Why are there no official Star Wars emoji in the Unicode Standard? We've got the "Vulcan Salute" from Star Trek, so where's the force choke hand gesture?! While you may never see Star Wars officially invade your emoji keyboard, there are ways to send Star Wars emoji and stickers to your friends in your favorite chat app.
Two of the three entities behind Pokemon GO, the reigning champion in mobile augmented reality gaming, are joining forces again to see if lightning can strike more than once.
Toymaker Lego has been on board with building AR into its playsets and mobile apps since the launch of ARKit.
The Animal Crossing series has been a big hit for Nintendo, so in a bid to enhance the experience even more for users, the game is getting the augmented reality treatment.
GameGuru was created for game enthusiasts who are not programmers or designers. By offering catalogs with thousands of royalty-free assets, GameGuru lets design novices bring their visions to life.
If you're a tech-savvy coding pro, you have a virtually limitless number of great career choices to choose from. Whether you're interested in working at a small tech startup, freelancing as a cybersecurity specialist, or founding the next Google, having a solid understanding of development terminology and general programming will inevitably get you far.
The ability to hide entire pages on your iPhone's home screen is an excellent privacy upgrade packed into iOS 14. That said, it can be a bit of a pain to find and open the hidden apps on those pages in a timely fashion. Luckily, iOS 14 has a solution that makes opening those apps, as well as any others, faster and more convenient — and we're not talking about the new App Library.
With the global COVID-19 pandemic preventing Pokémon GO players from venturing into the real world, developer Niantic has adapted the game for trainers to play in a socially-distanced manner.
For the average consumer, augmented reality is a fun way of dressing up photos and videos for social media. However, AR is also gaining momentum as a medium for storytelling, particularly in sharing powerful messages.
With protests springing up across America, there's a chance you may have your first interaction with law enforcement. Many demonstrators will have their phones in-hand to film the action, which, sadly, could prompt an officer to demand the device and any self-incriminating data it may contain. Before this happens, you should know there are tools at your disposal to protect your data in such situations.
With Avatar, Facebook's personalized stickers for use on its social and messaging platforms, those who aren't on Facebook or have otherwise dumped the social network may feel left out.
The Los Angeles Rams are the latest NFL franchise to introduce new or modified uniforms for the 2020 season, joining the Atlanta Falcons, Cleveland Browns, Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and their neighbors, the Los Angeles Chargers.
Over the past few months, Google has prioritized the development of its video communications products as the demand for social distancing solutions continues to increase in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the Wigle WiFi app running on an Android phone, a hacker can discover and map any nearby network, including those created by printers and other insecure devices. The default tools to analyze the resulting data can fall short of what a hacker needs, but by importing wardriving data into Jupyter Notebook, we can map all Wi-Fi devices we encounter and slice through the data with ease.
Computer vision is a key component in enabling augmented reality experiences, but now it can help give sight to the blind as well. In this case, that assistance comes from Envision, developers of mobile apps for iOS and Android that use optical character recognition (OCR) and object detection to provide an audio description of the user's surroundings.
While holographic Whitney Houston is hitting the road, a new mobile app is bringing volumetric captures of up and coming performers directly to the iPhones and iPads of fans.
It's time to make some more room at the augmented reality cosmetics counter. This week, social media giant Pinterest unveiled "Try On," a virtual make-up visualization tool running on its Lens visual search tool.
In a world full of augmented reality camera effects apps, one app is going in a more social direction.
We're a few weeks away from the fireworks associated with New Year's celebrations, but that doesn't mean you can't start a little early — in augmented reality.
Apple seeded the official version of iOS 13 to compatible iPhones on Sept. 19. Since then, we've seen two major updates — iOS 13.1, which, by our count, introduced 22 new features, and iOS 13.2, which also added 22 new features. Today, Dec. 10, Apple introduced the third major update: iOS 13.3.
After several iterations of the product, Snap is focused on making sure the world knows that its smartglasses can be fashionable.
