As Facebook, Apple, Samsung, and others offer augmented reality selfie effects and content that challenge its platform, Snapchat has continued to innovate with its augmented reality capabilities.
At its F8 developers conference on Tuesday, Facebook announced new tools and features coming in a new version of AR Studio, including the integration of 3D content aggregator Sketchfab's Download API.
For social media platforms like Facebook, augmented reality represents a whole new art form with which users can express themselves online. Now, Facebook is giving those users a new brush.
Along with the awesome early-2018 addition of Giphy GIFs in Snapchat, you can now share other people's Snapchat handles and tag them in a way that lets others reach those people easily — something you couldn't do before in the app.
The Force was awakened in many a household on Christmas morning this year, as evidenced by numerous recipients of newly unwrapped Star Wars: Jedi Challenges systems sharing their first lightsaber battles in augmented reality on social media.
If you ever thought the Snorlax in Pokémon Go should be taller, and you have an iPhone compatible with ARKit, get ready to look up.
Continuing its unrelenting (and mostly successful) campaign against Snapchat, on Tuesday, Facebook announced the addition of "World Effects" to its Messenger app.
Next to millennials, one of the groups most coveted by brand marketers is "Generation Z," the consumers of tomorrow who were born between 1996 and 2010. On Monday, Facebook established a beachhead with that demographic in the realm of augmented reality by launching Facebook Messenger Kids.
If you are a frequent poster on Facebook, then uploading your photos and videos in HD is essential for your viewers. There's nothing worse than realizing that the Boomerang you just uploaded is grainy and probably won't get any views.
Today, Facebook Messenger is rolling out Discover, a feature that helps you chat with companies and locate nearby businesses of interest to you. First discussed in April at Facebook's developer conference F8, Discover is finally available for public use.
If I told you to follow as many users as you could possibly follow, in order to get more Instagram followers, that may seem counterintuitive, right? If I told you I'm trying to brainwash/annoy you with how many times I could possibly say versions of the word "follow" in an opening sentence, that would seem weird, too.
Facebook is hiring video game teams and other eSports organizations to create live and on-demand videos for its newsfeed. The company aims to take on others such as Twitch and YouTube, where most of the eSports' content is typically housed.
If OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei was trying to be slick about using the new OnePlus 5 phone — especially before its speculated summer release — well, he didn't do that great a job of hiding it from us.
Thanks to live-streaming video and social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, we're all on camera nowadays. Unfortunately, though, we don't have a script to work with when we're shooting selfie videos, so it's hard to come off as perfectly eloquent when you're just freestyling off the top of your head.
The Google Chrome browser for Android allows you to cast quite a few different videos from the web to your TV, but some sites actively disable this functionality, and others have outdated video players that won't allow for it. For example, Instagram's mobile website won't let you cast any videos, and the official app doesn't support Google Cast.
Instagram introduced Photo Maps back in 2012, a feature allowing users to showcase where they've taken photos and explore where others have been, all through an interactive map.
The new Camera app in iOS 8 has a few really great features, but some of the best photo-centric features were packed into the iPhone's photo editing tools. These new editing features can create even more dynamic images than before, no Instagram required.
Some apps have a nasty habit of ignoring your Android's auto-rotation settings and locking the display into either portrait or landscape orientation.
While the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 has an integrated LED for notifications, it only works for a few things, like charging and low battery, and it only flashes two main colors (red and blue) when the screen's off. As someone that usually has their phone on silent or vibrate, it's hard to tell when I receive important messages or notifications. Sure, I could set a specific vibration or ringtone for individual apps, but that can quickly get annoying and distracting, especially at work or school.
Update: If you're running iOS 7 or higher, you'll want to check out the new way to fully close your background applications.
Old school media stalwart The New York Times launched its augmented reality news content in 2018 with a feature on the athletes of the Winter Olympics.
Ever since Snapchat rebuffed its acquisition attempts, Facebook has morphed Instagram with features from Snapchat, such as stories, chat, and, of course, augmented reality.
Let's say you want to download an Instagram video to your iPhone. What do you do? While Instagram doesn't offer an official solution, there are backchannel methods that exist to get the job done. However, if you want native support for downloading Instagram videos directly to your Photos app, you can start by updating your iPhone to iOS 12 and installing Shortcuts.
Continuing our NR30 series this week, we focused on the leaders of the software development industry that make augmented reality experiences possible. In other news, two of the current leaders in making AR headsets, Microsoft and Magic Leap, are pursuing multiple verticals with their products, as both now appear to be interested in making AR headsets for the military.
How many times have you sent a message on Facebook Messenger that you immediately wanted to take back? Most email services have an unsend option, as well as Instagram Direct, and Messenger has caught on to this convenience with a take-back button for any chat you're in — even in groups. Plus, you can also remove other people's messages.
Avocados have been the darling of the food world for quite some time now—so you'd think that we might have already exhausted the ways in which to enjoy this amazing fruit.
There are many reasons to root Android, but for me, the most important one is to have the Xposed Framework. Xposed gives you access to hundreds of modules, which take away the need to manually modify core system files to add new features and functionality to your Android device.
As Apple, Google, Snap, and Facebook wrestle for positioning to lure developers and creators to build augmented reality experiences for their respective tools, Facebook is looking at a learning approach for its Spark AR platform.
As soon as you try recording a video in the Camera app on your iPhone, any music playing on your device comes to a halt. Apple Music. Spotify. Pandora. Tidal. Deezer. No matter what you're listening to, as soon as you switch to "Video" in the Camera app, the music will stop. However, if you want background music in your movie files, there's a workaround to avoid having to add an audio track in post.
The still-unfolding story of China's Nreal augmented reality startup continues to develop, with each turn uncovering another unexpected wrinkle.
In a world full of augmented reality camera effects apps, one app is going in a more social direction.
After hosting an augmented reality experience using its Snapchat Landmarker technology at the Statue of Liberty, Snap is now giving creators the opportunity to create their own Lenses with Lady Liberty.
A year after making a splash at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Amazon Alexa integration, smartglasses maker Vuzix is bringing a notable weather app to its Blade smartglasses for the 2019 edition of the conference.
On Tuesday, the smartglasses startup known as North finally took the wraps off its Focals product, but in a very unique way: The team simply opened a couple of stores and invited the public in.
Because timing is everything, the latest entry in the location-based augmented reality gaming sweepstakes, Ghostbusters World, has arrived just in time for Halloween.
By now, you've probably already seen Andy Serkis and his performance capture demo for Magic Leap. And sure, marrying motion capture acting and augmented reality sounds compelling, but how does it really work as an experience?
While you were busy browsing Instagram, composing tweets, or chasing Snapchat updates, an eight-year-old ARKit developer was hard at work on her first step toward taking over the tech world via augmented reality.
While Instagram users can attach links to images, they can only do so in stories, and only if they meet the special requirements that most users cannot obtain. Snapchat, on the other hand, lets anyone add a link, and it can be done in regular snaps and in your story. This feature has only been around since July 2017, so you may have missed it and not even realized it was a possibility.
This week's Game Developers Conference came at just the right time for Magic Leap, a company that was riding a wave of bad news from legal troubles and rumors regarding Magic Leap One.
Some phones have a feature that turns your screen white for a second when you're taking a selfie in dim lighting. This does a great job of illuminating your face in a pinch, but there are two problems with it: First, not all phones have the feature, and second, it doesn't work in third-party camera apps like Snapchat and Instagram.
