Less than a month after the worldwide launch of HoloLens 2, call center consultant BellSystem24 has already prepared an augmented reality solution for one of its clients. This week, the company unveiled a call center virtualization solution, developed for coffee machine maker ...more
Folders are great for organizing apps and removing clutter from your home screen. But once they become overfull, it's not as easy to find and launch an app. If you have a jailbroken device, however, there's a tweak that will lessen the hassle of rummaging through folders and m ...more
Augmented reality seems to come into its own in museums, where audiences are ready and willing to try out new immersive tech. Now, that tech-powered palette is about to get a little larger. On Wednesday, the Knight Foundation announced grants that will allow five museums nati ...more
Even if you're totally familiar with all the routes you can take to go home or work, you'll still want to use Google Maps to find the fastest route in current traffic conditions. If you're on Android, there's an extremely fast way to do this. To quickly initiate navigation to ...more
Not long ago, connecting your iPhone to Bluetooth devices was a true pain in the neck. Control Center's AirPlay button made connecting to certain devices much easier, but it was with iOS 13 that Apple finally made connecting to wireless acceessories like AirPods, speakers, and ...more
Apple remains shrouded in mystery while continuing to sweep up small companies ahead of a rumored augmented reality headset launch. On Friday, Apple confirmed the acquisition of a UK-based firm called iKinema, which specializes in 3D motion captures of human figures. Don't M ...more
Augmented reality as a storytelling medium can do some extraordinary things words and images alone can't convey -- such as transporting readers 400 years into the past. On Thursday, to recognize the 400 year anniversary of the first African slaves arriving in North America, U ...more
Video may have killed the radio star, but will volumetric capture and augmented reality kill the video star? London-based rapper Tino Kamal recently released a music video for his single "V.I.P." that features volumetric video filmed with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture techn ...more
It appears that the floodgates of consumer-grade augmented reality smartglasses from China are now open, with Mad Gaze being the latest company to rush its product through. The Hong Kong-based wearables maker posted a trio of new videos on Thursday featuring its Glow new smar ...more
The mobile augmented reality war for dominance between Apple and its Asia-based rivals is in full effect. On Wednesday, Samsung continued the pattern it established with the Galaxy S10 4G smartphone by adding adding a depth-sensing camera to the new Galaxy Note 10+, which giv ...more
After building a tech empire on revenues from search advertising, Google is not about to sit back and let Snapchat, Facebook, 8th Wall, and others draw all the AR marketing attention to their platforms. This week, at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (basi ...more
After Apple unveiled ARKit 3 at WWDC on Monday, Unity Technologies wasted little time on ensuring its developers can take advantage of it. Earlier this week, Unity announced that AR Foundation, its cross-platform framework for building AR mobile apps that are compatible with ...more
New York-based virtual content startup Sketchfab is usually at the forefront of the latest developments in augmented reality, so it's no surprise that the company has locked in yet another major platform. Magic Leap has announced that Sketchfab is its first WebXR partner (a f ...more
Many tech insiders are waiting for augmented reality to go mainstream, but if you look around hard enough, you'll find that it's already gone as mainstream as possible, thanks to talk show host Ellen Degeneres. Degeneres and her partner, actor Portia de Rossi, recently teamed ...more
Arthur van Hoff, former CTO and co-founder of Jaunt, is taking his immersive content talents to Cupertino. As Variety reports, van Hoff began working at Apple as a senior architect this month, after ending a handful of technical advisor commitments listed on his Linkedin prof ...more
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. On Thursday, the medical software company unveiled AnatomyX, an enterprise-level augmented reality platform for the Hol ...more
We last saw China-based augmented and virtual reality headset maker Shadow Technologies at last year's Augmented World Expo, where they had the Action One, one of the wildest augmented reality headsets we've seen, on display. This week, the company re-emerged with Shadow Air, ...more
With plans to compete with Niantic and other augmented reality game developers, game developer WarDucks has closed a $3.8 million funding round. According to Venture Beat, EQT Ventures led the round, with Suir Valley Ventures and other investors also participating. The fundi ...more
Location services provider Mapbox is expanding the reach of its augmented reality development capabilities to include apps for automobiles as well as smartphone navigation. On Thursday, Mapbox announced a trio of new features for its Vision SDK, which will soon be available t ...more
It looks like it's cuffing season for AR hardware makers and telecommunications corporations. With AT&T aligned with Magic Leap as its exclusive wireless retailer on the high-end AR side, Verizon has also reached a master reseller agreement with Vuzix, according to a filing w ...more
