News: Vodafone Set to Become India's Biggest Mobile Contender
Vodafone India has merged with telecom company Idea Cellular to become India's largest mobile player this week.
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Roundup: The 5 Best Capacitive Gloves for Using Your Smartphone in the Cold
For some of us, winter puts the brakes on apps like Pokémon GO since smartphone screens usually only respond to bare fingers. Nobody wants to be that guy who caught frostbite chasing a Sneasel. When you use normal gloves, the display's sensor simple doesn't activate, so that doesn't help any. Fortunately, several options for touchscreen-friendly capacitive gloves are on the market to help you through this last blast of winter.
News: Apple Granted Patent to Make Augmented Reality Maps—Hinting at a Cool, Futuristic Version of Our Well-Worn Maps App
Apple recently scored a patent (number 9,488,488) to create augmented reality maps, hinting at possible AR integration into the iOS Maps application for iPhone. Does this mean we'll be seeing super visionary projections of places in the app in the near future? Maybe.
News: WhatsApp Stops Trying to Be Like Everyone Else & Brings Back Its Text-Based Status Option
In February, the popular Facebook-owned WhatsApp Messenger service jumped on the "stories" bandwagon and replaced their in-app, text-based "About Me" status (you know, those lovely little messages where you can say "Sleeping" or "Not Sleeping" under the tiny nub of your profile picture). Taking its place was a clone of Snapchat's Stories feature, continuing the social media giant's recent trend of shamelessly copying Snapchat.
News: Augmented Reality Empowers Indonesian Women to Operate Online Stores
While its direct-selling model echoes brands like Avon and Tupperware, Indonesia's MindStores gives the approach a modern twist—with augmented reality.
News: Bosch Wants to Speed Up AR Adoption in the Auto Industry
While there are many uses for augmented reality in the automotive industry, adoption has been slow. With the plethora of makes and models on the road today and rolling off assembly lines tomorrow, developing and deploying knowledge bases that utilize augmented reality to dealerships and garages can be costly and difficult to scale.
News: All the Cool New Features in iOS 10.3 for iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch
Apple just pushed out the iOS 10.3 update to everyone on March 27, so if you haven't installed it yet, make sure to do so by going to Settings -> General -> Software Update. Trust us, you'll want to.
News: Scope AR Brings Live, Interactive AR Video Support to Caterpillar Customers
Customer service just got a lot more interesting. Construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar just announced official availability of what they're calling the CAT LIVESHARE solution to customer support, which builds augmented reality capabilities into the platform.
How To: Access Bitcoin Gambling Sites from Your Phone — Even if They Ban Your Country
Bitcoin, the decentralized cryptocurrency notorious for its status as the currency of the dark web, seems to be shedding its shady past and is now enjoying soaring highs not seen since 2014. The highly volatile online commodity reached parity with an ounce of gold back in March amid speculation of a pending ETF approval from the Federal Trade Commission. Since then, Bitcoin has doubled in value and analysts predict a bitcoin could reach $100,000 in value in 10 years.
News: Microsoft Introduced Acer's New Windows Mixed Reality Development Edition Headset
This morning, in an early morning session at GDC 2017, Brandon Bray, a senior program manager lead at Microsoft, revealed a mixed reality headset made in collaboration with Acer—a different headset than the one we saw from Acer at CES 2017 earlier this year. Also at the event, the name for Microsoft's holographic system seems to have changed from Windows Holographic to Windows Mixed Reality.
News: Better Spatial Maps Will Make Mixed Reality Great
A group of researchers from Stanford University and Princeton University has put together the largest RGB-D video dataset to date with over 1,500 scans of over 700 different locations across the world, for a total of 2.5 million views.
News: This Bacteria Could Be a Signal That Your Baby's Coming Early
The rate of preterm birth has been increasing in the United States for unknown reasons, causing increased health risks for infants born too soon. But researchers may have found a signal that could help doctors plan ahead for, or even prevent, early birth with a simple swab of the vagina and cervix during pregnancy.
News: New 'Trojan Horse' Salmonella Bacteria Kills Tumors Instead of Making You Sick
We usually associate Salmonella bacteria with a dangerous type of food poisoning, but they actually are pretty good at seeking out tumors. That trait made the bacteria a great candidate to deliver a protein that would help knock tumors out.
News: Wikitude SDK 6 Embarks into Mixed Reality with Instant Tracking
While most people have only begun hearing the term augmented reality in the last year or so, AR has been around in some form since the early '90s. It all started with heads-up displays (HUDs) for pilots to see instant information in their visors, but has graduated to a far more useful and widespread technology thanks to the advancement of computers and, more recently, smartphones.
