This year's Game Developers Conference, better known as the GDC, is underway at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, California, and lasts until March 3, 2017. More importantly for us here at NextReality, the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC)—a new GDC sub-conference geared toward augmented, mixed, and virtual reality—has begun.
Regular HoloLens developer and YouTuber Sky Zhou, a founding member of mixed reality studio Matrix Inception, has done it again. With an Xbox One controller in hand, watch as he makes these Pokémon battle it out Super Smash Brothers-style in his HoloLens app.
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.
Want to go to Seattle and meet the Actiongram team?
If you're an Apple user and want an untethered virtual reality system, you're currently stuck with Google Cardboard, which doesn't hold a candle to the room scale VR provided by the HTC Vive (a headset not compatible with Macs, by the way). But spatial computing company Occipital just figured out how to use their Structure Core 3D Sensor to provide room scale VR to any smartphone headset—whether it's for an iPhone or Android.
Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive tether to desktop computers with robust GPUs in order to harness their power. The free-roaming, cordless Microsoft HoloLens forgoes those chains but loses a bit of graphical processing power in the mix. However, a recent report suggests we may get the best of both worlds.
Unless you had a master of visual effects for a parent, you had to imagine the floor was actually lava when playing the classic furniture-hopping game. With a Microsoft HoloLens, however, you don't have to imagine anything.
Leap Motion created gesture control for all sorts of things, including virtual reality, long ago, but developers must build in support for their tracking peripheral to use its full potential. As a result, they've created an "Interaction Engine" for Unity, the primary platform for developing virtual and mixed reality experiences, to try and take gesture interaction to the next level.
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.
Most people I've talked to agree that Shake Shack has mastered the upscale, fast food hamburger quite well. So when a new burger comes out on the ultra-popular fast food chain's menu, you've got to take notice—even if you live nowhere near one.
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.
Mozilla helped get the ball rolling with WebVR, but support for the technology has been notably absent in Google Chrome until recently. Now, the latest Chromium developer build offers limited support.
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.
Pie crusts are pretty intimidating if you're an at-home baker with little experience, since there's a lot of science behind making them. A perfectly flaky crust that's golden brown—not charred and black along the edges—requires careful attention, a foolproof recipe, and some decent baking skills.
When you want to leave someone a quick message, you often write it down on a sticky note and paste it to the relevant location. Alternatively, you call to leave a voicemail. Holo Voice Memo lets you do both at the same time by leaving an audio clip on a physical object in the room so anyone with a HoloLens and the app can play it back.
A stack of light-as-air pancakes can make a weekend morning truly golden. While fluffy pancakes may not seem like rocket science, the reality is that there are many little details that can contribute to a pancake fail that's either too dense or too crumbly.
With developers already figuring out how to use the HoloLens for home improvement tasks, it's no surprise that the device has greater applications in construction. Tech blog Digital Trends points out that holograms are a natural evolution of the blueprint, and several other aspects of construction work.
The HoloLens can do some pretty crazy things such as create a robot invasion in your walls, but it can also help you do simple stuff, like hanging frames, paintings, or anything else on those walls—after you repair them from the robot attack, of course.
Microsoft's HoloLens is certainly a leap into the future of mixed reality interfaces, but it's not without drawbacks.
I held the orange packet in my hands and presented it to my friend, Seth, as though it were a plastic-wrapped jewel—rather than three ounces of dehydrated noodles.
One of my favorite things about cocktails is that they're so diverse. They can be sweet or savory, filling or refreshing. And they can take advantage of nearly any ingredient imaginable, including egg whites, smoked ice, flavor cubes, and even beer.
It has become a popular and must-have beauty essential—the bath bomb. Not only does it bring an aromatic and calming feel to bath time, but it also leaves your skin soft and will make you smell wonderful for a whole week!
In this life hack video, I am going to show you how you can refill your air duster can with a bicycle pump.
Few things in life are as relaxing and enjoyable as baking. When I'm having a bad day, I make cookies. When I'm stressed out, I bake a cake. When I have a free Sunday with nothing to do but listen to music and drink coffee, I bake a tart or a batch of cupcakes.
Among the many gifts that Italy has bestowed upon the world, culinary and otherwise, pesto stands alone. The exact birthplace of pesto, that herby sauce made of pine nuts and olive oil, is an area of Italy called Liguria, whose microclimate is particularly kind to basil, one of pesto's key ingredients.
