Have you ever gotten into a taxi in a foreign country and had trouble expressing where you want to go? Or tried to ask a waiter what's in the dish you're eyeing on the menu? Perhaps you just want to know what's happening in another country, and the news outlets don't offer a translated edition.
Even though Samsung has features like the always-on display, you still might miss some notifications now that the alert LED is gone. But baked in One UI is the ability to turn the rear camera flash into a notification LED. Any incoming alerts or calls will cause the camera LED to blink, so you won't miss a thing.
OnePlus often introduces unique features that receive praise from the smartphone community. But they can sometimes change things up and confuse their users as well. Take dark mode, for example, which became a huge hit thanks to Android 10. Both Google and Samsung offer their dark mode settings in the same general location, but OnePlus took a slightly different approach here.
There are tons of apps to help you create unique and compelling posts and stories on Instagram, but you already have the tools you need to make something eye-catching. You can insert line breaks in captions, create translucent overlays for photos, rainbow-up your story font, and even add a 3D text effect to your stories.
When watching stories in your Instagram feed, there's a high probability that you'll come across an AR filter that you'll want to try out for yourself. A quick browse and search in the Effect Gallery will bring up nothing in most cases. But all of that unproductive work isn't necessary because there's a faster and simpler way to get the AR effect in Instagram Stories, and it works all of the time.
The augmented reality team at USA Today closed out a prolific year of immersive storytelling with a hard-hitting companion piece exploring the controversial conflict in Afghanistan.
Smartphones have so much sensitive information attached to them. If you share your home with others, then you know the pains of trying to keep anything private. Photos are surely among the things you'd prefer to keep to yourself, so OnePlus has you covered.
Lots of people sleep with their phone close by. When closing our eyes, our phones are often the last thing we see. But with help from Google's Wind Down Mode, we can have an easier transition into our sleepy time.
Sharing pictures from Google Photos by sending a link saves time because you don't have to download the image from Google, then reupload it somewhere else. But anyone who has your link can access your pictures, and baked into every file is metadata that you may not want prying eyes to know about.
Does your Activity page on Instagram feel cluttered? You're not alone. Instagram lumps all alerts into one long, chaotic timeline, so if you want to see comments or likes, you have to weed through everything else including shares from other users, memories, recommendations, and new follows. Instagram knows its a mess, and the company plans to add notification filters to sort things out.
With Android 10 "Q" right around the corner, now would be a great time to get accustomed to the new system-wide dark mode it's bringing with it. Dark themes not only allow for more comfortable viewing at night, but can also consume less battery at the same time. With a single button tap, you'll be able to enable this new dark theme for all compatible apps without having to jump through hoops.
As the premiere app for chatting and video calls, it only makes sense for Skype to provide a dark theme to help prevent eye strain and minimize battery drain. Not only that, it has to also keep pace with popular messaging apps like Facebook Messenger that also have the feature built-in.
Augmented reality is often likened to granting superpowers to mere mortals, but what about mutant powers?
The new film Brightburn, a horror take on the superhero genre produced by Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, debuted in theaters on Friday, and it has some promotional backing from Snapchat to drive ticket sales.
Dark mode is one of the most requested features these days, but it's even more important with a navigation app. If you're using Google Maps for directions while driving at night, the default white background will shock your eyes and make it harder to see the road in front of you. Thankfully, you can now enable a dark theme to make this whole process a lot safer.
Eight days ago, Apple pushed out iOS 12.3 public beta 4 for anyone who wants to try it out. Now, there's a new version, iOS 12.3 public beta 5, released May 7, less than an hour after the developer software update. Just like it's developer version, the fifth iOS 12.3 beta for the public is a simple update with seemingly under-the-hood changes only.
It may take practice to get to Carnegie Hall, but a new mobile app gives the average iPhone or iPad owner the experience of walking on stage with a live orchestra.
It looks like it's cuffing season for AR hardware makers and telecommunications corporations. With AT&T aligned with Magic Leap as its exclusive wireless retailer on the high-end AR side, Verizon has also reached a master reseller agreement with Vuzix, according to a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission.
The New York Times has made a habit of publishing augmented reality stories throughout 2018, and now the media giant's magazine is getting into the act, too.
There is not a single museum that houses all of the 36 paintings of Johannes Vermeer, so Google decided to come up with a solution to give art aficionados a venue to see the artist's work all in one place — your home.
Samsung's version of Android Pie has landed on Galaxy handsets like the Note 9, S9, and S8, though we've known what to expect thanks to leaked beta versions of the software a few months back. The newly dubbed One UI has plenty of new features and improvements, but some of the first you might notice are the visual improvements to the default messaging app.
If you've gone anywhere near a television in the US in the last 48 hours, you've probably seen some of the reports of Hurricane Florence and its devastating wind and rain making its way toward the Carolina coast.
It looks like Snapchat is becoming the MTV of augmented reality. On Thursday, Ariana Grande, with her new album Sweetner, joined Drake and Nicki Minaj and other artists who are pushing new releases through Snapchat's Shoppable AR e-commerce platform.
For the curious, here are a number of close-up shots of the Magic Leap One's optics and the magnetic attachment that can be swapped out for a version with lenses matching your glasses prescription in the near future.
Last week, Magic Leap gave us an additional peek at its Lumin OS and more tutorials that show how its device works with virtual content. But details about the hardware wasn't included in the array of new information.
The Magic Leap One: Creator Edition has been teased for months now, and while we still don't know exactly when the sales will begin, it can't be long now because we've discovered a couple of new hints that the device's launch is imminent, hiding in plain sight on the company's website.
With the launch of the Magic Leap One looming over summer's horizon, on Wednesday, Magic Leap released an essential component that will differentiate it from current augmented reality platforms.
With Apple preparing to bring a slew of new features to its Animoji app this fall, Samsung has updated its AR Emoji imitator with the ability to create more realistic digital doppelgängers.
With the 2018 FIFA World Cup underway in Russia, soccer (aka "football") fans worldwide can show support for their favorite teams and players in augmented reality via Snapchat and Facebook.
Alongside ARKit 2.0, Apple revealed new Animojis alongside new Memoji virtual doppelgangers that compete with functionality quite similar to that of Samsung's AR Emoji.
HBO is only a couple of episodes into the second season of Westworld, the television version of the classic science fiction movie about a robot resort gone awry, and the fan theories about the show are already reaching Season 1 levels of weirdness.
Apple's iPhone X now has the power to turn anyone into a Japanese anime character, thanks to a new app that harnesses the device's TrueDepth camera.
The research team at Google has found yet another way for machine learning to simplify time-intensive tasks, and this one could eventually facilitate Star Wars-like holographic video.
A Swedish digital artist has developed an app for the iPhone X that creates mind-bending 3D illusions that correlate to the user's point of view.
Researchers have developed a new method that harnesses the power of augmented reality to detect a patient's heart rate using a Microsoft HoloLens and computer vision.
The oldest Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, is now firmly rooted in the future with the launch of the MR Museum on Thursday.
In another move that pushes Meta 2 toward becoming a legitimate workplace tool, Meta Company has partnered with Dassault Systèmes to bring augmented reality support to the latter's Solidworks 3D CAD software.
On Sunday, the annual Grammy Awards delivered its usual mix of fashion, live performances, and music industry magic, but this time with one important difference: Animojis.
Facebook may have shamelessly copied Snapchat and its camera effects for faces (as well as its World Lenses), but it might beat its social media competitor to virtual body augmentation.
If there's one augmented reality app idea that should have gone up in smoke, it's probably Tokédex, an app that brings cannabis to the world of AR.