If there is one constant in currently available AR headsets, it's that, for a quality experience, they'll carry a high price tag. Price is one of the reasons these devices are mostly marketed towards enterprise customers for now.
Despite the unfortunate social media-driven association of Corona beer with the virus behind a global pandemic, beverage maker Constellation Brands has pushed its marketing forward like a lime through the mouth of a beer bottle.
As Apple, Google, Snap, and Facebook wrestle for positioning to lure developers and creators to build augmented reality experiences for their respective tools, Facebook is looking at a learning approach for its Spark AR platform.
Amazon has joined the ranks of film and TV studios using the power of augmented reality to engage fans looking to go behind passive screen viewing.
If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?"
My autistic son loves music. One afternoon, when he was nine, I downloaded GarageBand to his iPhone to help with the boredom of a long wait at a doctor's office. Instead of pacing or escalating into a meltdown, he spent the entire hour and a half practicing, learning, and composing. When we finally left that day, the rest of us exhausted and irritated, he shared his first composition with a big smile.
Here at Next Reality, our typical approach to all things augmented reality involves vision combined with remote control, either via a handheld device, gaze control, or hand/finger tracking.
You've probably heard of RCS messaging. The new standard has been promoted by Google as their answer to iMessage and is the backbone behind the new "Chat" features in Android Messages. With RCS, Android phones will now enjoy enhanced messaging like iPhone users have had for years — but is it really the same?
If you're looking to keep your conversations private, look no further than Telegram. Its cloud-based chats are secure and its optional end-to-end encrypted chats even more so, but you can't really prevent someone in the conversation from sharing your messages. However, you can lessen that chance by taking back your messages, deleting them for both you and the other end of the discussion.
Giving up your Wi-Fi password can be giving up more control than you think. Because of the way Chromecast and other IoT devices communicate, anyone on the same Wi-Fi network as your device can often make it do whatever they want. With a script called "Cast All the Things," we can hijack a Chromecast to play nearly any kind of media with a single command in terminal.
Back in 2015, Amazon Prime Video was the first subscription-based streaming service to introduce the ability to download movies and TV shows for offline viewing on mobile devices. For travelers and users with limited data plans that like to watch films and episodes on the go, this was a godsend. Amazon has updated its apps many times since then, but the process remains relatively the same.
Over the last few years, the only thing teased by Magic Leap more than the Magic Leap One itself has been the company's flagship gaming title Dr. Grordbort's Invaders. The game, developed by New Zealand studio Weta Workshop, finally got its debut last week during the L.E.A.P. conference in Los Angeles.
The hype train that left the station years ago has reached its first stop, and now we finally have access to the Magic Leap One, the device many have claimed would revolutionize the augmented reality space at launch. But is that really true?
After getting confirmation from Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, we now know Fortnite Battle Royale will not be available on the Play Store when it's finally released for Android. Instead, users will have to download the APK directly from Epic Games' website — and quite frankly, this is a bad idea.
Around this time in 2016, the predictions for the next year had reached something of a consensus: 2017 would be the year of augmented reality. But a funny thing happened on the way to the future — nothing much, really. At least not for the first half of the year.
Black Friday is fast approaching, and just like every other day-after-Thanksgiving, there will be too many tech deals you won't want to pass up. If you've been saving up all year just for this sometimes-chaotic shopping holiday, we'll help you figure out the best tech sales to take advantage of and when, whether it's Black Thursday, Black Friday, or Black Friday weekend.
From Farmville to selling a company to Google, Amitt Mahajan has been through the startup ringer. Now, as managing partner with Presence Capital, he's funding the future of augmented and mixed reality.
It looks like Chris Urmson has spent the six months since he left Google's Self Driving Car Project trying to build a get-rich-quick self-driving unicorn, along with Sterling Anderson, formerly with Tesla Motors. At least that is one of several scandalous accusations in a Tesla lawsuit aimed at the pair, and their secretive startup Aurora Innovation, LLC.
Beginners luck is a phrase I have always hated. But really, beginners luck comes down to not letting your experience in something get in the way of the idea.
New releases of iOS are always pretty exciting. I remember the anticipation buildup of iOS 7 before it was announced at WWDC 2013, as it was expected to be a complete game changer compared to previous versions—and it was.
Every year, tech companies use April 1st as a means to prove that they have a sense of humor. Sometimes their jokes are good for a chuckle, other times the gags backfire disastrously. For the most part, however, we'd be better off without the bulk of these annual antics.
