Hot Mobile AR News Posts

ARKit 101: Get Started Building an Augmented Reality Application on an iPhone or iPad Quickly
The reveal of Apple's new ARKit extensions for iPhones and iPads, while not much of a shock, did bring with it one big surprise. By finding a solution to surface detection without the use of additional external sensors, Apple just took a big step over many — though not all — solutions and platforms currently available for mobile AR.

News: App from Japan Uses Apple's iPhone X to Transform Your Face & Voice into the Cutest Anime Character
Apple's iPhone X now has the power to turn anyone into a Japanese anime character, thanks to a new app that harnesses the device's TrueDepth camera.

News: An Augmented Reality Game Brings the Monsters of The Rock's 'Rampage' to Your City Skyline
Given Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's blockbuster movie pedigree and the promotional power that usually accompanies his work, there's a certain predictable symmetry in the news that Rampage, a movie adaptation of the classic arcade game, has now become an augmented reality mobile app.

ARKit 101: Creating Simple Interactions in Augmented Reality for the iPhone & iPad
As a developer, before you can make augmented-reality robots that move around in the real world, controlled by a user's finger, you first need to learn how to harness the basics of designing AR software for a touchscreen interface.

News: HeadsupAR Turns Smartphones into Mixed Reality Headsets
Three years ago, with VR enthusiasts prepared to throw their money at Oculus to get their hands on the yet-to-be-release Rift headset, Google surprised the audience for Google I/O with Google Cardboard, a seemingly late April Fool's joke that actually jump-started virtual reality.

News: Apple iPhone X App Lets You Wear Your Friend's Face Like a Mask & Put Words in Their Mouth
On Wednesday, Apple released a new batch of Animoji characters that gives iPhone X users more virtual masks to play around with, but what many have been waiting for is an app that lets you put on a virtual mask of another person, not an animated emoji. Well, that day has finally arrived.

Apple AR: Zynga's CSR 2 for iPhone Puts Your Dream Car Within Virtual Reach with AR Mode
Exotic sports cars are the province of the ridiculously wealthy but, thanks to augmented reality, you can now get closer than ever to a Bugatti Chiron.

Apple AR: Star Wars Holograms Are Now a Real Thing on iPhone X via Clips App
Augmented reality is making many of our childhood dreams from Star Wars come true. A week after Lenovo gave us the ability to actually play Holochess, Apple has now made it possible to take live video of ourselves and layer on a (non-3D) hologram-like effect, closely resembling the famous Star Wars hologram scene featuring Princess Leia decades ago.

News: Apple's WWDC Invite Tells Us That 2018 Edition Will Be All About Augmented Reality
Historically, Apple loves to drop hints about its major upcoming events through clues included on its invitations. Those invites usually require a good bit of deciphering to connect the dots, but in the case of Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 invite, the topic is immediately obvious: it's augmented reality.

Apple AR: Quickly Find Your Friends in Crowded Places with Neon App
Going to music festivals is one of the best parts of the summer — Which is probably why thousands of people attend them. With numbers like that, trying to find and meet up with your friends can be difficult and intimidating. Thanks to Apple's ARKit, however, you'll soon be able to locate your friends in a crowd using an app.

News: Apple's iOS 11.3 Update Arrives for All With AR Vertical Surface Detection via ARKit 1.5 for iPhones & iPads
If you have an ARKit-compatible iPhone or iPad, check for a software update, as iOS 11.3, with ARKit version 1.5 in tow, has just dropped. As we previously reported, ARKit 1.5 brings several new augmented reality features for app developers to use.

News: This Augmented Reality Panda App Uses the Voice of Kristen Bell to Teach Kids About Nature
What's black and white, sounds like actress Kristen Bell, and is standing in your living room talking to your kids right now? Don't worry, that's just Genius the Panda, an augmented reality character from the Yakables app for iPhones and iPads.

News: Google Finally Releases ARCore 1.0 for Android Users, Adds Google Lens to Photos App
In one of the worst-kept secrets of the upcoming Mobile World Congress, Google has officially released ARCore on the Play Store for owners of the latest flagship Android smartphones.

How To: Use Your Smartphone's Camera to Instantly Translate Anything
If you're standing in a foreign city, surrounded by signage in a language you don't understand, you won't suddenly be able to read it. But with a clever feature in Google's Translate app, your smartphone can.

Apple AR: Star Wars & LucasArts Veterans Create Life-Sized HoloChess Game with ARKit
Until Star Wars Jedi Challenges arrives in November, a forthcoming ARKit revision of HoloGrid: Monster Battle from Tippett Studios and Happy Giant, might be the closest most Star Wars fans can get to playing the HoloChess game from the movie.

News: Snapchat Highlights Augmented Reality Feature in New Group Video Chat
Snapchat has added yet another social feature to its mobile app, and this one makes it possible to use augmented reality with a group of friends over video.

News: BMW Uses ARKit to Let You Customize Your New Car in iOS
Last month, BMW rolled out its playful take on augmented reality with Snapchat, and now the automaker is bringing that same immersive computing whimsy to iOS directly.

News: Facebook Debuts Image Recognition in Camera AR with 'Ready Player One' & 'A Wrinkle in Time' Poster Promos
Despite the wide availability of markerless augmented reality experiences for mobile devices, there is still a market for scanned triggers for content, as evidenced by the new image recognition capabilities on Facebook's Camera AR platform.

Hands-on: I Went to Battle in Augmented Reality with Father.IO & Lived to Tell About It
Last week, augmented reality startup Proxy42 released Father.IO, a multiplayer game that turns any indoor or outdoor space into a laser tag arena.

