Army Looks to Train with VR

Another example of VR training:

Magic Leap is Bidding on an Army Combat Contract
Microsoft has also expressed interest in providing augmented reality equipment for the battlefield

By Joshua Brustein in Bloomberg

Magic Leap Inc. is pushing to land a contract with the U.S. Army to build augmented-reality devices for soldiers to use on combat missions, according to government documents and interviews with people familiar with the process. The contract, which could eventually lead to the military purchasing over 100,000 headsets as part of a program whose total cost could exceed $500 million, is intended to “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide and engage before the enemy,” according to an Army description of the program. A large government contract could alter the course of the highest-profile startup working on augmented reality, at a time when prospects to produce a consumer device remain uncertain.   ... "

Forget the Glasses

You have probably not noticed, the Pokeman Go phenomenon is off the news,  but it is still here. IEEE Spectrum reports that the broad concept is still rumbling.   And companies like Niantic and Magic Leap are showing us how to truly augment reality, even without the glasses.   Will I ultimately expect reality to be seamlessly, and indistinguishably inter-layered with its augmentation?

Augmented Reality: Forget the Glasses
While we waited for a Magic Leap, Pokémon Go walked off with the AR crown   by  Tekla S. Perry  ...

Apple Continues Moves in VR

Continued interest by big players in Virtual and Augmented reality moves.  Lets see the big workplace applications.

Apple continues hiring augmented and virtual reality experts
By Jacob Kastrenakes 

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been hinting at Apple's interest in augmented and virtual reality all year, and it seems that interest continues to grow. Business Insider spotted two people who were hired by Apple over the summer after working at a pair of the biggest names in field: one at Oculus VR, the other at Magic Leap.

The two hires don't mean much on their own, but they suggest that Apple is continuing to invest in AR and VR research with the goal of eventually putting out a product. In January, the Financial Times reported that Apple already had "hundreds" of people working on AR and VR, though those employees were said to have come from acquisitions of smaller companies. Their goal, according to the report, was to eventually build some kind of headset. ..... "

Magic Leap and China Augmented Reality Shopping

Video at the link.  Suggesting further advances in China retail technology.

In Mashable: 
Magic Leap demo in China shows augmented reality shopping
The incredibly secretive augmented reality startup Magic Leap showed off another demonstration of its technology this week, this time using Chinese apps. 

During a discussion with Alibaba CMO Chris Tung in China, Magic Leap's chief marketing officer Brian Wallace gave audience members a look at how the technology works. The early look for Alibaba makes sense given the Chinese company's role as a major investor in Magic Leap. .... "

Augmented Reality in the Real World

As Virtual Reality Grows, Augmented Reality Hits The Spotlight

With the excitement growing as Facebook's Oculus and HTC's Vive hit homes, the tech industry has begun to pay close attention to the sleeping giant of Augmented Reality.

" ...  AR takes a user's reality and "augments" it, adding to or changing the world that the user can see. Many companies have emerged in the space, including Magic Leap, which has raised over $1.1 billion in funding despite relative secrecy and Meta, which recently debuted a headset that augments the world around you, but requires a PC connected to work and is yet to ship. ... " 

Magic Leap Virtual Reality

In Wired: A new kind of  virtual reality augmentation, with much less needed equipment in the way?   Making it a kind of augmented reality without some of the clumsiness?  Still under development, with lots of funding appearing.   Worth following.  And the related patents. 

" ... Virtual reality overlaid on the real world in this manner is called mixed reality, or MR. (The goggles are semitransparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.) It is more difficult to achieve than the classic fully immersive virtual reality, or VR, where all you see are synthetic images, and in many ways MR is the more powerful of the two technologies.

Magic Leap is not the only company creating mixed-reality technology, but right now the quality of its virtual visions exceeds all others. Because of this lead, money is pouring into this Florida office park. Google was one of the first to invest. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others followed. In the past year, executives from most major media and tech companies have made the pilgrimage to Magic Leap’s office park to experience for themselves its futuristic synthetic reality. At the beginning of this year, the company completed what may be the largest C-round of financing in history: $793.5 million. To date, investors have funneled $1.4 billion into it ... "