Tag: ar

Everyone you know is a Disney princess, which means AR is queen

This weekend, all of your friends morphed one by one into animated, Pixar-inspired characters. This isn’t a fever dream, and you’re not alone. On Thursday, Snapchat released a Cartoon 3D Style Lens, which uses AR to make you look like a background character from “Frozen.” Naturally, even though TikTok’s own…

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This Week in Apps: WWDC 21 highlights, Instagram Creator Week recap, Android 12 beta 2 arrives

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes…

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Snap acquires AR startup WaveOptics, which provides tech for Spectacles, for over $500M

Snap yesterday announced the latest iteration of its Spectacles augmented reality glasses, and today the company revealed a bit more news: it is also acquiring the startup that supplied the technology that helps power them. The Snapchat parent is snapping up WaveOptics, an AR startup that makes the waveguides and…

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Google Maps to add more detailed maps, crowd indicators, better routing and more

Google has announced a series of updates soon coming to Google Maps, as part of the company’s larger goal of delivering over 100 A.I.-powered improvements to the platform by year-end. Among the new improvements, detailed during Google I/O’s developer conference this week, are new routing updates, Live View enhancements, an…

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SightCall raises $42M for its AR-based visual assistance platform

Long before Covid-19 precipitated “digital transformation” across the world of work, customer services and support was built to run online and virtually. Yet it too is undergoing an evolution supercharged by technology. Today, a startup called SightCall, which has built an augmented reality platform to help field service teams, the…

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Extra Crunch roundup: Clubhouse UX teardown, YC Demo Day favorites, proptech VC survey, more

Since the pandemic began, I have been pushing the limits of my imagination to try to picture what cities will look and feel like in the coming years. If your town looks like San Francisco, where I live, it’s a pressing question: Our once-bustling financial district is a ghost town,…

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