Snapchat

Amazon Web Services is calling up an age-old tactic of the tech industry — the hackathon — to drum up excitement and encourage the development of apps built on the Amazon Sumerian AR/VR platform. The company will hand out more than $100,000 in prizes as part of the Amazon Sum ...more

If there's any lingering uncertainty as to the mainstream viability of augmented reality, a list of the top mobile apps and games of 2019 serves to dispell those doubts. Of the top 10 most downloaded apps of 2019 according to app analytics service App Annie, six include augme ...more

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 r ...more

The year 2018 was a rough one for Snap, the company behind the Snapchat app and the Spectacles wearable camera device. From executive departures to reports of slowed user growth, the company that once spurned Facebook's multibillion-dollar advances is now facing a moment of tr ...more

When filtered through the prism of the top stories of the year, the business of augmented reality 2019 was defined as much by epic failures of AR startups as it was by the promising developments that propelled the industry forward into 2020. On the dark side of the spectrum, ...more

For those about to rock, Live Nation salutes you, now with augmented reality. This week, at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival of Creativity in France, the live entertainment giant unveiled a suite of AR experiences that music festivals and their sponsors will be able to d ...more

At its height, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many auto showrooms to close their doors. As the pandemic persists, many consumers are still hesitant to let their socially distanced guard down. To solve this dilemma for its dealers in the UK, BMW has launched a web-based AR exper ...more

To create a destination for coffee connoisseurs, Starbucks has ordered up a venti cup of augmented reality to make the visit more interactive. The company's new Reserve Roastery in Shanghai, the second such location of its kind in the world, will be the first Starbucks locati ...more

Google dropped new features for its Pixel lineup of phones, and there's something here for everyone. With the launch of Android 12, Google gave its smartphones (Pixel 3 and newer) a handful of exclusive features that Android phones from other manufacturers don't have. Example ...more

In recent months, the Magic Leap One has frequently tied promotions to groundbreaking entertainment properties, but the latest may be the startup's biggest coup yet. On Wednesday, HBO announced an upcoming Magic Leap One experience that will allow fans to experience the world ...more

Lego has shipped several apps and products that add an augmented reality dimension to their playsets. But it has taken a reality TV show from Fox to allow brick fans to build with virtual bricks in augmented reality. Just in time for National Lego Day on Tuesday, the Disney s ...more

The Daily Prophet, the enchanted newspaper from Harry Potter lore, is no longer the sole source for magical moving printed photos. On Tuesday, Lifeprint Products Inc. unveiled the official Harry Potter Magic Photo and Video Printer as the latest edition in its line-up of conn ...more

While you were busy browsing Instagram, composing tweets, or chasing Snapchat updates, an eight-year-old ARKit developer was hard at work on her first step toward taking over the tech world via augmented reality. A new app called A.R.tist, created by Nova Fleming, allows user ...more

Two years ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the F8 Developers Conference keynote with augmented reality and the introduction of Facebook's AR camera platform, now known as Spark AR. Since then, Facebook has faced an avalanche of controversy on its appro ...more

Many native New Yorkers, like myself, get a chance to visit the famed Statue of Liberty during school trips when they're a child in grade school. And if you're not lucky enough to be born in the city, you have to make a special trip to the monument as a tourist. Alas, many ca ...more

Just as Apple, Snapchat, and other tech giants are working on augmented reality wearables in the race to replace smartphones for the future of mobile computing, so is Samsung. However, Samsung is actually betting on a few different horses in this race. One of those recent be ...more

From Farmville to selling a company to Google, Amitt Mahajan has been through the startup ringer. Now, as managing partner with Presence Capital, he's funding the future of augmented and mixed reality. With interest in 3D graphics, Mahajan started his career working on game e ...more

Snapchat parent company Snap credits its popular augmented reality experiences and its flourishing Lens Studio creator community to its user growth throughout the year. So it makes sense that the company would add some new tools to Lens Studio as 2019 enters the home stretch ...more

While there is a lot to be excited about when it comes to iOS 12 in general, iPhone X users will not just get the same new features and tweaks that all other iPhones will get — they'll get a few unique ones that will make the device even more desirable to those who don't have ...more

When Treasury Wine Estates released 19 Crimes Snoop Cali Red this summer, named for its new partner in wine, rapper Snoop Dogg, it already came with the brand's signature AR-enhanced label. Now, with an assist from creative studio Tactic and the web-based AR platform from 8th ...more

