Fast Company has named 8th Wall as one of The World’s Most Innovative Companies in its prestigious Most Innovative Companies list for 2021. 8th Wall was selected as one of 10 Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality companies in this year’s annual list which features groundbreaking businesses across the globe and industries.
In the world of augmented reality, authenticity matters. This holds especially true for brand experiences where the product is front and center. High-quality 3D renderings, realistic shadows, reflections and lighting are all necessary ingredients not only for creating a sense of immersion, but most importantly for accurately portraying a product to the end user while maintaining the brand’s integrity at all times.
The massive reach and frictionless experience you know and love about 8th Wall WebAR just got even better! With the new iOS 14.3 update, which brings camera access to WKWebView, your WebAR experiences now work in all major iOS apps, including Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Messenger, LinkedIn, and Chrome — increasing your discovery and reach to the 728 million iPhone users worldwide.
Augmented reality is a powerful technology which uses our own reality as a canvas to transform everyday places, faces and things into something new and extraordinary. With Image Target augmented reality, the physical image marker — such as a magazine page, poster or label — is an essential ingredient to bring your product to life, making it the subject in an AR experience. World Tracking augmented reality uses the surfaces around you to create a markerless experience anywhere you are. When these two powerful AR technologies are combined, it’s possible to create WebAR experiences which make use of the world and keep your product as the focal point.
UPDATE 4/2/2021: Live Learning sessions are now held every other Wednesday on a recurring basis. You only need to sign up once here for the schedule, and can use the same link to access each session.
You can view past Live Learning sessions here
We look forward to your questions and suggestions!
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We are extremely pleased to announce the launch of 8th Wall Curved Image Targets, providing developers with new tools to bring to life coffee cups, bottles, cans and more using web-based augmented reality (WebAR).
Curved Image Targets expand upon our existing WebAR image target capabilities which previously was designed for flat image targets only. With the rollout of Release 15 of our AR Engine, developers can now create WebAR projects that are activated by and track images wrapped around cylinder- and cone-shaped objects.
Today we are excited to announce the release of our Video Recording feature which can be added to any 8th Wall project to let your users capture and share their experience.
When you add Video Recording to your project, your users will be able to capture moments within the WebAR experience and have the option to download their media and/or share it with their friends using the most popular messaging and social media applications. This opens up viral marketing opportunities for your experience by equipping your users with the tools they need to share their experience with their network and inspire further use.
8th Wall Video Recording happens in-browser and on-device, supporting iOS, Android, and Desktop computers. Designed with privacy in mind, capturing video on-device not only makes recording of web content extremely fast but it also ensures that only the user has access to the media they have created.
With AWE 2020 Online right around the corner, we’d like to recognize our talented partners’ WebAR projects that have been nominated for various Auggie Awards. Vote for your favorites to help them take home an Auggie! Here are the 10 nominations…
Best Campaign Nominee
To promote Fox’s LEGO Masters TV show, Fox teamed up with Trigger — The Mixed Reality Agency to develop a WebAR experience that allows people to build their own 3D LEGO creations alongside the show’s master builders. Users could share their AR builds on social media for a chance to win tickets to LEGOLAND, a LEGO Masters Build Box, or a feature on official LEGO Masters social channels.
Best Campaign Nominee
Holograms are in high demand as brands and organizations turn to volumetric captures of actors, celebrities and spokespeople to entertain, educate, train, and sell to customers. When combined with WebAR, these holograms become free to be wherever the user is, including their home.
Back in October, we launched our integration with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) to support streaming of its volumetric video in augmented reality on the web. Combining Microsoft’s high-resolution, low-latency volumetric videos with 8th Wall’s scalable and frictionless WebAR platform has unlocked a massive market opportunity for holograms. Since this launch, the 8th Wall platform has been used by brands, agencies and even musicians to create WebAR hologram activations that bring a lifelike human experience directly to users.
We gained some valuable feedback in supporting many of the early developers in their hologram project development. This insight was used to implement some powerful changes to our platform to improve the end-to-end development of MRCS hologram WebAR experiences.
Today, we are debuting our official MRCS Hologram project template and a new Cloud Editor feature enabling asset bundle uploads which makes it possible to add MRCS volumetric video (HCAP) files to your project. The release of these new tools makes the 8th Wall Cloud Editor the best platform to create and publish WebAR MRCS hologram content.
The A-Frame MRCS Project Template kick starts your hologram project development by using the latest versions of Microsoft’s HCAP player and 8th Wall’s SLAM engine hyper-optimized for the browser to provide world tracking. It also includes everything you need to set the hologram’s initial scale, enable gestures for manipulation and movement and easily modify looping, muting, control playback, and display messages based on HCAP playback states.
The new asset bundle feature lets developers drag and drop .ZIP files or complete directories into their Cloud Editor projects. The addition of this feature is critical to supporting MRCS HCAP assets. Developers can now drag and drop HCAP asset bundles into a Cloud Editor project, preview the hologram once it has uploaded and then add it to their project.
When ready, the hologram WebAR project can be published instantly to a password-protected staging environment or live to the world — hosted right at the edge, where your users are, with low latency via 197 points of presence globally.
While MRCS hologram projects benefit greatly from asset bundles, this new feature can also be used to upload files with any file extension, including glTF, and brings support for files that rely on referencing relative path files. It also allows developers to serve files as assets which can improve build and load times.
You can check out the new asset bundle feature by logging into the Cloud Editor and clicking the “+” arrow beside “Assets” in any Cloud Editor project. Or, read more about it in our Documentation.
To get started with a hologram project, head on over to the Project Library to clone the MRCS Hologram project or select it as a project template in the Cloud Editor. MRCS Hologram projects will require you to have a volumetric video file (HCAP) from Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) or MRCS partners Metastage and Dimension Studio.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
