Modern warfare takes on a more literal translation with the advent of new augmented reality displays revealed recently by the US Army to improve soldiers' situational awareness on the battlefield.
Disruptor Beam just soft launched The Walking Dead: March to War in the Philippines. It's not officially available in the US yet, but there are ways to play this take on Robert Kirkham's post-apocalyptic masterpiece regardless of where you live.
We are in a pretty major technology boom at the moment. One that will likely make the industrial revolution look tiny. And one of these technologies that are building up to lead the way is something called augmented reality.
Tired of all those people tagging you in weird stuff on Instagram? Well, there's an easy way to prevent people from ever tagging you in one of those silly posts again. It's simple, too. It only takes a couple minutes of your time, but will probably save you from years of embarrassment (or however tagged photos make you feel).
Because of Android's new SafetyNet system, certain apps can now block rooted users or prevent you from accessing them altogether — but at least for now, there are still ways around these restrictions.
You're working on your iPhone or playing an awesome game when you receive a notification. You take too long to look up from your activity, so before you get a chance to see what's up, the notification is gone. Persistent notifications won't disappear on you like the default disappearing ones in iOS 11 and iOS 12, giving you as long as you need to check them. Here's how to set them up.
The iPhone has a feature that lets you see how much juice is left in your Bluetooth headphones, but most Android phones are lacking this ability. Thankfully, there's a simple app that'll close this gap in functionality.
Google Photos just got a killer new feature that everyone should know about. Instead of one endless stream of every picture you've ever uploaded, there's now an "Archive" section where you can stash select shots.
Prepare yourself for a trip back to the days when a Sega Genesis was your gateway to premium gaming. The mid-nineties classic, Comix Zone, has been soft-launched in the Philippines, and while it's not officially available for gamers in the states, you can install it right now with a little hackery.
Kik is an extremely popular messaging app, but it has a few annoying features that we all just sort of put up with. You can't turn off read receipts, nor can you hide when you're typing, and the photos you take with Kik's camera show up differently than ones you send from your gallery app. At least a couple of these features should be subject to change, but they aren't — well, not without some tinkering.
The Galaxy S8 and S8+ come with a set of AKG-tuned earbuds that would cost you $99 by themselves. Unfortunately, the earbuds alone don't automatically translate to superior sound, and they've been met with lukewarm reception. But as it turns out, there's a fairly hidden menu on Samsung's flagships that'll give you a tailor-made audio experience and help you get the most out of your S8-AKG pairing.
Water makes up about 60% of your body weight. Whether you like it plain, flavored, bubbly, or in beverages or food, we all need water daily to avoid dehydration and stay healthy. For communities in need of clean drinking water, new research using bacteria may offer a simplified, lower-cost method for boosting potable water supplies.
The evolution of our infection-fighting systems may have something to teach modern scientists. That's what a group from the University of Granada in Spain found when they studied a protein that's been around for over four billion years. Their work, by senior author José Sánchez-Ruiz and colleagues in the Department of Physical Chemistry, was published in the journal Cell Reports.
Depending on your device, when you lower your brightness slider all the way to the minimum, it may still emit a considerable amount of light. This is because manufacturers have the option of setting a minimum brightness value, and while 1 would be the true minimum brightness that your display is capable of, some have set is as high as 5 or even 10.
The Google Chrome browser does mostly everything well and integrates nicely with other Google services, but it's not exactly renowned for speed. With a rooted device and the aid of an app called Kernel Adiutor, however, you can make Chrome as nimble as some of the fastest browsers on the market.
If you use the Google Assistant on your Android device, you can easily send a text message to any one of your contacts. But even though that same Assistant is powering the Google Home, you can't use the smart speaker to accomplish the same task — at least, not without some tinkering.
Those of us that work with or around augmented and mixed reality have seen a powerful shift in the last year as the popularity and interest have grown in the field. With Microsoft's HoloLens release, the popularity of Pokémon GO, and the constant rumor mill known as Magic Leap, the terms augmented reality and mixed reality have started to become a part of the modern vernacular more and more each passing day.
Blizzard's Hearthstone was a rousing success with more than 10 million downloads on the Google Play Store. Not taking things lying down, Bethesda, the creator of The Elder Scrolls, has come up with a card game based off its popular fantasy franchise. The Elder Scrolls: Legends is now out in the wild, though, officially only available for select Android tablets. But with a little creativity, there's a way to game the system and play Legends on any Android device. The Elder Scrolls: Legends is ...
