A look at Snap’s recent work for teaching American Sign Language through AR (Image provided by Snap).
This Week in ARExperience
April 6, 2022 by Jon Jaehnig
- The XR Safety Initiative’s Metaverse Citizens Forum took place in AltspaceVR this week and focused, among other topics, on the use of artificial intelligence in building and populating immersive experiences.
- MultiBrush from Rendever announced updates including passthrough support and avatar integration. The multi-user XR painting platform was created by Rendever after the open sourcing of TiltBrush and was designed as a social support application for their senior living community clientele, but the app is available to everyone on the Quest Store.
- Rendever was also listed among TIME’s 100 most influential companies. The company appears in the list in the “Innovators” category.
- Speaking of Quest, Meta made a number of announcements this week including:
- A package of immersive experiences to celebrate Earth Month.
- The month’s event line-up for Horizon Venues including a gaming showcase on April 20.
- New game releases including the Fall Out Boy music pack for Beat Saber and Cosmonious High from Owlchemy Labs.
- Waveguide manufacturer Lumus announced two new products this week, the Maximus 1080p and the Maximus 14402P. Both are optimized for smart glasses displays as a result of “growing mass-market demand created by the eagerly-awaited metaverse.” Both components are scheduled to be released in the coming months.
- A package of immersive experiences to celebrate Earth Month.
- Snap has launched a new lens for learning American Sign Language. The lens is only the most recent in an ongoing effort to “celebrate deaf and hard-of-hearing” communities.
- Metapolis, an XR city-building platform on the Zilliqa blockchain, launched this week in an event at the Frost Science Museum in Florida.
- Browser-based virtual collaboration platform Frame announced continued updates this week including seamless transitions between frames, an analytics dashboard for white-label clients, and more options for customizing individual frames.
- The announcement also included more information on updates that had been initially revealed last week at Virbela Hands-In. Virbela, Frame’s parent company with its own desktop-app based virtual collaboration platform, hosted the virtual conference.
- Visual configuration company threekit announced an 8th Wall-powered immersive shopping suite. The AR-enabled application works for both virtual try-on of clothing items and virtually placing furniture in a shopper’s home, complete with customization options for features like item color.
- Wolf3D co-founder Kaspar Tiri teased “Spatial avatars with legs” in a short video on LinkedIn. The video presumably gets at an integration between the remote work platform turned metaverse cultural hub and Ready Player Me, Wolf3D’s cross-platform avatar builder.
- Immersive recording platform LIV announced an $8.5M funding round led by, among others, the Sony Innovation Fund.
- LIV enables recording with virtual personalities, but it also allows streaming VR content which is a big driver of new adopters – particularly in entertainment and gaming.
- Immersive learning platform VictoryXR announced ten “metaversities” launching in the fall. The program, partially funded by an immersive learning initiative within Meta, will include virtual twins of physical campuses that can be visited in the ENGAGE VR platform through provided Quest 2 headsets.
One potential theme this week is the idea of XR for good. Between XRSI’s meeting, VictoryXR’s Metaversities, Snap’s ASL initiative, Meta’s Earth Month experiences, and updates and recognition for Rendever and their amazing work, there’s a lot to celebrate in an industry that is often looked at with skeptical cynicism.
While it’s nice to see so much from experiences outside of enterprise and gaming, it’s also been a busy week for enterprise and gaming – which is great considering we need development in these sectors to drive hardware and software innovation and ecosystems for all of the other great things that XR has to offer.
