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.
After Ford's CEO Mark Fields' three-year tenure failed to keep up with the driverless industry and resulted in a 40% drop in shares since Field's took over in 2014, Ford is going in a new direction. Jim Hackett, who was previously chairman of Ford's self-driving division, has succeeded Fields as the company's new CEO.
Tuesday gave us what I am dubbing a "patent dump." Can you blame me? The U.S. Patent Office released 56 patents from Apple. 56! Among them, there are patents confirming Apple is working on embedded Touch ID, edge-to-edge displays, and a 3D camera system (surprise, surprise). Some of those things we've heard rumors on for some time, but what is new is one of the patents hidden amongst the bunch, describing an Apple-made avatar system. One whose end-goal is to reflect your current emotional sta...
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.
Throughout this NR50 series, we have talked about the incredible growth the augmented and mixed reality space has seen in the last year. More devices, software, developers, and use-cases seem to arrive daily. For this growth to have occurred, it took the work of many people, from many different backgrounds and skill sets — and Next Reality wants to recognize them for all that they have done and are doing.
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.
Last week, the internet was ablaze with talk about the Galaxy S8's home button, because it subtly changes positions without the phone alerting you. This feature was included to stop burn-in issues with the screen, and the general consensus from tech sites was the screens would not experience any burn-in at all.
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.
Apple is combining internal and external talent in an effort to give them in edge in the augmented reality market, though we still don't know what form their foray into alternative realities will actually take.
Apple recently scored a patent (number 9,488,488) to create augmented reality maps, hinting at possible AR integration into the iOS Maps application for iPhone. Does this mean we'll be seeing super visionary projections of places in the app in the near future? Maybe.
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.
If you've played the game Portal by Valve before, you've most likely popped one portal onto the ceiling and another directly below it on the floor, dropped your Companion Cube in, and then watched it fall forever. Well, now it has been done in real life, in an actual hallway, not in a rendered world.
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.
Once mixed reality technology is more widely available and realistically priced for consumers, using the tech to create the illusion of a larger space, will likely be a favorite use for mixed reality in places where real-estate is expensive, people tend to live in smaller homes and work in tighter offices.
Magic Leap, the mysterious Florida-based mixed reality start-up, announced on Wednesday that it would be opening a 260,000 square-foot expansion in Florida, and bringing along with it 725 new jobs over a five-year period. To make this happen, they will be making an $150 million capital investment, with government incentives, of course.
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.
