The AR Alliance launched today to provide a supportive and neutral environment for companies and organizations of all sizes to take an active role in advancing and strengthening the augmented reality hardware development ecosystem. Diverse organizations across the expanding, global AR ecosystem are working together through the AR Alliance to speed innovation of breakthrough technologies and processes for building AR wearables and devices that create a meaningful and positive experience for users.
The AR Alliance also announced that EssilorLuxottica (www.essilorluxottica.com), a global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of ophthalmic lenses, frames and sunglasses, is joining the alliance as a founding member with a seat on the board of directors.
“We are building AR together,” said Bharath Rajagopalan, chair, AR Alliance, and director of strategic marketing, STMicroelectronics. “The promise of AR and its potential market are so vast that there is ample room for all of our member companies to succeed together. The AR Alliance is the place where concrete work takes place to harmonize approaches for advancing, unifying and growing the global AR supply chain and accelerating innovation. We are excited for EssilorLuxottica to join us in this important work and bring their unique market experiences and perspectives to help propel the AR market.”
Added Fabio Borsoi, Global R&D Smart Eyewear at EssilorLuxottica: “There exists no AR market today, and the AR Alliance is fostering a holistic ecosystem to accelerate innovation toward mainstream adoption. For this reason, we are glad to join the Alliance. We need the unified, ecosystem approach that the AR Alliance is championing in order to build a real AR market.”
The AR Alliance grew out of the “LaSAR Alliance,” which was founded in 2021 and completed its mission of establishing an ecosystem of organizations in laser-beam scanning (LBS). The organization transformation was undertaken to enable the AR Alliance to serve and unify the robust, broad supply chain that tomorrow’s viable AR market will require. The alliance is open to any organization in hardware for AR, including (but not limited to) makers of batteries, cameras, clothing, displays/micro displays, eyewear/glasses, gesture devices, gloves, global positioning systems (GPS), heat managers, inertial measurement units (IMUs), lenses, microphones, optics, photonics, power, sensors (e.g., wireless and optical), solid-state compasses, speakers, stylus, pointers, thermal solutions, touch screens, etc.
Through the AR Alliance, hardware companies, who likely would not meet otherwise, connect with potential suppliers, partners and customers beyond their product category. Member companies can securely collaborate in early technology development across the AR ecosystem. Experts in the trenches of hardware development for AR come together through the alliance to trade lessons learned and market experiences, bounce ideas off one another and explore what’s working and what isn’t.
Furthermore, the AR Alliance provides industry a unified, balanced voice across its rapidly evolving ecosystem of hardware developers, both evangelizing AR advancement beyond the organizations that it serves and facilitating open innovation among them.
To learn more about membership in the AR Alliance, please visit www.thearalliance.org. Organizations of every size and at any spot in the ecosystem are respected, heard and advocated for via the AR Alliance’s non-competitive environment. Flexible membership levels allow companies of varying strategies, maturity and resources to engage.
