There are two types of bad USBs out there. One lets you trick the computer into thinking it's a keyboard or other USB device, and the other goes straight over malicious into computer killing territory.
It's impossible to predict the future, but it's fun to try. Adapted from Daniel H. Wilson's short story of the same name, filmmaker Giacomo Cimini's short film "The Nostalgist" shows a futuristic world where mixed reality serves as an escape from a less-desirable physical world.
Want proof that user experiences matter? Look no further than the HTC Vive and Omnipudding's particle generator, GPU Cubes VR, which lets you interact with thousands of colorful, cubic particles in a black void. If this was a simulator for your computer only, controlled with a mouse or keyboard, you'd be bored in seconds—but it's just simple, instant fun on the Vive.
We've heard a bit about Google Daydream—the new smartphone-based virtual reality platform that is supposed to provide a markedly better experience than Cardboard—but don't really know what it'll look like. Engadget claims we could find out in just a couple of weeks, since Android Nougat is already out, a necessary component of Daydream.
Data visualization has many applications in virtual and mixed reality, since a third dimension literally adds important depth to the represented information. A new app called HoloFlight is a good example of this, combining flight-tracking data and the Microsoft HoloLens to surround you with a look at every plane in the sky.
We've seen plenty of good, bad, and weird things that have come out of the worldwide augmented reality game Pokémon GO, including murder and location-based bans, but nothing on a large scale. That was, of course, until Iran decided to ban the game country-wide.
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.
If you've ever made graphs and charts, you know it can be a struggle to represent a large amount of data. It's something that just doesn't work very well on a flat surface. In virtual and mixed reality, however, the data can exist all around you.
If you want to quickly understand EtherWars, imagine a game like StarCraft where you build out your base on your living room floor instead of on a computer screen. Before we had computer games to help us imagine what space wars might feel like, we played with toy ships and used our imaginations. EtherWars combines those two elements by replacing toys with holograms that actually react to your choices.
What happens if you unknowingly connect a malicious USB drive and it starts infecting your entire office network? Instead of having a panic attack and working all night to find a fix, you can just put on a mixed reality headset like Microsoft's HoloLens and point.
Would you like to know what your next house is going to look like? With the HoloLens, you can just plop a hologram down in an open outdoor area and find out.
Opioids, or narcotic painkillers, serve as our primary method for alleviating physical distress. They also happen to be a leading cause of death due to their addictive nature. AppliedVR hopes to introduce a safer alternative: virtual reality gaming. They utilize the existing Samsung Gear VR for the hardware, but provides specialized software that offers up a distracting experience that fosters greater pain ignorance.
Virtual and mixed reality experiences feel immersive because they take over your senses in various ways, but they still lack tactile feedback. Haptic gloves can change that, and you can make a pair yourself.
While the early stages of any new technology always seems amazing because of the utilitarian, almost altruistic software concepts it inspires, mixed and augmented reality will still see its fair share of corporate apps. That might be a good thing, however, as Volvo's plan goes past general information and advertising to make a truly helpful tool for prospective car buyers.
Don't Miss: The Difference Between Virtual, Augmented, & Mixed Reality
If not the future of computing in general, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality certainly will change the world of gaming. If you want to try your hand at shaping this evolved medium, the Unite Europe conference posted a talk that explains the first things you need to learn to develop holographic games.
The latest beta of the popular open-source media player VLC just hit the Windows Store, which means it not only runs on Windows 10 and Xbox One, but the HoloLens as well.
A "reliable source" divulged specs of Google's new Nexus phones made by HTC, the Sailfish and Marlin, to Android Police, who used the information to create what they believe is an accurate render of the new phones.
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.
The human body is amazingly complex, and seeing inside one poses a variety of challenges whether you're dealing with an actual human or some kind of facsimile. Mixed reality offers the ability to get the best of both worlds by creating a holographic teaching tool for human anatomy.