Smartglasses from Apple have become the holy grail of augmented reality, and 2020 has been the rumored time horizon for the product's arrival for the past two years. The latest analyst report sheds more light on its potential debut next year.
Adobe is best known for its photo and video editing software, but they also have a number of lesser-known apps that you may be interested in. Adobe Fill & Sign, available on iPhone and Android, is the best way to electronically fill out important documents on your smartphone with a third-party app.
Phone specs get better and better each year, and multiplayer mobile games are right there with them. Instead of playing solo, jump into some real-time gameplay with co-op and player vs. player modes, and battle friends, family, and strangers from around the world. But which multiplayer games are worth your time on Android or iOS?
The subject line is a crucial part of an email, but you don't see it very often in texts. That's mostly because many people don't even know it can be done, and even if they do, why would they use it? Just like with emails, subject lines can make iMessages and SMS texts seem more important and more professional. Plus, they can help with organization and searching past messages, as well as make text bold.
Google is going all in with Childish Gambino as its musical champion for augmented reality, as the duo has now dropped its second AR collaboration of the year.
The Pixel is the phone to beat when it comes to cameras, and it's largely due to software. While its hardware is solid, Google's machine learning prowess and general coding wizardry are the biggest reasons the Pixel is so good with taking photos and recording video. What this means is that if you can get the Pixel's camera software, you can replicate the Pixel camera experience on other phones.
Yelp reviews are great for getting a feel for how a business operates, but they can't always be trusted, and they don't always get to the point fast enough. That's where "Tips" come in, and you can view and make them whether you're on an iPhone or Android phone.
After launching its first augmented reality title for Angry Birds on the Magic Leap One, Rovio has doubled back to the platform that made its franchise famous.
Slack recently released a dark mode for its Android and iOS apps, and for the most part, it works great. Super dark gray backgrounds and light gray fonts, which is much easier on the eyes than blinding white backgrounds and black text. But there's one thing that is not affected by the new night mode setting — your sidebar.
The Oscars are fast approaching, which means that all the most talked about films are getting a second dose of heavy promotion in hopes of winning an Academy Award.
On the surface, Instagram is pretty intuitive, so you might think that you already know everything there is to know about using it on your iPhone or Android phone. But this photo and video-sharing app is constantly adding new features, some of which don't make the press releases. Even if you're an Instagram guru, chances are you've missed one of these hidden goodies.
The company behind augmented reality's first real gaming hit, Pokémon GO, is quietly making moves toward supporting the rapidly growing smartglasses space that may one day move its content away from smartphones and tablets and onto AR lenses positioned on your face.
Because timing is everything, the latest entry in the location-based augmented reality gaming sweepstakes, Ghostbusters World, has arrived just in time for Halloween.
Do price tags on mobile games give you pause? We get it. With so many freemium games out there, it's tough to justify spending three or four dollars on a game for your iPhone or Android device. That's why you wait for moments like this one, as both "Reigns" and "Reigns: Her Majesty" are aggressively on sale.
Microsoft is adding another important piece to its growing immersive computing arsenal by putting its newest Mixed Reality Capture Studio in the center of the movie business: Hollywood.
Computer vision company Blippar has already dabbled with outdoor AR navigation, but now it wants to make it easier for people to make their way through indoor spaces with augmented reality.
Last month was a whirlwind for the augmented reality industry, with the Augmented World Expo, Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, and an exciting Magic Leap Twitch livestream all wrapping up before the ides of June. Now that we've had a chance to fully digest it all, we have a real sense of where the augmented reality industry is heading.
Last week's Augmented World Expo felt like a distant memory by this Monday, as Apple unveiled ARKit 2.0 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Certainly, this news would overshadow anything augmented reality this week as it nearly eclipsed AWE when early reports leaked of the toolkit's new superpowers.
If you're looking for your gaming fix and nothing on the App Store is piquing your interest, you should give soft-launched games a try. These are games that haven't been released in the US yet because they're getting tested in smaller markets first. Using a simple workaround, you can install them on your iPhone in any country.
