Brief Reality: Blippar Transforms into Shazam for Cars
Augmented reality is quickly becoming a popular tool for marketing use cases, as demonstrated by new projects serving the automotive, entertainment, and tourism industries this past week.
Augmented reality is quickly becoming a popular tool for marketing use cases, as demonstrated by new projects serving the automotive, entertainment, and tourism industries this past week.
Toyota is testing blockchain and distributed ledger technology (BC/DL) for data sharing for driverless cars and other applications. This could eventually reassure buyers of its upcoming high-end cars by making sure their sensitive data is secure.
Wound infections don't usually enter the blood and become systemic, spreading the infection throughout our bodies, and there's a good reason for that: Our bodies actively work to prevent it, according to research that discovered a new use for a protein first discovered decades ago.
Earlier this year, Google rolled out the first developer preview build of Android O. The new version added tons of cool features, but the downside was the fact that you needed to use Fastboot to manually install the update if you wanted to try it out. Thankfully, things just got a lot easier.
Water makes up about 60% of your body weight. Whether you like it plain, flavored, bubbly, or in beverages or food, we all need water daily to avoid dehydration and stay healthy. For communities in need of clean drinking water, new research using bacteria may offer a simplified, lower-cost method for boosting potable water supplies.
John Legere seems to operate under the philosophy of, "If you're going to be late to the party, throw a better one." On Tuesday, Legere announced T-Mobile's intention to build the nation's first true 5G network, following AT&T's rollout of its "5G Evolution" network. A network which many said was, to put it in polite words, nonsense.
The world of mobile gaming is flush with MMORPGs that entice players with console-quality graphics and gameplay, intense co-op dungeons similar to World of Warcraft, and epic loot that'll give you a leg up over your competition. While there are games like Order & Chaos that nearly match PC-based RPGs, most simply fail to measure up. But the latest entry in this genre, Crusaders of Light, may finally get players to ditch their computers for iPhones and iPads to get their online RPG fix. Crusad...
In this Tuesday's Brief Reality report, there's a trio of stories from the healthcare world where augmented reality is helping out with surgical microscopes, asthma treatment, and other diagnostic and treatment tools. There's also something for all of you AR/VR storytellers out there.
It's not the bacteria itself that takes lives and limbs during invasive flesh-eating bacteria infections. It's the toxins secreted by the group A Streptococcus bacteria invading the body that causes the most damage.
Every Friday, Next Reality reviews the latest headlines from the financial side of augmented and mixed reality. This Market Reality column covers funding announcements, mergers and acquisitions, market analysis, and the like. This week's column is led by two companies cashing in on visual inputs.
NextReality will be giving readers a rundown of the augmented and mixed reality news briefs from the preceding week that we didn't cover already. This way, you'll never miss anything of importance in the NextReality landscape, and will always know what's going on with new augmented and mixed reality tech and applications. The first one starts right now, and you can enjoy future ones every Tuesday going forward, so stay tuned.
Upskill, an enterprise software developer for industrial augmented reality applications, recently received an influx of funding and a major vote of confidence from two of their top customers.
Within the coming months, software startup Neurable plans to introduce the next paradigm in virtual and augmented reality: the brain–computer interface (BCI).
The first developer preview of Android Oreo 8.0 was only out for a couple of days before Chainfire created a new root method for it. For the time being, only the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P are supported by this first SuperSU ZIP, as the Pixel's dual-partition layout has created some hurdles, though Chainfire is surely working on overcoming those at some point soon.
When the mosquito that carries the malaria parasite (Plasmodium falciparum) bites someone, the parasite must travel to the liver where it undergoes part of its lifecycle before infecting red blood cells and spreading to its next host. Until now, the first step of how the parasite gets to the liver hasn't been clear.
LOOOK, a Seattle-based mixed reality and development studio, can now peer into the future with their new geotechnical engineering visualization application for Microsoft HoloLens.
Before many games make it to the US-based iOS App Store, they get "soft launched" in a smaller country to get real-world testing for bugs. It's a pilot program, so to speak, as countries like Vietnam or the Philippines have far fewer iPhone users than the US, thus offer a more controlled environment for developers to get feedback and zero-in on issues that may occur in a game's early development phases.
By looking for the mechanism that allows influenza A to invade lung cells, scientists also discovered a treatment that might block the virus from taking hold there.
Sony hit MWC 2017 in full gallop, announcing four different additions to its Xperia lineup on Monday, February 27, 2017: the XZ Premium, XZs, XA1, and XA1 Ultra.
Lenovo, the company that now owns Motorola, just announced two new entries in their wildly successful midrange Moto G series. The Moto G5, and its bigger brother, the Moto G5 Plus, were both shown off in detail at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain.
