AR Apps

Meta Will Bring ‘Augments’ to Quest 3, Persistent Mini-apps That Live in Your Room

ar app, AR Apps, Connect 2023, Meta Quest 3, mixed reality app, News, quest 3, quest ar, quest mr / Ryan Harris / September 28, 2023

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at Connect, the company’s annual XR developer conference, that it’s going to launch a set of mixed reality mini-apps on Quest 3 that you can stick anywhere in your house.

Relying on Quest 3’s room-mapping capabilities, the so-called ‘augments’ are due to launch sometime next year on Meta’s newly fully unveiled mixed reality headset, bringing what the company calls “interactive, spatially aware digital objects that come to life all around you.”

This includes simple objects, like a piece of art you can stick to your real-world wall, or something more involved like a weather app on your desk that alerts you before rain starts—all of it appearing right in place whenever you put on your headset.

Zuckerberg also noted that these sorts of ‘frames’ can contain things like Facebook videos, Instagram Reels, and other apps, but also portrait-shaped ‘portals’ that act as immediate links to VR games, like fitness app Supernatural.

Meta says it’s also going to launch branded augments like an iHeartRadio music player and Beat Saber trophies—ostensibly all of the sort of stuff that Meta thinks you’d want to hang on your wall as you’re consuming traditional content through the headset.

We’ve seen some similar stuff from Magic Leap before it pivoted to enterprise, and Apple is sure to push many of the same augmented reality widgets with the launch of Apple Vision Pro. It’s going to be interesting to not only see what sort of brand deals the company can reel in, but how it goes toe-to-toe with Apple as it courts the more purely AR side things.

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Connect 2023 kicks off today, taking place September 27th and 28th at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. There’s been a ton of news already, so make sure to follow along with Connect for all of the latest XR stuff from Meta.

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Treedis Transforms Physical Spaces Into Hybrid Experiences With a New Augmented Reality App

AR Apps, content creation, developers, Development, digital twin, featured, Immersive Technology, XR experiences / Ryan Harris / May 12, 2023

Augmented reality (AR) transforms how we view the world and do things. Since its first introduction in the 1960s, it has rapidly developed and been used extensively in fashion, marketing, the military, aviation, manufacturing, tourism, and many others.

Consumers are increasingly becoming adept at using augmented reality apps to try on products, learn new things, and discover information about their surroundings. Research shows that 56% of shoppers cite AR as giving them more confidence about a product’s quality, and 61% prefer to shop with retailers with AR experiences.

Aside from its impact on brands, AR is also transforming how companies operate internally by introducing better ways to perform jobs, train employees, and develop new designs.

No-Code Platform for Creating Your Own Immersive Experience

Creating AR experiences is no walk in the park. Firms that want to implement their own augmented reality apps require working with talented in-house app builders or purchasing from third-party app builders, with costs ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Treedis platform

Treedis makes the process simple with its Software-as-a-Service platform, which helps users create immersive experiences using a no-code drag-and-drop visual editor. Users can create digital, virtual reality, and augmented reality dimensions of their digital twin with just a single scan.

Digital twins are immersive, interactive, and accurate 3D models of physical spaces. They’re a digital replica of devices, people, processes, and systems whose purpose is to create cost-effective simulations that help decision-makers make data-driven choices.

Powered by Matterport technology, Treedis helps companies create these immersive experiences for retail, training, marketing, onboarding, games, and more.

Enhancing Digital Twins With an Augmented Reality App

According to Treedis CEO Omer Shamay, the Treedis augmented reality app helps you “view enhanced versions of your digital twins within their physical counterparts.” You can visualize any changes or modifications in real time and view all the 3D objects, tags, directions, and content in the digital twin.

“Any changes made to your digital twin will be instantly visible in AR, ensuring seamless collaboration and communication across your team,” Shamay adds.

The platform helps 3D creators and enterprises create an immersive and powerful digital experience for their users, so they can fully harness the benefits of AR solutions without huge developmental costs or challenges.

It can be used extensively for creating unique shopping experiences that incorporate elements of virtual commerce and gamification features. It’s ideal for developing immersive learning experiences to help learners grasp concepts better through physical interaction with their environment. The app can also be used to provide indoor navigation for guiding visitors to different access points and key locations within a space.

