News and Updates about Mixed Reality News

Reviewed by Julianne Ngirngir

Reviewed by Julianne Ngirngir

Apple's spatial computing journey hit a five-month milestone today, and while The Verge calls the first Vision Pro "a really, really, really big screen" that wasn't exactly "a groundbreaking, market-moving hit," the rumor mill is buzzing with news that could change everything. The latest reports suggest Apple isn't retreating from mixed reality—they're doubling down with meaningful hardware improvements that directly address the two pain points preventing broader adoption: processing...

Disney+ just rolled out something pretty spectacular for Apple Vision Pro users: an immersive environment tied to the upcoming "Alien: Earth" series. This isn't just another 3D movie or fancy background — we're talking about a full-blown spatial experience that transforms your living room into something straight out of the Alien universe. With the series premiering August 13, this environment gives fans a taste of what's coming while showcasing just how far Disney+ has pushed the boundaries of...

Halloween may be finished, but the augmented reality chills are not over yet for some people. Arachnophobes are bravely facing their fears by cozying up to augmented reality spiders for a university study.

James Ashley, Atlanta-based Microsoft MVP and author of Beginning Kinect Programming with Microsoft Kinect, has been running monthly challenges since around the release of the HoloLens Developers Kits. Each month, those of us who follow what happens in the community can look forward to seeing what creative ideas come out of these challenges. It has been a treat, to say the least, and who knows ... maybe one of us here at Next Reality even won one of these before his time here.

We know your time is valuable to you, so starting this week — and continuing every Wednesday — we are going to release weekly Dev Reports that quickly highlight important news and updates that augmented and mixed reality developers should know about.

In the tech world, when you're a small startup going up against the Goliaths and their massive marketing budgets, you're forced to find and produce something almost magical to help your product stand apart from the rest. And that's exactly what Occipital Inc. has done with their Bridge headset.

In an early morning blog post, Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Partner Program. This announcement comes on the tail of an expanded HoloLens release over the last few months to many countries outside the initial US and Canada.

Trimble is integrating its mixed reality applications into the DAQRI Smart Helmet to enable outdoor and on-site support for design, construction, and heavy industry as part of a collaboration the companies announced today.

This morning, in an early morning session at GDC 2017, Brandon Bray, a senior program manager lead at Microsoft, revealed a mixed reality headset made in collaboration with Acer—a different headset than the one we saw from Acer at CES 2017 earlier this year. Also at the event, the name for Microsoft's holographic system seems to have changed from Windows Holographic to Windows Mixed Reality.

With the release of the HoloLens, Microsoft has put itself in both a great position while giving the competition a serious target to aim for. This is normally the case for anyone that is first to the market with a new idea, and now we've finally got a good competitor HoloLens coming. Stereolabs, a company known for its impressive 2K stereo camera, will be entering the mixed reality head-mounted display space with a Developers Kit as soon as early-2017.

A new contender has entered the mixed reality ring. San Fransisco-based Occipital has just released an "Explorer Edition" of Bridge—an iPhone-based mixed and virtual reality headset that uses their popular Structure Sensor. At a fraction of the cost of a HoloLens developers kit, this could be a place many curious people use to find their NextReality.

As we slowly approach its January 3 start date, CES 2017 seems to be shaping up to be an exciting year for smart glasses as well as augmented and mixed reality.

If you've ever made graphs and charts, you know it can be a struggle to represent a large amount of data. It's something that just doesn't work very well on a flat surface. In virtual and mixed reality, however, the data can exist all around you.

With most augmented and mixed reality devices, you wear a purchased headset and use it alone, in a place of your choice—but not this one. Ben Sax decided to reinvent the binoculars to create a mixed reality experience that anyone can walk up to and try for free. He calls it the Perceptoscope.

We're already glimpsing the future when we look at mixed reality through a headset, but is the real evolution of this technology something that will exist as part of our bodies? As intense as that may sound, TechCrunch's Jay Donovan offers compelling reasons why it's not such a crazy idea:

Our future technology has a lot of amazing possibilities, and few have more promise than augmented and mixed reality headsets. But these advancements come with several concerns over privacy, and if we don't understand them, we may lose control of our own data without even knowing.

What if everything in life was controlled by augmented reality? Keiichi Matsuda imagines:

Creepy crawlers. I'd say I'm not an extremely girly-girl. But (much to my embarrassment) bugs still have the capacity to make me shriek. Solution? A new study suggests that augmented reality could be used to cure cockroach phobia.