The augmented reality industry has an insatiable lust for 3D content, which makes an investment of $48 million into Matterport a no-brainer for investors. This week, the 3D content capture company confirmed the investment via Twitter, stating that it had closed the funding ro ...more
We're still weeks away from a probably HoloLens 2 release, but Microsoft's immersive computing team is still hard at work on other aspects of its "mixed reality" ecosystem. Earlier this week, Microsoft published a new extension for Unity and the Mixed Reality Tookit that enab ...more
You open the App Store to see a huge red number hovering over your profile icon. There's a ton of updates to install, so you tap "Update All." But wait! You needed to check Instagram or send a reply to a timely WhatsApp message, but those apps are now stuck waiting for others ...more
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. Last week, Shackleton Whisky launched an augmented real ...more
While the betting lines on iPhones with depth-sensing, rear-facing cameras in 2019 have already been established, a new report adds some certainty to the notion that the iPhone will get new AR superpowers later this year. Citing anonymous sources familiar with the company's p ...more
Despite less than glowing reviews from critics, the latest installment from the Harry Potter spinoff movie series, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, is winning at the box office. Now, to help build on its holiday momentum, the film is getting another promotional as ...more
Owners of Google Pixel devices now have a plethora of imaginary friends to play with thanks to the Playground augmented reality app. The app, a rebrand of the AR Stickers app, launched as an exclusive app for the Google Pixel 3 and 3XL handsets in October. On Wednesday, Googl ...more
The New York Times has made a habit of publishing augmented reality stories throughout 2018, and now the media giant's magazine is getting into the act, too. As a tie-in to its annual "Great Performers" issue, which recognizes the top thespians of the year in the eyes of Time ...more
In recent years, many software publishers have tried to sell the business community on remote meetings via VR, but if social media chatter is any indication, it hasn't taken off in a big way just yet. However, for some, the notion of holding remote meetings using augmented rea ...more
Occipital's initial augmented reality module, the Structure Sensor, gave iPhones and iPads the depth-sensing abilities of the HoloLens. Now, the company's latest product promises to do the same for Android devices, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality headsets and ...more
While a new museum to house the original torch of the Statue of Liberty is under construction on Liberty Island and scheduled to open in May 2019, New York Times readers can now view the sculpture in their own space through augmented reality. Available in the NY Times mobile ...more
After publishing two batches of videos from its L.E.A.P. developer conference, Magic Leap has made the session on Seedling from Insomniac Games available to the public. Featuring Joel Bartley, lead gameplay programmer for Insomniac Games, and Michael Liebenow, lead software e ...more
Over the years, Magic Leap's long-cultivated shroud of mystery led some onlookers to buy into the company's dream before even trying the device, while for others, the secrecy seems to have stoked the kind of resentment and overcorrecting critique usually reserved for the might ...more
While many of the latest content partnerships announced by Magic Leap appear to lean towards entertainment and gaming, a new partnership with medical technology provider Brainlab has Magic Leap getting down to more serious business. The companies have arrived at an exclusive ...more
The iPhone XR has touched down alongside the XS and XS Max, and it utilizes tried and tested materials found on the iPhone 8, while being molded in the same vein as the iPhone X. The budget-friendlier flagship comes with its own set of design elements to set it apart from its ...more
You want whales? Ok, you'll get whales! That seems to be the unspoken message from Magic Leap via its latest update in the form of several new experiments posted inside its Helio app. Years ago, Magic Leap stoked its early hype by showing off an image of a massive augmented r ...more
While numerous examples exist of hospitals deploying the HoloLens to assist doctors, surgeons, medical professionals, and students while treating patients, California's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford is actually using the augmented reality headset to improve the p ...more
Despite the rise of music streaming, the experience of immersing oneself in the artwork and lyrics of old school albums is alive again, as sales of vinyl records and CDs have outpaced digital downloads for the first time since 2011. Now, the latest album from Amsterdam-based N ...more
With all the hype around Magic Leap's recent launch, it's easy to forget that augmented reality hardware is still very much in its infancy. While we marvel at what is available now, researchers are still finding ways to design and produce more sophisticated components for next ...more
Now that the cat's out of the bag, Magic Leap has published videos of a pair of apps that will be available to Magic Leap One early adopters. Alongside the core apps, Magic Leap will make Create and Tónandi, developed in-house with early-access partners, available at launch. ...more
