W|W: The Wearable Weekly – Google saves the HTC Vive

Welcome to The Wearable Weekly, your trusted guide to all things wearable tech. If you only have time to read one thing about wearables this week, this is it.

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Statistics and Forecasts

Apple Watch Series 3 selling way faster than expected, report suggests (Forbes)

Augmented reality spending exploding 11x to $36.4 billion in 2023, Greenlight says (Forbes)

Shasta Ventures launches a fund to accelerate AR and VR app development (TechCrunch)

49 percent of Apple Watch owners likely to Upgrade to the new Apple Watch 3 (Forbes)

Fitness wearable users will average 20 percent to 25 percent more steps after receiving prompts from a digital coach (MobiHealthNews)

Shares of Fitbit closed down nearly 5 percent Tuesday after reviews of its new Ionic smartwatch (MarketWatch)

Device Announcements

Apple Watch Series 3 with Cellular now available (MobileSyrup)

Funding & M&A

HTC to continue Vive efforts thanks to $1.1 billion deal with Google (Rolling Stone)

Leonardo DiCaprio invests in Mind Maze (Fortune)

HTC leads $4 million Series A investment in social VR platform ‘VRChat’ (Road to VR)

Mira AR headset startup grabs $1 million in new funding led by Greylock (TechCrunch)

Augmedics secures $8.3 million in Series A funding (Business Wire)

Major milestones

Google Daydream’s web-browsing features surface in Chrome (Engadget)

Snap Spectacles hardware lab cuts some jobs, changes leadership (Bloomberg)

Intel is cutting plans for its Project Alloy ‘merged reality’ headset (The Verge)

AR smart helmet Skully is coming back (TechCrunch)

Apple releases watchOS 4 (MobileSyrup)

Rumours

Amazon could be working on smartglasses with Alexa built in (MobileSyrup)

Google’s next Daydream VR headsets will reportedly come in three colors (The Verge)