The XR event of the year, Increased World Exposure, takes place in Santa Clara next week, from Wednesday June 1 to Friday June 3. The conference and expo are expected to surpass their record attendance of 7,500 in 2019. Representatives from most major companies in the field, including NASA, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Unity, HTC, Niantic, Verizon, Roblox and Snap will be in attendance along with hundreds of startups, entrepreneurs, investors, analysts, press, academics, and enterprise clients. While many consumer-facing companies attend, and there is a “Playground” of XR experiences on the show floor, the majority of the conference is for enterprises, startups, developers, press, and thought leaders.

It’s a long shot, but Apple’s ARVR headset may be teased at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next week, which will be online for the third year in a row. Tom’s Guide thinks it’s too early to joke, but on the other hand, after last week, the genie is out of the bottle, and how long can Apple wait before giving third-party developers something to work with? A development kit. an emulator. Something. Anything.

Glimpse Group buys Brightline Interactive for $32.5 million. Publicly traded XR holding company Glimpse Group (NASDAQ: VRAR) announced that it will acquire Brightline Interactive, for $32.5 million in cash and stock. DC-based Brightline is a successful virtual reality training company with numerous government and corporate clients. The deal will increase Glimpse’s annual revenue by 33%.

Metaverse BUD app raises another $37M, plans to launch NFTs The Singapore-based startup closed $36.8 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India, bringing the total funding to $60 million. Launched in November 2021, BUD rewards users for creating 3D content like avatars and other props in a web-based code-free interface. The app has been in the top ten social apps in nearly forty countries in North America, Southeast Asia, and South America. User-generated digital assets like costumes have changed hands more than 150 million times on the BUD marketplace.

XR All-Stars out of stealth with $4 million for Mirrorworld Matt Miesnieks, who sold his computer vision startup 6D.ai to Niantic in the spring of 2020, announced in a blog post this morning that he would be partnering with former Magic Leap SVP John Gaeta and Foursquare co-founder , Dennis Crowley, to create a new company. , LivingCities.xyz, which “will connect real places with digital twins, bringing life to the mirror world… We are building a social layer that intertwines the Metaverse and reality, so we can better express who we are.”

Niantic Developer Summit Sees VPS Launch, WebXR Addition At its first developer summit in San Francisco this week, the company unveiled the Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS), a crowdsourced 3D world map created by millions of phone cameras scanning actual locations as you play. Entry Y pokemon go. Thanks to 8th Wall technology (they were acquired by Niantic earlier this spring), this can easily be done with a smartphone camera and browser.

pixelynx, the new Metaverse music game platform created by deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin introduced their first mobile game, Elynxir, which was built on the Lightship platform. Niantic also announced an investment in Pixelynx at the conference. Watch the video above. It really kicks @**.

Somnimum Space leads a $4 million investment in Lynx ahead of delivery of its R-1 mixed reality headset. Somnium Space founder and CEO Artur Sychov will join the Lynx board. Lynx is based on the same XR2 chipset that powers the Quest 2, but uses full-color, high-definition exterior cameras that pass through AR. The outdoor sides can be closed off to allow for virtual reality experiences as well.

ArborXR and Qualcomm team up for XR implementations The companies collaborated on an enterprise-scale device management solution. Under the agreement, ArborXR will provide its device management software to Qualcomm XR customers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for large-scale deployments.

Journey is a new creative design company for the Metaverse. Led by Andrew Zimmerman, former CEO of Frog Design and co-founder of Accenture Interactive, and funded by Growth Catalyst Partners. Zimmermann. “We support customers seeking a panoramic view beyond what we can see today, spanning physical, voice, digital and virtual touchpoints. the future landscape it’s the ‘space’ where we envision the next chapter in the customer journey and then build it.” Renowned futurist, consultant, author, podcaster, and former Magic Leap executive Cathy Hackl will join as director of Metaverse .

Unity for Humanity Grant Awarded to Zoe Immersive Unity’s grant will allow the company to bring its platform to an underrepresented school district to create a curriculum that develops a 21st century skills education for the district.

​​Augmented World Expo, the world’s leading XR conference in Santa Clara June 1-3. The conference, now in its 13th year, will live stream main stage presentations online on AWE.live for free. The conference has twelve agenda tracks and 400 speakers. John Riccitello, CEO of Unity, and Hugo Swart, Vice President and General Manager of XR and Metaverse at Qualcomm will deliver keynote addresses. All sessions, including tracks, are recorded and posted to YouTube after the show.

This week on XR is now a podcast hosted by Viacom futurist Ted Schilowitz and Charlie Fink, the author of this weekly column. We’re free this week, but last week we featured AWE Co-Founder and CEO Ori Inbar. You can find us on the Spotify, iTunes and YouTube podcasting platforms.

what we are reading

Marketing in the metaverse: an opportunity for innovation and experimentation This white paper was a collaboration of Eric Hazan, Greg Kelly, Hamza Khan, Dennis Spillecke, and Lareina Yee of McKinsey.

Epic CEO calls App Store ‘a disservice’ to developers, says Facebook is their metaverse ally (Jose Adorno/9to5mac)

Me and my Selfie Drone: Life with a Snap Pixy (Scott Stein/Cnet)

Amid Crypto Market Turmoil, Andreessen Horowitz Announces $4.5B Web3 Fund (Lucas Matney/Techcrunch)