It looks like Facebook really likes Google's augmented reality leadership talent, as the social media giant has hired away another employee from the AR and VR team at Mountain View to lead its team for a product that brings Facebook's AR platform into homes.
First, there was SnapCat. Now, we have DogChat! Or SnapBark? In October, Snapchat took social media by storm with its Lenses for cats. But the latest addition to the camera app has given dog lovers an augmented reality Christmas gift they won't want to return.
The city of London is getting a holiday gift this season, but it's not the kind you unwrap, since it's completely delivered in augmented reality.
Boomerangs are a staple camera feature for Instagram and its users. The idea is to take up to 20 frames of video, which Instagram then processes into a looping movie that plays forward and backward. Since Facebook owns Instagram, it was only a matter of time before the feature hit its namesake apps, so it's not surprising that Messenger now supports the popular camera technique.
Safari has a convenient "Find" feature to search for specific words and phrases in a webpage, and Apple Books has a similar feature for e-books and PDFs. But those do nothing for you when searching text in the real world. Hardcover and paperback books are still very much a thing, as well as paper-based documents, and finding what you need is as simple as pointing your iPhone's camera at the page.
Occipital's initial augmented reality module, the Structure Sensor, gave iPhones and iPads the depth-sensing abilities of the HoloLens. Now, the company's latest product promises to do the same for Android devices, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality headsets and other devices.
The augmented reality smartglasses future that Snap founder Evan Spiegel has teased for so long may be closer than many realize.
While many are familiar with Samsung, I'm pretty sure most Americans couldn't name the second-largest smartphone OEM. It's actually Huawei, and they recently released a spec-sheet dream of a phone in the Mate 20 Pro. So naturally, we wanted to see how it compared to the largest OEM's best offering.
One of the neatest tricks available in Google Lens, an app that can identify and interpret real world information, is the ability to copy text from the app's camera view and paste it into a digital document.
Snapchat users are used to raising their eyebrows or opening their mouths to activate augmented reality face effects. Now, they get to use their voices as well.
After first being announced at Mobile World Congress 2018, the ASUS ZenFone 5Z will finally be coming to the US. Deemed an iPhone X clone by some, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to this flasghip. While it is similar to the iPhone X, in some ways, it improves on the design.
A peek inside the code of the Snapchat app has revealed that the company is expanding the search capabilities of its augmented reality camera to include visual search that may link to items within Amazon's massive online store.
LG is really coming strong at the flagship smartphone market in 2018. They have already released three new flagship caliber smartphones this year: the V30S ThinQ, V35 ThinQ, and the G7 ThinQ. But LG isn't done with flagship phones yet — they've just announced the V40 ThinQ.
While 3D motion capture via iPhone X is coming soon from Unity, software maker Reallusion offers similar functionality to 3D model animation producers today.
The addition of a new research mode for Microsoft HoloLens will enable researchers and developers to tap into a wider range of data collected by the device's sensors.
Augmented reality avatars that mimic facial expressions are no longer the exclusive province of Animojis on the iPhone X or AR Emojis from Samsung. Camera app Snow has added its own alternative to Apple and Samsung's features, which it also calls AR Emoji, for iOS and Android.
Another AR cloud savior has emerged this week in Fantasmo, a startup that wants to turn anyone with a smartphone into a cartographer for spatial maps.
For social media platforms like Facebook, augmented reality represents a whole new art form with which users can express themselves online. Now, Facebook is giving those users a new brush.
If bezel-less was the goal of OEMs in 2017, 2018 seems to be the year of the notch. Thanks in no small part to Apple's iPhone X, more and more smartphone manufacturers are designing their displays with this polarizing cutout. While many are frustrated with the trend, it's worth taking the time to consider what each phone gains with the unique design.
With a fresh series of videos and a new webpage, Snapchat has composed an answer to its own question, "What is Snapchat?"
What many thought was inevitable, based on recent hints, has been revealed to be in the planning stages: Snapchat is working on smartglasses. The surprising information came out on March 2 in a report that also claims Snap Inc. is planning to release version two of its Spectacles product in the third quarter of 2018.
