It's that time of year again. The world's largest electronics companies are sending representatives to the annual Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, and for gadget lovers like us, that means we'll get our first look at some of this year's biggest upcoming flagship smartphones.
When the HoloStudy Demo app for HoloLens came out in September, it was a pretty impressive start to what could be a very valuable science tool for education. Now, Moscow-based HoloGroup, makers of HoloStudy, started an Indiegogo campaign to improve their modular teaching app.
If you've been following NextReality, you've surely seen me around, or at least have seen my articles. My name is Jason Odom, aka Subere23, and it's about time for a formal introduction.
In the past, creative chefs and bakers have been rewarded for their daring in the kitchen with viral attention from the internet—like the rainbow bagel or cronut. These sensations weren't crafted for the sake of going viral, but ended up generating an insane amount of buzz anyway.
By now, nearly everyone with any type of media access is aware that Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked on November 24th. Although there can be many interpretations and lessons drawn from this audacious act, there is one indisputable conclusion: it and its ripples across the globe underlines how important hacking has become in our all-digital 21st century. As I have emphasized so many times in this column, hacking is the discipline of the future. From cybercrime to cyber intelligence to cy...
The march to the mainstreaming of augmented reality can sometimes seem slow, but this week things picked up in earnest.
When it comes to the future of AR smartglasses, DigiLens has one word for you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.
The Paris-based technology conference Viva Technology, which hosted the likes of Apple's Tim Cook and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, is now over.
The march of Snap to become the world's augmented reality engine isn't slowing down. In a new deal announced on Thursday, Snap has revealed that it has signed an agreement to become the software driving Universal Music Group's (UMG) mobile AR music offerings.
With the tagline "More Than Meets the Eye," the Transformers franchise was pretty much preordained to have its own augmented reality game, and AR gaming pioneer Niantic has stepped up to fulfill that destiny.
Facebook Reality Labs just experienced its first major executive exit since the pandemic began. Hugo Barra has announced that he's stepping down from his position as vice president of VR at Facebook.
The new WandaVision series is perhaps the hottest TV show on the Disney Plus streaming service since...well, its own The Mandalorian wrapped up its second season late last year.
After piloting the Nreal Light in South Korea and Japan via carrier partnerships and securing another round of funding, Nreal is now ready to begin selling the consumer edition of the smartglasses to the western world as well as introduce a version for enterprise customers.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses into remote work models, whether they were ready or not, making Zoom a household (or home office) name for its video conferencing service.
Toymaker Lego has been on board with building AR into its playsets and mobile apps since the launch of ARKit.
Black Friday is upon us. Whether you prefer to duke it out in stores or calmly shop online, there's no doubt you'll find great deals on the items you're looking for this holiday season. It's the perfect time of year to buy something expensive, like a good pair of AirPods, Beats, or Bose, at a much more opportune price.
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.
If you're worried about the security of your Mac, there are easy measures to prevent the most dangerous attacks. Named after the tactic of accessing an unattended computer in a hotel room, we can thwart "evil maid" attacks with Do Not Disturb and LuLu, free macOS tools by Objective-See that keep an eye on unattended computers and flag suspicious network connections that indicate a malware infection.
The tactic of brute-forcing a login, i.e., trying many passwords very quickly until the correct one is discovered, can be easy for services like SSH or Telnet. For something like a website login page, we must identify different elements of the page first. Thanks to a Python tool for brute-forcing websites called Hatch, this process has been simplified to the point that even a beginner can try it.
The rise and fall of Meta, the Silicon Valley-based augmented reality startup that looked to challenge the likes of Microsoft's HoloLens, and others, took just six years.
Smartphones and other Wi-Fi enabled devices send radio signals called probe frames to locate nearby wireless networks, which makes them easy to track by listening for their unique MAC address. To show how this kind of tracking works, we can program a NodeMCU in Arduino to sniff the air for packets from any device we want to track, turning on an LED when it's detected nearby.
