At the WinHEC Shenzen 2016 Keynote, Microsoft showed off a system running Windows 10 smoothly on an ARM processor. This could be great news for developers of mixed reality software.
Ready to finally play some Pokémon on your HoloLens? Here is your chance! KennyWdev has released a video showing off his newest build of PokéLens, a Pokémon clone for the HoloLens similar to Pokémon GO. In the video, you get to see two Pokémon battle it out on what appears to be an office floor. Apparently, Pikachu is "super effective." This coincidentally appeared online the same day that another developer, Sky Zhou, showed off his Smash Brothers-style Pokémon game.
As we slowly approach its January 3 start date, CES 2017 seems to be shaping up to be an exciting year for smart glasses as well as augmented and mixed reality.
If you really want to end your next big guitar solo with a bang, consider giving this shotgun guitar a try.
Regular HoloLens developer and YouTuber Sky Zhou, a founding member of mixed reality studio Matrix Inception, has done it again. With an Xbox One controller in hand, watch as he makes these Pokémon battle it out Super Smash Brothers-style in his HoloLens app.
This weekend, Atlanta, Georgia will be the battleground for a large group of HoloLens designers and developers. HoloHack, a 24-hour hackathon put on by elevator manufacturer ThyssenKrupp, will be taking place at The Garage, and the design theme will be smart cities.
China's e-commerce site Alibaba has been making heavy investments in augmented and mixed reality startups. In February of this year, they led a $793 million round of Series C financing of Magic Leap. And now they've just invested in Israeli-based InfinityAR, which acquired $18 million in its Series C financing.
If we learned anything from Mulan, it's that "the flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of them all." Well, these have been a trying couple of weeks in the US, hence the need for a blooming marshmallow flower.
Want to go to Seattle and meet the Actiongram team?
If you're looking to mix up your home décor with something a little bit outside the traditional cabinet box set, check out the amazing Wave cabinet from NYC-based, Chilean designer Sebastian Errazuriz. This revolutionary design will change the way you think about interior decoration and furniture functionality.
HoloMaps, an application by Seattle-based Taqtile, is available for free on the Windows Store. Taqtile, whose Vice President of Product Management was Microsoft's former Director of Business Development, is one of the few partners currently in the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Program. This interactive 3D map they have created, powered by Bing, offers more than just a top-down view of the world on the HoloLens.
Today in Los Angeles, Unity will be at the Loews Hollywood Hotel to host Unite '16, its annual developer conference. Unite is Unity's platform for showing the development community its upcoming direction and roadmap for augmented and virtual reality, game development, 3D technology, and more.
Today, Microsoft announced its Windows 10 Creators Update, adding the ability to scan objects in your world and bring them into the computer. With newly-announced inexpensive VR headsets and the HoloLens, you can enjoy those transplanted 3D objects in mixed and virtual reality.
We've already seen plenty of shopping potential for mixed reality headsets, from holographic car showrooms to trying on clothes and picking out furniture. Very few of those ideas have been put into actual practice, but we're getting closer, and consulting firm Valorem is making headway. They created HoloTire for the Microsoft HoloLens to demonstrate the advantage of experiencing a product in mixed reality. I'm hard-pressed to think of a more boring product to put on a holographic pedestal tha...
If you're an Apple user and want an untethered virtual reality system, you're currently stuck with Google Cardboard, which doesn't hold a candle to the room scale VR provided by the HTC Vive (a headset not compatible with Macs, by the way). But spatial computing company Occipital just figured out how to use their Structure Core 3D Sensor to provide room scale VR to any smartphone headset—whether it's for an iPhone or Android.
We've already seen how VR can have some therapeutic benefits, but not the dramatized version. A play called Ugly Lies the Bone emotionally examines how war veterans can heal (or at least treat) their PTSD using virtual reality.
Snapchat accidentally—and then intentionally—announced their digital eyeglasses, known as Spectacles, over the weekend. While we'd hoped their augmented reality-heavy platform would result in related hardware, Spectacles unfortunately seek to "reinvent" little more than a video camera.
Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive tether to desktop computers with robust GPUs in order to harness their power. The free-roaming, cordless Microsoft HoloLens forgoes those chains but loses a bit of graphical processing power in the mix. However, a recent report suggests we may get the best of both worlds.
Cancer is a complicated illness, but the more we understand it, the likelier we are to beat it. The 3D Visualisation Aesthetics Lab at the University of New South Wales took to virtual reality to help improve our odds by allowing scientists to walk through virtual representations of actual cancer cells.