How To: Get Nintendo's Fire Emblem Heroes Game on Your Android Phone Right Now
Nintendo's first ever game for Android has finally touched down (unless you actually count the abomination that is Miitomo). Fire Emblem Heroes, a classic turn-based RPG optimized for mobile gaming, has come out for Android and iOS in Australia, Europe, and Japan, and is due out in North America and other worldwide locales very soon. Due to Nintendo's staggered release, the game isn't available to us in the United States at the time of this writing, but fret not—there's another way to downloa...
News: How Your Diet & Gut Bacteria Work Together to Reduce Risk of Colon Cancer
We all know you are what you eat—or so the expression goes—but it's good to remember that what you are (at least intestinally) is mainly bacteria. A new study has shown that what you eat, and how your gut microbiome reacts to that food, might be a key player in your risk of developing a certain type of colon cancer—and changing your diet can help decrease your risk.
News: The Root Cause of Type 1 Diabetes Could Be a Common Childhood Viral Infection
A young child becomes very thirsty very often and seems tired all the time. A visit to the pediatrician determines she has type 1 diabetes. The onset of type 1 diabetes may seem sudden, and it can be, but the disease may actually have been triggered by common childhood viruses years earlier.
News: How El Niño—& Climate Change—Kill People with Virus Epidemics
Using mathematical modeling, researchers suggest weather and warming created the "perfect storm" that drove the Zika outbreak in 2016.
News: DAQRI's New Smart Glasses Made Tough for the Manufacturing Sector
DAQRI, a company mostly known for its odd but fun-looking industrial Smart Helmet, unveiled their new Smart Glasses product at CES 2017. Their smartglasses look like a strange attempt to answer the Microsoft HoloLens, and the price tag of $4,995 for the developer's edition reinforces that notion.
News: The OnePlus 3T Crashes When Its Snapdragon 821 Processor Runs at Full Speed
The OnePlus 3T was released about five months after the OnePlus 3 with several noticeable upgrades. Firstly, it has a new processor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, which is the same one that the Pixel and Pixel XL sport. Second is the 16 MP front-facing camera with a different sensor. And the next big change was a slightly larger 3,400 mAh capacity battery.
News: Google's New Self-Driving Car Spinout Waymo Debuts Their Fleet of 100 Chrysler Pacificas
Last week it was announced that Waymo, the former Google Self-Driving Car project, had graduated from Alphabet's X innovation center. This graduation had been in the cards for many months with senior members of the project team and X hinting that it would be soon.
News: Trimble & Umbra Partner to Bring Complex Imagery on the HoloLens
When developing for the HoloLens, keeping a constant 60 fps (frames per second) while making things look beautiful is a challenge. Balancing the processing power to display complex models and keeping the frame rate where it needs is just a straight up painful process, but a solution seems to be on the horizon.
News: Unity Releases EditorVR Experimental Build Days After Unity 5.6 Beta
Unity released the Beta 5.6 on December 13 with a bunch of new upgrades in the works, including support for Vulkan, better instancing options, and more improvements to particles—to name just a few that are potentially relevant to the mixed reality community. And today, December 15, Unity has just released the EditorVR that we reported on a few weeks ago as a part of their "Experimental" builds.
How To: Replace Your Android Browser with This Enhanced Version of CyanogenMod Gello
No matter which smartphone you buy, it will come with an internet browser preinstalled. Depending on your OEM, the default browser might be called Samsung Internet, HTC Internet, Silk Browser by Amazon, ASUS Browser, or Google Chrome—there's just so many stock browsers available.
News: Linux Kernel Exploits Aren't Really an Android Problem
It seems like a new, dangerous Android exploit is uncovered every month or two. The latest headliners are NightMonkey and Chronos from the list of CIA hacks reported by Wikileaks, which have been billed as gaping security holes in the world's biggest mobile operating system.
How To: Test for Adups' Spyware on Your Phone—& Disable It
Mobile security researchers at Kryptowire recently uncovered spyware preinstalled on hundreds of thousands of Android smartphones by FOTA provider Adups which was gathering personally identifiable information (PII) such as call logs, app usage data, and even the full contents of text messages and sending these to a third-party server—all without the users' knowledge.
How To: Everything You Need to Know About RCS Universal Profile
Google is on a mission to bring a better messaging experience to Android users. We've seen them try and fail over the years with various messenger apps, but this time, they're taking a different approach by working with industry leaders to create a new messaging standard. The result is RCS Universal Profile, or simply Chat, and it's finally catching on.
