Marry Me Jlo and Maluma still: Jennifer Lopez and Maluma appeared as Snap Bitmojis in a virtual concert from Universal Pictures. (Snap)
This Week in ARExperience
February 3, 2022 by Jon Jaehnig
- AR content creation platform MyWebAR has released four new occlusion plugins that can be quickly and easily incorporated into user projects. Occlusion is the ability to place a digital object in a scene such that it appears behind other objects. It’s notoriously tricky but very important for immersion.
- Sprite sponsored an AR experience that brought out-of-arena viewers into the Latto halftime show for the Atlanta Hawks late last month. The AR concert was triggered by Sprite packaging in and around Atlanta.
- The XR Association announced a number of new big-name members including Accenture, Qualcomm, and Unity. The association also announced a number of new board members.
- Rendever announced greater availability of its RendeverLive program. Rendever provides content to improve the lives of seniors living in care facilities and this program in particular has a focus on live and social content to decrease feelings of social isolation.
- Snap held a live virtual concert featuring Jennifer Lopez and Maluma presented as Bitmojis. The concert is coming in advance of the release of the film “Marry Me” which stars Lopez, Maluma, and Owen Wilson.
- Industry analyst Tom Ffiske’s book “The Metaverse: A Professional Guide” is now available in digital and paperback editions.
- AR/VR company Glimpse Group has closed acquisition of Sector 5 Digital, a creative XR studio that will now join Glimpse Group’s impressive list of companies.
- In other acquisitions news, Diem (formerly known as Libra) has sold all intellectual property to Silvergate. This isn’t strictly XR news, but the digital currency was infamously largely a project of Meta, formerly known as Facebook Company. Having essentially their own digital currency might well have streamlined in-app purchases within their extant virtual and aspirational AR worlds.
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In more direct XR news from Meta, the company released a 15-second YouTube video that seems to be teasing a virtual space called “Questy’s” with a release date of Feb. 13. So, keep watching these articles for a follow up on that in the next few weeks.
- Also in Quest news, another batch of new titles are now available on the headset, including rhythm game AVICCI Invector: Encore Edition, and Multibrush, a multi-user 3D art experience created by Rendever. Also available, the highly anticipated Zenith: The Last City, making good on a release date announced last month.
- In other gaming news, the Game Developer’s Conference has released their free annual “State of the Game Industry” report. The GDC is not specifically focused on XR titles but has also not glanced over the fact that AR and VR in particular are increasingly becoming major fractions of the game industry pie.
A lot of this week’s news falls under the category of “market maturation.” Acquisitions, reports, books, all of these are healthy signs that the XR industry is starting to function less as a giant, disorganized start-up and more like other segments of the tech industry.
Of course, we also see a lot of more immediately exciting news particularly in the entertainment space, and particularly in the augmented reality space and remote events.