Jurassic Park makes a great (and sometimes mediocre) action movie, but hopefully isn't the sort of thing we're dumb enough to actually make. Fortunately, on the HoloLens, you can now walk with the dinosaurs with no risk to your life and limbs.
Unless you had a master of visual effects for a parent, you had to imagine the floor was actually lava when playing the classic furniture-hopping game. With a Microsoft HoloLens, however, you don't have to imagine anything.
After updating your iPhone to iOS 10, you may have noticed that your screen will wake up whenever you pick up the device to look at it, or even when it's just in your pocket or dangling in your hand.
Wish your dull room was a little more refreshing? Through the power of mixed reality and the Microsoft HoloLens, one app can transform your space into a relaxing tropical island.
People fear virtual reality will isolate us, but the right experience can prove it does the opposite.
Apple announced their new iPhones today, and the 7 Plus features two camera lenses on its backside. That could push smartphone photography ahead in a major way. It may also serve as the basis for their foray into virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.
Humans learn best by doing or through an experience, and so the holographic environments provided in virtual and mixed reality are ripe with educational opportunities. HoloStudy took this to heart and created an educational science app that teaches you with animated models you can explore in your own space.
Sure, sites like SeatGuru can show you which seats are the best—but in a 2D graphical form that doesn't really show you what the plane actually looks like inside and out. Aircraft Explorer contains 3D models you can peer inside of to check out what the next plane you catch will actually look like.
LARPing, or live action role-playing, can look a little silly because it requires a lot of imagination to suspend reality. But mixed reality technology like the Microsoft HoloLens can change all of that with voice commands and special effects.
It's impossible to predict the future, but it's fun to try. Adapted from Daniel H. Wilson's short story of the same name, filmmaker Giacomo Cimini's short film "The Nostalgist" shows a futuristic world where mixed reality serves as an escape from a less-desirable physical world.
Apple's plans for virtual, mixed, and augmented reality have remained a mystery for some time, but now we at least have some idea of what they're thinking about. UploadVR uncovered a patent showing a VR headset design that looks like a thick pair of sunglasses and utilizes an iPhone to provide an experience similar to the Samsung Gear VR.
Want proof that user experiences matter? Look no further than the HTC Vive and Omnipudding's particle generator, GPU Cubes VR, which lets you interact with thousands of colorful, cubic particles in a black void. If this was a simulator for your computer only, controlled with a mouse or keyboard, you'd be bored in seconds—but it's just simple, instant fun on the Vive.
Leap Motion created gesture control for all sorts of things, including virtual reality, long ago, but developers must build in support for their tracking peripheral to use its full potential. As a result, they've created an "Interaction Engine" for Unity, the primary platform for developing virtual and mixed reality experiences, to try and take gesture interaction to the next level.
We've heard a bit about Google Daydream—the new smartphone-based virtual reality platform that is supposed to provide a markedly better experience than Cardboard—but don't really know what it'll look like. Engadget claims we could find out in just a couple of weeks, since Android Nougat is already out, a necessary component of Daydream.
As people experiment with mixed reality software, we're seeing applications that cover the entire spectrum of human interest. Anything that can exist in the physical world has a place in the holographic one. And just as we enjoy building various contraptions with real parts, a new app called ARails knew we'd feel the same about digital ones.
Data visualization has many applications in virtual and mixed reality, since a third dimension literally adds important depth to the represented information. A new app called HoloFlight is a good example of this, combining flight-tracking data and the Microsoft HoloLens to surround you with a look at every plane in the sky.
The Microsoft HoloLens mixes the digital world with the physical one, allowing you to coexist with holograms of your choosing. But those worlds won't fully blend until we can experience it all together and create for each other. Vuforia could make that possible in the near future.
We can't be in two places at once, but with virtual touch interfaces we can theoretically use a machine to act as our second body in a remote location. Over at MIT, Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer, with the advisement of Hiroshi Ishii, created an interface that makes this possible.
We've seen plenty of good, bad, and weird things that have come out of the worldwide augmented reality game Pokémon GO, including murder and location-based bans, but nothing on a large scale. That was, of course, until Iran decided to ban the game country-wide.
Microsoft began shipping the Development Edition of its much-anticipated HoloLens—the world's first untethered holographic computer—back in March. As the name implies, it was only available to developers (we got ours near the end of April), but Microsoft has recently opened up the program to anyone who wants one—not just developers.
Microsoft recently announced that they're producing HoloLens units fast enough to keep up with demand, which means you can acquire up to five dev kits right now—if you've got the $3,000 fee for each one.
