News: Lego Transforms Statues into AR Creatures at Legoland Windsor Theme Park via Mobile App
Few brands have been more enthusiastic about augmented reality than Lego, which has now expanded its AR experiences from toys to theme parks.
Few brands have been more enthusiastic about augmented reality than Lego, which has now expanded its AR experiences from toys to theme parks.
Sure, Microsoft has mostly marketed its HoloLens headsets towards enterprises and developers, but we learned this week that, like every other tech giant, the company is working on a consumer-grade AR wearable. Speaking of consumer smartglasses, Apple made another strategic investment this week that has implications for Apple's AR future.
Apple's Find My app just got way more useful. While it's great for locating a lost or stolen iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple Watch, Mac, and AirPods, as well as anything attached to an AirTag tracker, it's even better now that it works with third-party accessories and gear.
The march of Amazon to insert itself into nearly every retail arena continues with the e-commerce giant's latest move to launch its own brick-and-mortar beauty salons.
This week, Google showed off some wild new and innovative AR experiences that showcase the WebXR protocol for browser-based AR content, while 8th Wall applied its own web-based AR platform in service of Captain Morgan.
When Microsoft unveiled Mesh a couple of weeks ago, the move revealed a major part of Microsoft's next steps toward dominating the augmented reality space, particularly with regard to enterprise customers.
Snapchat may trail Facebook and Instagram in terms of daily active users, but a new partnership with Samsung may get those innovative AR Lenses onto the mobile devices of a lot more users.
The process of trying out new augmented reality and virtual reality hardware is as personal as it gets. Bottom line, if you can't directly try these immersive devices on, it's difficult to really understand the benefits they can bring to your life and work.
The Lens Studio creators have published more than 1.5 million AR effects to Snapchat. One of them is Audrey Spencer, who shared her story with us and provided her insights into Lens Studio as a storytelling device. Meanwhile, Snap has added new capabilities to the platform to stoke more creativity from its creators.
The rapid advance of Lens Studio as a platform for easily developing augmented reality experiences is just one indicator that immersive computing is becoming the norm.
The Super Bowl isn't just the most important NFL game of the year, it's also the biggest night for brands to bring their most creative advertisements to a vast television audience.
The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been felt in practically every business sector. Now, as we look back at the top augmented reality investments of 2020, the AR industry has been no exception.
For enterprise augmented reality platform makers, remote assistance apps represent one of the greatest opportunities to show off the power of immersive computing. These apps enable experts to guide front-line workers or customers with AR prompts and other content in the field of view of their smartphones or smartglasses.
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.
Comparing the present-day states of the consumer and enterprise sectors of augmented reality is like evaluating the merits of sports car versus work trucks. Like consumer AR, sports cars are sexy and exciting, but perhaps a bit impractical at times. On the other hand, enterprise AR is utilitarian, but it gets the job done and, in the long run, pays for itself.
Smartphones are now indispensable when traveling. Domestic and overseas travel alike require food, navigation, translation, and so much more to make work or vacation successful. Gone are the days of lugging multiple tourist books around with you everywhere you go — you need to let your smartphone handle the dirty work.
It feels strange to be walking through an open field in a small village in the English countryside. There's no one else around — just the four of us: me, my husband, my 12-year-old son, and my adult niece. The day is spectacular, particularly for England. The sun is shining, and the temperature is in the low '70s.
Mystery is a tricky thing. Used correctly, it can give onlookers the impression that wondrous and perhaps valuable things are afoot. However, once the veil of suspension of disbelief is removed in any significant way, that same mystery can quickly turn into not just skepticism, but outright anger at what may have seemed like an attempt to dupe trusting onlookers.
Think back to when you last wanted to transfer some music or videos to your friend's smartphone and how difficult and slow it was. As powerful as our phones are, the default file sharing options are limited. There are, fortunately, some better options which make moving files easy, secure, and painless.
Coinhive, a JavaScript cryptocurrency miner, was reportedly discovered on the BlackBerry Mobile website. It was placed there by hackers who exploited a vulnerability in the site's e-commerce software that allowed them to anonymously mine cryptocurrency every time the website was viewed. There's no doubt Coinhive, an innovative mining method, is being abused and exploited by hackers in the wild.
The private automobile has been an intrinsic part of our lives for around a hundred years. But over the last decade, car sharing has gained a very small but growing part of the mobility market. The more recent rise of companies like Uber and Lyft is witness to a more dramatic shift in mobility and car ownership. Private vehicle ownership to a transportation-as-a-service model has already started, and high capability SAE Level 4 vehicles will complete this trend.
When shopping for a new smartphone, you'll encounter comparisons and spec sheets that are filled to the brim with values like mAh, GB, and GHz. To the average consumer, however, these values are meaningless, so we end up looking at which device has the specs with the highest actual numbers.
You no longer have to worry about repair technicians accessing the personal information on your iPhone when you send it in for repairs. With Apple's new security feature, you'll no longer have to erase your iPhone to ensure your photos, messages, accounts, and other private data remain for your eyes only.
Apple's iOS 16.3 update for iPhone had impressive new features, but iOS 16.4 might impress you even more.
Without realizing it, you may be giving away the GPS coordinates of your home, workplace, school, and other important or secret locations. Unless you've blocked the feature on your iPhone, location data is stored in almost every photo and video you take, and anyone you share the content with can find out where you are or were. But there are a few things you can do to safeguard the information.
While you can quickly see the edit history of a modified iMessage in the Messages app, there's no way to view an iMessage that somebody in the conversation deleted unless you happened to see it before it disappeared. But that's only true if you didn't implement these security measures on your iPhone.
Away from the hype around Facebook's smartglasses, the high-end fascination with the Microsoft HoloLens, and the unending rumors about Apple's AR wearable is the small but powerful darling of the enterprise AR world—Vuzix.
As NASA nears the launch of another mission to the Moon in 2024, and a subsequent mission to Mars in the 2030s, augmented reality is increasingly being woven into the normal space operations to test various capabilities.
If the importance of augmented reality and VR hardware to Facebook's future wasn't already clear enough, a shake-up in the executive ranks at the company has made it as clear as smartglasses lenses.
Wireless charging is pretty much ubiquitous among modern iPhones and Android smartphones, but the technology has brought a lot of clutter with it.
As if answering Apple's major iPhone event on Tuesday, Chinese mobile giant Xiaomi held its own product launch event the following day.
The battle for augmented reality and social media supremacy starts with the people working behind the scenes, and this week Snap pulled off a telling win that could indicate a shift in the AR space.
On this platform, we talk a lot about the future of augmented reality, and we pay attention to what is being said elsewhere as well.
After adding full-body tracking and 3D body mesh in its past two Lens Studio updates, Snap continues to supply creators, particularly apparel retailers, with tools for creating clothing-centric AR experiences.
The 2021 season of Major League Baseball (MLB) is in full swing, and now that vaccines are widespread in the US, major baseball stadiums are allowing fans back in at full capacity.
It's all fun and games until the technology is actually put into use and you realize augmented reality is now part of Death Star.
The startup JigSpace, which was among the first apps to support ARKit and LiDAR for iPhone augmented reality apps, has capitalized on its early mover status by innovating within the space.
While Apple was one of the first to integrate LiDAR into mobile devices for depth sensing, headset maker Varjo has developed a truly remarkable feat with its implementation of the sensor.
Over the past few weeks, Google, Snap, and Facebook have all taken their turns to show off their new augmented reality technologies. This week, it was Apple's turn, with new AR features for iOS 15 along with new capabilities for developers.
The debut of the augmented reality version of Snap's Spectacles came with several examples of how the wearable can allow creators to transform the world around them.