The Huawei Nexus 6P was released a little over a year ago, but despite doing moderately well in sales, the device has had more than its fair share of issues. When first released, there were numerous reception and memory management difficulties that left users extremely frustrated, though, those problems were solved with updates pushed by Google.
3D modeling is usually a very long and complicated process. Manipulating the thousands to millions of vertices, faces, and triangles to the correct shape you want is just the first part of the process, and can take a good while depending on the level of detail needed. From there, you need to texture the model by applying the UV coordinates and placing the textures in the correct places. And all of this isn't even including the process of creating normal maps.
For some time now, there has been quite a bit of speculation as to when the selection of augmented and mixed reality head-mounted displays would begin to trickle out to the public. Pricing, availability, and software selection are all issues that will have to be addressed before widespread adoption will start.
Last week, a new Kickstarter campaign arrived for a completely untethered, augmented reality headset for under $300 called Okularion. While at first glance, this unit looks very much like a Samsung Gear VR, one thing that sets it apart (aside from being untethered from a nearby computer) is that it does not require a smartphone. Well, that and it's an augmented reality headset as well.
There's no question about it—Skype is one useful program, but has always been lacking in the mobile department. On your desktop, Skype works just fine and all of its options are available for usage. However, the same cannot be said for Android. On Android, you can't even change your status to "Away" or "Invisible."
When the "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" video was released last year, it was called a mind-blowing, stunning, and breathtaking take on mixed reality gaming. It was a great presentation of what the technology could be, but not for a second did I think it was anything other than a concept video, and I'm not the only one who thought that. This was a goal to reach for mixed reality, not the reality.
The US Department of Education has put together a competition called the EdSim Challenge with a $680,000 purse to facilitate next-gen education. The event calls upon augmented and virtual reality, as well as video game developers, to bring immersive simulation concepts to prepare the workforce of the future.
If you've ever been inspired to try out 3D modeling after enjoying computer-generated imagery in video games and movies, chances are you've checked out an paid applications like 3ds Max (previously called 3D Studio Max), or even free ones like Blender, then just went "No Way! It's way too complicated."
In years past, Apple has always waited two years before redesigning the iPhone, but this year they broke the trend. Aside from a few minor changes, the overall design and style of the iPhone 7 models is the same as last year's iPhone 6s models, and the iPhone 6 ones before that, so it's almost as though they've switched to a three-year cycle—just as early reports suggested.
With the next iPhone release around the corner, Apple is hard at work getting iOS 10 squared away. On Monday, July 18, they issued the third beta of iOS 10 to developers, which should be released within a few days to those using the iOS 10 public beta.
Google switched things up this year by releasing a developer version of Android N far ahead of I/O, but that's not the only convention they've done away with this year. For the first time, Google will accept name suggestions from the public.
The Oculus Rift is finally shipping to customers in more than 20 countries, and we're getting a good idea of how the device holds up from the initial reviews. You'll see some common threads throughout: along with an impressive virtual reality experience, the device is very comfortable with a solid design.
Microsoft is working hard to make Bing a good alternative to Google for more than just looking up images of the "human anatomy" that Google and a lot of other search engines filter out of their results.
Had so much fun filming underwater fish releases that I now enjoy filming them rather than fishing for them. You can view my latest (make believe) adventure on YouTube. I have to admit that adding the right music really makes a difference.
This how to is about making a fighting game and pretty much anyone can do this! We will also be using Game Maker to create it.
A while back, I wrote review of my favorite hacking movies of all time. Two of my key criteria were; (1) how realistic was the hacking, and (2) are the hackers portrayed as the "good guys." This past winter, a new hacker movie was released, appropriately named Blackhat starring Chris Hemsworth (from Thor fame) as a blackhat hacker who is released from prison to stop a notorious and destructive hacker that only he can stop. Although the movie did very poorly at the box office, I thought it was...
If you couldn't wait to test drive iOS 9 before its official release this fall, you probably have the beta software on your iPhone right now. However, if you're not a fan of all the bugs and glitches that accompanies it, it's not too late—you can still downgrade back to the latest version of iOS 8.
UPDATE 5/21/15
There are lots of great reasons for going out to a fantastic coffee shop for a cuppa. Coffee shops have a lovely ambiance, are a perfect place to meet with friends or do some work, and are a great excuse to get out of the house. Seeking out a perfect cup of coffee, however, shouldn't be one of the reasons that you hit up your local café.
CyanogenMod has always been on the forefront of ROM customization, and its newest release, CyanogenMod 12, is no exception. In the newest nightlies, they have included an updated version of their Theme Engine, which allows you to effortlessly change the way your entire system looks.