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.
In case you thought the long and unfortunate story of ODG was over, hold on, there's one last chapter to tell.
This week, inside sources divulged details of how Apple nearly acquired Leap Motion, twice. Otherwise, companies offering or working on augmented reality technology had more successes than failures to talk about.
Adding another arrow to its quiver of augmented reality acquisitions, Apple has reportedly acquired Spektral, a computer vision company with technology for real-time compositing (otherwise know as the "green screen" technique in broadcast TV and film).
While Apple may not be ready to divulge its roadmap for shipping its rumored augmented reality headset, the company's actions tell us a different story.
Intel's driverless division will be managed by Israel-based Mobileye, as the chip giant emerges from relative obscurity in the driverless space to become a major supplier after completing its $15.3-billion purchase of Mobileye this week.
Snapchat parent company Snap has opened up its war chest to acquire yet another company that will play a role in its augmented reality ecosystem.
There's already some fierce competition between Snap and Facebook in the AR space, but it's about to heat up even more, with Snap snatching up a 3D mapping startup that could add some new AR capabilities to its arsenal.
Board game enthusiast Scott Nicholson reviews a new game each week showing you the pieces and rules of play, as well and demonstrating the game with friends. This weeks game, Indonesia, is about producing and shipping goods, dealing with mergers and acquisitions, and will take 3-5 hours to play.
Over the past week, we are seeing more companies capitalizing on services leveraging augmented reality. One company secured funding to expand their service, while two other companies grow its own services through acquisition.
Apple continues to build its augmented reality hardware and software team in stealth mode. The latest addition comes via the hiring of a former DAQRI user experience designer and VR app developer.
While Magic Leap turned heads at the Game Developers Conference with AR experiences at the Unity and Unreal Engine booths, news broke that the company was the winning bidder for ODG's patents.
In recent years, Apple has assembled its augmented reality team and supply chain through a series of acquisitions, high-profile hires, and strategic investments, but at least one potentially major deal was recently ditched.
Smartglasses from Apple have become the holy grail of augmented reality, and 2020 has been the rumored time horizon for the product's arrival for the past two years. The latest analyst report sheds more light on its potential debut next year.
If you're not impressed with the current crop of AR content, and you're worried this may put a damper on the industry's growth, these stories should give you cause for some optimism.
The Augmented World Expo is winding down in Santa Clara, where Qualcomm, Vuzix, and Meta Company were among the companies making big announcements.
The week in AR business news started out with a bang with two bombshell reports that cast a shadow on the AR industry as a whole.
Developers and enterprise customers chomping at the bit to get their hands on HoloLens 2 may not have to wait much longer, as Microsoft passed one of the remaining hurdles needed to release their new tech into the wild.
This week's Market Reality covers a variety of business news from acquisitions and partnerships to competitive and technology assessments to quarterly financial results.
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.
While Apple has generally been more bullish on augmented reality as opposed to virtual reality, the latest whispers about its purported AR headset suggests that it may be giving VR another look.
With numerous insider reports, patent awards, acquisitions, and hires over the past few years, augmented reality smartglasses from Apple appear to be an inevitability.
With many of the companies working in augmented and mixed reality focused on the Augmented World Expo, the finance side of the industry has been relatively quiet.
Online lives could be made easier now that Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger are testing merged app notifications. 'Could' being the operative word!
The world of investment and finance can be labyrinthine in its very nature — and even more complicated in regards to augmented and mixed reality. While these new emergent technologies are teeming with explosive levels of unrealized potential, there's still a big layer of uncertainty in terms of return — but these investors aren't afraid to take the leap.
If there is one constant in currently available AR headsets, it's that, for a quality experience, they'll carry a high price tag. Price is one of the reasons these devices are mostly marketed towards enterprise customers for now.
One of the worst-kept secrets in the tech world is Apple's plans for consumer-grade AR smartglasses, still unconfirmed publicly and only recently corroborated through a leaked account of an internal employee meeting.
Unless you've been totally off the grid, there's a good chance you're aware that the Disney Plus streaming video service launched this week. And, if you're on this site, you're likely salivating over the new Star Wars series, The Mandalorian.
Augmented reality enthusiasts who expected an AR hardware unveiling at Apple's annual iPhone launch event might not have to wait much longer.
At its F8 developer's conference in 2016, Facebook went on record with a roadmap that called for augmented reality integration into Oculus within 10 years. Now, it appears as though Facebook is accelerating those plans.
Following San Francisco-based Occipital's successful Structure Sensor Kickstarter campaign, the release of its Bridge AR/VR headset, as well as a string of technology and company acquisitions, the company has built a rather strong name for itself in the AR community. And now, with the first public release of its Bridge Engine on Thursday, the company continues to expand the features its platform has to offer, with hopes of bringing in more developers to utilize it.
The business of enabling the development of augmented reality experiences appears to be as lucrative as AR app development itself.
With the Google Maps API giving entertainment brands the means to build their own location-based AR games, Niantic is raising the bar for the genre with new updates to Pokémon GO.
This week, two companies preparing the most anticipated augmented reality devices for consumers were the subject of reports regarding strategic moves to put them in better positions to move those products forward.
Investors are ready to throw their money at augmented and virtual use cases that demonstrate a business purpose and a return on investment.
As augmented reality gains popularity, the demand for delivering related services and generating content increases. This is demonstrated by a pair of investments from the past week, one in the expansion of a technology lab and another in the form of seed funding for a content studio.
Influenced by the growth of augmented and virtual reality technology as well as 3D computer vision, Ericcson Ventures invested in Matterport, whose hardware and software help companies create AR/VR experiences.
A new survey shows that the majority of companies have an interest in using augmented reality, though adoption remains low. Meanwhile, two companies with support roles in the augmented reality industry are seeing positive financial results.
While many analysts predict that the market for augmented and virtual reality will continue to grow over the next five years, now is the time for investors to get in on the ground floor.
While the numbers may not always seem to agree, the message remains the same: augmented reality is a growth segment. This week's edition of Market Reality starts with two new reports outlining the expected good fortunes for the industry and concludes with an example of a company capitalizing on their own growth.