If you find yourself on the run from the Empire, you no longer need a droid to send a holographic distress message, you just need an iPhone X and the HoloBack app. Now available in the App Store, HoloBack uses the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X to create instant 3D imagery ...more
Now even muggles can see how they'd look chasing the Golden Snitch on a Nimbus 2000. That's because Snapchat is gifting Harry Potter fans with a 3D Bitmoji Lens that adorns their digital doppelgängers in the robes of the houses of Hogwarts. To cast this AR spell with your Sn ...more
Among a treasure trove of new developer information on the Lumin OS that Magic Leap recently published on its Creator Portal appears to be the official confirmation of the Magic Leap Mobile Companion App. The app was alluded to in job postings previously reported by Next Real ...more
One of the more compelling human interest stories of the summer has been the plight of the Thai Wild Boars soccer team, who were trapped in a cave for weeks. To show just how perilous the largely unchartered cave was, The New York Times has transported its readers into an aug ...more
The old school staple of many US homes with children, the remote control race track, has been given new life in augmented reality thanks to the Room Racer app for iPhones and iPads. Using ARKit, the app places a miniature race track on a floor or tabletop. The game includes n ...more
With the opening round of Wimbledon, one of professional tennis's four major tournaments, beginning on Monday, Snapchat is serving up an augmented reality tennis mini-game. The game challenges worldwide users and their 3D Bitmoji avatars to take on the digital doppelganger of ...more
Voice-activated digital assistants from Amazon, Apple, and Google currently have the upper hand for home automation integrations, but a new augmented reality mobile app promises to give homeowners and renters visual control over their connected appliances. Smart AR Home, avai ...more
The spirit of Google's Tango augmented reality platform lives on at Vivo, a China-based company that has developed its own 3D sensor for mobile devices. Presented during this week's Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, the smartphone maker revealed its new the time-of-flight (T ...more
Magic Leap just did something it didn't do during its recent Twitch hardware demo: show us some new demo footage of what augmented reality really looks like through the Magic Leap One. During this week's Unite Berlin conference, an event dedicated to Unity developers, Magic L ...more
The addition of a new research mode for Microsoft HoloLens will enable researchers and developers to tap into a wider range of data collected by the device's sensors. Available in the Windows 10 RS4 update for HoloLens, application code in Research Mode can access computer vi ...more
Looking to inject a little more processing juice into your HoloLens? Unity can fix you up with the Standalone Universal Windows Platform Holographic Emulation. While its name appears to have skipped the marketing department in the decision-making process, the tool enables dev ...more
Apple's lead marketing tool for the iPhone X, 3D Animoji that you control with your facial and head movements, are once again in the spotlight in a new commercial the company posted on its Korean YouTube account this week. In conjunction with the release of a new single from ...more
Location services company Mapbox has added new capabilities to its location-based gaming tool to fend off Google's challenge for the same mobile app category. With version 1.4.2 of its Maps SDK for Unity, Mapbox has made it easier for developers to target real-world points of ...more
When it comes to augmented reality apps, visually immersive experiences are plentiful, but audio experiences are somewhat underrepresented. A new app for iPhones and iPads seeks to shift the AR paradigm toward the latter. Now available via the App Store, the Fields app create ...more
It's not an official app, but for fans of Rick and Morty, it's a welcome piece of the series' universe until the recently renewed animated show returns to Adult Swim. Created by New York-based filmmaker Gabe Jacobs, the short experience is designed to be viewed via Snapchat a ...more
Like Marvel's Avengers, Facebook's Camera AR platform now has a number of new AR superpowers at its disposal, so it is fitting that Earth's Mightiest Heroes have the distinction of displaying them. Available now in via Facebook on iOS and Android, the Avengers: Infinity War A ...more
As if its users weren't already having enough fun with dancing hot dogs and face effects, Snapchat is upping the ante with a new kind of shared augmented reality content. Called Snappables, the interactive Lenses include games that users can play with facial expressions and h ...more
HTC is entering the augmented reality market through the back door by giving developers access to the stereo front-facing cameras on the Vive and Vive Pro VR headsets. The company announced on Wednesday, April 11, an update to the OpenVR camera API that will enable developers ...more
French automaker Renault is tapping into the promotional machine for Solo: A Star Wars Movie by deploying an AR experience through Shazam that's triggered via synergistic advertising. To access the experience, users scan the Shazam code embedded on bus stop advertisements in ...more
Magic Leap loves to stoke mystery around its still unreleased product, the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition, and now we've found yet another piece of the puzzle in the form of an Easter egg on the company's website. When you hit one of Magic Leap's 404 error pages, you see a s ...more