"Necessity, not novelty," is a phrase I use often when it comes to HoloLens development. It would be fair to call it my mantra, or mission statement, as I prototype and explore software creation on this new frontier of mixed reality.
If you've played the game Portal by Valve before, you've most likely popped one portal onto the ceiling and another directly below it on the floor, dropped your Companion Cube in, and then watched it fall forever. Well, now it has been done in real life, in an actual hallway, not in a rendered world.
The HoloLens is a natural medium for 3D data visualization, which offers a far more ideal approach over 2D screens to managing multiple resources simultaneously and grasping the bigger picture. We've already seen how management is using holograms to oversee cities, firefighters, and the military, and now training for sports teams is being addressed with VAR Football.
It seems to me you can't swing a dead cat near an augmented reality developer without hearing the word Vuforia escape their lips. PTC's software solution has become the go-to for most developers in the mobile AR space, and since they recently added full support for the HoloLens in Unity, I figured it was about time we learn to make something with it.
For some time now, there has been quite a bit of speculation as to when the selection of augmented and mixed reality head-mounted displays would begin to trickle out to the public. Pricing, availability, and software selection are all issues that will have to be addressed before widespread adoption will start.
Today, December 7, it was officially announced that Magic Leap has found their replacement for the recently departed Brian Wallace. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has tapped Brenda Freeman, former EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of National Geographic Channel, as their new Chief Marketing Officer.
The new Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ phones were announced on March 29 at the Samsung UNPACKED 2017 event. Preorders start on March 30 for the Korean tech giant's latest flagships, and sales officially begin in the US on April 21. Samsung will need a smooth release to win back consumer trust after the Note7 mess, and it's already looking like the S8 won't disappoint.
In recent years, wave after wave of technological advancement has led us down roads that are beginning to look more and more like science fiction stories. In their efforts to bring us from science fiction to science fact, Microsoft Research showed us a new communication medium called Holoportation earlier this year—and now they have found a way to make this highly complex holographic system far more mobile.
Walking while taking a video is always a pain. But it doesn't have to be, especially with Google's new Pixel smartphone and its new and improved Electronic Image Stabilization (EIS) feature. A new video, released on Reddit, pitted the Pixel's EIS against the Nexus 6P with some incredible results.
Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones are available for pre-order right now, but the general public won't start to get their hands on these devices for another week or two. Tech reporters got some hands-on time at Google's launch event on October 4th, but camera testing wasn't allowed, and the Wi-Fi coverage at the event was too flooded for real-world performance reviews.
Augmented reality allows for all kinds of experiences to happen just about anywhere, and that creates some incredible potential for entertainment. While games like Pokémon GO take you out into the world, one crowd-funded game wants to keep you inside—to scare the crap out of you in your own home.
Virtual reality, along with its siblings, has the opportunity to profoundly change the way we interact with all things digital. As a visual medium, we often don't think about the impact on audio, but it plays a significant role nevertheless. When it comes to music—and music videos—the possibilities are enormous.
We've been hearing rumors for months now that suggest Apple will be getting rid of the 3.5 mm headphone jack in the iPhone 7, which will presumably be replaced by an adapter that connects your earbuds directly to the Lightning port. But finally, thanks to Vietnamese site Tinhte, we now have some hard evidence to back up this claim.
Our brains do a magnificent amount of work to process visual stimuli, but they aren't difficult to fool. Optical illusions can trick our minds into believing what we're seeing is real, even if it's not—and virtual and mixed reality technologies take advantage of this little loophole in our brain to help us accept the unreal.
Keyboards and mice work fine for computers, but in a holographic environment you'll want to do more than just point, click, and type. While we can still benefit from these input devices, complex hand-tracking methods are necessary for the evolution of mixed reality user interfaces.
There seems to be a nearly cult-like craze surrounding those glasses filled with summery, pink-hued rosé wine. From picnics in the park to long days spent on the beach, rosé wine offers light, warm-weather refreshment to its lucky imbiber.
If you're in the market for a new tattoo, the biggest hurdle to clear is imagining exactly how it's going to look. It's going to be part of your identity for the rest of your life, so you have to make sure it looks just right—or as your mom probably told you, "Think of what it's going to look like when you're 60."
Want to actually catch 'em all? Pokémon GO has long-teased the opportunity to hunt for Pokémon in the real world through augmented reality, but few have had the opportunity to actually see it in action.
For generations, parents have been struggling to come up with innovative ways to get their kids to eat their vegetables. They'll cut them into fun shapes, bake them in cheese, batter, and deep-fry them.
Nintendo rolls out its first smartphone-specific game in the U.S. on March 21st, and the main protagonist is... you. Well, your Mii, and it's not a game, but a social app.
Android's Google Play Games app has let you track your feats and accomplishments in the games you play for quite a while now, but for some, the immersion experience might be broken after you finish dominating a game only to see your regular-ass name from your Google account on the leaderboard.
