Month: July 2021

Over the past week, practically every major tech company working on augmented reality has held their quarterly earnings calls with investors, and each addressed or at least mentioned the role of AR during their prepared remarks. However, Facebook’s earnings call had some of the spicier commentary on the technology. Speaking of Facebook, the company’s Spark AR platform assisted The New York Times in delivering AR content on the ongoing Olympic Games. Google also delivered its own Olympic AR experiences through its own AR platform. Finally, Snapchat continues to lean on AR as its growth driver… more

Facebook’s earnings calls are generally focused on numbers—revenue and user growth. But this week the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, carved out a significant portion of the call to elaborate on Facebook’s plans for immersive computing. • Don’t Miss: Facebook CEO Zuckerberg Uses Latest Appearance to Triple Down on Augmented Reality & Creator Revenue-Focused Future By now, even non-VR users are aware of the Oculus Quest and its promise to transport you to other worlds. But most of the public is still unaware of Facebook’s even bolder augmented reality ambitions. Those ambitions… more

Old school media stalwart The New York Times launched its augmented reality news content in 2018 with a feature on the athletes of the Winter Olympics. However, after a solid year of AR reporting, the Times all but abandoned its AR news coverage via its mobile app, instead opting to publish AR content via the Spark AR platform from Facebook. Don’t Miss: Google Adds More Olympic Athletes to Its Roster of Augmented Reality Search Content Now, the publication’s AR journey has come full-circle with a pair of AR camera effects visualizing the physics behind two of the sports of the Summer Games… more

The Lens Studio community, now made up of more than 200,000 creators, has generated some impressive augmented reality effects in the last few years. Amazingly, the groundbreaking Lenses for Snapchat continue to come, often from the internal AR team at Snap. Take, for instance, Cartoon 3D Style, which generated approximately 2.8 billion engagements on Snapchat within its first week. Don’t Miss: Snap Adds Upper Garment Segmentation, Multiple Object Detection, & More with Lens Studio 4.1 The latest AR magic trick to arrive on Snapchat (iOS or Android) from Snap’s AR team is the… more

After facing delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Olympic Games are underway in Tokyo, but a surge in cases worldwide has taken the spectator out of these spectator sports. However, thanks to AR content in Google Search, fans can get closer to select athletes than they would have if they had a ticket to the events. Don’t Miss: Google Adds Pac-Man, Hello Kitty & More Japanese Anime & Video Game Characters to AR Search During the keynote presentation for its I/O developer conference in May, Google unveiled sports athletes as the latest content type available in Google Search, with Olympic… more

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. Speaking of Epic Games, its lawsuit against smartglasses maker Nreal took another plot twist, with the plaintiff firing back this week. Back to Snap, the company released the latest version of Lens Studio with new features catering to retailers and shared a preview of a new AR… more

Facebook Reality Labs chief Andrew “Boz” Bosworth does a lot of hinting and teasing of what’s coming next at Oculus, often with only a vague timeline on the horizon. However, on Friday, Boz finally delivered on a big tease he last highlighted back in April, and it has everything to do with augmented reality on the Oculus Quest. • Don’t Miss: Facebook Reality Labs Chief Teases AR Coming to Oculus Quest Gaming, Delves into Future Smartglasses Hardware The feature is called the Passthrough API Experimental and Boz describes it as “a way to build and test apps that seamlessly blend the real and… more

On Friday, the Tokyo Olympics finally kicked off after massive delays and complications due to the pandemic. Part of the opening ceremonies included an Intel-powered drone show that put a virtual globe in the sky, but this weekend a different kind of virtual object innovation will be in play at the games thanks to augmented reality. • Don’t Miss: Japan-Based Developer Unleashes Giant AR Gundam Robot on the Public via HoloLens 2 Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo has launched a series of tech-powered innovations at the Olympics called the Tokyo 2020 5G Project. (In case you weren’t aware, the… more

One app is continuing to make a name for itself as the go-to platform for celebrity art that transcends canvas and paint and moves in augmented reality. The Acute Art app’s latest example of this comes from the likes of BMW and its stable of fine artists who have spent decades transforming the luxury car maker’s vehicles into works of art. • Don’t Miss: Microsoft HoloLens 2 Brings Extinct Animals Back to Life at Paris National Museum The first real foray the Acute Art app made into the world of immersive celebrity art involved street art legend KAWS. That AR release on the app allowed users… more

After adding full-body tracking and 3D body mesh in its past two Lens Studio updates, Snap continues to supply creators, particularly apparel retailers, with tools for creating clothing-centric AR experiences. Arriving via Wednesday’s release of Lens Studio 4.1, the Upper Garment Segmentation template enables users to create the ability to project AR content shirts, jackets, dresses, and other similar clothing on multiple persons appearing in the camera view. Don’t Miss: AR Snapshots: Dive into Shark Week with These Snapchat AR Lenses But that’s not all. The Multi-Object Detection template… more