I couldn't live without seeing previews of certain notifications on my iPhone, but there are definitely some that I'd like to hide, either because they're annoying or because I don't want anyone else to see them. Previously, you could only disable notification previews for Apple apps such as Mail, Messages, Photos, and Wallet, but in iOS 11, you can disable previews for every single app on your iPhone.
For younger children, a day at the playground is not complete without some sandbox time. Long a favorite of children and parents, sandboxes could also be sheltering dangerous pathogens.
Two salsa dancers who also happen to be programmers are soon releasing an app called Dance Reality, made with Apple's ARKit. Through this app, you will be able to practice your dancing with augmented reality as your teacher right from your iPhone.
At Facebook's first Communities Summit, admins from top Facebook groups assembled to discuss tools to better manage and optimize their members. Here, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that these changes fuel the company's shifting focus from connecting the world to uniting it.
Snapchat's newest feature will allow you to see where your friends are posting from around the world. Called Snap Map, this easy-to-use update gives users the ability to view your friends' stories and locations on a map.
As summer heats up, new maps from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) gives us our best guess at where Zika-carrying mosquitoes could be hanging out this year in the US.
With so many companies announcing news or demonstrating technologies at the Augmented World Expo 2017, it can be a challenge to see it all. In fact, we are still unpacking some of our in-depth on-site coverage. So, this edition of Brief Reality is focused on the news we did not cover last week.
With many of the companies working in augmented and mixed reality focused on the Augmented World Expo, the finance side of the industry has been relatively quiet.
Wound infections don't usually enter the blood and become systemic, spreading the infection throughout our bodies, and there's a good reason for that: Our bodies actively work to prevent it, according to research that discovered a new use for a protein first discovered decades ago.
Waymo has done a lot of things over the course of their driverless journey, but their solution to little birdies pooping all over a self-driving car's LiDAR system is definitely our favorite.
The east coast is becoming a hotbed for driverless. Sure, the west coast has all of its fancy tech companies testing self-driving cars, but we've got the goods too. Uber has brought the technology to Pennsylvania and will soon do the same in Toronto. (Stratford, Ontario, has plans to test out driverless too!) And today we got some great news: Governor Andrew Cuomo just approved of driverless testing in New York.
Apple Maps. For years now, its reputation has been that of a punchline. Although Apple and Google battle for supremacy in most hardware and software categories, in the map game there's no question who has the superior app. But the news of the day shows Apple expanding the cities it plans on collecting street data from, opening up speculation that they're not ready to throw in the towel on Apple Maps.
A Seattle development team is putting the "ARRRR" in AR with the maiden voyage of Captain Blimey, an augmented reality game for iOS and Android devices that puts a pirate premise on Pokémon GO.
Augmented reality software developer Edgybees has launched Drone Prix. The new mobile app immerses DJI drones and their pilots in more than 30 augmented reality obstacle courses.
While the technology continues to mature, businesses from various industries continue to adopt augmented reality to improve the efficiency of business processes. In this edition of Brief Reality, as conference season continues, we see examples of augmented reality applied to logistics processes and marketing of industrial supplies, as well as the topic of discussion at another trade show.
In honor of Earth Day tomorrow (woo!), visual artist Justin Brice Guariglia has released a new augmented reality app that lets you experience climate change from wherever you're standing.
Samsung's new Galaxy S8 can turn into a PC with its DeX dock, but while that may sound like the future of mobile computing on the surface, there are definitely a few issues with the entire setup.
Obstetric tetanus in an unvaccinated Amish woman after a home birth has emphasized the need for preventative healthcare.
For a long time, Apple has kept the upper hand on Android as far as app revenue is concerned. However, this tradition looks likely to change this year, as Android's app sales are expected to surpass Apple's.
WinFuture, a German tech-news site, has leaked a spec sheet for the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus. We previously covered all speculation and leaks in our rumor roundup, but thanks to Roland Quandt, we now have a very clear look at what to expect from Samsung's latest flagship release.