We've already taught you a few tricks for getting chilled, rock-hard butter to spread easily on toast, and some of you probably bypass that issue entirely by purchasing spreadable butter from the supermarket. But why waste your money when you can make a healthier, tastier version at home for a fraction of the cost?
What can't Sriracha do? You can use it to upgrade your ramen, spice up your candy, or even try one of various recipes to make your own. And if you want an easy way to add it to basically everything, you can make your own Sriracha salt, which is just as awesome as it sounds.
Carving pumpkins into creepy looking jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween can actually become fairly boring and tedious if you’re doing the same thing year after year. This time, jump into a whole new realm of Halloween fun with some exploding pumpkin faces! I like to call them blast-o’-lanterns, but can call them whatever you want.
I've never met a kid who didn't love sidewalk chalk. There's just something about drawing all over public surfaces that seems to appeal to the rule-breakers in us all. And it's not just for kids—artists have done some pretty incredible works with the stuff, too. If you're looking for a fun project to do with kids, or make custom colors for your own drawings, making sidewalk chalk at home is really simple and cheap. Jamielyn Nye from I Heart Nap Time shows just how easy it is in her tutorial o...
Here's how to make a simple form of a slow burning fuse from materials around the house. WARNING: Ignition of an incendiary or explosive material may not be legal in your area, so check local laws before attempting. Use of this video content is at your own risk.
We've shown you how to make water change color on command, but how about just half of it? What if I told you that you can split a solution right down the middle and make the color disappear from one side, just by shining light on it?
So, you want to throw a steampunk party and you have almost everything in place—your steampunk persona and iPhone are ready to go, and you've even got your own steampunk straight razor. What's missing? The Elixirator, that's what. The Elixirator is a steampunk cocktail-making machine by Botronics that can hold four different ingredients and mix up to ten drinks. It has a Picaxe microcontroller for a brain and was built using a lot of pieces from thrift shops. It has a plasma globe at the top ...
Fixing frizzy hair is as easy as applying haircare products that contain silicone, dimethicone or cyclomethicone. Learn about these haircare products that can help control frizzy hair in this free video on haircare from an experienced hairdresser.
Practical self defense, MMA style! Defend against headlocks, mounts, grappling, choke holds, and more in this free video on mixed martial arts and self defense.
Self-recording and mixing music today is easier than ever with programs such as Apple's Logic Pro 8. Mix any piece of multi-track music easily and quickly with tips from an experienced studio engineer in these free recording videos.
Make your mix sparkle with Logic Pro! Learn how to use Logic Pro 8 software to fine-tune your music mix in this free music production tool from a professional audio engineer.
Adam Nieman shows you how to make over fifty mixed drinks, frozen drinks, and shots. You will learn to make a Mai Tai, Irish Coffee, Liquid Coca, Red Eye, Frozen Margarita, Urinal Cake, Heavenly Sex, G String, and many more. Adam also shares recipes for shots: Granny Panties, Hand Job, Golden Nipple, and more. There are two special clips that teach you how to drink body shots from the bellybutton (navel) or the mouth.
In this tutorial, we learn how to cook your green beans so they keep their color. The secret ingredient you can add to your boiling water while cooking your green beans is ice! This will help the green and yellow colors from appearing in your green beans! It will keep the color a beautiful green and not mix in any other colors. To start, put enough water to cover the green beans in a saute pan and then heat it up, put in the green beans and as you cook them add in ice cubes. When finished, ad...
This isn't your standard origami for kids. It's more like "craft-igami". The difference is the glue. Origami is strictly and art with paper— no epoxies required, but when you throw a little glue into the mix, it becomes the perfect kids project. This paper tulip flower is the perfect paper project to start out your children in the wonderful world of paper crafts. To make this paper tulip with your kids, you'll need:
This video from Lowe's shows you how to successfully repot a plant into a larger container. You will know it is time to repot your plant when the roots are visible on the surface, or when they start growing through the drainage hole. If you need to repot one of your plants into a larger container, simply follow these steps: You will need a clean pot that is no more than two sizes larger than the old one. Place a wire mesh or pieces of broken clay pot over the drainage hole. Add a layer of pot...
