On Thursday, Mojo Vision, a startup comprised of former engineers from Apple, Amazon, Google, and other Silicon Valley mainstays, emerged from stealth backed by $50 million in funding for a hands-free augmented reality platform that runs without smartphones, tablets, or other devices.
Fresh off shipping an augmented reality game for Magic Leap, Resolution Games has farmed another $7.5 million in funding through a Series B round.
Throughout this NR50 series, we have talked about the incredible growth the augmented and mixed reality space has seen in the last year. More devices, software, developers, and use-cases seem to arrive daily. For this growth to have occurred, it took the work of many people, from many different backgrounds and skill sets — and Next Reality wants to recognize them for all that they have done and are doing.
The North remembers...that smartglasses are the future! Game of Thrones jokes aside, the smartglasses startup opened its doors, and we visited its Brooklyn store to get our hands the consumer-focused Focals smartglasses.
Over the past week, companies took a variety of approaches to investing in augmented reality. Lampix is backing its own effort to build an ecosystem for augmented reality platforms. Nokia and Xiaomi are teaming up on numerous fronts, potentially including augmented reality.
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.
Augmented reality optics maker WaveOptics has just infused its operations with a fresh round of funding to facilitate its objective of bringing consumer-grade smartglasses at a $600 price point to market in 2019.
Welcome to the first annual Next Reality 30, our list of people who've made the biggest impact on the augmented reality space in the last 12 months — and what a 12-month roller-coaster ride it's been. Apple introduced ARKit-powered apps last fall, Google launched ARCore for Android soon after, Snapchat began monetizing AR, and the Magic Leap One headset finally came out. These are historic times.
As more companies begin adopting augmented reality in the workplace, providers like Vuzix reap the benefits.
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.
With plans to compete with Niantic and other augmented reality game developers, game developer WarDucks has closed a $3.8 million funding round.
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.
It's safe to say that we can call the annual ranking of AR investments a holiday tradition at Next Reality.
Having emerged as one of the leading augmented reality video conferencing apps, Spatial is ready to improve upon the experience.
While the tech industries giants and eager startups chase the dream of widespread consumer augmented reality, enterprise AR is living the dream today.
Less than a week after debuting its AR Cloud platform in public with a multi-user installation of more than 100 participants, Ubiquity6 announced on Tuesday that it has closed a Series B round of funding totaling $27 million.
The business of enabling the development of augmented reality experiences appears to be as lucrative as AR app development itself.
Google's AI investment arm, Gradient Ventures, has joined a $10.5 million round of funding for Ubiquity6 and its platform for shared augmented reality experiences, just weeks after Google's GV fund backed a competing AR cloud platform.
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.
If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?"
Almost half a year after we broke the story about the demise of Meta Company, there's good news for fans of the augmented reality startup — a rebirth is at hand.
With Pokémon GO as its cash cow and the forthcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Niantic Real World Platform promising future revenue streams, Niantic has convinced investors to bet on its flavor of augmented reality
Hollywood has already proven that it's on board with augmented reality, with examples ranging from Avengers: Infinity War to Ralph Breaks the Internet. But one startup wants to make the augmented reality content that's being used to promote TV and film entertainment smarter.
The company behind augmented reality's first real gaming hit, Pokémon GO, is quietly making moves toward supporting the rapidly growing smartglasses space that may one day move its content away from smartphones and tablets and onto AR lenses positioned on your face.
A Series B round of funding, totaling $30 million, will enable Helsinki-based startup Varjo to launch its industrial-grade augmented and virtual reality headset capable of "human-eye resolution" before the end of the year.
Modern "mad men" are buying into augmented reality for marketing, with the two latest examples being trendy burger maker Bareburger and department store chain Zara.
Augmented reality startup 6D.ai is now accepting applicants for the closed beta of its 6D SDK. While operating in the background on a smartphone, the computer vision platform captures a dense 3D mesh in real time using just the device's camera (such a feat typically requires a depth sensor).
Tesla's Autopilot self-drive interface in its new Model 3 signals the carmaker is already prepping its cars for Level 4 driving years ahead of the competition.
This week in Market Reality, we see two companies capitalizing on technologies that contribute to augmented reality platforms. In addition, industry mainstays Vuzix and DAQRI have business news of their own to report.
Upskill, an enterprise software developer for industrial augmented reality applications, recently received an influx of funding and a major vote of confidence from two of their top customers.
The results of Microsoft's $480 million contract with the US Army are on display and users continue to test the suped-up version of the HoloLens 2.
Before smartglasses makers can dream of taking smartglasses to mainstream consumers, they must first determine the right mix of form, function, and price that will drive customers to buy into what they're hoping to sell.
Despite its status as a hot commodity amongst emerging technologies, the augmented reality industry is not immune to the ebbs and flows that occur in every industry.
All of the the tech industry giants, including Apple, Facebook, and Google, are working on new smartglasses and/or AR headsets, but this week, Google took a major step forward with gesture recognition technology that could make its way into AR wearables, posing a threat to Leap Motion and its hand-tracking controllers.
While Magic Leap has gained attention for its ability to raise capital, the company (now with an actual product on the market) still faces an uphill climb against the titans of the industry.
The de Blasio Administration of New York City has announced that the NYU Tandon School of Engineering will be hosting the country's first publicly funded VR/AR facility.
The year in augmented reality 2019 started with the kind of doom and gloom that usually signals the end of something. Driven in large part by the story we broke in January about the fall of Meta, along with similar flameouts by ODG and Blippar, the virtual shrapnel of AR ventures that took a wrong turn has already marred the landscape of 2019.
When building anything of a social nature, be it a local roller derby or softball team, a club dance night for chiptune, or building new technology markets, the community around those ideas are an important factor in helping these things not only come into existence but to grow into something that enlightens everyone involved. The community around an idea can actually make or break these new ventures — and this applies to augmented and mixed reality as well.
The augmented reality cloud and multi-user experiences are shaping up to be one of the hotter areas of augmented reality, and now Google is the latest entity to back these emerging branches of AR.
On Monday, German newspaper and digital publisher Axel Springer announced its role as the latest company to invest in Magic Leap. This is just the latest in a series of investments the augmented reality company has garnered from the likes of Google, Qualcomm, Alibaba, Legendary Entertainment, Warner Bros., and others amounting to almost $2 billion in overall funding.
