The holidays are here, which means a slew of new smartphones are set to be gifted to loved ones in the spirit of giving. Of course, a great case to compliment and protect that precious flagship is a must, regardless of whether it's a OnePlus 6T, iPhone XS, or Galaxy Note 9. And while quality cases usually come with a hefty price tag, there are plenty of Black Friday deals to keep you from going broke.
This week, Next Reality published profiles on the leaders in augmented reality hardware industry, with Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz topping the list. So, it should be no surprise that two app makers want to align themselves with Magic Leap's flagship product.
It is almost indisputable that smartglasses and head-worn displays are the future of augmented reality. However, at this precise moment, they are still a very niche market.
The march towards mainstream adoption of eSIM technology got a massive boost with the arrival of the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR. We're now one step closer to ditching physical SIM cards altogether. If you're on the fence about this new technology, you may be surprised by the benefits it brings to the table.
As a longtime Android user, one of the changes I was most excited about with Android Pie was the fact that the volume rocker finally controls media volume by default. However, the new way isn't ideal for everyone, but thankfully, there's an app that can change it back.
While it's very easy to enable "Low Power Mode" on your iPhone, since Apple will prompt you to enable it once your battery dips below a certain percentage, it's not as obvious as to how to disable it. If you start charging your iPhone, it won't automatically disable it right away, but there are a few ways you can manually disengage it to get your iPhone running at top speeds again.
When it comes to traveling from one location to another with the aide of your iPhone, ensuring your navigation app works as it should keeps you one step ahead of potential hassles. One feature often overlooked is audio settings, and while having no voice prompts is easy enough to ignore while walking or commuting, having no sound to guide you while driving can spell disaster.
Bookmarks and favorites are handy options for saving interesting websites you come across while surfing the web on Android but are far from ideal when it comes to instant access. Thankfully, Google Chrome gives you the added ability to save webpages and progressive web apps directly to your home screen for added convenience.
The Galaxy S9 and S9+ have a new camera feature that Samsung is calling "Dual Aperture." On the surface, that may sound like your typical techno-jargon, but it actually has some significant implications for the future of smartphone photography.
Google's new AI-powered camera, Google Clips, seems to be targeted at parents of young children in its current form, but the idea itself has unique potential. Just set it up somewhere, then you'll never miss a moment trying to capture the moment — you'll have a robot photographer taking care of that stuff for you.
For the unaware, RED is a company that specializes in high-end cameras and other recording devices. RED's cameras are used to shoot some of Hollywood's biggest films and TV shows. Their modular designs make them ideal for the user who does a lot of mixing and matching — and has a wallet to back their work up (their WEAPON 8K VV starts at $79,500).
With their first attempt at the mobile market, Razer introduced a device that looks at the smartphone differently. Instead of focusing on minimal bezels or an amazing camera, Razer decided to make a phone for gamers. So how could Razer target the growing mobile gaming market, which is projected to generate $40.6 billion in global revenue in 2017? It starts with the IGZO LCD Display.
When it comes to paying with Apple Pay, showing your rewards number or coupon at a store, or paying for your coffee with a digital gift card, Apple Wallet is as convenient as it gets. But one issue you'll probably experience at least once on your iPhone is a persistent notification on your lock screen to view or use one of your passes — even if you're not somewhere you can actually use it.
Two-factor authentication has been around since iOS 10. It's a handy option that adds an extra layer of security to your iPhone and makes its almost impenetrable security even stronger. This feature has remained intact in iOS 11 and iOS 12, and thanks to the straightforward nature of iOS, is relatively easy to enable.
Thanks to ever more powerful smartphones — the iPhone X with its advanced A11 processor and the Galaxy Note 8 powered by Snapdragon's 835 come to mind — the mobile industry is fast closing in on consoles and PCs with regards to gaming. Game developers have been aware of this fact, and have ported many games once dedicated to computers onto our handheld devices.
While ARKit and ARCore are poised to bring AR experiences to millions of mobile devices, one company is poised to anchor those experiences anywhere in the world with just a set of geographic coordinates.
The large, dome-shaped LiDARs that have become a fixture on driverless car prototypes are expensive and notably ugly. And yet, these unsightly devices should remain planted on driverless cars, even when they become available in commercial fleet services across the country in a couple of years.
If you have a large media library, you should definitely have the Plex server installed on your computer. If you do, you can just install Plex for Android or iPhone, then you'll have access to all of your music, movies, and TV shows anywhere.
Foodborne infections often occur through the contamination of equipment, food-prep tools, and unsanitary surfaces. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reminds us that breast pump parts are part of the food-delivery chain — and they can become contaminated too.
Brace yourselves, because Siri has a trick up its sleeve that iPhone users have wanted for some time. Yep, that's right, I'm talking about the ability to use Siri without having to talk out loud for the whole world to hear. It's great for privacy, Siri-ing on the down-low when you're not supposed to, or ... you know ... if you have a speech disorder.
