We are pleased to announce our newest integration with the cross-app avatar platform for the metaverse, Ready Player Me. This integration equips 8th Wall developers with all the tools they need to create immersive browser-based experiences with custom, interactive avatars. Avatars play a major role in the metaverse, acting as our digital identity in virtual worlds and spaces, in joining forces with Ready Player Me users will now be able to bring their avatars into 8th Wall powered experiences. 

At 8th Wall, we are on a mission to make augmented reality for everyone and today we are further realizing this vision by making WebAR accessible beyond the smartphone.   

We are pleased to announce the latest integration with volumetric video partner, 8i, which provides an end-to-end solution to capture, transform and stream recorded and live broadcast volumetric video in WebAR. Livestreaming holograms represents a fundamental advancement in volumetric video technology that enables the future of communication in 3D, where real people — not avatars — are brought into immersive digital environments in a live broadcast, instead of taking days or weeks to render, an industry first. Combined with 8th Wall’s powerful AR engine which enables high quality, interactive augmented reality experiences to work in the browser, livestreaming holograms can be accessed on nearly 3.5 billion iOS and Android devices with no app required to download. 

Today we are introducing Landing Pages, a new product feature which makes it incredibly easy to create and customize branded web pages designed to increase engagement with your WebAR experience. This new feature dynamically generates an optimized landing page for your 8th Wall project while giving you complete control to tailor every aspect of the page to match your brand. Landing Pages give users a meaningful experience no matter what device they are on and helps them get to your WebAR experience.

Apple’s latest operating system update, iOS 15, has officially been released to the public. iOS 15 makes the iPhone and iPad even more powerful devices for web-based augmented reality with support for WebGL 2.0 and WebGL via Metal, enhancements to Web Share and a new Safari browser bar design. At 8th Wall, we have been preparing for the release of iOS 15 to ensure that your 8th Wall powered experiences are optimized and benefit from these changes. 

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.

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. 

The web is a powerful place for highly realistic augmented reality experiences and 8th Wall is empowering developers with tools to make that happen.

Developers can already use the 8th Wall platform to create realistic WebAR experiences which make use of high fidelity models, lighting and shadows. Today, we are pleased to introduce our latest feature to elevate your WebAR projects, 8th Wall Realtime Reflections.

With 8th Wall Realtime Reflections, you are now able to add dynamic environment maps based on data coming in from the camera feed to your 3D models to add a deeper level of realism to your project. These dynamic reflections are made possible by 8th Wall's unique camera application framework which gives our developers precise control over how the camera feed is processed and presented in their projects.

To help developers elevate the realism in 8th Wall projects; we wanted to share how Realtime Reflections and other best practices can be used to create lifelike AR experiences.