When we talk about augmenting our reality, we often first think about vision instead of our other senses—but there's more to an immersive experience than what you see. One inventor figured out how to utilize sound and touch to create a simple, upgraded version of laser tag that you can play with your smartphone.
Traditional root ad-blockers like AdAway and AdBlock Plus have no effect on YouTube anymore. Until now, if you wanted to get rid of the commercials that play before your favorite videos, there have only been two ways—either by paying for a YouTube Red subscription, or by using an Xposed module to modify the YouTube app itself and force it into not showing ads.
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.
Among the many new changes ushered in by the iPhone 7, only one has the potential to completely change the way you interact with your smartphone—a new 3D Touch-enabled home button. Instead of the mechanical click we've grown accustomed to, your home button will now behave like the rest of the phone's touch screen interface.
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.
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.
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.
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're on the verge of an amazing evolution of technology where we can work and play in virtual worlds that merge with our own—or let us escape into our imaginations entirely. But creating virtual, mixed, and augmented reality experiences requires resources and hardware that not everyone has access to. If you want to build something awesome with the Microsoft HoloLens (or one of the other awesome platforms), we want to help you do just that.
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.
If you want to quickly understand EtherWars, imagine a game like StarCraft where you build out your base on your living room floor instead of on a computer screen. Before we had computer games to help us imagine what space wars might feel like, we played with toy ships and used our imaginations. EtherWars combines those two elements by replacing toys with holograms that actually react to your choices.
Mozilla helped get the ball rolling with WebVR, but support for the technology has been notably absent in Google Chrome until recently. Now, the latest Chromium developer build offers limited support.
Don't Miss: The Difference Between Virtual, Augmented, & Mixed Reality
If not the future of computing in general, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality certainly will change the world of gaming. If you want to try your hand at shaping this evolved medium, the Unite Europe conference posted a talk that explains the first things you need to learn to develop holographic games.
Most virtual and mixed reality headsets offer unnatural controls, making you use awkward movements or physical devices to control the holographic elements in your direct view. This doesn't make a lot of sense because using your hands is more natural, so Manus developed a set of gloves that solves that problem entirely.
Deaf people primarily communicate through sign language, so understanding spoken languages can prove challenging. To bridge that gap in communication, the HoloHear team built a mixed reality app at a Microsoft HoloLens Hackathon in San Fransisco that translates the spoken word into sign language.
If you've been to the doctor enough, you know that the medical staff can make a variety of mistakes from time to time. They're human and that's normal, but errors in the medical field can often have significant negative impacts. At Boston's 2016 HoloHacks event, a team of developers created HoloHealth to mitigate human error in common healthcare tasks.
North American users get a raw deal when it comes to Sony devices. For some reason, the critically-acclaimed Xperia lineup of smartphones is hardly ever available here, whereas in Europe, the Sony Xperia Z series is one of the most popular flagship devices around.
The human body is amazingly complex, and seeing inside one poses a variety of challenges whether you're dealing with an actual human or some kind of facsimile. Mixed reality offers the ability to get the best of both worlds by creating a holographic teaching tool for human anatomy.
The Microsoft HoloLens has a good amount of content available, but it's fairly limited in terms of what you can customize. You can access a built-in library of holograms, but if you want to create your own you have to do that with code.
One of the best new features in iOS 10 is the ability to delete all of those stock bloatware apps that you never use. Instead of hiding them in a folder somewhere to get them out of your way, you can finally remove them—or at least, that's what we wanted to believe.
Since the days of flip clocks, alarms have always had one function—make a bunch of annoying racket early in the morning to ensure that you wake up in time. And this simple MO has stayed in place while technology advances at a breakneck pace, almost in spite of the fact that today's devices are capable of doing far more than beeping at 7 in the morning.
The headsets of tomorrow offer some amazing possibilities in both gaming and work, but what we've seen so far only begins to scratch the surface. The US Navy saw the potential to use augmented reality in a helmet to provide divers with an incredible amount of information we have so far only seen in Hollywood movies.
Microsoft enjoyed a few months in the spotlight after releasing the developer version of the very first mixed reality (MR) headset, but now we're starting to see the competition jump in.
Lenovo announced at Tech World '16 a slew of new products, and one of them aims to upend the smartphone accessory ecosystem: Moto Mods. Moto Mods are proprietary modular add-ons developed for two new Motorola phones that were also announced in the keynote, the Moto Z and Moto Z Force. Sixteen magnetic nodes align the bottom back of the phones that connect and hold accessories, forming a case appearance. The nodes transfer both data and power at high speeds, a fact that Lenovo hammered home wi...
HoloTube, a new unofficial YouTube app for the Microsoft HoloLens, brings a whole bunch of new content to the mixed reality headset. While it's nice to have, the experience feels focused on quantity, not quality. HoloTube has a simple interface most people will recognize. You get a page of video categories, and as you drill down through each option you're presented with videos to watch. You can view regular, flat videos on the wall (or wherever you like)—which has its merits.
Are there any benefits to watching a movie in a holographic mixed reality headset, or should you just stick with your TV? It's not as cut and dried as you might think. While TVs have some advantages, so does the virtual screen of a Microsoft HoloLens.
Augmented reality has a variety of applications, but lately the face has been a major point of concentration for many companies. We're all pretty familiar with face swapping by now, but ModiFace employs similar technologies for more practical purposes.
The Oculus Rift's virtual experiences become a little less immersive when you're barely moving in a chair with a headset on, playing on a gamepad—but you don't have to accept that reality anymore.
More proof is emerging that the iPhone 7 won't include a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and damn—it is not pretty. These third-party Lightning-to-3.5 mm dongles were spotted on Chinese site Tama, and they give us a glimpse into a horrifying future in which we have to attach one of these clunky monstrosities to an iPhone just to connect a set of standard headphones.
Facebook Messenger is getting ready to roll out a Snapchat-esque feature that will let users send messages that self-destruct after a certain amount of time, so you'll have an extra level of security when you need to send sensitive financial information or, more likely, risqué texts or images.
Facebook just added another feature to Messenger as part of its quest to have their service become an all-encompassing communications app. This feature lets you make free group calls using Messenger's VoIP service, and you can chat with up to 50 people at once.
Developers across the U.S. and Canada have started getting their augmented reality headset packages from Microsoft, and so far, everyone's raving about one gaming experience that shatters all doubts of just what the HoloLens can do... RoboRaid.
Samsung's Galaxy S7 is an incredible piece of technology, but the Skype app that's preinstalled on some models may have some nasty issues, such as video and audio that freezes. Luckily, the fix for these problems is a simple one, although somewhat buried in the phone's Settings app.
One of the more annoying parts about cooking or baking at home is dealing with sticky ingredients. You scrape the peanut butter out of the jar and into a measuring cup to make sure you have the right amount for your recipe, then scrape the correct amount into the bowl you're cooking with.
The first White Hat Award for Technical Excellence tutorial contest ended last night at midnight! We had many excellent articles submitted, once again re-affirming what an incredible community we have here at Null Byte! We had quite a flurry of great articles in the last few days. Thanks to all of you who submitted such high quality material to our community. Your efforts are appreciated and you have the undying gratitude of our community. We will not forget your efforts. I'll be reading and ...
Obviously this is just a teaser, and who knows how soon we'll see something like this in real life, but just go ahead and watch the video first before you continue reading.
Google's design chief Matias Duarte has gained fame and acclaim for his recent visual revamp of the Android operating system, and now, Google's starting to incorporate this Material Design styling into more of its products.
I mentioned in 2015 I wanted to start a 'DoXing' series, and since I havent seen this on Null Byte, I am now going to introduce this to the community.
