With augmented reality comes an infinite realm of possibilities for storytelling. We have seen it through wineries telling their history with interactive AR experiences and through authors that use augmented reality to bring portions of their books to life. However, filmmaker Peter Jackson might take the cake on creating an incredible new way of storytelling.
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.
If we're being honest, very few people go on Tinder to fall in love with someone's personality. Oftentimes, the only reason they'll look at your bio is to make sure there are no red flags.
You will soon be able to play an AR version of one of the most frustrating mobile games of all time, thanks to Apple's ARKit.
Apple just jumped on the auto-play bandwagon with their revamped App Store in iOS 11. Now, when you visit an app or game page that has a video trailer, it will automatically play. This can not only get pretty annoying, but it can eat up your precious data. Luckily, there's a way to restrict these auto-playing videos to Wi-Fi only — or disable them altogether.
With augmented reality making its way into the mainstream, consumers have been expecting a company bloodbath for a while now, one that will have a ton of casualties. Blippar has been expected to be one of those casualties due to the reported loss of millions of dollars earlier this year. Now, their situation might be made worse as the creators of the Layar app, Raimo van der Klein and Martin Lens-Fitzgerald, are rumored to be asking for their company back.
Waymo's hardware development team for self-driving vehicles will now be led by Satish Jeyachandran, previously director of hardware engineering at Tesla.
Ok, I have to admit, I drop my phone around 2–4 times a week. I'm horrible at protecting it and I've gone through my fair share of cracked phones. Most of the time, once the phone is cracked it's just easier to get an entirely new phone, rather than have to fight your phone provider for a fix.
Amidst reports of the newspaper industry struggling to survive, it's becoming more and more clear that people are increasingly turning to their smartphones for the news. In fact, a new study by the Pew Research Center has found that 85% of US adults check the news on mobile devices. Surprisingly, seniors constitute a sizable portion of this.
The leaks and rumors surrounding the highly anticipated Galaxy Note 8 just keep coming. But none have suggested that the new Samsung phone might be powered by a different chipset than the Snapdragon 835, until now.
Lenovo has partnered with Wikitude to develop a cloud-based platform for delivering industrial-focused augmented reality content, the companies announced at the Augmented World Expo today in Santa Clara, California.
It's never fun to fidget around with your phone's camera while you're out and about, especially when it comes to transitioning between its front- and rear-facing cameras. Thankfully, Galaxy S8 users can scratch this one off their list of inconveniences, as Samsung has built in some nifty features that let you switch from the main shooter to the selfie cam without having to look at the screen or tap on the camera switch icon.
Most music streaming services will either use the stock Android equalizer or their own built-in equalizer. A couple of apps, such as Spotify, bring both to the table. Spotify has a built-in equalizer which kicks into play when a system or third-party equalizer isn't detected. However, other apps such as SoundCloud and Pandora don't use the installed equalizer even if it's a system-wide one.
There's nothing worse than driving up to your destination only to discover that there isn't a parking spot in sight — but thankfully, Google Maps will soon have you covered.
The Galaxy S8, with all its new features, is shining in the news right now as one of the best phones of the year. However, users in the US may be at a disadvantage to those overseas, as it seems that the Snapdragon 835-powered S8 models underperform variants with Exynos processors in almost every category.
In the driverless race, technological advances can sometimes just add more tension to an already heated competition, if Waymo suing Uber over their allegedly stolen LiDAR technology is any indication. Now, Sony is offering a new camera sensor, one that should help self-driving cars "see" the road with much more accuracy than any other camera sensors available for vehicles currently.
Magic Leap is no stranger to hype and speculative advancement—when their name pops up in the news, all focus turns to them. And the company is making news again this week, with the knowledge of an acquisition of a startup founded by former Apple employees, and by hiring animators from an Emmy and Oscar award-winning studio.
Microsoft, even being Apple's fierce competitor, is no stranger to producing iOS apps—in fact, they've made 94 of them. But their latest iOS app may be their silliest yet: a goofy photo editor named Sprinkles.
We live in a marvelous age, a time where technology is driving us forward as a species at a rapid pace, and tech-driven miracles are becoming more and more commonplace. While the human race may not be focused on building the largest wonders of the world, as it once was in history, the current order of wonders are much smaller in scale—even internal.
Ever since the update that turned Google Keyboard into Gboard rolled out, a lot of people have been noticing that word suggestions and auto-correct features are downright slow. The issue seems to affect users with multiple languages installed more than anyone, though it can also happen if you have a midrange phone or older device with only one language installed.
WhatsApp recently updated their emojis (or emoji, depending on your preference), but it wasn't exactly a welcome change. Many users have complained that the new smilies are just way too big, others aren't too fond of the shinier appearance, and countless folks have been venting their frustrations on Twitter.