The Microsoft HoloLens has a good amount of content available, but it's fairly limited in terms of what you can customize. You can access a built-in library of holograms, but if you want to create your own you have to do that with code.
The mysterious Magic Leap just partnered up with Lucasfilm's ILM xLAB to bring Star Wars to their mixed reality headsets. Based on the video demo making its way around the internet, it looks pretty impressive.
The headsets of tomorrow offer some amazing possibilities in both gaming and work, but what we've seen so far only begins to scratch the surface. The US Navy saw the potential to use augmented reality in a helmet to provide divers with an incredible amount of information we have so far only seen in Hollywood movies.
When shopping for a new smartphone, you'll encounter comparisons and spec sheets that are filled to the brim with values like mAh, GB, and GHz. To the average consumer, however, these values are meaningless, so we end up looking at which device has the specs with the highest actual numbers.
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, a new smartphone manufacturer named Nextbit emerged, then released its first flagship device—the Nextbit Robin. The headlining feature of this colorful gadget is its cloud-based app storage, but the phone itself comes with a very polished and sophisticated suite of software.
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.
The world's first cloud-oriented smartphone, Nextbit Robin, is now available to the masses via Amazon with free one-day shipping for Prime members.
It's been known for a while that Google was opening up their Android N preview to OEMs, but we didn't think any manufacturers would actually take advantage. Well, we were wrong. Sony had just announced that Xperia Z3 owners will be able to install and run the N preview build. This is the first time a major manufacturer has offered Android previews on their phones. The preview build is only available for Xperia Z3's international models (D6603 and D6653), so those of you with T-Mobile's US var...
If you tend to go over your data allotment each month, or are constantly afraid you will, Verizon Wireless is giving you chance to relax a little bit with up to 2 GB free data for two months.
Speeding tickets suck, and I don't know a single person that can tell me otherwise. But the reality is, most of us will break the speed limit for one reason for another, regardless of the pricey risk.
With the DOJ attempting to rip Apple a new one and an Apple attorney firing back, the President offered his opinion on the recent encryption debacle between the FBI and Apple at SXSW, amidst some talk about the direction of today's tech industry.
For well over a year, Spotify's most requested feature was to add Chromecast support. While they left the request unanswered, it seemed that Spotify just didn't want anything to do with the $35 streaming stick.
Since it was released last fall, Super Mario Maker has offered us a glimpse into the minds of some of the most evil people on the planet. The game, for Nintendo Wii U, lets players create their own Super Mario levels using a deep list of objects, enemies, and green pipes, which can then be uploaded for anyone to play.
While iPhone sales are expected to dip for the first year ever, Apple is reportedly planning to release a souped-up, 4-inch iPhone 5 in hopes of boosting sales for users who prefer a smaller handset.
Here on nullbyte we always hear mention of hacking being used to shut down power grids or attacking SCADA and other such cyber warlord activities, but ive never seen a TDos post come up.
If you don't have the time or patience to build a complete Ant-Man suit from scratch, there's another way to make a Ant-Man costume for Halloween. If you're more skilled with brushes and makeup rather than drills and cardboard, this is the Halloween DIY for you—especially if you're a fan of the Marvel universe.
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From laptops to tablets, technology is taking over classrooms. Elementary schools offer kids tablets, and college students are bringing laptops into lecture halls, leaving their notebooks behind. Today, many students prefer putting their fingers to a keyboard rather than pen to paper, but are these helpful devices truly beneficial?
In an attempt to remain a mobile-exclusive app, Instagram doesn't let users upload photos or videos from their computer. On the Instagram web app, you can pretty much only like and comment on items in your feed, but what about all of those photos on your computer that scream #tbt?
Dolby may have made a lot of Android users angry by only offering their Atmos surround sound equalizer to Lenovo and Amazon, but we all know that exclusivity is only temporary in the Android world. Thanks to worstenbrood, we now have a ported version that can be installed on any device running Android 4.3 and above.