Treedis augmented reality app

The app is already available for Treedis’ enterprise users and promises to be “an accessible app with low prices and an easy-to-use AR solution,” according to Shamay.

With AR becoming more accessible, it won’t be long before more brands and firms adapt the technology and provide better and enhanced experiences to their audiences.

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“The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights” Is a Charming AR Story Puzzle

AR Apps, AR games, augmented reality, children, featured, Reviews / Ryan Harris / February 23, 2023

When a polar bear sees the northern lights for the first time, he wants to reach out and touch them. How will he get there and who will he meet along the way? That’s up to you with this charming interactive AR story puzzle.

The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights

“The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights” is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure AR story for children where the “chapters” are physical puzzle pieces. The artwork and story are by Julie Puech and Karl Kim.

The ways in which these pieces fit together (or don’t) helps the AR story keep a logical narrative. However, pieces can be added and removed or swapped out resulting in multiple different possible tellings of the tale.

Of course, the adorable puzzle doesn’t tell the whole story. The puzzle pieces come to life with the help of a free AR mobile app for Apple and Android devices. The mobile app recognizes the pieces and animates their artwork, as well as queueing an audio narration by Kasey Miracle.

As a weary old XR veteran with a cold little heart, I sometimes find it helpful to recruit fresh eyes for product reviews – like when my younger brother provided his insights for my Nreal Air review. This time I recruited the help of my fiancée’s eight-year-old daughter.

What’s in the Box?

The puzzle comes with 15 AR story cards and an instructional booklet. The instructional booklet has information about the product, links to the app, and some advice for doing the puzzle for the first time – but don’t panic if you lose it. The puzzle information and a QR code to the app are both on the outside of the box and the first puzzle piece triggers an AR guide to using the app.

AR app - The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights - AR Story Puzzle

The free app, powered by Unity, opens with a quick warning about being aware of your surroundings while using AR and encourages you to supervise children when using the app. From there, the app only has a play button and a settings button. Settings include background dimming to make the animations stand out better, or an option to turn the animations off.

Do be aware that the app is 394 MB and does require a fairly modern device to run. Like any AR app, it requires the use of your camera while the app is running.

Following Directions

Some pieces have special icons on them. Cards with a blue “+” are optional chapters that don’t have to be included in the AR story. Cards with green and orange arrows can be swapped out for one another, changing how the story unfolds.

The play guide recommends that you remove the optional chapters and two of the interchangeable chapters the first time that the puzzle is constructed. This is presumably an introductory version of the puzzle to avoid throwing too much at first-time players.

As with any puzzle, it’s important to find a flat surface large enough for the puzzle when completed. The play guide recommends a space of two feet by three-and-a-half feet. The AR story puzzle is long and narrow in nature, particularly with all of the possible pieces in play, but has some curves in the overall shape so it isn’t just a straight line.

AR app - The Bear Who Touched The Northern Lights

The AR instructions at the beginning of the puzzle remind you that you also need to have space to sit comfortably with the puzzle in front of you for about 20 minutes (give or take). After all, the play guide also recommends additional activities like asking the child to try to construct the story from the puzzle before watching the narration.

Putting the Pieces Together

The first time putting the puzzle together, we followed the play guide’s advice to remove extra pieces and one set of interchangeable chapters. The shapes of the pieces are similar enough to make it a little challenging for young hands to assemble without it being frustrating. They’re also different enough that the story can’t be constructed in an order that wouldn’t make sense.

It only took a few minutes to assemble the puzzle for the first time, and then we fired up the app. The AR instructions are short, cute, and very informative, telling us everything we needed to know without being boring. It takes the app a second or so to recognize the cards, so moving from one chapter to the next is neither seamlessly fast nor frustratingly slow.

The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights - AR Story Puzzle

The animations are cute and colorful, and the effects are simply but beautifully done. The default background dimming on the app is 35%, and it certainly worked. Turning it up can make the background disappear completely, which makes for optimum viewing quality, but also makes it harder to find the pieces in the camera. Pick what setting you like best.