When you're an audiophile, managing music is a labor of love. Metadata, like artist names, album thumbnails, and genres, is attached to many digital audio files, though some of the songs in your library might not have such tags, and others may have missing or incorrect information.
Now you can watch your old copy of Bridget Jones's Diary anywhere, anytime, on your smartphone. It's a dream come true! (Disclaimer: This dream may oddly specific to me.)
A state of emergency has been declared in Malaysia's northeastern Kelantan state after an outbreak of avian influenza virus H5N1.
Leaked documents from Uber, obtained by Re/code, detail the ride-hailing app's latest wins and failures in their self-driving experiment. The reports detail the number of autonomous miles traveled, the number of driver interventions needed, and the number of times the drivers had to avoid serious damage.
Cholera is rapidly spreading in Mozambique, with over 1,200 people infected. Since the outset of 2017, cholera has spread from the capital city of Maputo (pictured above) to three of its ten provinces. Health officials report other areas in the country are seeing case counts rise, and two deaths have been logged so far.
It's 2017 and finally ordering "fries with that" at McDonald's is an even easier prospect for all you lovers out there ball and chained to the fast food game. The great big golden arches are moving one step closer to making your order as golden as it ought to be through a mobile ordering app using geofencing technology to track your location.
When it published its 2016-2017 catalog last year, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) became the first college to leverage augmented reality technology for a college catalog.
Dirty, malformed, and outright mischievous text strings have long been the enemy of interactive website developers. Strings contain any combination of letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation, and are entered into text boxes on websites by users. These strings in particular can do everything from highlighting XSS vulnerabilities to soliciting 404 error pages.
For some time now, there has been quite a bit of speculation as to when the selection of augmented and mixed reality head-mounted displays would begin to trickle out to the public. Pricing, availability, and software selection are all issues that will have to be addressed before widespread adoption will start.
As we first reported here on Gadget Hacks, Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones come with an unlockable bootloader, with the exception of models sold by Verizon.
If you were a particularly good little girl or boy this year, Santa might have finally brought you that cool new smartphone you've been wanting. Or perhaps you just took advantage of a great sale and treated yourself to a new gadget this holiday season—totally justifiable, and surely a well-deserved gift.
The Google Nexus 6P, manufactured by Huawei and released a little more than a year ago, has been a well-received smartphone in general. It sports front-facing stereo speakers, an awesome camera, a massive screen, supports all US carriers, and doesn't allow the infamous Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 to hamper its performance in the slightest.
If there's one thing you'd never think to play music on, it's probably a coffee stirrer, right? But that didn't stop this guy from playing one of my favorite theme songs on one — "Darth Vader's Theme," aka "The Imperial March."
At the WinHEC Shenzen 2016 Keynote, Microsoft showed off a system running Windows 10 smoothly on an ARM processor. This could be great news for developers of mixed reality software.
This year, there's no need to waste time and energy stringing colorful Christmas lights all over your home and yard. All you need is the Circuit Marker from AgIC, a Japanese technology company, and you're ready to deck the halls.
Most websites prevent you from saving embedded videos, but if you have the Xposed Framework installed on your Android device, a cool module from developer Ashish Bansal will now let you download almost any video. The way it works is simple—just start playing a video in your favorite web browser, then you'll see a notification that lets you download the source file in one tap.
Many new developers are diving right into the Microsoft HoloLens, but augmented and mixed reality are fairly big subjects in terms of learning. There's a lot to cover and, unfortunately, very few places for someone brand new to Windows Holographic to begin lessons.
Breaking off a piece of that Kit Kat bar gets a lot more difficult when the whole thing weighs 13 pounds.
In case you didn't know, Google has an awesome app that gives you free money to spend on apps, games, movies, books, and virtually anything you can buy on the Google Play Store. The app is called Google Opinion Rewards, and all it asks in exchange for the Play Store credit is that you answer a few questions every now and then.
Over the years, we've covered many different methods for enabling background playback for YouTube videos on Android, but none have ever been as easy as this: Simply watch the videos with Firefox for Android, and they'll continue playing when you leave the app.
