AR

Apple has been chasing after augmented reality and virtual reality for almost a decade now, hoping to come up with a commercially feasible product that changes the way we interact with our devices and the world around us in more ways than one. The Cupertino giant planned to launch the combined VR/AR headset in 2020, but in late 2019 it was announced that the launch will be delayed to 2022 as the then developed prototype didn’t meet the quality standards at Apple – mainly due to its bulky size.

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Shopping online is the primary way people get most of the items they want or need, but there are some downsides: you can't try on clothes to make sure they'll fit right and it's not easy to determine whether a particular makeup color will look good on you. Pinterest has introduced another feature that addresses the latter problem, one that lets you virtually try-on eye shadow before buying it.

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Throughout the years, we've heard a lot of rumors about Apple's VR and AR ambitions, but today, a new report is revealing a ton of new information. As it turns out, Apple is said to be pursuing a virtual reality headset first and is planning to take what it learned in creating such a headset and apply it to the creation of AR glasses. That virtual reality headset Apple is working on is also said to be an expensive, niche product, while the company is planning on its eventual AR glasses to have more mainstream appeal.

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Although the likes of Facebook Oculus and HTC Vive take the lion's share of the attention of consumers and mainstream media, their technologies are still mostly seen to lean more towards entertainment and gaming. In contrast, Microsoft's HoloLens platform was designed primarily to be an extension of the company's productivity ecosystem. That nature is being emphasized even more in the latest Insider Preview for the HoloLens, bringing Microsoft's new Edge browser at long last.

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Lenovo is diving further into wearables, with the ThinkReality A3 smart glasses promising virtual displays, 3D visualization, remote collaboration, and more, by tethering either to your laptop or smartphone. Announced at CES 2021, the headset runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR1 for AR glasses and attempt to squeeze wearable computing into a sunglasses-style form factor.

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This week Niantic announced that they'd acquired the company called Mayhem. This acquisition was made for what Niantic described as a reinforcement of their commitment to "real-world social as the centerpiece of our mission." In other words: They're aiming to take a more firm grasp on the masses of gamers playing Pokemon GO out there in the real world.

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This week the augmented reality game Minecraft Earth was announced as headed for the graveyard. On June 30, 2021, the game will officially end support, and no more Minecraft blocks will appear in any players' augmented reality as such. Does this mean that Minecraft interest is dying too, or that this game didn't capture the Minecraft spirit?

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Shopping online for certain products is still tricky if you don't already know what you want, but we're increasingly seeing the use of technologies in ways that make things easier. The latest example is Google's latest AR feature, which enables users to virtually try on makeup from select brands to see how it looks.

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It's no secret that Google has had very little luck with anything that comes close to being a social platform. It is perhaps less known that it also has had very little luck when it came to 3D content. While SketchUp briefly became a buzzword in the 3D modeling space, Google eventually relinquished its hold on the product just after six years of acquiring it. Now another one of its 3D-related products will be joining its notorious graveyard, once again raising concerns about its commitment to VR and AR technologies.

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Although it is only recently that OPPO's name became more familiar around the world, the company has long been making innovations in the smartphone space, including some rather unconventional form factors. Those include the OPPO N1's rotating camera as well as the more recent OPPO Find X's pop-up top. These days, however, nothing says "unconventional" more than foldables, swivables, and rollables so it is with great pride that the company is revealing its OPPO X1 2021 rollable concept phone alongside its next step in AR eyewear.

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Oculus has taken up the majority of the VR news of late, though not always in a positive light thanks to parent company Facebook. It isn't the only game in town, of course, but HTC's Vive has mysteriously gone a bit silent. And then there's the realm of mixed reality, where VR and AR collide. Microsoft's HoloLens, technically an AR system, is pretty much still the biggest player and it has just announced two major updates that aim to bring its mixed reality platform to more users and more developers.

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We now live in a world that revolves around digital objects but we still naturally have to deal with physical ones. Bridging the two have never been easy nor seamless but a lot of technologies, like augmented reality or AR, try to narrow the gap. But while AR brings digital objects to the real world to some extent, a new app goes the opposite direction and lets you clip and drop real-world objects into your digital canvas.

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