The OnePlus 3T was released about five months after the OnePlus 3 with several noticeable upgrades. Firstly, it has a new processor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, which is the same one that the Pixel and Pixel XL sport. Second is the 16 MP front-facing camera with a different sensor. And the next big change was a slightly larger 3,400 mAh capacity battery.
China's e-commerce site Alibaba has been making heavy investments in augmented and mixed reality startups. In February of this year, they led a $793 million round of Series C financing of Magic Leap. And now they've just invested in Israeli-based InfinityAR, which acquired $18 million in its Series C financing.
With the death of Google's Nexus line, the market for phones with top-notch specs at midrange prices is now wide open. OnePlus is apparently ready to fill this void, as they've just announced the OnePlus 3T, an iterative update to their OnePlus 3 flagship only five months after initial release.
Everyone's been raving about the Pixel's top-notch camera, and the acclaim is well-deserved. The main difference between Google's new camera software on their Pixel phones and the older software on their Nexus devices is that the Pixel has almost no perceptible lag between tapping the shutter button and the image being captured—even with HDR+ mode enabled.
Facebook released a new app in November 2016 that aimed to compete directly with Snapchat, but it was only officially available in Brazil—and still is. The app, called "Flash," is so much like Snapchat that it's not even the slightest bit of a stretch to call it a clone.
It seems that fans of the Android open-source operating system are a bit peeved by some of the choices Google has made regarding the new #MadeByGoogle Pixel phones. And with good reason. The new phones are expensive, the Nexus line is dead, and some Redditors are speculating on whether or not the Pixel bootloaders may not be unlockable at all.
When Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19.3 billion back in 2014, we all knew this was coming—it just took longer than we thought. But starting today, the data mining became official, and now, information from your favorite messaging app is no longer out of reach for the world's biggest social media site.
We've seen how mixed and augmented reality can offer better shopping experiences for consumers, and even how Magic Leap wants to make advertising a non-intrusive experience. So it's no surprise that Magic Leap seems to have partnered up with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba—one of their largest investors—to create an augmented reality shopping app.
Most virtual and mixed reality headsets offer unnatural controls, making you use awkward movements or physical devices to control the holographic elements in your direct view. This doesn't make a lot of sense because using your hands is more natural, so Manus developed a set of gloves that solves that problem entirely.
We started with a static page and evolved to dynamic screens, and making that 2D surface interactive was a relatively straightforward transition in design. But when you can put holographic objects literally anywhere in the room, the way you design apps, games, and experiences requires a different mode of thought entirely.
It just got a whole lot easier to decide whether or not saving $50 on Amazon's new ad- and bloatware-subsidized smartphones is worth the headache of having to see an advertisement on the lock screen every time you wake the device.
One of the best new features in iOS 10 is the ability to delete all of those stock bloatware apps that you never use. Instead of hiding them in a folder somewhere to get them out of your way, you can finally remove them—or at least, that's what we wanted to believe.
We've experienced the HoloLens, learned a lot about the Meta 2, but almost nobody knows exactly what to expect out of Magic Leap's mixed reality headset. Thanks to a patent dug up by Quartz (which we saw first on Tech Insider), we now might have a better idea.
When Hey Siri was first introduced in iOS 8, it was a pretty lackluster feature since you had to be plugged into a power source in order to even use it. Since then, newer devices (iPhone 6s, 6s Plus, SE, 9.7-inch iPad Pro) don't need to plug in to have always-on Siri, which makes the feature actually worthwhile—when it works.
Microsoft's enjoyed being the only mixed reality headset on the block for a little while, but the Meta 2 intends to join the party very soon. According to UploadVR, in a couple of weeks they'll begin shipping alpha versions of their headset with improved hand tracking.
Augmented reality has a variety of applications, but lately the face has been a major point of concentration for many companies. We're all pretty familiar with face swapping by now, but ModiFace employs similar technologies for more practical purposes.
The Oculus Rift's virtual experiences become a little less immersive when you're barely moving in a chair with a headset on, playing on a gamepad—but you don't have to accept that reality anymore.
Augmented reality (AR) generally exists through the lens of our smartphones as information layered on top of what the camera sees, but it doesn't have to. Developer Jon Cheng worked with an indoor climbing facility in Somerville, Massachussetts, called Brooklyn Boulders, to turn rock climbing into a real-world video game where participants compete in a time trial to hit virtual markers on the wall.
Samsung's next Galaxy Note smartphone is expected to contain some nifty new additions that the company hopes will give it the long desired edge it has been seeking over Apple. One of those features that might make the difference? An iris scanner, which could make it the first major smartphone on the market to have that technology included.
