Samsung's Galaxy S9 was recently announced with features like AR Emoji and Dual Aperture, but great functionality lives underneath them — such as the ability to have your home screen auto-rotate to landscape mode. It's a nice feature, but with a little work, you can already do this on any Android phone.
When you accidentally close out of an important tab on your iPhone, Safari's "Recently Closed Tabs" list really comes in handy. However, when it comes time to clear the list, things get a bit complicated. There's no "Delete" or "Erase" button on this page, but don't let that fool you — there are three easy ways to clear your recently closed tabs list.
In the not so distant past, you had to actually go meet someone in person to repay money you owed them. Say they covered your half of dinner or picked up movie tickets — they wouldn't get their money back at least until the next time you saw them. Thankfully, Venmo has effectively eliminated this inconvenience.
If you want to automate tasks with your smartphone, IFTTT is a great app. It does a tremendous job of helping you find applets or creating your own from scratch, so it's easy to connect your favorite online services and make them react to each other. With all this personal information, though, you should ensure that your data is secure by enabling two-step verification.
Over the past few days, we've learned a lot about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones. In addition to a full list of hardware specs, we have complete renders direct from renowned leaker Evan Blass. Of course, Samsung always has a few surprises up their sleeve, and today, we have some new information about the facial unlock method arriving on the S8.
Continuing its unrelenting (and mostly successful) campaign against Snapchat, on Tuesday, Facebook announced the addition of "World Effects" to its Messenger app.
Over the past month, we've spent significant time covering Samsung's Oreo Beta program, and the detailed list of features in Oreo is extensive for the Galaxy S8 and S8+. Many of you were upset when the Galaxy Note 8 was left out of the official Oreo beta program entirely, but we found a method to install a beta Oreo build right now on the unlocked and US variants if you'd like to give it a try.
Until self-driving cars become mainstream, augmented reality might be the next big technology to hit your dashboard.
On Wednesday, Snap, Inc. unveiled a revamp of its Snapchat app that draws a hard line between content from your friends and content from professional media organizations.
Christmas came early for Apple, as the company was awarded more than 40 patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday, including one covering a system for compositing an augmented reality construct based on image recognition.
Live theater doesn't typically benefit from the kind of computer-generated special effects that big-budget Hollywood blockbusters deploy, but that could change soon thanks to Microsoft's HoloLens.
When it comes to augmented reality smartglasses, for now, it's still a mostly enterprise world, since the form and function of most are more acceptable on a job site versus your local cafe, and the still high price tags are far more palatable to major companies rather than individuals.
Google's new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL have a new camera mode called "Motion Photos." As the name implies, it's quite similar to Apple's Live Photos feature or HTC's Zoe before it. For every picture you take, a few seconds of video footage from before and after the shot was taken will be embedded in the file, which gives you two ways to relive that moment.
There are a few different ways to install Magisk. If you're already rooted and you just want access to Magisk modules, you can use Magisk Manager to install the Magisk framework. Or, if you want to pass SafetyNet on a rooted device, you can switch from SuperSU to Magisk SU. But the best way to do it is to start fresh by installing Magisk on a non-rooted phone using TWRP.
If thieves, hackers, law enforcement, or other would-be enemies should ever gain entry to your smartphone, they could also access conversations you've had in Signal Private Messenger. To better secure your encrypted communications, you can password-protect the whole app and its contents — but only on Android. Even then, it's necessary to perform data deletion on a periodic basis, if not immediately.
Intel's driverless division will be managed by Israel-based Mobileye, as the chip giant emerges from relative obscurity in the driverless space to become a major supplier after completing its $15.3-billion purchase of Mobileye this week.
Ex-Uber CEO and founder Travis Kalanick's bad and likely illegal behavior aside, his vision of not wanting to pay "the other dude in the car" has lead to a ground-breaking driverless test fleet.
Life is all about spending time together with loved ones, experiencing new places together to enjoy and create memorable moments. Luckily, Google has made it easier for us to rendezvous with friends and family at specific places by letting us broadcast our locations using Google Maps.
Research group OpenAI, a research institute co-founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, says it is possible to trick driverless cars' neural networks into mistaking images for something else.
As we all know, and certainly have marked on our calendars, it's World Emoji Day! Considering that over five billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook Messenger alone, emojis deserve to be celebrated, and Apple's doing just that. On this monumentous day, the tech giant is gifting us all with images of its newest emojis. From dinosaurs to headscarf-clad women, the releases are sure to please emoji fanatics throughout the world.
Augmented reality headset maker DAQRI has collaborated with the US Navy to outfit the company's Smart Helmet device for use on battleships.
