News: T-Mobile & ZTE Add New Entries in the Budget Phone Race
The battle of the budget phone is well and truly underway, as both T-Mobile and ZTE have launched affordable new devices simultaneously.
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News: Nissan Joins Mobileye's Real-Time Map System for Self-Driving Cars
One thing you don't see often in the driverless industry are partnerships. When automakers are in the news together, it usually means drama. However, an important partnership between Nissan and Mobileye was announced today. One that has the potential to make driverless cars on the road better and safer.
News: Here's How Apple Is Training Their Self-Driving Car Engineers
Apple staff will be put through their paces now that the company's "Automated System" for driverless cars is in motion.
News: Verizon's Galaxy S8 Is Missing a Key Bixby Feature
The Galaxy S8's Bixby Vision feature isn't working up to its full potential for Verizon customers, according to a recent CNET report.
How To: Enable the Qualcomm DAC on Your Snapdragon-Powered Phone for Superior Audio
Every phone powered by a Qualcomm processor has a built-in WCD9xx Audio DAC, but it's rarely configured to be used to its full potential by OEMs. This might not seem like a problem to some people, but if you're a music lover, or you simply enjoy high-quality sound, it's an issue you'll definitely want to fix.
News: Andre Iguodala Leaks Magic Leap Details—A Possible 'Siri' Bouncing in Your Hand
NBA star Andre Iguodala, of the Golden State Warriors, got to try out a Magic Leap demo in Florida and started dishing out some pretty revealing details about the upcoming mixed reality headset to CNET's Brian Tong.
News: A 22-Year-Old May Be About to Disrupt the Entire LiDAR Industry
Uber has been in the hot seat for awhile now, for many reasons, especially for being sued by Waymo over stolen LiDAR designs. But now, perhaps the attention will be taken off both Uber and Waymo as a new contender enters the LiDAR arena; A small, independent company called Luminar has finally let the world in on what it has been cooking up.
News: Excited About the Embedded Touch ID in the iPhone 8? Think Again
The rumor mill surrounding the iPhone 8 is churning this week, and not necessarily in a good way. Yesterday, we learned Apple may be leaving the 3D camera out of the next big iPhone to keep the phone on schedule. Today, rumors allege the 10th-anniversary edition of Apple's smartphone may not ship with Touch ID embedded under its display.
News: Functional Guidelines for Manufacturers Will Shape the Future of AR Technology
The first augmented reality hardware and software functional requirements guidelines have been released today by UI LABS and the Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance (AREA).
News: Apple Developing New iPhone Graphics Chip
Apple is in the process of developing its own graphics processors for future iPhones, according to recent reports.
News: Google's Pixel 3 Stirs Up Competition Between Phone Makers HTC, LG, TCL & Coolpad
Google's Pixel smartphone is striking up some heated competition between phone makers HTC, LG, TCL, and Coolpad, as the Pixel 3 gets ready to release in 2018. Yep, you heard that right—not the Pixel, not the Pixel 2, but the Pixel 3—which shows that Google is really committed to the future of its new flagship line.
News: Augmented Reality Can Make Good-for-You Food Look More Attractive, Making It Easier to Eat Well
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.
News: Shopping for a New Couch? Amazon Wants You to See It in Your Home (While You're Still in the Store)
Amazon has been toying with the idea of opening physical retail stores for some time now, even opening old-fashioned bookstores in select locations and teasing cashier-less convenience stores. But the online retailer has some new ideas in the works, including implementing virtual and augmented reality into retail home stores.
News: T-Mobile Helps You Dodge All Those Annoying Phone Scams with New 'Scam Likely' Warnings
T-Mobile just unveiled two new services—Scam ID and Scam Block—which specifically target those pestering robo-calls that reach out to 2.4 million Americans every month.