Apparently, Amazon's new year's resolution is to bulk up its fitness fashion sales by pumping up its augmented reality muscles. Last November, Amazon updated its iPhone and iPad apps with ARKit to display a limited selection of furniture, home decor, electronics, and toys in ...more

Apple has yet to create a successful social networking app, but that doesn't mean they want to be left out of the social video conversation. Case in point: Today they announced a new video app set to debut for iOS in April called Clips. Clips is separate from the core Camera ...more

Apple just released the fourth public beta for iOS 14 today, Thursday, Aug. 6. This update comes two days after the company released iOS 14 developer beta 4, 15 days after Apple seeded developers the third dev beta, and two weeks after the release of public beta 3. Apple rele ...more

Help me, George Clooney. You're my only hope. If that mash-up of cultural references doesn't make sense, it will momentarily. To promote The Midnight Sky, the new film starring George Clooney and dropping via Netflix on December 23 (Happy Festivus), the streaming studio is la ...more

Augmented reality is becoming a slam dunk for sports entertainment, as leagues, their teams, and their broadcast partners have been quick to adopt AR. This obsession with the immersive space is particularly true when it comes to the NBA. The league itself has produced AR apps ...more

The Stories feature on Instagram has a pretty great editing program, and it's one that I think is extremely undervalued. Instagram Stories goes beyond just its Snapchat-like features, but also allows you to create more creative and original content to post on your actual profi ...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

Amazon has joined the ranks of film and TV studios using the power of augmented reality to engage fans looking to go behind passive screen viewing. To that end, Amazon has quietly launched the Amazon AR Player app. Don't Miss: Snapchat Gives John Wick Fans the Tools to Build ...more

The NFT space is moving so fast that if you're not already engaged, you've probably already missed several history-making events. One of those events happened this week with the sale of Mars House, a virtual home that sold for over $500,000, which is more than many real-world ...more

The business of enabling the development of augmented reality experiences appears to be as lucrative as AR app development itself. Apple is already reaping the rewards for its own AR toolkit, with more than 13 million installs of ARKit apps in the six months since its launch. ...more

While Snapchat augmented reality often embraces pop stars like Drake and Ariana Grande, a couple of bands from the louder side of the music industry have found a home with Facebook. First, Slipknot has published an AR experience via Facebook's Spark AR platform to promote the ...more

A recent update to Facebook's News Feed could significantly broaden its reach when it comes to delivering augmented reality content. In a post on its developer's blog on Tuesday, the company announced that it has adopted the industry-standard gITF 2.0 format for 3D posts on i ...more

While a viable version of consumer-grade smartglasses has yet to find mainstream success, two more contenders emerged this week, as Vuzix confirmed that a leak of a fashion-forward design is legitmate and Vivo introduced tethered smartglasses designed to pair with its new 5G s ...more

The remake of the Warner Bros. classic animation meets live-action movie Space Jam, this time starring LeBron James instead of Michael Jordan, hits theaters today. And while bringing Bugs Bunny into your real world surroundings is still Hollywood fantasy, thanks to augmented ...more

The new WandaVision series is perhaps the hottest TV show on the Disney Plus streaming service since...well, its own The Mandalorian wrapped up its second season late last year. Now, after publishing AR experiences in partnership with Google to promote the latter, Disney has ...more

Bus stops can provide shelter in the event of rain, and now they also protect you from augmented reality squid. Surprising recent commuters at bus stops in Los Angeles and New York, outdoor media company Outfront Media used the cover of night to add Watchmen-inspired augmente ...more

Another branding team has stepped up to the bar to order a tall glass of augmented reality for its marketing campaign, this time through a mobile app for Rémy Martin VSOP Limited Edition cognac. Available in the App Store, the ARt by Rémy Martin app displays AR versions of th ...more

Now that iOS 13 is in the wild, developers are starting to show off the magical augmented reality powers ARKit 3 can deliver. One shining example comes via the new Meisai AR Filter app, developed by Japan's Kitasenju Design, which is capable of producing visual illusions that ...more

Next to millennials, one of the groups most coveted by brand marketers is "Generation Z," the consumers of tomorrow who were born between 1996 and 2010. On Monday, Facebook established a beachhead with that demographic in the realm of augmented reality by launching Facebook Me ...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

During his opening address on April 18 at F8, Facebook's developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched the company's augmented reality platform centered on artificial intelligence-powered cameras. The new AR platform will allow developers to display information, add digi ...more

