Microsoft Seals Largest Deal to Deploy Immersive AR
The US Army will receive up to 120,000 battlefield-ready Hololens headsets in a deal that is worth up to $21.8 billion over ten years.
Facebook's Browser Rapidly Ships With Velocity
This week version 15 of Facebook's browser for the Quest platform rolled out, bringing with it copy-paste and context menu functionality as well as additional motion information on WebXR's XRPose API which will allow experience creators to provide better feedback based on how users move their heads and hands.
Google Intends to Ship Planes
To most people, the detection of planes seems like an abstract concept but to experience creators the planes detected in the world around us are walls, floors, tables, and other crucial features that contribute to a well formed reality. This week Google announced their intent to ship the WebXR plane detection API. In related news, a few folks noticed that Google is once again hiring AR hardware people.
Console Crashes into Wonderland
In another step toward many developers' goal of never removing their headsets, the Wonderland engine now has immersive console logging! The demo and repo are available to those who never want to see the sky unless it's in a WebXR planetarium.
WebXR, A-Frame, and Entity Component Systems (Oh, my!)
The Director of Research and Education for UW's Reality Lab published an in-depth course that covers fundamentals of the immersive web.
An Educator's POV
Educator, consultant, author, attorney and public speaker (quite a combination!) Rachelle Dené Poth wrote about her experience with the immersive web in the classroom.
KaiXR's Education Team Is Growing
With three new hires and the announcement that they have been accepted into T-Mobile's accellerator program, the educational XR experience builders at KaiXR are picking up steam.
More Shaders Coming to A-Frame
XR studio Planet Voodoo announced that they're building and open sourcing a series of new shaders for Three.js, starting with this hologram shader.
Sonification in VR
The GIFs and notes about this new immersive web experience are a fascinating exploration of sound as another channel of information for interaction design:
In the Kromophone, color is separated into channels for red, yellow, green, blue, and white. The intensity of each channel gets mapped to its own voice, which specifies a pitch, a pan, and a timbre. The intensity of each color channel controls the gain of each audio channel