At one point in the story, the bear starts receiving items for his journey. The Child got to choose which items he used when, but only one item was ever needed in the story, and selecting the wrong item isn’t penalized – you just pick again. We were split on this. It’s nice that we couldn’t pick wrong, but picking at all felt kind of unnecessary. (This made more sense later on.)

We reached the end of the AR story. Sort of. Immediately upon finishing the puzzle and the story the first time, The Child asked to do the puzzle again with the extra chapters.

Putting the Pieces Together Again

We added in the two optional AR story pieces and swapped out both of the interchangeable pieces and put the puzzle together again. Suddenly, the choices made a much bigger difference and a lot more sense.

The interchangeable pieces provide the bear with a different item and see him use it in a different way. The additional chapters introduce new characters, which the bear befriends by using the different items. This gave The Child a new appreciation for the AR story, but it gave me a new appreciation for the AR app.

Doing the puzzle the first time, one would be forgiven for assuming that the chapters are stand-alone pieces that don’t affect one another. Doing the puzzle again makes it clear that the app is telling a new story each time based on the pieces, their placement, and your choices throughout the story.

AR Story Puzzle - The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights

We’ve only done the puzzle those two times so far. I haven’t done the math to figure out how many different versions of the story are possible with different choices, pieces, and arrangements, but I know that there are a lot of versions of the story that we have yet to hear.

And that’s a good thing. As soon as we finished doing the puzzle the second time, The Child immediately asked if there were any more AR story puzzles like this one.

Where to Find the AR Story Puzzle

So far, The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights is the only product by Red+Blue Stories (but we’re hopeful for more). The company is based in Canada but also ships to the US. Prices start at around US$34, but you can pay more for different shipping options. As of this writing, the AR story puzzle is not available on other online retailers like Amazon.

The AR instructions say that a child can use the product by themselves after the first go-around. That may be true, but if you’re letting your child construct this AR story puzzle without you, you’re missing out.

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Learning in AR: Bring Textbooks to Life With Ludenso

AR Apps, augmented reality, education, Education & Training, featured, learning / Ryan Harris / December 8, 2022

Augmented reality is exciting. It’s interactive and can be a great visual aid for information that might otherwise be difficult to visualize or that might be just plain dull in 2D. As such, it has huge potential for educators. Unfortunately, good AR content can also be difficult to make for people who aren’t experts. That’s where Ludenso comes in.

Ludenso works with textbook publishers, educators, and tech experts to create an app for augmenting textbooks with an easy-to-use interface. I talked with co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Ingrid Skrede, to learn more.

What Is Ludenso?

Ludenso gives educators low-and-no-code tools to bring augmented reality into the classroom. The company can and does work with educators and publishers to create models in-house, but they also make libraries of educational 3D assets available in a drag-and-drop interface.

“Bringing AR [textbooks] to life on mobile is not new. What’s new is the ability to view it and update it without technical expertise,” said Skrede. “We put the studio’s creative power into the hands of content experts, not just our development team.”

Ludenso AR app for learning

With a few keystrokes, educators with no AR development experience can add their own notations to existing 3D models that launch when a phone with the Ludenso Explore app recognizes images in a textbook. They can also add images, videos, or links – whether to more resources, online quizzes, or something else.

I saw this process in a screen share during a demo with Skrede but spent most of my time on the user side of the app. The app recognizes the target images instantly. Manipulating the model to scale and rotate it is easy, as is finding the annotations and contextual information that the educator (played by Skrede) attributed to it.

The app doesn’t only feature image detection, it also features planar detection. So, I can view a mini 3D model on the textbook page with the context of the words around it. I can also switch my view to place a 3D model in my office and scale it up as much as I want.

What’s more, once I’ve opened the models associated with a textbook, I can place them in my environment without the image target. So, a student could study the 3D models in a textbook chapter even if they left their textbook at school.

How Ludenso Inspires Learning

Of course, Ludenso isn’t just for educators – as no educational service should be. The application is also for students. Over the course of our remote interview, Skrede brought up numerous studies showing that AR helps students maintain attention and retain information.

