While Magic Leap has remained mostly silent regarding its plans for its Magic Leap One successor, the software team continues to makes strides with improvements to the device's Lumin OS and SDK.
Tuning into a favorite station on Pandora has become part of a routine for many, and it's easy to see why. The app automatically plays songs tailored to your tastes to ensure a relatively hands-free experience. And if you're a subscriber, Pandora even has you covered in moments where there's poor cellular service by letting you keep listening to your go-to tracks uninterrupted.
Ratings and reviews apply everywhere, from a restaurant you want to try to a new camera you're thinking of buying and games you might want to play. Podcasts are no different. Reading reviews of shows can help determine which are worth listening to, and your opinion is valuable to other people too. In Apple Podcasts, there are a few different ways to read, rate, and review shows.
WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, has several important privacy and security-related features, including end-to-end encryption, screen lock, read receipts, and two-step verification. If you're an avid WhatsApp user, you'll be happy to know there are more privacy features you might not know, such as hiding your profile photo from other users.
For the most part, people use real names on Facebook. That's all fine and well for keeping tabs on those you know, but it can make friendly Messenger chats feel oddly formal. Skirt around this stiffness by giving your friends nicknames in Messenger for Android and iOS, so your conversations reflect the way you and your friends communicate in real life.
In Safari for iPhone, as far back as iOS 7, you can request the full desktop version of websites. The process was streamlined starting in iOS 9, but the process remains relatively hidden and easily missed. Now, iOS 13 shines a light on it, as well as adds functionality to set the desktop view for individual websites indefinitely.
As promised with its teaser from Build 2019, Microsoft has unveiled the details for its augmented reality version of Minecraft for smartphones.
After applying augmented reality as a solution for the sale and marketing of sneakers, Nike is taking the next step in its adoption of AR to improve the customer experience.
After announcing at Google I/O 2019 that augmented reality content would come to Search, Google revealed how it would make that happen with the latest round of updates to ARCore.
If Google hasn't already demonstrated that it is serious about augmented reality, then it made it abundantly clear at the Google I/O keynote on Tuesday.
Two years ago, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the F8 Developers Conference keynote with augmented reality and the introduction of Facebook's AR camera platform, now known as Spark AR.
While some widely praised immersive computing initiatives at Google are shutting down, over at Epic Games things are just ramping up, and it involves quite a bit of cash available to indie augmented reality developers and startups alike.
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.
Last week at Mobile World Congress 2019, Google put an augmented reality twist on its annual Android Partner Walk via its ARCore toolkit.
Although all signs points to Microsoft releasing a new HoloLens in the coming days, the company is nevertheless looking to distribute its augmented reality apps to other operating systems.
While Leap Motion has given makers a DIY solution for building their own augmented reality headset with Project North Star, a self-described "AR wonk" has taken the blueprints one step further by creating an untethered version.
With the rise of OLED displays, Android users have been begging Google for a true system-wide dark mode for years. While a system-wide solution is still somewhat unlikely, Google has given in by providing a dark mode for certain apps, including Contacts.
Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic has been preparing its flavor of AR cloud, the Niantic Real World Platform, to bring more realistic and interactive augmented reality experiences to mobile apps. And now the company is looking for a few good developers to help execute its vision on the platform.
Mobile augmented reality pioneer Blippar has now completed its fall from hopeful AR startup to the immersive computing history books.
Augmented reality gaming company Niantic Labs is now instigating conflicts between Pokémon GO players, but it's not as bad as it sounds.
Apple has done a fantastic job of instantly patching iOS exploits through constant firmware updates to keep hackers at bay. Because of this, jailbreaking has largely been pushed to the fringes, resulting in a myriad of tweaks being abandoned by developers which, in turn, have been rendered incompatible with later jailbroken versions of iOS.
Ingress, the godfather of location based-AR games developed by Pokémon GO creator Niantic Labs, is getting a new lease on life via Ingress Prime, a reboot of the game built on the Niantic Real World Platform.
While many retailers have introduced try-before-you-buy features in their apps, Walmart has gone in another direction by bringing shoppers an augmented reality tool to help them compare products they want to buy.
At its annual MAX event kicking off on Monday in Los Angeles, Adobe gave the audience a new preview of its forthcoming Project Aero augmented reality authoring tool during the keynote presentation.
If you own a Google Pixel, you'll soon have augmented reality versions of Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and Childish Gambino on your camera.
While most kids his age are busy playing Fortnite, 11-year-old Yumo Soerianto is developing augmented reality games. Kids like Soerianto are the future of the augmented reality field — they'll likely be coming into their own as professional developers right as AR technologies become lightweight and powerful enough to be contained in a pair of sunglasses.
While they don't do augmented reality just yet, the latest styles of Snapchat's Spectacles 2 camera glasses serve as a peek into the future of how mainstream AR wearables may look.
Luxury automaker Mercedes-Benz has joined the growing list of automakers adopting augmented reality to provide an assist to its manufacturing operations, in this case, via the Microsoft HoloLens.
The mainstreaming of augmented reality won't happen overnight, but it's becoming increasingly clear that traditional media is leading the charge in the effort to introduce the public to immersive computing. A recent example came from none other than USA Today via its 321 Launch app.
You can view battery information in the Today View, you already know what carrier services you, and you can quickly figure out with normal use whether your display orientation is locked, so what do you need the status bar at the top of your iPhone? If you don't find much use for it and would like to see more of your wallpaper, there's a way you can get rid of it for good.
The shifting sands of immersive computing, currently fluctuating between augmented reality and virtual reality, can be hard to navigate if you're only versed in one of the platforms. But a new series of videos from Leap Motion paints a picture of a near future world in which AR and VR will seamlessly merge together, forcing us to change the way we see both.
Location-based gaming pioneer Niantic has offered a preview of its augmented reality cloud platform that could change the immersive content game yet again.
Using the ARKit 2.0 announcement as its springboard, software maker Adobe is looking leap up to the level of Unity Technologies and Epic Games, the companies making the go-to tools for creating augmented reality experiences.
In the new Android P, the multitasking view is reminiscent of webOS days. As a result, enabling split screen mode no longer works as it once did. However, it's still easy to use, whether or not you're using the new "Swipe up on Home button" gesture or have stuck with the old-style navigation buttons that include the "Recents" aka "Overview" softkey.
During Tuesday's keynote at the I/O developer conference, Google unveiled new capabilities for its Lens visual search engine and expanded the availability of the platform in smartphone camera apps.
On Monday, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft revealed two new apps for the HoloLens apps.
Facebook's shadiness when it comes to user privacy has never been much of a secret. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, however, has thrown the company and its practices into the limelight, with users taking their data more seriously than ever. If you're one of those users, you might want to check your "Location History" to see if and how Facebook's kept tabs on your whereabouts.
The price tag for the Microsoft HoloLens might be out of range for the average consumer's budget, but for enterprises, like BAE Systems, adopting the AR headset is yielding a return on the investment. And for those with even slimmer wallets, Best Buy just made the Lenovo Mirage, part of the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges package, more affordable.
You really can't beat Google Photos. Not only does it give you free unlimited cloud storage and let you search for almost any object in one of your pictures, but it also packs a few powerful editing tools. Among these is a dead-simple way to create your own animated GIFs out of any set of pictures.
Starting with Android 8.0 Oreo, the process of sideloading apps has changed dramatically. Google removed the old "Unknown Sources" setting and replaced it with a permission that you have to grant to individual apps. It's really an interesting security feature.
