AR Snapshots: Dive into Shark Week with These Snapchat AR Lenses
Shark Week, which debuted in 1988 as a week of programming on the Discovery Channel dedicated to the titular predatory fish, has grown into a cultural beast of its own.
Shark Week, which debuted in 1988 as a week of programming on the Discovery Channel dedicated to the titular predatory fish, has grown into a cultural beast of its own.
Apple has a sterling reputation when it comes to managing its supply chain; it's where CEO Tim Cook proved his mettle to succeed Steve Jobs. Now, the company has made a strategic investment with a supplier that will be crucial to its future plans for AR wearables.
Snapchat's face tracking has certainly come a long way. This week, we've got an example of one effect that is nearly guaranteed to freak out your friends.
As soon as you try recording a video in the Camera app on your iPhone, any music playing on your device comes to a halt. Apple Music. Spotify. Pandora. Tidal. Deezer. No matter what you're listening to, as soon as you switch to "Video" in the Camera app, the music will stop. However, if you want background music in your movie files, there's a workaround to avoid having to add an audio track in post.
Google Meet might not have virtual backgrounds like Zoom, but it hits all of the other basics, from hosting many multiples of video participants to sharing your screen, that you'd expect from a robust video conferencing platform.
As more and more people use the video conferencing service Zoom, the chances of trolling behavior and attacks only increase. But it's not just "Zoombombers" you need to worry about. A heated discussion between family, friends, or colleagues could turn sideways real quick, and sometimes the best course of action is to remove the participant from the group video meeting altogether.
While holographic Whitney Houston is hitting the road, a new mobile app is bringing volumetric captures of up and coming performers directly to the iPhones and iPads of fans.
The top five apps of the 2010s were all social media apps of some kind, and the fact that's not surprising to you says a lot. We may use them for other reasons here and there, but our phones are social media machines at their cores. The thing is, some make better machines than others.
Some of the leading big tech companies are still working in the lab on actual products, but at least some of their leadership did have some thoughts to share on the future direction of the technology this week.
In a world full of augmented reality camera effects apps, one app is going in a more social direction.
One Instagram creator's augmented reality homage to Disney's deep bench of animated characters has earned him fifteen minutes of fame.
The newly enhanced focus from Magic Leap on enterprise, announced on Tuesday, also came with a few companies opting to weigh in with their experiences developing for the platform.
While Apple, Facebook, and Snapchat are still working on their first-generation AR wearables, startup North is already preparing to bring its second-generation smartglasses to the world in 2020.
Silicon Valley-based startup 8th Wall has spent much of the last few years building a reputation for enabling AR experiences that are platform agnostic via web browsers and mobile apps. Now, 8th Wall is promising to give developers the freedom to build and host AR experiences from anywhere via a simple web browser.
Suddenly, Magic Leap's lawsuit against Nreal, as well as its barrier to entry in the Chinese market, appears to be as insurmountable as The Great Wall itself.
Although early attempts at consumer smartglasses have employed trackpads and handheld or wearable controllers for user input, its the gesture control interfaces of the HoloLens 2 and the Magic Leap One that represent the future of smartglasses input.
While Toyota ranks as the leading automotive brand in the world, the company is a follower when it comes to augmented reality.
The annual Augmented World Expo (AWE) typically packs the front page of Next Reality with new products and services from companies in the augmented reality industry.
Move over, cosmetics companies. The athletic footwear industry wants to be able to give their customers the opportunity to try on products in augmented reality as well.
Among a crowded field of AR cloud companies aiming to power the future of augmented reality by creating a world of persistent holographic content that lives in a cloud, accessible across devices and accounts, Ubiquity6 is hoping it has found a way to differentiate its platform.
Bitmoji are personalized emoji that look like you and can be used to make funny memes or snappy replies. Normally, you have to find one of these reaction emojis in the Bitmoji app, then use Android's share menu to send it to the app where you ultimately want to post it, but there's a much better way.
This year's holiday shopping season is shaping up to be fertile ground for augmented reality to show its worth, as both Walmart and Target have crafted immersive experiences designed to engage shoppers in the coming weeks.
If you own a Google Pixel, you'll soon have augmented reality versions of Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and Childish Gambino on your camera.
The Daily Prophet, the enchanted newspaper from Harry Potter lore, is no longer the sole source for magical moving printed photos.
While we've seen Snapchat apply sky segmentation to AR content, the makers of the Blue Sky Paint app have applied similar capabilities to create and share airborne art.
The mainstreaming of augmented reality won't happen overnight, but it's becoming increasingly clear that traditional media is leading the charge in the effort to introduce the public to immersive computing. A recent example came from none other than USA Today via its 321 Launch app.
Using the ARKit 2.0 announcement as its springboard, software maker Adobe is looking leap up to the level of Unity Technologies and Epic Games, the companies making the go-to tools for creating augmented reality experiences.
Most of us have, at one point or another, found ourselves glued to our smartphone in a trance-like state, totally unaware of what's around us. Well, Apple has a way to curb overuse with an awesome tool for iPhone starting in iOS 12. It can help nudge us away from our phones to spend more time attending to real-life matters.
Apple's doubling down on AR features in iOS 12 and iOS 13. The iPhone's augmented reality framework got a major overhaul with ARKit 2 and ARKit 3, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. While the updated API tools will help developers make better interactive apps, there's another new AR feature that regular users will enjoy: Animoji in FaceTime.
Modern "mad men" are buying into augmented reality for marketing, with the two latest examples being trendy burger maker Bareburger and department store chain Zara.
MLB.TV is a great service that lets you watch most Major League Baseball games in North America, as long as you're a subscriber, of course. While I personally love it, blackouts can ruin the ability to watch my favorite teams. Fortunately, MLB At Bat Android users have an easy way to bypass blackout restrictions — and with no root required.
While you were busy browsing Instagram, composing tweets, or chasing Snapchat updates, an eight-year-old ARKit developer was hard at work on her first step toward taking over the tech world via augmented reality.
In one of the worst-kept secrets of the upcoming Mobile World Congress, Google has officially released ARCore on the Play Store for owners of the latest flagship Android smartphones.
Before The New York Times brought augmented reality to its iPhone app, the only way Winter Olympics fans could get this close a view to the world's best athletes would be to acquire a press pass.
With the Super Bowl just days away, it seems appropriate to draw parallels between football and the professional sport of technology business, or, more specifically, the augmented reality segment.
It's long past time to face the facts: farts are funny. The first fart joke dates back nearly 4,000 years to the ancient Sumerian people. References to flatulence were also found in ancient Greece within the works of Aristophanes. (More like Aristo-fannies, am I right?) A standard in practical jokes, the whoopie cushion debuted way back during the time of the Roman Empire.
Nowadays, with the convenience of online shopping, brick-and-mortar retailers and malls have to work harder to draw shoppers to stores. This year, many of them are turning to augmented reality for assistance.
Instagram is a great platform to share photos and videos with the world, but sharing with smaller groups is near impossible. You can directly message pictures, stories, or post links to friends, but that only works for one person at a time or in group chats you create. To share your content with a small group of people you care about the most, you'll want to use the "Close Friends" list.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its re:INVENT developers expo with a bang by launching Amazon Sumerian, a new tool that could become the dominant platform for building cross-platform augmented and virtual reality applications.
We may have to wait a few years before they arrive, but reports of Apple's headset taking shape in Cupertino gives the tech world hope that its white knight for consumer AR is on its way.