More than that, Skrede says that working with Ludenso has put her in numerous positions to see “underperforming” students drawn into their lessons in ways that shocked their teachers.

“When we’re born, we want to learn. But, we have sixteen thousand hours of learning ahead of us and that’s a long time to sit and learn what everyone else is learning,” said Skrede. “When using AR, you’re challenging the perceptions teachers have and what it means to be a strong student.”

Living and Learning

Ludenso has been around for a couple of years now. The Oslo-based company is finally starting to get the buzz that it deserves, as well as a recently-cleared $1M funding round.

One of the pillars of Ludenso’s philosophy is that the best educational content is going to be made by educators – not by tech moguls. As a result, they started out working with schools directly. This was a great way to work directly with educators, as they wanted, but it came with its own challenges.

AR app for learning - Ludenso

“We saw how excited the students were, and how excited the teachers were,” said Skrede. “We also realized that it’s challenging to scale in the school sector.”

Working with individual schools meant that Ludenso was working with individual curricula. What the company enabled one school to make might only work for that one school. Some of the tools that make the current (and upcoming) iteration of Ludenso possible were developed at this time, but the company’s outreach structure changed.

“We were rather fortunate to get in touch with a publishing house here,” said Skrede. The company is currently partnered with three major textbook publishers, which serve as a distribution channel for educators. “We’re interested in building a learning platform.”

Using textbooks to launch the experience also helps educators implement the technology that they might not be familiar with – particularly as a part of a structured curriculum.

“We go with textbooks because teachers want to use AR but they need a tool that they can come back to over and over,” said Skrede.

As this article was being written, Ludenso also announced a partnership with Cambridge University Press & Assessment. The partnership allows Cambridge University to carry Ludenso content and gives Ludenso global exposure with a renowned publishing company.

Where Was This a Decade Ago?

One of the most challenging things about covering emerging technology is seeing an application like Ludenso that would have been great to have when I was in school. At the same time, it helps to remind us why emerging technologies are so exciting. Most readers might have been born too late for this particular app, but there’s a whole generation that’s just in time.

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QReal Launches Multi-Brand, Multi-Category AR Virtual Try-On App TRYO

AR Apps, augmented reality, featured, Retail, shopping / Ryan Harris / November 30, 2022

Virtual try-on is not an entirely novel concept. Converse, for one, first offered this shopping experience back in 2010 through The Sampler iPhone app which leveraged augmented reality. However, limitations on technology and devices hampered the adoption of virtual try-on.

With the rising popularity of online shopping today, virtual try-on is getting the spotlight. As it helps address challenges in online shopping, it enables consumers to get the best possible experiences when shopping on digital platforms.

Addressing Challenges in Online Shopping

In 2021, online retail sales in the United States amounted to $1.050 trillion. However, the amount of merchandise returned accounts for approximately 20.8 percent of this figure. That’s a whopping $218 billion in returns.

One contributing problem to this loss is the difficulty shoppers face in finding out how an item will fit or look on them without trying it on. This results in ill-fitting clothing, wrong shades, unmet expectations, and other issues that compel buyers to return the products.

Leveraging advanced AR and VR technology, virtual try-on presents an effective solution to this problem. This digital tool lets shoppers try on items before purchasing them. A smartphone, an app, and a few taps of their fingertips are all they need to make better selections when shopping online.

A Snap research substantiates how effective virtual try-on is. In their recent research, 80% of shoppers said that they feel more confident in their purchases as a result of using AR. The same research shows that 2 out of 3 shoppers are less likely to return a product after using AR.

Still, shoppers have limited options when it comes to using this functionality. Not all brands have virtual try-on apps. Also, shoppers have to visit different online boutiques or download multiple apps to use the virtual try-on.

This is something the newly-launched TRYO – a virtual try-on experience that lets shoppers view multiple brands and multiple categories in one library – could help with.

QReal AR Virtual Try-On App TRYO

TRYO’s Virtual Try-On: Revolutionizing How People Shop Online

TRYO strives to become the engine that powers the next evolution of shopping. It is creating a vast library of 3D branded models including products from Gucci, Cartier, and Adidas to name a few.

