Market Reality: Apple's AR Toolkit Is Slowly Catching on While Google & Snap Invest in More AR Development Tools
The business of enabling the development of augmented reality experiences appears to be as lucrative as AR app development itself.
The business of enabling the development of augmented reality experiences appears to be as lucrative as AR app development itself.
Google's AI investment arm, Gradient Ventures, has joined a $10.5 million round of funding for Ubiquity6 and its platform for shared augmented reality experiences, just weeks after Google's GV fund backed a competing AR cloud platform.
It looks like Google's feud with Amazon won't end anytime soon. A war has been brewing ever since Amazon pulled Chromecast, Apple TV, and other competing devices from their store in 2015, but the latest exchange is a huge blow to people using Amazon Fire tablets and streaming TV sticks.
The legal travails of Magic Leap appear to have no end in sight, as a lawsuit filed by an ex-employee further threatens to dampen the startup's 2018 launch.
Along with the awesome early-2018 addition of Giphy GIFs in Snapchat, you can now share other people's Snapchat handles and tag them in a way that lets others reach those people easily — something you couldn't do before in the app.
It's human nature to wonder if the grass is greener on the other side. This is no more true than for people who use iPhones, and those who use Galaxy S phones. While iPhones were initially the gold standard for smartphones, Samsung's phones equal them in many ways and surpass them in others. If you use an iPhone and you're on the fence, here's the case for making the switch to a Galaxy S9 or S9+.
A recent update to Facebook's News Feed could significantly broaden its reach when it comes to delivering augmented reality content.
Apple CEO Tim Cook's most recent tech prophecy is that "AR will change everything." And now, that includes Apple's own website.
Although The New York Times may have won the race in terms of presenting coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics through augmented reality first, The Washington Post is nevertheless working to compete in AR in a different way—via gaming.
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.
On Thursday, Snapchat opened up its walled garden of World Lenses to the masses of creators with the launch of Lens Studio.
With a pair of new APIs and low-latency media servers, Twilio's Programmable Video platform could soon help ARKit and ARCore app developers build shared AR experiences between multiple users.
Augmented reality software provider Ubimax unveiled their graphical authoring and publishing tool for their Frontline enterprise platform to attendees at Augmented World Expo Europe today.
Until Star Wars Jedi Challenges arrives in November, a forthcoming ARKit revision of HoloGrid: Monster Battle from Tippett Studios and Happy Giant, might be the closest most Star Wars fans can get to playing the HoloChess game from the movie.
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.
"Valar morghulis." Don't know what that means? You should probably download Duolingo for Android or iPhone.
Free beer and AR? What could be better? Amstel, a Dutch beer brand, has launched an innovative sampling campaign using an AR app called "Snatch." Snatch is a treasure hunt gaming app, and if you win the game, your prize is 10,000 free pints of Amstel beer, redeemable at Mitchell & Butler pubs.
Say goodbye to boring video chats over Messenger. Now the app is rolling out new features that can make any chat interesting and fun.
German groups ZF Friedrichshafen AG and HELLA are collaborating to add to their autonomous portfolios with camera and radar development.
More video content is making its way to Facebook as the social network relentlessly tries to get its video platform up to par with YouTube. Now, they seem to be making more of an effort to improve their video tab, as new features have started to appear on some Android phones.
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.
Savor this moment: we've got a confirmed number of sales for the Google smartphone. We say this because unlike most hardware manufacturers, Google refuses to share official sales numbers for their phone. Instead, during earning reports they simply bundle the product under Alphabet's "Other Revenues", leaving us in the dark about how successful the product is.
Nope, it's not 2016 again. Samsung is giving it another go at beating its competitor by attempting to unveil their new Galaxy Note 8 before the new iPhone. Because it worked out so well the last time.
Global design and technology services company Tata Elxsi says it has licensed its advanced autonomous vehicle middleware platform "AUTONOMAI" to a "leading automotive OEM."
Uber has been in the hot seat for awhile now, for many reasons, especially for being sued by Waymo over stolen LiDAR designs. But now, perhaps the attention will be taken off both Uber and Waymo as a new contender enters the LiDAR arena; A small, independent company called Luminar has finally let the world in on what it has been cooking up.
Once mixed reality technology is more widely available and realistically priced for consumers, using the tech to create the illusion of a larger space, will likely be a favorite use for mixed reality in places where real-estate is expensive, people tend to live in smaller homes and work in tighter offices.
This week, Dr. Sung-Hoon Hong, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, announced at the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego that not only does Samsung have a new virtual reality headset coming, but that Samsung intends to enter the field of augmented reality, too. In fact, Hong talked very little about virtual reality and instead spoke at length about Samsung's move into augmented reality.
Most popular virtual reality headsets, like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, require a tethered connection to the computer and that imposes some obvious restrictions on how much we can move in our space. We'd all prefer a simpler, untethered option, and Intel wants to provide just that.
Microsoft's HoloLens has many applications in the business world, both large and small, but what about gaming? Initial demos gave the impression that we could expect amazing first person shooters, platformers, and even Minecraft. Yet, as Newsweek noticed, the HoloLens was nowhere to be found at E3 this year.
Google first introduced Google Home, its latest smart product in the works, at the company's I/O conference in May 2016. It will directly compete against Amazon's Echo, which has so far been a success with over 3 million devices sold, and it was even featured as FBI Agent Dom's only real friend in the second season of Mr. Robot. Google may have their work cut out for them, but we're betting Home will knock Echo out of the water. Google Home is a personal assistant with a built-in speaker and ...
Nearly nine months after the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, we finally have some solid information on the "S" model of Apple's flagship device, slated for release this fall. Coming straight from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities (via AppleInsider), quite a few upgrades will be included in the next iPhone model.
In the shadow of Facebook's announcement for third-party app development on Messenger, the company has announced the release of a whole new application called Riff, a creative tool for making videos with friends.
Video games have come a long way over the last 30 years. In the late-'80s, Atari, Nintendo, and Sega were taking gaming from arcades to living rooms. Back in 1994, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were in bedrooms everywhere, and over the next couple of years, were slowly being replaced by Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and the first ever Sony PlayStation.
Confirming a lot of what we already knew, now we have a physical walkthrough video on HTC's new flagship, the M8. Or, maybe the "New HTC One", but let's hope that's not the name of the final product. Before we get to the video, here's what we already know:
You may not notice it when you're intoxicated and banging your head to the music, but when you're at a club or concert, your ears are getting seriously damaged. The noise level is usually above most people's pain threshold for sound, which begins around 120 to 140 decibels. At that level, it only takes a few minutes to damage your hearing. For me, there's something even worse than long-term hearing loss in a loud environment—not being able to hear or talk to your friends.
Life has many perils: parasites, predators, and pitfalls. Eventually, any organism will succumb, and if that organism has not first passed on its genes, those genes will face extinction.
If you're like me (and everybody else probably), you probably have a few nights of reckless drinking that you wish your could take back, or at least turn down a notch.
Males fight for dominance in order to gain access to the limited supply of female eggs. This is why male birds expend energy on brightly colored plumage, but female birds do not.
While becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg may be out of reach for someone just getting introduced to code, the skill has never been more valuable. Just understanding basic programming language is a great thing to put on your resume, and if you know how to code, you’re golden. Software developers and programmers have been the most resistant to the recession, as jobs in the tech industry continue to grow.
Google pushed a new kind of augmented reality walking navigation to the mainstream last year, and now startup Phiar is hoping users will use its AR app in the same way for driving navigation.