that will leave other theater-going experiences in the dust ... all in the comfort of your own home. Patently Apple discovered the patent application, which was publishe ...more

A new contender has entered the mixed reality ring. San Fransisco-based Occipital has just released an "Explorer Edition" of Bridge—an iPhone-based mixed and virtual reality headset that uses their popular Structure Sensor. At a fraction of the cost of a HoloLens developers ki ...more

We've highlighted the projects of Wavelength Studios a few times over recent months for their work in the augmented and mixed reality space. Since receiving their HoloLens headsets, they've been hard at work on both development community projects as well as efforts for clients ...more

While Leap Motion and Microsoft are looking to capture natural human motion with cameras, Enflux figured out how to do it with a shirt and pants that feel completely natural. Video: . Everyone's trying to figure out the best way to interact with virtual environments now that s ...more

Mixed reality can give you the feeling that you've uncovered a hidden world layered into the physical one you already know. This can happen in so many ways, from a trading card that births a hologram or a first-person shooter with robots blasting through your walls. Xperiel—a ...more

Empea Berlin, a Germany-based company specializing in augmented, mixed, and virtual reality software, released a Facebook video a few months back showing off their experiments in smart home technology. Using a Raspberry Pi and a HoloLens unit, they were able to make a virtual ...more

What happens when a entrepeneur/theme park creator and special effects artist/magician team up? You get a team crazy enough to create the first true virtual reality theme park (sorry, Six Flags). They only have a single experience so far, but it's already taken a giant leap be ...more

Luden.io just revealed more details about their mobile game "AR Tribe," made using Apple's ARKit. The company has previously focused on VR games such as InMind 2 and VRobot. This is the company's first attempt at AR, and it looks like it's going to be pretty cool. AR Tribe al ...more

Later this week, Black Friday will mark the start to the holiday shopping season, but if you're buying for a Magic Leap One owner, you can buy their ideal gift now. On Monday, Sennheiser fulfilled the September announcement of its partnership with Magic Leap with the release ...more

Last week, I tried out StackAR, a puzzle app updated to support ARKit where the AR features felt mostly unnecessary. On the other hand, PuzzlAR: World Tour, available on the App Store for $2.99, demonstrates how a puzzle game should be played in AR. The objective of the game ...more

Mixed reality developer Arvizio has updated its MR Studio software suite to integrate processing of 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds. The new capability makes the enterprise collaboration software for Microsoft HoloLens an attractive solution for architectu ...more

Today in Santa Clara, California, at the Augmented World Expo, Scope AR revealed a major new update that will add markerless tracking for their remote assistance application, Remote AR, on standard devices. This update, powered by real-time image tracking solution Wikitude, p ...more

The Augmented World Expo (AWE) is upon us, and that means it's time to get excited about all the awesome next reality things to come. AWE is the world's largest AR and VR conference, and this year the event is dedicated to "Superpowers to Change the World." Pretty cool to thi ...more

In a press event this past week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, Unity Labs, the experimental and forward thinking arm of Unity, announced an upcoming toolset for developers in the augmented, mixed, and virtual reality space called the XR Foundat ...more

With the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco just a few weeks away, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Vlad Kolesnikov has announced via Channel9 (Microsoft's developer news outlet) that not only will new low-cost virtual reality headsets be coming in March to deve ...more

Today at the Unite '16 conference in Los Angeles, Unity's Timoni West and Amir Ebrahimi showed off its new virtual reality authoring and world editor, EditorVR, using the HTC Vive. Coming in December to Unity is a version of its editor that works inside a VR headset, which wil ...more

Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its re:INVENT developers expo with a bang by launching Amazon Sumerian, a new tool that could become the dominant platform for building cross-platform augmented and virtual reality applications. Available now as a preview, Amazon Sumerian is a ...more

To the best of my recollection, Fruit Ninja was one of the first touchscreen games that appeared to really take advantage of the new paradigm of user input, turning the player's finger into a produce-slicing katana. At first blush, the latest title from Halfbrick Studios, mak ...more

Verto Studio 3D is a 3D modeling package that has been in the works for a while now by Michael Farrell, the owner of Verto Studio LLC. Farrell has been working toward bridging the gap between XR 3D modeling and what we have become accustomed to with desktop 3D modeling package ...more