TRYO provides online shoppers with a one-stop shopping experience. Through advanced AR tech, shoppers can virtually try on footwear, watches, hats, eyewear, and other merchandise. From over 500 items at the time of the launch, TRYO’s library of ultra-realistic branded models will be growing fast with new products planned to be added weekly.

TRYO AR virtual try-on app

As TRYO offers brands an easy way to provide exceptional shopping experiences, we can expect more rapid adoption of virtual try-on technology across the industry.

“We want to show brands how easy it could be to embed a virtual try-on experience into their own websites,” said Mike Cadoux, co-founder of TRYO, and Managing Director at QReal, in a press release shared with ARPost. “It may seem like a daunting task, but we’re able to do it. TRYO shows it can be done.”

Developed by QReal, The Glimpse Group subsidiary, TRYO features world-class 3D and AR capabilities. It is now available for download in the App Store. Shoppers can also view the 3D models in the TRYO digital showroom.

The Future of Shopping Is More Exciting

Virtual try-on apps bring value to both brands and shoppers. Brands are able to deliver memorable shopping experiences that delight shoppers and make their buyer journeys seamless and enjoyable. They are also able to ensure customer satisfaction and lessen the need for returns. Ultimately, utilizing virtual try-on technology impacts the entire industry and makes shopping more exciting.

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Artebinaria Open-Air Museum: Imaginary Museums Without Walls in Augmented Reality

AR Apps, art, Art & Culture, augmented reality, featured, Sponsored / Ryan Harris / November 30, 2022

Meet Artebinaria

Artebinaria is a tech company based in Florence, Italy, founded by senior software engineer Alessandro Bemporad, operating internationally since 2019 in the field of augmented reality applied to the world of art. The company develops its own solutions on Apple devices and Cloud Computing platforms.

The team is composed of software engineers and art historians, all with many years of experience in their respective professional fields.

Artebinaria believes in augmented imagination – the symbiosis of creativity, knowledge, and technology.

Artebinaria Open-Air Museum in Florence, London, and Paris

The first three imaginary museums are already open at Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence, at Primrose Hill (The Regent’s Park) in London, and at Place-Vendôme in Paris, and offer a selection of 100 masterpieces of painting from the 13th to the 20th century.

The selection of the artworks, and the original content of the information sheets, illustrating the artworks, have been curated by an art historian, the Art Director of Artebinaria, Maddalena Grazzini.

How to Visit Artebinaria Open-Air Museum

A visit to one of Artebinaria’s Open-Air Museums takes place via the app Open-Air Museum by Artebinaria, which allows visitors who are in one of the geo-located museum locations to explore the artworks in augmented reality.

Visits to the Artebinaria Open-Air Museums are free of charge and are offered by selected sponsors, whose logos are visible in 3D directly within the augmented reality scenes.

artebinaria open-air museum augmented reality florence

Each of Artebinaria’s Open-Air Museums is arranged in a series of ‘Pavilions’ and ‘Exhibition Rooms,’ which over time will house new thematic exhibitions.

Inside the virtual rooms, visitors can admire the artworks, displayed in life-size, as if they were hanging on invisible walls which do not conceal their surroundings.

Moving within each imaginary room, visitors can admire the artworks from any perspective. In particular, it is possible to get close to an artwork to discover all its details or touch an artwork in space to view its information sheet.

100 Masterpieces in Augmented Reality

In this first edition, located in London, Paris, and Florence, the Pavilions of Artebinaria Open-Air Museum are dedicated to the themes of everyday life, portraits, mythology, and sacred art. Inside the exhibition rooms are shown 100 paintings of more than 60 great masters such as Giotto, Vermeer, Rubens, Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Renoir, Degas, Monet, etc.

artebinaria open-air museum augmented reality london phone

Artebinaria Open-Air Museum in Your City

With the opening of the first museums without walls in Florence, London, and Paris, Artebinaria invites all art history enthusiasts to visit them, and also to propose new locations for the opening of fantastic new Open-Air Museums in augmented reality all over the world.

Why don’t you propose to Artebinaria the opening of an Open-Air Museum in your city, too?

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