Sean Dougherty and Jeffrey Colon are Access Technology Experts who work for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired non-profit, and they were very active at the XR Access Symposium during a number of sessions focusing on the NSF-grant...
Yvonne Felix has been using augmented reality as an assistive technology since 2012. They tell me, “I actually wear an augmented reality device that allows me to see. I’m legally blind, so that means that I have about 2% of my vision...
Ohan Oda works at Google on an AR feature in Google Maps called Live View that he was showing off during the demo session at the XR Access Symposium. It adds some screenreader support for geospatial browsing where users can search for nearby...
Niantic’s Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit celebrated it’s one-year anniversary in November 2022, and I had a chance to catch up Caitlin Lacey, a senior director of AR platform marketing at Niantic to talk about the evolution of...
Photo of The Beast Prototype courtesy of Rony AbovitzI had a chance to sit down with Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz for two hours to unpack some of the many threads Magic Leap's behind origin story, including some of the underlying philosophical...
Time Detectives AR by Picture This Productions is a site-specific AR trail experience meant to be seen at the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, UK, but you can also experience it remotely as a table-top experience at home. Time Detectives AR asks...
Living Cities is a digital twin XR startup announced on May 26th, 2022 with an article titled 'Reality is Scarce...and The Metaverse is infinitely abundant.' that shares a list of '9 principles for connecting the real & virtual.' The founders of...
ReachYou is an AR story that receives transmissions from the future in order to connect to the tenderness of the now. It's a slow media project aimed to create a portal into a story world that allows the audience to access emotion states of deep...
Iago: The Green Eyed Monster is an Animated AR, Rock Operetta, exploring the villain origin story of the character of Iago from Shakespeare Othello. There are links to the iOS and Android AR app linked on their website, and I'd recommend checking...
Tamara Shogaolu is an interdisciplinary artist & director who works in film and as a creative technologist that mixes analog with digital including VR, AR, and mixed media forms. We discussed these following immersive projects that she has had at...
Asad J. Malik is an AR artist who spent a lot time making work for the HoloLens on the film festival circuit, and then started a AR Hologram company named Jadu creating volumetric captures of celebrities and musicians using the high-end Microsoft...
One of the most magical AR demos I've ever had a chance to see was Tilt Five at Augmented World Expo 2021. Jeri Ellsworth stumbled upon a complete paradigm shift towards AR while she was at Valve and accidentally had a beam splitter turned around...
Breonna's Garden is an augmented reality experience that premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival that was created by Lady PheOnix in collaboration with Ju'Niyah Palmer to honor the life of her sister, Breonna Taylor. I found it to be a...
On April 22, 2020, Magic Leap announced layoffs of somewhere between 600 to 1000 employees, which amounted to around 1/3 to 1/2 of their total staff. On December 2019, The Information reported that Magic Leap had only sold 6,000 AR headsets against...
Mark Pesce's new book Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing was released on Friday, January 8th, 2021. It's a lucidly-written look at the past, present, and future of augmented reality. He contextualizes AR within the history of...
Oculus Connect has been rebranded Facebook Connect, and what would have been Oculus Connect 7 is now Facebook Connect 1. Facebook Connect happened on September 16, 2020, and I talked with Doug North Cook on the following day. North Cook is the...
There were not a lot of AR or VR announcements that happened during the main keynotes of Microsoft Build 2020, but there were a number of announcements that I was covering as comprehensively as I could in real-time in this Twitter thread. But Azure...
Breathe is a Magic Leap, mixed reality experience with four people in shared environment that uses a biometric sensor measuring chest movements in order to explore how our breathing connects us to each other and to the atmosphere. It's a powerful...
Nancy Baker Cahill is an artist who is creating the 4th Wall App AR platform that distributes inclusive, augmented reality art at site-specific, locations that are contested in some way. She launched Battlegrounds: New Orleans in December 2019, and...
Through the Wardrobe was an augmented reality experience by Rob Eagle about gender identity that took place in a pop-up shop in the hallways of Amsterdam's Central Station. The IDFA DocLab had three storefronts in Central Station this year during...
Duncan Speakman's Only Expansion was an augmented audio tour showing at the IDFA DocLab that was doing real-time modulation of the surrounding soundscape mixed with produced sounds in order to create a unique experience. The headphones had...
Avi Bar-Zeev has been involved with immersive technologies for over 27 years, including working on the very first prototypes of Microsoft's HoloLens back in 2010. He's mostly been working on secret projects for the last 11 years, and so I got was...
