The Auggie Awards are back this year and 8th Wall WebAR is making a huge splash with 23 nominations across 6 categories.

Today we are giving our developers new superpowers with powerful new features for the 8th Wall Cloud Editor designed to save you time, empower you with more information, and enable you with even more tools to make augmented reality for everyone. Developers with Pro or Enterprise workspaces can now make use of Code Search, an Asset Property Panel and an on-device Debug Mode when developing WebAR experiences using the Cloud Editor.

Augmented Reality can change the real world into something extraordinary or open a door to teleport users to another world completely. World Effects are the most popular category of augmented reality created on 8th Wall with WebAR Portals a dominant use case for World AR content. Today, we are excited to announce that WebAR Portals powered by 8th Wall are getting a major upgrade.

We are thrilled to announce the official launch of the 8th Wall Partner Program, a first-of-its-kind global network of trusted agencies and creative studios that have proven experience in bringing web-based augmented reality experiences to market. Our Partner Program is designed to connect brands with agencies so that they can harness the power of WebAR to engage users in new ways and achieve business results with augmented reality. 

Today we are pleased to announce the launch of Public Profiles, a new offering from 8th Wall that gives all of our developers their own public-facing pages to feature their work on 8thwall.com. Public Profiles act as a portfolio to showcase your work, let users try out your experiences and even show and share your code if you so choose. These pages are designed to help you succeed by attracting new opportunities, inspiring the community and engaging new users. 

8th Wall is pleased to announce our latest integration with our volumetric video partner, Tetavi. Starting today, developers can now easily add high-quality holograms created using Tetavi’s portable end-to-end system to any 8th Wall WebAR project. 

We're thrilled to announce that 8th Wall has officially joined the newly formed IAB Augmented Reality Board of Directors, with our VP of Product, Tom Emrich, appointed to the board. As a board member, 8th Wall will help the IAB on its mission to unlock the value of augmented reality for brands by focusing on buyer education, creative best practices and AR ad measurement standards.

Your 8th Wall WebAR projects are about to get even more extraordinary. With Release 16, 8th Wall’s powerful AR Engine has received its biggest upgrade resulting in a 50% improvement in accuracy of our SLAM system and increased frame rate of up to 70% on some devices, more precise Image Targets, and smoother video recording. 8th Wall’s hyper-optimized AR Engine further arms developers, brands and agencies with the ability to develop robust WebAR experiences that are highly performant and interactive. With these performance updates—and a reach of 3.5 billion devices—it’s no wonder that the web is a powerful place for augmented reality.

8th Wall's AR Engine offers developers a world-class SLAM system that runs directly in the browser, powering interactive WebAR experiences. The AR Engine is as fast as it is mighty—reaching desktop benchmarks of 300FPS. 8th Wall's SLAM system needs to be computationally efficient because it must be versatile, capable of running in any major browser on mobile phones, desktops, tablets, and more. For 2021, our engineering team was asked to take a deeper dive into the AR Engine, kicking off new initiatives this year aimed at making this SLAM system better, faster, and more powerful than ever. 

8th Wall has been the home of WebAR-enabled holograms since 2019 and we are pleased to announce our latest integration with our new volumetric video partner, Arcturus. 8th Wall developers can now stream volumetric video using Arcturus’ HoloStream solution in their WebAR projects. With its studio-agnostic solution, HoloStream expands the number of capture studios developers can use for 8th Wall projects. Additionally, its adaptive bitrate streaming solution optimizes performance of volumetric video in WebAR.