News: Now You Can Bring NASA's Spacefaring Robots into Your Home via ARCore
Space might be the final frontier, but NASA is making a detour into augmented reality first. The Spacecraft AR app, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in collaboration with Google, debuted exclusively for Android this week (an iOS version is also in the works).

Apple AR: iPhone X Face-Masking App Gives New Meaning to 'Incognito Mode'
Augmented reality developers are rapidly bringing science fiction tropes into the real world, with the latest example leveraging the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X to emulate the cloaking technology made famous by movies like Predator and Marvel's The Avengers.

How To: Make Your Own Animoji Karaoke Video
Introduced along with the iPhone X, Animoji are animated characters, mostly animals, that are rendered from the user's facial expressions using the device's TrueDepth camera system to track the user's facial movements.

Apple AR: Learn What Your Food Is Made of Using Augmented Reality
With the release of Apple's ARKit comes endless possibilities for education and learning. One of those possibilities is an AR rotating model of our solar system in your room, another is using AR to instantly know the nutritional value of food items.

News: This App Turns the iPhone X into an AR Face-Painting Booth
Thanks to Face Maker, a new app for the iPhone X, children everywhere can now avoid the trauma of face painting.

How To: Why & When to Evolve Your Pokémon in Pokémon GO
Like previous installments in the Pokémon series, as you progress through Pokémon GO you'll be able to evolve your Pokémon into more-powerful monsters with new and more-damaging attacks. However, unlike older entries in the series, your Pokémon won't simply evolve when they reach a certain level. Instead, you'll have to "feed" them a certain amount of character-specific candy to induce the transformation.

Apple AR: Houzz ARKit App Beats IKEA to the App Store
With the official release of iOS 11, the availability of an app that uses the much-hyped ARKit platform to place virtual furniture in one's home was expected.

News: Resolution Games Ports Popular Fishing Game from VR to Augmented Reality
Having pushed more than two million downloads of its Bait! game for the Gear VR and Daydream platforms, VR developer Resolution Games is bringing the virtual fishing fun to augmented reality.

News: Jurassic World Augmented Reality Game Wants to Be Pokémon GO for Real Dinosaurs
Following in the augmented reality footsteps of Pokémon GO, Universal Studios has decided to give us an AR version of Jurassic World.

How To: The Ultimate Guide to Hatching Eggs in Pokémon GO
Finding Pokémon in the wild isn't the only way to add to your collection in Pokémon GO—you're also able to hatch your own from eggs that you've gotten from PokéStops.

News: Maroon 5 Dives into Augmented Reality with Music Video Created Entirely in Snapchat
Move over, Hype Williams, it looks like Snapchat is about to take some of your music video-making business, and pop rock group Maroon 5 is the proof.

News: Apple Bursts onto Augmented Reality Scene with ARKit
During the opening keynote of their Worldwide Developers Conference today in San Jose, Apple introduced the ARKit for the new iOS 11 that will bring augmented reality apps to millions of compatible iPhones and iPads.

News: Meet the 8-Year-Old ARKit Developer Who Just Uploaded Her First Augmented Reality App to Apple's App Store
While you were busy browsing Instagram, composing tweets, or chasing Snapchat updates, an eight-year-old ARKit developer was hard at work on her first step toward taking over the tech world via augmented reality.

News: Walmart Shoppers Can Now Use Their Smartphones to Become Marvel's Black Panther via Augmented Reality
Marvel and Walmart are looking to capitalize on the uber-successful Black Panther film with a mobile augmented reality app designed to push the franchise's merchandise.

Apple AR: Virtual Dog Demo by Ridgeline Could Be the New Tamagotchi
This demo made with Apple's ARKit is 13/10 and features a very good boy. Since the ARKit was announced, there have been rumors going around about what it could mean for pet lovers who want to see augmented reality dogs. The popular Twitter We Rate Dogs has created a Good Dogs Game app that lets you have a your own virtual dog, but now Ridgeline Labs have also entered the arena with an ARKit dog game of their own, and it's the best thing I've ever seen.

Apple AR: IKEA Takes the Wraps Off of Its ARKit App
When Apple introduced ARKit earlier this year, they trotted out IKEA as one of the companies it was working with to build an augmented reality app that lets customers see furniture as it would appear in their home.

News: Apple iOS 11.3 Update Introduces Brand New Set of Animoji Characters
We knew it was coming, it was just a matter of when. Apple has just announced iOS 11.3, a new update for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, and it will include a brand-new set of Animoji for the iPhone X.

Apple AR: Blippar Charts New Territory with Launch of First AR Navigation App for iPhones & iPads
Mobile AR developer Blippar has achieved a breakthrough by releasing what appears to be the first commercially-available AR navigation app.

News: Blippar Brings App-Free Augmented Reality to Web Display Ads
Mobile augmented reality developer Blippar has escalated the augmented reality advertising arms race, introducing a new rich media ad format that enables augmented reality experiences without a dedicated app.

How To: Use This App to Test Out Tattoos Before They're Permanent
If you're in the market for a new tattoo, the biggest hurdle to clear is imagining exactly how it's going to look. It's going to be part of your identity for the rest of your life, so you have to make sure it looks just right—or as your mom probably told you, "Think of what it's going to look like when you're 60."

Apple AR: Art.com & Houzz Apps Take Imaginative Approaches to Hang AR Art Until ARKit Update Arrives
One of the more obvious benefits that vertical surface detection will bring to iPhone and iPad apps with the spring 1.5 update to Apple's ARKit platform is the ability to hang virtual artwork that rests realistically on walls.