For social media platforms like Facebook, augmented reality represents a whole new art form with which users can express themselves online. Now, Facebook is giving those users a new brush. A new AR painting tool for Facebook Camera, which began rolling out to users on Monday, ...more

While Gucci is among the most recognizable brands in fashion, you would be excused for not realizing that the company makes sneakers as well. Yet, here we are, with Gucci adding an augmented reality try-on camera tool to its iOS mobile app, available now via the App Store, fo ...more

It takes confidence and guts to pull off attractive and yet adequately frightening Halloween makeup as an adult. But rest assured, Perfect Corp's makeup try-on app YouCam has published a new face filter that it crowns the "spookiest, most glam and ghoulish" of all the makeup ...more

The Halloween season is the perfect time for telling scary stories, but augmented reality is here to bring the tradition of frightening children to the modern age. On Thursday, app developer Within released "Willowcrest Manor," the sixth story for its Wonderscope mobile AR ap ...more

If there's one company that is a fan of the TrueDepth camera on Apple's iPhone X devices, it's the popular eyeglasses retailer Warby Parker. Last year, the company introduced the ability to measure customers' faces using the depth-sensing front-facing sensor on the original i ...more

Over the weekend at IFA 2017 in Berlin, Huawei introduced the Kirin 970 processor, the first of its kind to include artificial intelligence baked into the chip. Instead of hosting AI in the cloud, the Kirin 970 has an integrated neural network processing unit (NPU) for proces ...more

The development of virtual reality at Facebook has been evolving lightspeed in the last few years. But while a relatively small group of VR enthusiasts and gamers are enjoying the social media giant's dedication to immersive headsets, it is the augmented reality space and its ...more

The Broadway musical War Paint is teaming with augmented reality cosmetics app YouCam Makeup to promote the show on iOS and Android devices. The musical, which centers on the famous rivalry between Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, two cosmetics industry pioneers, has bee ...more

The promotions around last week's release of Stranger Things 3 have been numerous, with Netflix at one point even taking over an entire baseball field via augmented reality. Don't Miss: YouTube App Lets You Put Yourself in the World of 'Stranger Things 3' via Augmented Realit ...more

Lately, any subject in the realm of politics is a figurative powderkeg primed to explode on the nearest social media channel. Now, one app wants to use your iPhone and AR to strike a match. Released on Tuesday on the App Store, fuse.it gives users the ability place augmented ...more

Augmented reality platform maker Zappar and its marker-based augmented reality technology have been around well before Apple and Google brought markerless AR to mobile apps. But, as the saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them. On Thursday, Zappar unveiled ZapWorks Stud ...more

Sure, it's the giving season, but sometimes you've just got to treat yourself to some cosmetics. If you're shopping at Walmart, L'Oreal just made that a shade easier when shopping for Garnier hair color products with an assist from Google Lens and the Modiface AR platform. D ...more

While they don't do augmented reality just yet, the latest styles of Snapchat's Spectacles 2 camera glasses serve as a peek into the future of how mainstream AR wearables may look. On Wednesday, the company unveiled two new styles, Nico and Veronica, that expand its Spectacle ...more

The entire wireless industry is working overtime to convince the world that 5G, and the higher prices associated with the faster speeds it affords, will not only be worth it but will deliver never-before-seen wonders. But few companies have produced such a stunningly well-done ...more

The newly enhanced focus from Magic Leap on enterprise, announced on Tuesday, also came with a few companies opting to weigh in with their experiences developing for the platform. One of those companies is Obsess, an app that allows Magic Leap users to create customized immer ...more

Two companies armed with web-based augmented reality tools, Vertebrae and Shopify, are ready to help online retailers boost their sales. It takes some real backbone to wear certain styles of hats in public, so it is fitting that Tenth Street Hats partnered with Vertebrae to i ...more

The hype around augmented reality has risen to a fever pitch over the past two years, and if this week's selection of business news stories are any indication, the din is about to get down right deafening. That's because the Microsoft's follow-up to the original HoloLens is a ...more

If we're being honest, very few people go on Tinder to fall in love with someone's personality. Oftentimes, the only reason they'll look at your bio is to make sure there are no red flags. Knowing this, Tinder's latest redesign isn't that surprising, and it probably won't eve ...more

Fans attending the US Open Tennis Championships in Queens, New York, which kicks off on Monday, will have the opportunity to meet tennis star Venus Williams in an augmented reality game sponsored by American Express. Fittingly, Williams' younger sister Serena was recently fea ...more