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This Week in ARExperience

April 21, 2022 by Jon Jaehnig

• U.K.-based AR experience builder Blippar announced that it is expanding its presence in the United States.
  
  
  • While AR experience building certainly isn’t a saturated market in the United States, Blippar may find itself competing more directly with the likes of 8^th Wall.

• Enterprise smart glasses manufacturer Vuzix announced that a Zoom application is now available for their glasses. The application will allow the face-to-face remote calls that we know from Zoom, but it will also enable users to show remote viewers what they see through a world-facing camera on the glasses.

• Snapchat and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have released the second installment of lenses in the Monumental Perspectives series. The series once again features lenses that can be experienced anywhere, but are inspired by lesser-known stories around the LA area.
  
  
  • The series was smaller this year with three lenses to last year’s five. This is contrary to expectation as Snap has put so much work into location-based tech and partnerships since last year’s inaugural series.

• Glimpse Group subsidiary Foretell Reality was issued a patent for a VR system that allows users interaction between users of a platform accessed through different levels of immersion – for example, one user on a head-worn XR device and one user on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop.
  
  
  • If you think systems like this are already around, you’re right. Cross-platform and hardware agnostic VR-enabled experiences are common in entertainment and light-weight remote collaboration solutions. However, enterprise solutions dealing more with elements like virtual assets are trickier – and that’s what we hope to see from Glimpse.
    
    
  • One of the things that make this even more special is the network that Foretell has access to within Glimpse through the other subsidiaries. For example, 3D modeling company QReal. Sharing solutions and approaches between subsidiaries is a major column to the success of Glimpse Group as a whole.

• The University of Michigan is partnering with Coursera to offer XR-enabled courses – the first group to do so. UofM has long had courses on XR available on the platform, which included XR-enabled modules outside of Coursera, but the new partnership enables tighter integration between courses and material.
  
  
  • UofM’s Center for Academic Innovation has fostered a robust XR initiative for the past few years now. In addition to making XR more available to students at the University and through outreach programs like the Coursera partnership, faculty members involved in XR at UofM are frequent presenters at industry events.

• AR giant Niantic announced Peridot, an augmented reality pet care game. While some aspects of the game seem similar to their current giant in the ring, Pokémon Go, Peridot features individual creatures that players can breed with the pets of other players to create new generations.
  
  
  • We don’t know much about the game, which is only in pre-registry, but the company released a teaser trailer on YouTube this week.

This week’s news is a perfect combination of enterprise, education, art, and entertainment. It makes for a varied round-up, but it also speaks to the fact that no one industry is carrying XR. While many of us have our own pet corner of the market, it takes all kinds and provides for all kinds.