Augmented reality (AR) wayfinding firm ARway, recently announced it would partner with Magic Leap to integrate its solution on the latter’s headsets.
The company’s no-code platform aims to complete the process in the next 60 days, allowing ARway to provide its products to customers with compatible hardware. This will expand the company’s offerings beyond mobile handsets and boost the number of use cases for its technologies.
Magic Leap 2 devices will also allow ARway to leverage its eye tracking, spatial audio, and six degrees of flight (6DoF) for greater interactivity with creative content.
The measures will allow Magic Leap to accommodate large-scale experiences and boost its supported products and solutions ecosystem. This aims to create a growing number of key partnerships capable of building use cases for AR technologies.
Efforts to do so will lead to greater return on investment and expanded use for global virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality (VR/AR/MR/XR) solutions. Businesses set to benefit from ARway’s advancements include those in the retail, manufacturing, and industrial sectors.
ARway-Microsoft HoloLens 2 Collaboration
The Toronto, Canada-based company also struck a major deal with Microsoft to integrate its solutions on the latter’s HoloLens 2 headset. The firm aims to complete the moves with a similar time frame as Magic Leap.
With both integration plans, ARway hopes to enter and disrupt the Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) industry, valued at $44 billion USD.
Working with Microsoft, ARway will introduce its digital wayfinding platform to Microsoft’s world-renowned set of hardware capabilities. The headset, used across industrial, medical, immersive learning, and remote guidance, will remain a strong ally of ARway’s current and future asset deployment plans.
HoloLens 2 users will also gain access to ARway’s platform, allowing them to explore immersive content worldwide across many ongoing use cases.
It will also provide support for developers using Unity 2021.3 LTS, where Unity will become the only Unity backend for HoloLens 2 and Windows MR headsets.
Comments from ARway’s Evan Gappelberg
In a press statement, Evan Gappelberg, ARway Chief Executive, said that the partnership represented “a major milestone” for his company and a “significant advancement” for the development of AR.
He explained further,
“Given that ARway.ai is an AI-powered platform that delivers immersive AR experiences and AR navigation, this integration with Magic Leap Glasses is perfectly aligned, as they possess the device while we supply the compatible content for users. This partnership is expected to create new business opportunities for our technology, allowing users to experience digital content in the real world in ways that were previously unimagined”
According to the exec, the breakthrough signalled the “first of many integrations with AR headsets,” allowing ARway to ‘develop once and deploy everywhere.
He concluded that wearables and smart glasses were expected to succeed mobile phones “in the not too distant future.” For the company, integrating the technologies marked a “massive step towards the widespread adoption of ARway’s technology.”
He added that HoloLens 2 efforts would help ARway take “a giant leap forward in revolutionizing the way we live, work, and learn.”
Concluding, Gappelberg said,
“This is a potential game-changing move for the Company, as integrating with a product from a tech giant like Microsoft brings several benefits to ARway. It can provide ARway with access to a wider customer base, as Microsoft has a massive reach and influence in the technology industry, increasing ARway’s brand recognition and market share. It can also help ARway to establish partnerships and collaborations with other companies and organizations that are also part of the Microsoft ecosystem, providing ARway with new opportunities for growth and expansion”
OpenXR and Building Industry-Wide Interoperability
The news comes after Magic Leap announced plans to boost compatibility with OpenXR digital assets to build “an open and accessible [AR] ecosystem.” Doing so will support major industries across the global economy to leverage XR content and further cement interoperability standards.
Magic Leap aims to facilitate “cross-platform solutions” and eliminate siloed development across XR ecosystems, leading to walled garden fragmentation. Through open-sourced content development, businesses will also benefit from reduced overhead costs and time-to-market production cycles.
The Plantation, Florida-based enterprise also serves as the Vice Chair to the Khronos Group’s OpenXR Working Group. On the board, it aims to facilitate collaboration across member organisations and provide advice on technical concerns.
Magic Leap will also unite developers, standards groups, and end-users to build best practices and strengthen coordination across the industry.
At the time of the announcement, the company reaffirmed “the benefits of OpenXR for our developers and end users” with expanded support. It added it had begun developing new extensions for developers to expand access “to the advanced AR capabilities of Magic Leap 2.”
