Welcome to The Wearable Weekly, your trusted guide to all things wearable tech. If you only have time to read one thing about wearables this week, this is it.
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Wearable Weekly using the form below to make sure it hits your email inbox every week!
Statistics & Forecasts
52 million units of virtual reality head-mounted displays by 2020 says Forrester (ZDNET)
ABI Research found that close to 67% of respondents plan to buy a smart watch in the next 12 months in China (Patently Apple)
42% of businesses surveyed by THE AREA predict they will implement smart glasses technology within the year, and another 38% predict adoption in 2-3 years (MarketWired)
Frost & Sullivan predicts the global healthcare market for wearable devices will blossom from $5.1 billion in 2015 to $18.9 billion in 2020 (ReadWrite)
Device Announcements
AMD launches $199 AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card for VR at Computex (Forbes)
Quanta Computer and ImmerVision announce “world’s first 360-degree live VR streaming camera for smartphones” (Forbes)
Qualcomm announced its new series of Snapdragon Wear chips aimed at wearables (VentureBeat)
Kate Unsworth launches Zenta: the world’s first biometric band for your emotional wellbeing (Forbes)
Samsung announces Gear Fit2 wearable and Gear IconX fitness headset (MobileSyrup)
Olympic athletes will be the first to wear VISA’s new payment ring (SportTechie)
Funding & Acquisitions
China’s Huace raising $300 Million for U.S. investment, buys stake in Magic Leap (Variety)
Augmented and virtual reality startup uSens raises $20M Series A (PE Hub)
Merge VR raises $10M (San Antonio Business Journal)
Leyard invests in Magic Leap (LED Inside)
Major Milestones
Microsoft opens the HoloLens platform to OEM, ODM and hardware partners (MobileSyrup)
Microsoft launches Outlook Android Wear watch face (ZDNET)
Pebble’s new Core will support Amazon’s Echo (MobileSyrup)
Bjork’s latest album will be in VR (The Verge)
Magic Leap is giving 10 Twilio developers early access to its SDK (TechCrunch)
Microsoft HoloLens gets Outlook and Calendar (Engadget)
Google teams up with The Drum to give Cardboards away with latest issue (The Drum)
Jaunt launches venture in China (Hollywood Reporter)
Scope AR launches WorkLink, an industry-first Augmented Reality Smart Instruction Creation Platform (PR Newswire)
Atheer brings AiR Suite for enterprise to Osterhout Design Group’s R-7 Smartglasses (PR Newswire)
Samsung launches 5 wearable startups built around products from its Creative Labs (MobileSyrup)
Rumours
Jawbone to produce new health-focused wearable (Fortune)
Jawbone not getting out of the wearables business? (ZDNET)
Huawei’s Daydream smartphone coming this Fall (Ubergizmo)
Subscribe to The Wearable Weekly
Don’t forget to subscribe to The Wearable Weekly using the form below to make sure it hits your email inbox every week!
Feature image courtesy Rio 2016.