The de Blasio Administration of New York City has announced that the NYU Tandon School of Engineering will be hosting the country's first publicly funded VR/AR facility.
Legionnaires' disease is named after 1976 outbreak in Philadelphia that sickened 221 people and killed 34. More often striking adults over the age of 50, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported two cases where newborns contracted the often fatal disease — at their moment of birth.
We're all looking to meet someone, and in this day and age the easiest way to do that is through one of the various dating apps out there. But we can all admit it can get disheartening swiping through all of those people for the frustration of someone not answering your messages after matching. The fact is, we could be missing out on great people just because they don't have time in their busy lives to answer their dating apps every day. Not to mention the fact that we as a society are becomi...
I haven't bought into Apple Pay just yet, but I do love the idea of having quick access to passes like loyalty programs, boarding passes, and my Starbucks card. However, for some users, it's impossible to open these passes stored in Apple Wallet on the iPhone's lock screen. While it's not totally obvious, or even ideal, there is a way to get those Wallet passes back on your lock screen in iOS 9 or iOS 10.
Solid-state LiDAR is cheap, robust, and compact in size — this is why the device is seen as the LiDAR of choice for future high-volume production of level 3 and level 4 cars.
Even though the Ebola virus was discovered as recently as 1976, over 30,000 people have been infected since, and half have died a horrible death. Since there's no way to cure the infection, the world desperately needs a way to prevent it — and the five similar viruses in its family, the ebolaviruses.
If you're a developer in the augmented and mixed reality space, there's a high probability that you're intimately familiar with the 3D application and game engine Unity. In May, at VisionSummit 2017, Microsoft announced that 91% of all HoloLens applications have been made with the software. But there's a section of Unity that you may not be familiar with, which has become very important to augmented, mixed, and virtual reality (known collectively as XR, for "extended reality") — Unity Labs.
Water makes up about 60% of your body weight. Whether you like it plain, flavored, bubbly, or in beverages or food, we all need water daily to avoid dehydration and stay healthy. For communities in need of clean drinking water, new research using bacteria may offer a simplified, lower-cost method for boosting potable water supplies.
When just floating peacefully in the water with their brood mates, the Culex mosquito larvae in the image above does not look very frightening. But in their adult form, they are the prime vector for spreading West Nile virus — a sometimes mild, sometimes fatal disease.
Every Tuesday, Next Reality will give readers a rundown of the augmented and mixed reality news briefs from the preceding week that we didn't cover already. This way, you'll never miss anything of importance in the Next Reality landscape, and will always know what's going on with new augmented and mixed reality tech and applications.
Before many games make it to the US-based iOS App Store, they get "soft launched" in a smaller country to get real-world testing for bugs. It's a pilot program, so to speak, as countries like Vietnam or the Philippines have far fewer iPhone users than the US, thus offer a more controlled environment for developers to get feedback and zero-in on issues that may occur in a game's early development phases.
For regions that experienced a boom in mouse populations last year, scientists say 2017 could see a surge in cases of Lyme disease.
Bitcoin, the decentralized cryptocurrency notorious for its status as the currency of the dark web, seems to be shedding its shady past and is now enjoying soaring highs not seen since 2014. The highly volatile online commodity reached parity with an ounce of gold back in March amid speculation of a pending ETF approval from the Federal Trade Commission. Since then, Bitcoin has doubled in value and analysts predict a bitcoin could reach $100,000 in value in 10 years.
A virtual design and construction services firm has built an augmented reality application that uses the Microsoft HoloLens to improve the efficiency of quality control on construction sites.
We may not fully appreciate all the important roles wheat plays in our lives until it's gone—or at least, when it's in very short supply. What would a world be like without bread, cakes, cereal, pasta, or wheat beer? If the dire warnings about an impending stem rust fungus come to pass, we may know all too soon.
We live in a computer world full of file formats. Whether we are talking about images, videos, or text documents, there are dozens of file types for each, and there are new ones added every year to applications. Keeping in mind that many of these formats were created before the internet was widely available (at least, in infant form), the primary reason for this glut of often complex choices is competition.
Last week it was announced that Waymo, the former Google Self-Driving Car project, had graduated from Alphabet's X innovation center. This graduation had been in the cards for many months with senior members of the project team and X hinting that it would be soon.
True innovation tends to come from the places we least expect as developers. The Microsoft HoloLens is still a very new product, and some of the other headsets are still just ideas, so the rules for mixed reality are not set in stone. That means all the real problems to be solved are yet to come.
Mobile gaming still isn't on par with video game consoles or PCs, but we've come a long way from Snake. Modern games running on the latest smartphones boast downright impressive graphics—even more so when you consider how compact the system has to be in order to fit in people's pockets.
We're wild for whipped cream in our coffee, atop our brownies, and in-between wafer cookies, so we always have some in our fridge. To be specific, we always have homemade whipped cream in our fridge, because the taste is just so much better than the pre-made stuff.