Attendees to this year’s Governors Ball Music Festival lit up the sky with a social AR lens from Snapchat through partnership with Live Nation and Verizon (Image provided by Snap Inc.)
This Week in ARExperience
June 16, 2022 by Jon Jaehnig
- The Governer’s Ball Music Festival took place this week and Snapchat helped to light up the sky. Through its partnerships with Verizon and Live Nation, members of the audience were able to use their mobile phones to share real-time, social, collaborative augmented reality moments with other fans.
- Spatial analytics company Esri released a Unity SDK for their ArcGIS maps. The SDK allows users to geolocate virtual objects, perform spatial analysis of scenes, and port geographical information into experiences and portals that are already running Unity.
- Nreal announced an “AR Jam” for developers looking to make applications or port existing applications onto the consumer AR glasses. Along with the suspected categories, there are bonus categories for social, educational, and NFT-related applications.
- The industrial XR hardware manufacturers at Varjo announced a partnership with Simucube, a racing equipment provider. Together the two will partner on a VR racing simulator.
- Automotive visualization has been a huge use case for Varjo, and it’s one that they often lean on in publications, demos, and expos. As the company has dipped its feet into the high-end consumer market, simulation is a natural step. It will be interesting to see how long this product stays in the enterprise world once it’s completed.
- In other industrial partnerships, head-mounted, hands-free enterprise AR company RealWear announced Zoom integration this week. Remote collaboration may have become a more of a norm for many of us during the pandemic, but in the field where RealWear works, being able to consult with a remotely located expert is a game changer plague or no plague.
- No-code XR content creation platform MyWebAR is rolling out 3D object tracking with “Phygital products” company DEVAR. The functionality is currently in the “testing” phase with a complete rollout expected this summer.
- A shared release specifically mentions use cases in the gaming industry, which is fair. However DEVAR has previously done a lot with AR in education, and relatively boring science or history models could come to life with this tech.
- Cloudhead Games has been teasing a Pistol Whip VR update that should be live by the time you read this. As of this writing, we don’t know as much as we might like about the update to the iconic first-person shooter, which apparently includes new game modes and cinematic experiences.
- Select gamers, community members, and influencers, got a stylized physical package. The rest of us just got this tweet.
- Speaking of teasing on Twitter, FrameVR, a web-based, cross-platform collaboration tool, let out that the next update to its beta product will include collaborative web-browsing with spatial audio. Their updates usually pack a lot, so we’re expecting more than that feature to come down the pipes. We’ll let you know when the full release notes are published.
Some new features are being introduced this week (or in the coming weeks) but most of the news this week is squarely in the realm of partnerships and integrations – which is great. XR companies are ever embracing the idea that they can do more with their professional community – and by engaging their clients, customers, and audiences.
