PISCATAWAY, N.J., July 31, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The AR Alliance a program of the ISTO federation that is dedicated to advancing open and interoperable augmented reality (AR) ecosystem standards, proudly announces the addition of four influential members: Magic Leap, Tekscend Photomask, and University of California San Diego.
These new members reflect the global diversity and strength of the AR hardware development ecosystem, bringing expertise across foundational research, advanced optics, semiconductor tooling, and spatial computing platforms. Their participation reinforces the Alliance’s collaborative mission to accelerate innovation, support open standards, and unify the AR industry through concrete action and shared success.
The AR Alliance provides a supportive and neutral environment for 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 work together through The AR Alliance to speed innovation and breakthrough technologies and processes for building AR wearables and devices that create meaningful and positive experiences for users.
“We are building AR together” said Dr. Bharath Rajagopalan, Chair of The 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 our member companies, and stakeholders, 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 as well as accelerating innovation. We are pleased to welcome these new members to the AR Alliance and to join us in this important work and bring their deep technology experience, manufacturing capabilities, product leadership and research to help enable the AR market.”
Magic Leap is a leader in transparent optics technology and scalable optics manufacturing for Augmented Reality (AR) experiences. They build proprietary manufacturing equipment and processes to produce highly precise eyepieces, with their flagship AR product, Magic Leap 2, featuring patented optics and a lightweight design.
UC San Diego has been named the No. 8 university worldwide in powering global innovation, according to Clarivate’s latest report. The university ranked third among U.S. public institutions, reflecting its deep impact on industry and society through cutting-edge research and breakthrough patents.
The unique collaboration between UC San Diego’s Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination has given rise to an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, computer scientists and artists working together to pose problems in new ways and advance scientific methods and knowledge with full STEAM ahead. Their combined methods leverage recent advances in lightweight biometric sensors, virtual reality, eye tracking, EEG, as well as state of the art immersive Virtual Reality. Their lab (located at the Supercomputer Center for Neuroscience, UCSD) has a wide variety of neuroscientists. The lab is also renowned for the use of the MoBI lab, a research space dedicated to virtual reality experiments.
Tekscend Photomask Corp is the world’s premier provider of photomasks for semiconductors, and a group company of TOPPAN Holdings Inc. Tekscend Photomask was previously known as Toppan Photomask. Headquartered in Tokyo, Tekscend Photomask leverages its worldwide customer service network and eight manufacturing facilities in key geographic locations to offer the worlds most advanced lithography technology. Tekscend Photomask is also expanding into nanoimprint molds and other nano-fabricated products.
About The AR Alliance
The AR Alliance Founding Board Members comprise STMicroelectronics, META, Essilor Luxottica, Corning, Dispelix, Optofidelity, MICROOLED, Google, and Qualcomm.
Organizations of every size and in any sector of the ecosystem are respected, heard, and supported in The AR Alliance’s non-competitive, collaborative environment. Flexible membership levels remove barriers to access enabling companies of varying stages of maturity and resources to engage.
To learn more about membership in The AR Alliance, please visit http://www.thearalliance.org.
Media Contact:
Brianna Rich
Program Manager
brianna.rich@isto.org
