Thousands of emoji are available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and you can use these in many of the apps you have installed on your Apple devices. But there's one emoji you'll likely never see on any of Apple's official emoji keyboards, and its absence may surprise you at first, considering it's embedded in virtually every Apple product. That emoji is, of course, the Apple logo icon.
The march to the mainstreaming of augmented reality can sometimes seem slow, but this week things picked up in earnest.
Over the past week, practically every major tech company working on augmented reality has held their quarterly earnings calls with investors, and each addressed or at least mentioned the role of AR during their prepared remarks. However, Facebook's earnings call had some of the spicier commentary on the technology.
It's already been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions in the augmented reality industry, with WaveOptics and Ubiquity6 among the notable companies acquired. Two of the more active M&A players, Snap and Epic Games, continued their respective buying sprees this week with major deals supporting their AR strategies.
A pair of properties from the soon-to-merge Warner Media and Discovery companies chose different platforms for their augmented reality marketing, with Warner film Space Jam: A New Legacy opting to go with Facebook and Discovery Channel publishing an AR experience through Snapchat.
In these times of social distancing, video calling is becoming the technological substitute for face-to-face connections. For those who carry an iPhone, the art of video calling defaults to FaceTime, the native app on iOS that is exclusive to Apple devices. But what do you do if you or the other party is on Android?
It's (virtual) developer conference season, and this week was Facebook's turn with F8 Refresh. Like Google and Snap, Facebook had some new AR capabilities to show off.
Apple's iCloud is a fantastic way to ensure that all of your photos, messages, notes, and other important data are backed up and appear on all of your connected devices. However, you may have information like reminders attached to accounts other than iCloud, which won't appear when signing into iCloud on a new device. Here's how to get the full picture of where your reminders are stored.
There's already some fierce competition between Snap and Facebook in the AR space, but it's about to heat up even more, with Snap snatching up a 3D mapping startup that could add some new AR capabilities to its arsenal.
The Metaverse, or AR cloud, has been a sci-fi dream for decades, but only recently have companies begun to actually develop the technology to build it. With its latest funding round, Epic Games is suddenly a front-runner in this pursuit.
Microsoft believes its Mesh platform can help developers build immersive AR apps more easily. We spoke with a member of the Microsoft team to learn more about the platform.
When Microsoft unveiled Mesh a couple of weeks ago, the move revealed a major part of Microsoft's next steps toward dominating the augmented reality space, particularly with regard to enterprise customers.
Snapchat may trail Facebook and Instagram in terms of daily active users, but a new partnership with Samsung may get those innovative AR Lenses onto the mobile devices of a lot more users.
The team over at Spatial isn't done innovating its way through augmented reality in 2020. Just days after adding a mobile option to its groundbreaking Spatial virtual collaboration product, the company is releasing Tele, a new app geared toward more casual, AR-powered video chats.
Apple just released iOS 14.1 for iPhone today, Tuesday, Oct. 20. This update first hit iPhones one week ago, but not for long — Apple pulled the release almost immediately, later seeding it to iOS developers only as a GM (golden master) release.
It's pretty much a given at this point that Facebook has a lot of data on us. While you might be conscious of the data you share with Facebook when you post, upload photos, or chat with friends on Messenger, you might not be thinking about all the data it receives from websites and apps you use outside the social media giant. Now, you can actually do something about it.
The top five apps of the 2010s were all social media apps of some kind, and the fact that's not surprising to you says a lot. We may use them for other reasons here and there, but our phones are social media machines at their cores. The thing is, some make better machines than others.
Who here binges TV on a regular basis? I know I do. Never before have we had so many options for watching our favorite shows, especially when you consider how easy it is to stream from anywhere on a mobile device. But sometimes, all that choice gets a little overwhelming. What services are really worth the money? Where should you be investing your Friday-night binges?
Mobile gaming has exploded in recent years, with experts predicting 2.4 billion global mobile players by the end of 2019. It already accounts for 47% of the worldwide gaming market, besting console and PC. No wonder we've seen the rise of gaming smartphones, a class of phones that specialize in mobile gaming.
