Augmented World Expo wrapped this afternoon. It was noticeably larger than previous years. Main stage emcee Amy Peck asked the packed room on Wednesday morning who had been to the conference before, and more than half the hands in the room went up. We hear there were more than 7,000 people there. We'll get to our full AWE roundup later this weekend. Meanwhile, we'll share some of the bigger AWE company announcements and doings the wider world of XR. At the top of our list: hand tracking pioneer Leap Motion is selling for 30M to London-based Ultahaptics. The company, once valued at $300 M, reportedly turned down a similar offer from Apple late last year. The hand-tracking technology of Leap Motion has been used by the mid-air ultrasonic haptics company for some time now. The acquisition intends to marry the technologies closer than before and build off of shared knowledge.
nReal drew enthusiastic applause from the AWE stage yesterday when it announced $499 smart glasses will be available in early 2020. The nReal Light glasses connect with USB-C to a Snapdragon 855-powered smartphone. It will be the first affordable natural looking glasses that do fully spatial computing. Your phone is the controller.
Lenovo announced its ThinkReality AR glasses. Lenovo is launching a new AR headset aimed at enterprise use cases. The twist here is that it's part of an integrated SaaS solution for the most common enterprise use cases, like see-what-I-see interface with remote experts.
Looking Glass Factory announces holographic workstation Looking Glass Pro. Looking Glass Factory’s previous offerings were displays that required connection to an external computer. The Looking Glass Pro is a self contained computer with 15.6 inch display, a fold-out 2D display for UI navigation, and embedded Leap Motion controller. Pre-orders for the standalone 3D visualization solution can be found here starting at $5,500.
VRgineers announces mixed reality module for XTAL headsets. Pass-through, a method of combining the physical and the digital inside of the camera in real time, builds momentum as the ultra high-resolution VR HMD adds two cameras for inside-out tracking, hand tracking, and video pass-through. A list of development partners will be first to acquire the new mixed reality module for further testing before an official launch.
Facemoji surpasses 1.6 M downloads for their Animoji-like app. 80% of Facemoji’s users are Gen Z women, and the team claims to be reaching over 10k new users per day. The Facemoji team recently updated their app to work with older iOS devices, as most of their Gen Z users don’t have an iPhone X.
Toronto-based MetaVrse CEO Alan Smithson announcned the launch of the XR Ignite Global Community Hub and XR for Business podcast. XR Ignite’s mission is to ‘Hyper-Accelerate XR for business and education’. The program will connect market-ready B2B startups with enterprise customers around the globe, and is now accepting applications for any XR related business. Also announced at AWE is the launch of the XR for Business podcast, the first episode of which features yours truly. Additional episodes feature Alvin Wang-Graylin, Cathy Hackl, and more XR industry leaders.
AT&T SHAPE announces second round of speakers including Rony Abovitz of Magic Leap, Archit Bhargava of Niantic, actress Laverne Cox, and many more. The full list of speakers is too long for this article, but more information on this year’s SHAPE event, including speakers, panels, and exhibits can be found here.
"This Week In XR" is written and edited with Michael Eichenseer.