Snap Inc.'s dedication to augmented reality has expanded the world lenses in Snapchat to our own Bitmojis. While it's great to see our characters interacting with real environments, we haven't seen them connect to other Bitmoji in AR space. That all changes with "3D Friendmojis," a lens from Snapchat that lets you stage scenes between your Bitmoji and a friend's.
Sure, you just got your Galaxy S8. But now, Samsung came out with their latest and greatest device — the Galaxy S9. While the S8 is still a great device, it's possible that the Galaxy S9 completely outclasses it, almost forcing you to pick it up. It is worth it though? That's a harder question to answer than you may think.
2017 was a down year for HTC. First, the U11 and U Ultra were widely criticized. Later, Google purchased a large chunk of HTC's manufacturing division, leaving the Taiwanese company running with a skeleton crew after losing 2,000 key employees. But that's not stopping HTC — their flagship U12+ was just announced, and it's quite impressive.
Facebook may have shamelessly copied Snapchat and its camera effects for faces (as well as its World Lenses), but it might beat its social media competitor to virtual body augmentation.
Thanks to Face Maker, a new app for the iPhone X, children everywhere can now avoid the trauma of face painting.
OnePlus surprised the mobile industry last year when it revealed the OnePlus 3T in November, an improved version of the OnePlus 3 that came out just months earlier in June. While many thought this was a fluke, history has repeated itself with the arrival of the OnePlus 5T.
Immersive advertising company Vertebrae has extended its native ad platform to augmented reality via mobile Chrome browsers for Android and Safari for iPhone.
Over the weekend at IFA 2017 in Berlin, Huawei introduced the Kirin 970 processor, the first of its kind to include artificial intelligence baked into the chip.
Two companies behind a number of augmented reality devices have joined forces to develop a 3D depth-sensing camera system that will facilitate computer vision capabilities for augmented/virtual reality experiences and more.
At the risk of breaking a few rules, we're going to talk about Fight Club. More specifically, digital artist Mateusz "Marpi" Marcinowski has mimicked a scene from the movie using Apple's ARKit.
If you've ever wondered how to import your photos in Snapseed, then you've come to the right place. Snapseed is a wonderful photo-editing app and will provide you with many tools to take your photos to the next level. But you can't get to that next level if you don't know how to get your images into Snapseed in the first place.
Arguably the most impressive aspect of the iPhone 7 Plus is its dual-lens camera, or better yet, the Portrait mode that comes with it. This mode creates a dramatically shallow depth of field behind a subject, and was pretty impressive as is. Now, in iOS 11, Apple is making it even better with support for more camera options.
If you thought the selfie would only ever be used to bombard your feed on Instagram, you were wrong. Dead wrong. JetBlue is looking to take those selfies and use them to check you in for your next flight.
If you're a tech enthusiast, there's no way you're not watching HBO's Silicon Valley. So you surely know the Pied Piper crew's latest shenanigans involve an app that uses a phone's camera to find facts about food items — a sort of Shazaam for food, if you may.
In a race to make self-driven cars mainstream, Intel announced today that they've bought Israeli microchip technology company Mobileye for $15.3 billion, setting the stage for Intel to dominate a large portion of the driverless market.
If you're tired of fumbling with the Control Center every time you need to turn off your iPhone's LED flashlight, you'll be happy to know there's a faster way. Using a simple trick that was discovered by Redditor 49599066, you can actually toggle your flashlight off in less than a second in iOS 10 and higher.
Walking while taking a video is always a pain. But it doesn't have to be, especially with Google's new Pixel smartphone and its new and improved Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) feature. A new video, released on Reddit, pitted the Pixel's EIS against the Nexus 6P with some incredible results.
If you just can't wait to see the Pixel and Pixel XL, the new Google-branded smartphones expected to be announced tomorrow, you're in luck. After weeks of rumors and blurry images, a smartphone sales company called Carphone Warehouse just accidentally dropped the entire ball. The UK business accidentally set the product pages for the Pixel and Pixel XL live a couple days early, and for just long enough for them to be archived before they were taken down.
In the wake of Google Glass' failure, we can expect other companies to fill the void in due time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Snapchat may be one of the first.
