By Tom Emrich Canadian Startup News July 3, 2017

W|W: The Wearable Weekly – Apple’s AR glasses

Apple AR glasses concept

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

77% of devs believe AR/MR will be more popular than VR, long-term says survey (Gamasutra)

Apple is going to start shipping its augmented reality glasses in 2020, or so says Gene Munster from Loup Ventures (The Motley Fool)

CFC release ongoing study tracking the evolution of Canada’s VR ecosystem (MobileSyrup)

Device Announcements

Qualcomm’s introduces new Snapdragon 1200 chips for long-lasting, purpose driven wearables (MobileSyrup)

Funding & M&A

Apple acquired eye-tracking startup SensoMotoric Instruments (MacRumors)

Kaleidoscope Launches Funding Platform (UploadVR)

Snapchat bought the AR location intellectual property of startup Drop (TechCrunch)

Smartwatch start-up Matrix lands $17.3 million to go after Apple with a device powered by body heat (CNBC)

NYU lands New York City’s ambitious VR/AR hub (Engadget)

Vaqso raises $600K to make VR smelly (Business Insider)

Car360 Secures $3.55 Million in Series A Financing Round Led by BIP Capital (PR Newswire)

Major milestones

Qualcomm Partners With Ximmerse For Mobile VR Input Solution (VentureBeat)

Oculus Now Supports Mixed Reality Capture Natively (VRFocus)

The Void Opens VR Experience Center in Toronto (Variety)

DAQRI Partners with Flex for Production of Augmented Reality Headsets (PRNewswire)

Queen launches 360-video VR app “VR the Champions” (CNET)

Ubisoft Reveals Several HoloLens Prototypes (VRFocus)

Google unveils Advr, an experimental Area 120 project for advertising in VR (TechCrunch)

Rumours & Patents

Fitbit is struggling with its upcoming smartwatch (Bloomberg)

Andy Rubin-backed AR hardware startup CastAR reportedly shuts down (TechCrunch)

Thalmic Labs patent describes holographic lenses (BetaKit)

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Feature image via Getty / The Motley Fool.

Tom Emrich

Tom Emrich

Sometimes called the “man from the future” Tom Emrich is a leading voice in wearable technology as an investor, community builder and influencer. His passion for this space is driven by his belief that wearable tech plays a critical role in our human evolution.

  • Smanny

    Those that believe “77% of devs believe AR/MR will be more popular than VR, long-term says survey (Gamasutra)” truly don’t know what they are talking about. Or have never tried any of the technology to begin with. For instance the vast majority of apps on both Apple’s app store and Googles play store are games. VR gives you the ability to have a game that feels fully immersive​. Something that AR cannot give you. Say your playing a space game, and you are in you home. Do you want to see your TV or couch in the background of this space game? Both AR and VR are different and both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both have their place in life. Now when you are talking about MR (mixed reality), then this is the best of both worlds. Where users have both full VR and AR. The AR part comes from the cameras that sit in front of the VR headset. So now you will have fully immersive VR with the display taking up a greater FOV (field of view), and the cameras can still show the user the outside world on that immersive VR display. So you have the best of both worlds. That is where the technology is going.