News: 360world's Windows Mixed Reality Tools Will Help Air Traffic Controllers See in New Ways
360world, a Hungary-based tech company involved in motion control and augmented reality, released information today about their latest products, the CLAIRITY HoloTower and CLAIRITY SmartBinocular. These tools are designed to bring augmented reality into the hands of air traffic controllers, via Windows Mixed Reality, to greatly improve their workflow over tools already in use.
News: Vodafone Set to Become India's Biggest Mobile Contender
Vodafone India has merged with telecom company Idea Cellular to become India's largest mobile player this week.
News: From Dogs to Clothes, New Roadie App Helps You Move Your Stuff
A new app called Roadie now makes life a little easier by connecting users to people who can transport their stuff. The app allows users to transport anything from dogs to getting rid of your ex's things. Furthermore, anyone can register as a sender, or become a driver to make an extra buck. The app is very easy to use: simply download (the app is available on both iOS and Android) and register using an email address or with Facebook. Using the profile you've created, users then select whethe...
News: The Washington Post to Start Using Augmented Reality to Tell Better Stories
The Washington Post believes augmented reality adds an extra layer to stories, and they're doubling down on that belief by adding in new AR features into their already popular "rainbow" news (iOS and Android) and Classic (iOS and Android) news apps.
News: Interactive Surface Developer Lampix AR/VR Winner of SXSW Accelerator Event
Judges at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Accelerator Pitch Event named Lampix the winner in the Augmented and Virtual Reality category, conference organizers announced today. The ninth annual competition, which took place over the weekend in Austin, Texas, pitted 50 startup finalists against each other in 10 technology categories.
News: Microsoft Introduced Acer's New Windows Mixed Reality Development Edition Headset
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.
News: LineageOS Adding New Advanced Battery Saver Menu with Performance Profiles
LineageOS, the successor to the wildly popular CyanogenMod custom ROM, is adding an interesting new feature that could potentially save lots of juice when your battery is running low. When enabling "Extreme power saver" mode, which can be set to kick in automatically at 15%, you'll soon have the option of changing your kernel's performance profile as well.
News: Free & Open-Source JavaScript Solution for Augmented Reality Comes to Life on Mobile
AR.js is a new JavaScript solution that offers highly efficient augmented reality features to mobile developers. With HoloJS released back in December, there is a potential that the free AR.js, developed by Jerome Etienne, one of Next Reality's 50 people to watch in augmented and mixed reality, could work with the Microsoft HoloLens as well.
News: Samsung's 'Monitorless' Remote Desktop Smartglasses Blur the Line Between Virtual & Augmented Reality
There are already a few ways to use your home computer on the go, but none of them feel very natural when you're out and about, and are clunky options at best. Samsung wants to change that with Monitorless, their upcoming augmented reality smartglasses, which offer remote desktop viewing capabilities as well as the ability to switch between augmented and virtual reality modes using electrochromic glass.
News: Doctors Use 3D Holograms on the HoloLens to Aid in Collarbone Repair During Surgery
Late last year, two surgeons from the Instituto de Ortopedia e Traumatologia de Jaraguá do Sul in Brazil started using a combination of 3D printing and the Microsoft HoloLens to help plan spinal surgeries. And now, with the rest of their team, they've successfully performed a surgical procedure on their first international patient using their 3D impression planning and augmented reality process.
Video: Space & Sound Used to Help Visually Impaired Navigate with the HoloLens
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.
News: Experiments in Stock Market 3D Data Visualization on the HoloLens
HoloLens developer Michael Peters of In-Vizible has released quite a few videos since receiving his HoloLens last year. Many of his experiments are odd and funny, but some include serious potential approaches to data visualization. In the videos embedded below, you'll specifically see stock market information beautifully rendered in different ways to help understand the data.
News: Boston Dynamics' Latest Nightmare Robot 'Handle' Is Humanoid with Wheels for Feet
Today, at Abundance 360, an exclusive event for tech entrepreneurs in Beverly Hills, California, Boston Dynamics unveiled a video of "Handle," a humanoid-like robot with wheels instead of feet.