When it comes to platform games on mobile, endless runners are some of the hardest to play since they can go on seemingly forever. There's always room for improvement since your goal is to beat your previous score (or someone else's high score). But which endless running games are worth your time?
Google has recently been pushing to replace the decades-old messaging technology we've been stuck with. SMS was never meant to handle the high-quality multimedia content we consume with our smartphones today, so in comes RCS, which is a universal platform that aims to change our messaging game forever.
Your childhood "social networking" may have been to go outdoors to the neighbor's — and outdoors is a great place for kids to be. But these days, the terms educational, digital media, entertainment, and toddlers don't have to be mutually exclusive. Like most things in life, it's about balance, and these apps can aid your child with social-emotional development when not playing with friends.
There are nearly 100,000 unique onion service addresses online with over two million people using Tor every single day. Join me as I explore a small fraction of what the Tor network has to offer.
Over the years, the internet has become a dangerous place. As its popularity has increased, it has attracted more hackers looking to make a quick buck. However, as our dependency on the web grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to sever all ties. This means we have to protect one of our weakest points, the password.
If you're one who enjoys a good DIY project, or if you're just tired of paying exorbitant labor fees to have your vehicle serviced every 5,000 miles, changing your own oil can be a rewarding endeavor. Even though cars and trucks are becoming increasingly over-engineered these days, manufacturers generally see to it that the basic maintenance items can still be taken care of in your driveway with a few common tools.
I obviously do a lot of Steampunk projects, but there are a ton of things out there that I haven't tried yet. So, in an effort to broaden my horizons, I recently taught myself how to use Arduinos, which I plan to incorporate into some of my future Steampunk builds.
Sailing is a popular pastime in the coastal areas around the world. It is a skillful hobby where a person controls the motion of a sailboat in a race, on a cruise, or on a day sailing course. Maneuvering the sailboat can be tricky and movement is controlled by arranging sails to catch the force of the wind and using that to guide the boat. Basic sail techniques include steering and turning, running, reaching, sailing upwind, reducing sail, sail trimming, hull trimming, and heeling. Familiariz...
If you're a normal, non-corporate video conferencing user, you may not have heard of BlueJeans, but in the corporate world, the software has long been a major staple when it comes to remote meetings.
As NASA nears the launch of another mission to the Moon in 2024, and a subsequent mission to Mars in the 2030s, augmented reality is increasingly being woven into the normal space operations to test various capabilities.
As we move toward the end of the year, the wheels of the augmented reality space continue to shift in major ways.
If the importance of augmented reality and VR hardware to Facebook's future wasn't already clear enough, a shake-up in the executive ranks at the company has made it as clear as smartglasses lenses.
It's about that time again: Facebook has announced the dates for its annual Facebook Connect (formerly known as Oculus Connect until last year).
Amid a troubling resurgence in coronavirus cases, led by the new Delta variant, augmented reality is once again moving back into the spotlight as a solution, especially now that the move to return to offices has been stalled.
Some tried to call it a brief cryptocurrency-fueled fad, but it looks like NFTs are here to stay. Now, one of the biggest sneaker companies on the planet, Japan's Asics, is getting into the game with its own set of NFTs, and there's a virtual object component included.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Google has packed new functionality into Google Meet to compete with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other video conferencing platforms.
The startup JigSpace, which was among the first apps to support ARKit and LiDAR for iPhone augmented reality apps, has capitalized on its early mover status by innovating within the space.
Yo dawg, Snap heard you using Snapchat augmented reality Lenses in your messages, so it's putting its AR Lenses in other messaging apps.
Like its predecessors WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Marvel's latest series for Disney Plus, Loki, has its own augmented reality experience.
The big day for Snap that resulted in the debut of brand new augmented reality Spectacles smartglasses is turning into a big week.
Throughout Thursday's virtual Snap Partner Summit, Snapchat's parent company made a profound statement: If you use Snapchat, you're a creator.