News: Reputable Analyst Predicts Apple's AR Ambitions Are Heading to Cars
Google and Microsoft have both established platforms and hardware for emerging digital realities, but Apple, true to form, hasn't had much to say on the subject. They've shown interest in augmented reality, and we've seen patent filings that indicate research and development, but a recent rumor points to that research ending up in your car instead of a rose gold headset.
Tested: Make Bad Beer Taste Better with a Bit of Bitters
When your day sucks, all you want is a tall, ice-cold glass of beer at the end of it all. Nothing complicated about having some booze to temporarily drown your sorrows.
News: A Siri 'Feature' Makes Personal Information Accessible from a Locked iPhone
If you follow tech, you're probably familiar with Siri, Apple's personal voice assistant, which has been integrated heavily into iOS ever since iOS 5. But you might not have known that Siri is capable of performing some tasks when the iPhone is in a locked state. The default state of iOS is to allow access to Siri from the lock screen, most likely for the convenience of hands-free access to the phone.
News: Google Is Deadly Serious About Taking on Apple's iPhone
Looking past the obvious visual similarities between the iPhone 7 and Google's new Pixel phones, there are several indications that the search giant had Apple in its sights as they released their latest flagships. For once, this isn't an Android phone we're talking about, it's a Google phone—and it showcases Google's latest strategy.
News: Enflux's Smart Clothing Lets the VR User Control Their Avatar Just by Moving
While Leap Motion and Microsoft are looking to capture natural human motion with cameras, Enflux figured out how to do it with a shirt and pants that feel completely natural.
News: Mirai Botnet Source Release Threatens Increased DDoS Attacks from Smart Home Devices
Security journalist Brian Krebs recently suffered a record-breaking DDoS attack to his his website, clocking in at or near a whopping 620 Gbps of traffic. Krebs' site was down for over 24 hours, and it resulted in him having to leave his CDN behind.
News: Hello to the Null Byte Community!
Hello, Null Byters. I'm Barrow, and I'm excited to introduce myself as the new admin here on Null Byte. Just like previous admins have done before me, I will be writing new guides, updating older guides if they need it, and responding to some of your issues in the forum. Before I get started with any of that, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about myself and the future of Null Byte.
News: Touch & Feel Things That Don't Exist with Dexmo's Exoskeleton Gloves
One of the disadvantages of the digital world is that you can't pick it up and touch it. While that can feel like less of a problem in virtual reality, where you're already holding controllers, mixed reality environments—like the one you'd experience in Microsoft's HoloLens—suffer from a lack of physical connection with the digital objects that appear in your real world. Dexmo aims to solve that problem with a relatively intimidating new controller that encompasses your hands.
News: 25 Cool New Things You Can Do with Android Nougat
Codenamed "Nougat" after the sugary stuff that fills your Snickers bar, Android 7.0 is living up to its name with tons of sweet features. There's almost too many changes over Marshmallow to cover in one go, with new functionality ranging from a revamped Doze Mode for battery saving, to split-screen apps, and even an easier update process. All told, the Nougat update has a lot in store for your phone or tablet.
News: You're Eating Mold & You Don't Even Know It
Koji is a culture made up of a certain fungus (mold) called Aspergillus oryzae, which has been used to ferment rice and soybeans in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean kitchens for centuries. Koji can actually have other involved fungi, but Aspergillus oryzae is the most common, and therefore the names can be used interchangeably. Its end purpose is to enhance the flavor of items like soy sauce, sake, and miso.
News: Valve Opens the Gates for Third-Party HTC Vive Controllers
The HTC Vive and Valve's SteamVR make for one of the more compelling virtual reality experiences, mixing in real-world motion tracking with the immersive headset. But third-party manufacturers couldn't tap into the Vive's full potential and make creative new peripherals—until now.
How To: Use Your Android Smartphone as a Real-World Search Engine
When you're browsing the internet on a computer, you just need to hit Ctrl F (or Command F) and type something out to find all instances of that word in the webpage. It's a handy feature baked into most browsers (nearly all mobile browsers have a "find" feature, too), but unfortunately, it doesn't work with real-world documents, signs, and menus—or at least it hasn't, up until now.
How To: Watch Viral Videos on Your iPhone Without an Internet Connection
The internet, as I understand it, is a wonderful, magical place where people congregate to share memes and viral videos. Well, okay... there's a lot more to it than that, but let's just focus in on the good stuff.