Zooming in and out within Instagram Stories is a good way to take your videos to the next level. Whatever a next level is. Sometimes I just run out of words to describe how fun using Instagram is, so for today, I got "next level," which means whatever you want it to mean.
Bixby — Samsung's voice-activated digital assistant — has been delayed again because the software still can't recognize English. Although Samsung claims Bixby can execute 15,000 tasks, it appears it's inability to master English is a major obstacle that's preventing its full release in the United States.
Modern warfare takes on a more literal translation with the advent of new augmented reality displays revealed recently by the US Army to improve soldiers' situational awareness on the battlefield.
German groups ZF Friedrichshafen AG and HELLA are collaborating to add to their autonomous portfolios with camera and radar development.
Thanks to a $100 million deal, you could be seeing more original shows on your Snapchat soon. Already, Snap has been producing super short shows in order to compete with social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook who have also been attempting to create their own content. While musical.ly has so far had the biggest success in this area, this deal with Time Warner is certainly promising for the beleaguered platform.
The common thread between this week's Brief Reality stories is that augmented reality is beginning to prove its worth as a technology that improves workflows and processes. From customer service to healthcare to manufacturing, augmented reality is helping companies improve productivity.
On April 7, 2017, residents in Dallas, Texas, woke to the sound of emergency sirens blaring all over the city. No one could shut them off, and after repeated efforts to contain the situation, the city had to shut down the entire system. While the media reported a sophisticated computer hack was responsible, the truth was much less high-tech.
After Ford's CEO Mark Fields' three-year tenure failed to keep up with the driverless industry and resulted in a 40% drop in shares since Field's took over in 2014, Ford is going in a new direction. Jim Hackett, who was previously chairman of Ford's self-driving division, has succeeded Fields as the company's new CEO.
When a new jailbreak method comes out, Apple is quick to patch the vulnerability it exploits by issuing a new iOS update. If you were to accept such an update, you'd no longer be able to jailbreak your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch unless you could roll back your firmware to a version that could be jailbroken. But Apple even takes things a step further and stops signing older iOS firmware versions, which makes downgrading next to impossible. This is where your SHSH2 blobs come into play.
Malware attacks on mobile phones are reaching an all-time high and it looks like companies like Samsung are doing all that they can to prevent any unwanted hackers from accessing its sensitive user data.
Beware: After a new caucus — the Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality Technologies for the 115th Congress — formed in the US House of Representatives, the government has decided to go after all mixed reality head-mounted displays. The HoloLens, Magic Leap — nothing is safe anymore.
The May 2017 security update has begun rolling out to Nexus and Pixel devices, which is usually great news. It means that your device is now being updated to protect you from the latest exploits and vulnerabilities found in Android. At other times, though, security updates patch root methods like Dirty COW, which is extremely frustrating for users and developers alike. Especially since most OEMs don't condone rooting or even unlocking the bootloader on their devices.
Every Friday, Next Reality reviews the latest headlines from the financial side of augmented and mixed reality. This weekly Market Reality column covers funding announcements, mergers and acquisitions, market analysis, and the like. This week's column starts with a stock price that's performing well for one company — one that HoloLens developers should know quite well.
User interfaces for computers have evolved over the years, from the introduction of the keyboard and mouse on the personal computer, to touchscreens on mobile devices, to natural voice recognition. However, the same cannot be said for robots or drones—until now.
Over a billion people use WhatsApp, which makes it the most popular standalone messaging service out there. But if you're one of the many people whose group of friends relies on WhatsApp for all communication, chances are, you have several years-long messaging threads with all sorts of random pictures and GIFs cluttering up the place.
Dutch filmmaker Anthony Van der Meer published his 2015 thesis short from Willem de Kooning Academy in South Holland online in December 2016. It's a brilliant piece of work that managed to be touching, alarming, and informative at the same time. His documentary, which already has over 6 million views on YouTube, covered the journey made by a stolen smartphone and how the theft and ensuing tracking affected all parties involved.
The HoloLens is the world's first untethered holographic head-mounted computer, which Microsoft has been rather proud of—and they have every reason to be. Of course, as soon as we developers get adjusted to the idea of keeping the scope of our projects inside the bounds of the HoloLens' processing power, Microsoft hits us with the Holographic Remoting Player.
In recent years, wave after wave of technological advancement has led us down roads that are beginning to look more and more like science fiction stories. In their efforts to bring us from science fiction to science fact, Microsoft Research showed us a new communication medium called Holoportation earlier this year—and now they have found a way to make this highly complex holographic system far more mobile.
Dutch police are using a system very similar to Pokémon GO on smartphones, but they aren't walking around trying to catch little pocket monsters. The purpose of this system is to give augmented reality help to first responders who may be less qualified to work a fresh crime scene. If successful, the idea of a contaminated crime scene could be a thing of the past.
