A preview of the new Food Scan solution offered by Snapchat and All Recipes. (Image provided by Snap Inc.)
This Week in ARExperience
November 18, 2021 by Jon Jaehnig
- XR expert and promotor Stephen Black is trying to bring Bubiko Foodtour to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade through augmented reality. Bubiko Foodtour is an AR character used in Black’s educational content often focusing around cultural foods from around the world. You can learn more about Black’s project and support it here.
- Full Sail University announced plans to build a cutting-edge virtual production studio at its campus in Winter Park Florida.
- CareAR launched a new platform, CareAR Instruct, as well as drone support this week. The company has also acquired image recognition platform CraftAR. CareAR is a remote instructions and workflow management firm owned by Xerox and these acquisitions, updates, and releases will help the company to expand and enhance their offered services.
- The Unity Asset Store announced a Black Friday Sale including up to fifty percent off over 500 select limited assets.
- The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released an official summary of key takeaways from the conference that it held virtually last month on Public Policy for the Metaverse in partnership with the XR Association.
- Location-Based Experience company Dreamscape has just opened a new location in Paramus New Jersey’s Garden State Plaza. This is the company’s fourth U.S. location and fifth location overall, with titles drawing from popular series like Men in Black and DreamWorks Dragons, not to mention original content.
- On Tuesday, Snapchat rolled out Food Scan in partnership with Allrecipes. The new experience recognizes 1,200 ingredients recognized through the Snap camera. The integration has the ability to pull up information on ingredients, suggest recipes, and more.
- The Camera Company has also announced a deal with Sony Music allowing Snapchat creators to record with lenses including embedded songs.
- Zakeke has launched a 3D and augmented reality viewer allowing users to upload 3D assets through a link or QR code. The solution, targeted at advertisers and retailers, begins pricing at a $10 per month subscription.
- Hardware giant Qualcomm, until recently operating largely behind the scenes, has announced its own developer platform, Snapdragon Spaces. This following the acquisition of hand tracking data from Clay Air that made the roundup last week.
- Meta’s XR hackathon is taking place this week and next week, with developers competing for $700,000. Registration is still open.
- On the professional development side, Facebook Reality Labs released some tantalizing information on research into advanced Haptics.
- Pico Interactive announced in a tweet on Tuesday that the zombie survival game Arizona Sunshine is coming to the Neo 3. Pico has been around in enterprise in the United States for quite a while but has only been gradually expanding into consumer support in the last few months. At this point, any new consumer offering on their app store is kind of a big deal.
From Stephen Black to the Unity sale and from Snapchat’s partnership with Sony to Meta’s hackathon, user-generated content and content creation tools make up a dominant trend this week.
With Dreamscape’s new location and Arizona Sunshine coming to Pico, it’s also a good week for entertainment and consumer applications at a time when most of the news that we see is still in enterprise.