With T-Day on the horizon and approaching rapidly, you are probably in one of two camps. The one that is eagerly awaiting the holiday feast with barely-contained drool. Or the one that involves breathing heavily into a paper bag while worrying about your lack of oven and stovetop real estate, while also bemoaning the lack of multiples of you to get all the prep work done.
April Fool's Day, aka National Screw with Your Friends Day, is finally here. You can always pull a conventional prank, like strategically placing a whoopee cushion on your mom's chair, but that joke has been exhausted generations before smartphones were around. We live in a day and age where smack cam is the new level of pranking, so it's time to step your game up, novices.
While most people were worried about having the scariest costume when I was younger, I was always more interested in the candy. While everyone wasted time trying to perfect their costume, I was busy mapping out every detail in my city, finding the most efficient way of getting the most candy in my pillowcase(s) before the night ended. Although I'm long retired from the game, it's about time to pass along all of the tips and tricks I've learned from my youth for getting treats. So, here I pres...
Adobe Audition, Audacity, and other audio editing software have tools to isolate vocals and instruments in regular songs so that you can get an instrumental track for karaoke, vocals for an a capella version, or solo drums, bass, keys, etc. that you can use to learn the song yourself. The software is mostly for desktop computers, and it doesn't always do a good job, but that's where Moises comes in.
The volume buttons on the side of your iPhone can do more than just adjust the volume levels for media, ringers, alerts, Siri, and other sounds and voices. You can use them to perform different actions in certain apps and even create custom actions using the Shortcuts app. It's not exactly button mapping, but it's as close as you'll get without jailbreaking iOS.
As we move toward the end of the year, the wheels of the augmented reality space continue to shift in major ways.
When you're a writer with work published across various online platforms, building a portfolio of your work can be pretty time-consuming. That's where Authory comes in.
Billionaire Richard Branson did his part to advance space tourism this weekend by beating Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) to become the first among them to travel into space.
Almost 190 secret characters are hiding behind your iPhone's default keyboard, and I'm not talking about what you see after tapping the "123" or "#+=" keys. These special composite characters can include accents, dots, and other diacritics, and you'll even see some strange typographical characters like the section sign, inverted marks, and per mille symbol. Here's how you find them.
Throughout Thursday's virtual Snap Partner Summit, Snapchat's parent company made a profound statement: If you use Snapchat, you're a creator.
Thanks to the grandest of puns, May the 4th is Star Wars Day. And what better way to pay tribute to the space opera than with the augmented reality superpowers of Snapchat.
I'm always looking for solutions to problems people are having with their smartphones. This means I spend a lot of time browsing forums and release sites looking for new apps. In doing so, I find a lot of apps that don't quite solve a major problem, but are nonetheless pretty cool. I came across four of those this week.
We often discuss the augmented reality efforts coming from the biggest players in Silicon Valley like Google, Facebook, Apple, and others, but one name that keeps coming up when you really begin to dig into the AR space is Vuzix. Since the late '90s, the company has quietly but deliberately worked to build itself into a viable competitor in the enterprise space via its wearable display technology.
It's safe to say that we can call the annual ranking of AR investments a holiday tradition at Next Reality.
Why do you need augmented reality? Because enterprise, they say. And while that's certainly true for several disciplines, there's still that mainstream use case hanging out there waiting for users to discover beyond the realm of enterprise and gaming.
Smartphone technology has become as ubiquitous as automobiles. In Austin, Texas, a city that is widely known as the "Live Music Capital of the World," smartphones have been embraced by the music community not just as a way to document and promote, but to create music.
Comparing the present-day states of the consumer and enterprise sectors of augmented reality is like evaluating the merits of sports car versus work trucks. Like consumer AR, sports cars are sexy and exciting, but perhaps a bit impractical at times. On the other hand, enterprise AR is utilitarian, but it gets the job done and, in the long run, pays for itself.
As I've mentioned in recent days, it was refreshing to discover that Microsoft's HoloLens 2 stage production was every bit as accurate as presented (check out my hands-on test of the device for more on that).
The year 2018 was a rough one for Snap, the company behind the Snapchat app and the Spectacles wearable camera device. From executive departures to reports of slowed user growth, the company that once spurned Facebook's multibillion-dollar advances is now facing a moment of truth as it stares down its uncertain future.