If you have never heard of a Virtual Machine (VM) before you might think it to be some new kind of gamers virtual reality system, and that would be incorrect. A virtual machine is a Virtually a real computer that exists inside of your own computer. You can run Kali inside of a Windows environment via your VM. Not quite the same as an actor portraying an actor on TV. A virtual machine will have it's own IP address and you have the ability to network to it from your Real (Host) computer and bac...
Oven space is scarce on that fated fourth Thursday of November. Even if you can find a spare space for pumpkin pie on the bottom shelf, you risk turkey drippings overflowing from above and ruining your beautiful dessert — not to mention a burnt crust from different temperature requirements. The bottom line is: oven real estate is valuable, and it's tough to multitask cooking for Thanksgiving when every dish requires baking or roasting.
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.
It sounds like a dream come true: just press a button on your phone, and 30 seconds later, a machine produces a custom-made, ready-to-eat meal. Finally, science comes through for the truly lazy!
When I was younger, my family would go to fancy restaurants and I would invariably order a Shirley Temple. (Ironically, the real Shirley Temple actually didn't like it much.) But it's hard to really find anything offensive in this kiddie cocktail: It's ginger ale with a splash of grenadine. There's also the less famous Roy Rogers, which is Coca-Cola with grenadine. The grenadine, red and sumptuous, always made its drinks look and taste much cooler.
Early last year, Google purchased Quest Visual, acquiring the immensely popular augmented reality translator app Word Lens in the process. While Google did put the feature on the Google Glass, they spoke more about implementing Word Lens into their Translate app sometime in the future.
Revised Version, Gallery pictures of the Ambassabank have been removed since XCL 2.0 has been released.
Tequila is a hard liquor that's often been misunderstood. Produced from the agave plant, this aged spirit has complex flavors that bloom the longer it's aged and can rival the finest scotch.
Real suffering is sitting through a thirty-second ad to watch a fifteen-second video, or watching your favorite music video in three-second fragments. Real suffering is this: “An error occurred, please try again later.” If you’re a modern human and multitask with multiple tabs while you're on YouTube, you don’t have to sacrifice your bandwidth and sanity. There's a simple way to watch YouTube ad-free and lag-free.
It can be a pretty exasperating ordeal to hunt for one image on your tablet when you have hundreds and hundreds of photos in your gallery. Luckily, there are ways to make this a pain-free process on your Nexus 7, as well as make sure it's never a problem in the future.
I know all of you softModders love these little modifications, like enabling the hidden battery percentage on the Nexus 7 or getting the exclusive Google Launcher on your Nexus, so here's an easy one that lets you hide the soft-keys from your tablet, which will actually expand your screen to look a little bit longer.
Thousands of history files, cookies, other unwanted files stored in your system as logs and other formats. To manually check each one is difficult. New computers are too fast by processor behavior, after some times of working it comes to slow performance.
For most of us regular folk, the only opportunity to relish in the conveniences of a maid is during hotel stays. Personally, I would love to have a maid around to help fold my clothes and sweep up those crumbs that accumulate in the corners of my kitchen, but sadly, I currently live in reality and can't afford that luxury just yet. In real life, I'm on my own.
On Thursday, March 14th, Samsung unveiled their new Galaxy S4. With it came a slew of new features, but what does that mean for us S3 users? Unless we're willing to shell out big bucks for the full retail version, most of us S3 owners (at least in the states) will not be eligible for upgrades until next year.
Frankly, I never cared about the care labels on my clothing. They supposedly held some secret key to keeping clothes clean and bright, but who wants to look at little icons and a bunch of fine print for every single garment they wash?
First off, let me say this—using real steam power is dangerous, and heavy, and just generally not worth it when you have modern alternatives. Except, you know, if you're a Steampunk. Or this guy:
Earlier today, a meteorite flew over the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, triggering a shock wave that injured hundreds of people and caused damage to buildings and vehicles in the area. Witnesses describe seeing a bright ball of light streak through the sky followed by a loud boom as the 10-ton meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere and exploded.
Inhabiting the microgravity environment on the cusp of the world's atmosphere has to be filled with some of the most unique experiences in the world. Astronauts eat, sleep, and work just as we do, except that their lives are filled with the added dangers of extreme temperatures and possible life-threatening malfunctions, all while being 240 miles up in the sky. Well, now's your chance to ask a handful of astronauts anything you ever wanted to know about life on the International Space Station.
Craigslist is probably the greatest site ever created, and I'm just talking about it's classified section, both awesome and amazingly creepy. Seriously, spend 20 minutes scrolling through the personals and you'll never want to take your eyes off the screen. But I digress—Craigslist is also one of the most convenient places to buy and sell pretty much anything you can think of. I've used it to buy my bed, my old bike (which was stolen!), and my couch. And while Craigslist is great in many ways...