Perhaps in tribute to the season premiere of Game of Thrones, Google Glass is demonstrating that what is dead may never die, as Alphabet's X (formerly Googlex) has revealed that the Enterprise Edition of the smart glasses are now available to businesses. Two years ago, the te ...more

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 bet ...more

We know your time is valuable to you, so starting this week — and continuing every Wednesday — we are going to release weekly Dev Reports that quickly highlight important news and updates that augmented and mixed reality developers should know about. The goal here is to creat ...more

Asobo Studios, one of the first companies to partner with Microsoft on HoloLens development, is applying their expertise towards building applications for various business verticals through their internal HoloForge Interactive team. Their latest proof of concept is a holograp ...more

Early this morning, Unity held their keynote at GDC 2017 in the InterContinental San Francisco hotel. During the event, they talked about their upcoming roadmap and many changes that are coming down the pipe. This list included the lighting explorer, progressive lightmapper, t ...more

For photographers, the "plus" in the iPhone Plus models used to mean optical image stabilization, but now that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus both have OIS on board, that "plus" has moved onto something else—the dual-lens camera. Actually, the new dual-lens setup on the iPhone ...more

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. The best example of this new pastime being en ...more

With a new installment of the Saw horror series opening in theaters nationwide this weekend, Lionsgate is betting its ad dollars on immersive advertising to sell tickets. Using Vertebrae's recently-launched AR mobile web ad platform, the ads for Jigsaw will be served as displ ...more

Though the Microsoft HoloLens' release to the consumer market is still a distant thought at the moment, Ubisoft is preparing for the future with the unveiling of AR video game prototypes. The French video game publisher revealed the AR prototypes at a talk called 'AR Prototyp ...more

Instagram just added another nail in the coffin for Snapchat. It looks like it's the AR platforms final hurrah as IG has snapped up the app's last good feature: its AR selfie filters. Instagram just combined all the good about Snapchat into one platform eliminating the former ...more

According to Alex Kipman, HoloLens inventor and futurist at Microsoft, the smartphone is already obsolete. In an interview with Bloomberg, Kipman boldly stated that the HoloLens will eventually replace the smartphone and drive society right into a new augmented normal. Kipman ...more

The Snapdragon 820 and 821 were met with praise last year, receiving almost no complaints compared to their overheating predecessor, the Snapdragon 810. But now, all eyes are on Qualcomm to see what goodies they have in store for us this year, as their new SoC, the Snapdragon ...more

If you've ever been inspired to try out 3D modeling after enjoying computer-generated imagery in video games and movies, chances are you've checked out an paid applications like 3ds Max (previously called 3D Studio Max), or even free ones like Blender, then just went "No Way! ...more

Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz doesn't engage in tweetstorms often, but when he does, those tweets are bold, exceedingly confident, and there's usually a strong takeaway regarding what the company is or isn't doing. But on Thursday, Abovitz's latest tweetstorm sent an unusually f ...more

UPDATED 5/4/17: SI has stated that they won't be augmenting its Swimsuit Edition. Although, this could be a sign that the company may do so in the future. If they already have all the tech set up for the latest feature, then they are already half way ready to augment other SI ...more

In this episode of Have You Seen This?, we will look at Oriental Museum by 247 Technology Limited, a free application in the Windows Store for HoloLens. Museum exhibits seem to be a popular theme amongst the demonstrations going up, so let's see how this one looks. Oriental M ...more

If you've been following NextReality, you've surely seen me around, or at least have seen my articles. My name is Jason Odom, aka Subere23, and it's about time for a formal introduction. My background primarily falls in the computer game industry, and I have co-owned a small ...more

It finally happened! In a world of "go big or go home," Magic Leap has finally done something other than tease us with vague promises and rendered video concepts. Although, other than actually showing us what the developer's kit will look like, it seems little more than a slig ...more

If the rumors are right, Microsoft has decided to cancel the second version of the HoloLens, and they will instead move onto version three of their mixed reality headset. In the latest report, Thurrott's Brad Sams states that the expected release date of this new Windows Holog ...more