Ethics in Mixed Reality is a hot topic, and I moderated a panel discussion at SIGGRAPH. This panel was attended by a number of people in the immersive industry including HTC's Daniel Robbins, who works as a principal UX designer at HTC Creative Labs...
Architects Anna Mill & Luke Jones spent eight years creating a graphic novel called Square Eyes that explores the speculative design of augmented reality technologies and interfaces. They see this project as an in-depth paper architecture...
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, and she's created a public art application called The 4th Wall AR app that allows people to place augmented reality art onto contested sites. Cahill used her 4th Wall AR app to place...
The Open AR Cloud is a volunteer organization whose mission statement is to 'drive the development of open and interoperable spatial computing technology, data, and standards to connect the physical and digital worlds for the benefit of all.'...
Spatial XR creative collaboration platform has been featured in that past two Microsoft presentations at the Microsoft Build Keynote on Monday, May 6th as well as in the HoloLens 2 announcement at Mobile World Congress on Sunday, February 24, 2019...
The Venture Reality Fund general partner & co-founder Tipatat Chennavasin travels around the world tracking the progress of virtual and augmented reality, and I had a chance to catch up with him at Microsoft Build 2019 in order to get his...
French journalist Julien Bergounhoux has been covering the business applications for spatial computing for L'Usine Digitale over the past 6-7 years, and I had a chance to catch up with him following the Microsoft Build opening keynote. We talked...
I got to do a hands-on demo with the HoloLens 2 at Microsoft Build, and then talk about my impressions with Microsoft Developer Relations Program Manager Jesse McCulloch. We talked about where HoloLens is at, more details on the 4th generation Azure...
Jessica Brillhart's Vrai Pictures & Superbright launched a spatial audio platform at SXSW called Traverse, and they premiered a spatialized audio experience that turned your body into a mixer. As you walked around a space, then your movements...
The Bose AR platform with the Bose AR Frames and the QuietComfort 35 headphones was one of the most exciting announcements that happened at SXSW. These Bose AR Frames wearables feature spatialized audio and serve as a bluetooth headset that has an...
I moderated this 90-minute Sundance New Frontier panel discussion about immersive storytelling in AR and the role of virtual characters and conversational interfaces. It included Alice Wroe, who is the creative director of Magic Leaps digital human...
Your brain can fuse together so many different layers of reality so seamlessly that it's quite flexible and capable of blending the digital and the real in a way that will soon be completely indistinguishable. The Dial at Sundance New Frontier...
Pilgrim is an AR audio documentary that I experienced at the IDFA DocLab premiere as I was walking through the streets of Amsterdam. Co-director Lauren Hutchinson captured audio stories of people as they were walking the Camino de Santiago trail in...
Qualcomm believes that the future of XR is mobile. TechCrunch published rumors published that the Oculus Rift 2 headset was being cancelled, which catalyzed a larger discussion about the degree to which Facebook/Oculus is committed to VR on the...
Our stores of the past shape our future. There is a growing movement to use augmented reality technologies to reclaim suppressed histories by creating site-specific AR art installations that challenge institutionally-backed narratives. Glenn...
Google announced some new features for ARCore at Google I/O last week including Sceneform to help Java developers integrated 3D content into apps, augmented images to trigger immersive AR experiences off of trained images, and cloud anchors to...
Google's mission statement is to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,' and so it's a natural fit that they'd be a leader in creating educational experiences for AR & VR. Google Expeditions continues to...
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to 'synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space' in order to enable 'persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.' Miesnieks has founded a...
Keiichi Matsuda went from being a dystopian filmmaker to becoming the vice president of design at hand-tracking company Leap Motion. Matsuda is probably the most famous for his HYPER-REALITY dystopian filmthat imagined an commodified & gamified AR...
Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality...
ARQUA! was one of the ARKit launch applications that was designed by VR veteran Isaac 'Cabbibo' Cohen, and it has the same indie charm and shader art aesthetic as his previous VR experiences of Blarp! and L U N E. ARQUA's gameplay involves you...
Augmented Reality has played a huge role at the developer conferences for Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which is a great sign that the industry is moving towards spatially-aware computing. Microsoft is the only company to start with head...
Funomena's Woorld won the best AR experience at the recent Google Play awards. You scan your room with a Google Tango-enabled phone, and then you're encouraged to decorate your space with extremely cute art and characters designed by Katamari's...
Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web...