News: Peavey & Behringer Showed Off HoloLens at Winter NAMM Music Covention
A few days ago, there were flying piranha, snakes, and dragons roaming around freely at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, but they weren't real or even hallucinations—they were holograms brought to life with the Microsoft HoloLens.
News: Samsung Patent Shows Move Toward Hybrid Augmented, Mixed, & Virtual Reality Device
Last month, Dr. Sung-Hoon Hong, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, announced at the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego that Samsung would be moving into the augmented reality market. According to a recently published patent application, that move has begun.
News: Meta 2 Developers Kit to Feature PMD's Depth-Sensing Technology
Meta's long-awaited Meta 2 development kit finally began shipping in late-December last year, after having been delayed about six months. While very few have received a dev kit at this point, some more information about the headset has just been announced; Depth-sensing technology from pmdtechnologies is included in the dev kit headset.
Have You Seen This?: Secrets of Ancient Egypt Shows the Potential of HoloLens Tourism
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.
News: HoloSuit Proof of Concept Uses Full Body Motion to Control the HoloLens
Here at NextReality, we talk a lot about the many different ways of controlling holograms in the HoloLens and other augmented and mixed reality devices; New and creative ways are coming more and more every day. Most recently is something called the HoloSuit. In the 25-second clip below, you can see a woman moving the arm of a jacket which in turn moves a 3D model of Darth Vader on the screen. It's a simple idea with big potential.
News: Unity Releases EditorVR Experimental Build Days After Unity 5.6 Beta
Unity released the Beta 5.6 on December 13 with a bunch of new upgrades in the works, including support for Vulkan, better instancing options, and more improvements to particles—to name just a few that are potentially relevant to the mixed reality community. And today, December 15, Unity has just released the EditorVR that we reported on a few weeks ago as a part of their "Experimental" builds.
News: Artist Turns a Penny into $207 by Morphing Lincoln into Homer Simpson
Pennies may only be worth $0.01, but if you want a coin with everyone's favorite donut-eating dad on it, you're going to need to shell out a little bit more.
News: Microsoft Research Shows Off Mobile Holoportation
In recent years, wave after wave of technological advancement has led us down roads that are beginning to look more and more like science fiction stories. In their efforts to bring us from science fiction to science fact, Microsoft Research showed us a new communication medium called Holoportation earlier this year—and now they have found a way to make this highly complex holographic system far more mobile.
News: Augmented Reality Helps Dutch Police Out on Crime Scenes
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.
News: One Magic Leap Mystery Solved—Former Senior Dev Paul Reynolds Confirms Unity & Unreal
After many months of endless speculation over the mysterious augmented reality platform Magic Leap, software engineers worldwide have been waiting for any news of what development environment this amazing technology might use. Thanks to Paul Reynolds, the former Magic Leap Senior Director of SDKs and Apps, we no longer have to guess. Just like existing mixed, augmented, and virtual reality platforms, developers will be able to use their experience with Unity and the UNREAL engine.
News: Google Pixel's Pros & Cons
Whatever you think of Google's new Pixel phones, the one thing we know for sure is that these are the most polarizing devices in recent memory. On the one hand, we've seen reviews in which longtime Android users say they'll be walking away from the OS all together thanks to Pixel. On the other hand, you've got the iPhone-obsessed David Pierce over at WIRED saying he'll be switching immediately.
News: This Dev's Awesome Kinect + HoloLens Hack Lets Him Control a Hologram's Entire Virtual Body
It's no surprise that the Microsoft Kinect can provide far better motion tracking than the HoloLens currently can on its own, but at least one developer didn't want to wait for the company's own eventual implementation. Kyle G, founder and CEO of Wavelength Studios, projected his movements using a Kinect into a holographic zombie.
News: Enflux's Smart Clothing Lets the VR User Control Their Avatar Just by Moving
While Leap Motion and Microsoft are looking to capture natural human motion with cameras, Enflux figured out how to do it with a shirt and pants that feel completely natural.