A baby with severe Zika-related birth defects was born in San Diego County this week, prompting officials to urge pregnant women to avoid disease hotspots.
Augmented reality seems to be the talk of the town lately, with everything from glasses to furniture stores prepping to implement exciting, new AR technology. Well now, it looks like even our food is getting a makeover for the augmented reality future.
Future mothers hoping to use donated semen might want to think twice before using any samples from the Miami-Dade Country area of Florida. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that sperm from as far back as June 2016 may be infected with the Zika virus. Damn those mosquitoes.
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.
In December of last year, UK-based Zappar successfully raise $84,356 for their ZapBox mixed reality headset—over $50,000 more than their goal. Well, they just blew that sum out of the water when they announced this morning that they've closed a Series A round of funding with $3.75 million.
If your phone has an AMOLED display, it doesn't waste any battery to power black portions of the screen. This is because the individual pixels that make up an AMOLED screen emit their own light, which means the backlight you'd find behind a traditional LCD screen is not present. In other words, showing a full-screen black image on an AMOLED phone is like turning your display completely off.
After about six months of testing, Facebook has decided to start rolling out a new feature on mobile that automatically plays sound for videos in your News Feed, thanks to "positive feedback" from test users. As far as I'm concerned, they have been testing with the wrong users, because auto-playing sound is by far worse than auto-playing videos ever could be.
Android is a highly customizable operating system. Sometimes, we use these capabilities to add core functionality or streamline the user experience, but there are other times when customization is just about having fun and making your smartphone's interface more enjoyable.
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.
Android's notification system is quite robust, especially now that Google added bundled notifications and quick reply features to Android 7.0 Nougat. However, things can still get quite cluttered when you have several unread messages, which fills your status bar with icons and makes your notification tray take up half of the screen by itself.
Every day the young world of mixed reality is creating new ways for people to work with with computers. We are looking for, and finding, new ways for these head-worn computers to understand what we tell them. Sometimes it is with our hands, sometimes it is where we turn our head, sometimes it is what we say. In the case highlighted below, it's where we walk.
A few days ago, I pulled up the Windows Store on my HoloLens and saw a few new applications. One that caught my attention was Oriental Museum, which lets you explore China's Forbidden City, and the other one is very similar free demo app called Secrets of Ancient Egypt by Link Development.
Dutch filmmaker Anthony Van der Meer published his 2015 thesis short from Willem de Kooning Academy in South Holland online in December 2016. It's a brilliant piece of work that managed to be touching, alarming, and informative at the same time. His documentary, which already has over 6 million views on YouTube, covered the journey made by a stolen smartphone and how the theft and ensuing tracking affected all parties involved.
Skype is one of the most popular messaging and video chat services for a good reason—it's packed to the brim with tons of cool features. But one bit of functionality that Microsoft left out is the ability to block friend requests from people that aren't in your contacts, which can lead to a lot of unwanted notifications from spammers and bots.
Dutch police are using a system very similar to Pokémon GO on smartphones, but they aren't walking around trying to catch little pocket monsters. The purpose of this system is to give augmented reality help to first responders who may be less qualified to work a fresh crime scene. If successful, the idea of a contaminated crime scene could be a thing of the past.
Paranoid Android has always been one of the most popular custom ROMs because of the inventive features its developers add to Android. Two of the biggest draws in particular have to be the "Halo" notification bubble, and the "Pie" navigation buttons, which can both fundamentally change the way you interact with your device.
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.
Google worked with design agency B-Reel to create some unique wallpapers for its Pixel and Pixel XL flagships, and the end result is quite stunning. These "Live Earth" wallpapers, as they're called, combine Google Earth's high-def satellite imagery with a 3D parallax effect that changes perspective as you move between screens.
A few months ago, LlabTooFeR leaked a full system dump from Google's then-unreleased Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. That may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but the system dump contained all of the preinstalled apps and services from Google's new flagships—including the much-anticipated Google Assistant.
There are lots of cool new additions to Messages in iOS 10, including the ability to send GIFs, as well as custom stickers, weather info, and lots more with the new App Store for Messages.
The newest version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 10, has been out for about a month now. But like every year beforehand, some of you who updated will not be happy with the latest and "greatest" iOS version.
Microsoft has the HoloLens and Google has their money on Magic Leap (as well as their own Tango and Cardboard, among others), but we've heard next to nothing about how Apple plans to enter the virtual/augmented/mixed reality space. A new patent offers some clues.