Over the years, Magic Leap's long-cultivated shroud of mystery led some onlookers to buy into the company's dream before even trying the device, while for others, the secrecy seems to have stoked the kind of resentment and overcorrecting critique usually reserved for the mighty Apple.
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.
Following the launch of the Magic Leap One earlier this month, the device and the company took a few hits from early reviewers. But it turns out those were just love taps compared to the absolute scorched earth acidic screed penned this weekend by someone well credentialed to dissect Magic Leap One: Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey.
While many of you were off surfing and lounging on some sandy beach or trying to figure out how to balance work with sky-high summer temperatures, I've been talking to all the companies that make augmented reality what it is today.
Using just a small sticky note, we can trigger a chain of events that ultimately results in complete access to someone's entire digital and personal life.
Social engineering makes headlines because human behavior is often the weakest link of even well-defended targets. Automated social engineering tools can help reclusive hackers touch these techniques, but the study of how to hack human interactions in person is often ignored. Today, we will examine how to use subtle, hard to detect persuasion techniques to compromise a human target.
Black Mirror, Netflix's technology-horror anthology, never fails to provide thought-provoking entertainment centered around emerging and futuristic technologies, and the third season's second episode, "Playtest," delves deep into the worlds of mixed, augmented, and virtual reality. While designed to leave you haunted by the end, offering a more "evil" narrative than we'll likely see in our actual future, the episode explores possibilities that aren't as far off as one might think.
In the aftermath of the unindicted police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, we've been told that the system worked as intended. When our legal system's outcome is at conflict with what a majority of Americans believe is just, it's clear that some changes are needed. But what specifically needs to change? And what can an average citizen with a moral and just cause do to prevent these kinds of tragedies from repeating themselves again and again?
Google and Snap held their annual conferences this week, and both companies managed to upstage their new AR software features with fantastic new AR hardware.
While Apple has been rather secretive about its work on AR wearables (despite the abundance of leaks revealing details about their unannounced devices), Facebook has been rather chatty about its plans for smartglasses.
The year 2020 was a pivotal span of time during which the word "virtual" took on a brand new meaning. Instead of referring to VR or augmented reality, the term was hijacked to describe meeting across long distances through a variety of software tools, most often through video.
Quietly, while the rest of the world was engaged in pandemic and political concerns, a few weeks ago Facebook casually upgraded its Spark AR platform with what it calls Unified Effect Publishing.
There's a variety of brilliant colors in the iPhone 12 lineup, including the elegant Gold and show-stealing Pacific Blue finishes on the Pro models. It's difficult enough to choose an iPhone color as a customer, but deciding on accessories can make things even worse. Which color case looks best with what iPhone color? What about a MagSafe wallet attachment? Well, Apple has a tool to help you figure that all out.
Penetration testing, or pentesting, is the process of probing a network or system by simulating an attack, which is used to find vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a malicious actor. The main goal of a pentest is to identify security holes and weaknesses so that the organization being tested can fix any potential issues. In a professional penetration test, there are six phases you should know.
People fundamentally distrust magicians. And they should. The illusions they proffer are just that, illusions meant to astound rather than tangible interactions and results that have weight and meaning in our real world. Our lizard brains know this, and, no matter what the outstanding feat of "magic" presented, we nevertheless hold fast to our survival-based grip on the truth: we just saw simply "can't be real."
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).
I was in college, and my 15-inch Sony Vaio laptop was my prized possession. It was my first PC and probably the most important thing I brought with me to my dorm — it was both how I completed my assignments and my primary source of entertainment. How could it turn its back on me in my time of need?
The easiest way around a security policy is to find users who don't follow it. The Have I Been Pwned database identifies accounts with information breached by major third parties like Yahoo and LinkedIn. With Maltego, hackers can locate breached accounts created using company email addresses, potentially giving attackers access to a company account if the employee reuses a compromised password.
In just a few months, Binance has experienced explosive growth, overtaking its rivals to rank among the top three cryptocurrency exchanges in the world by trading volume. Without a doubt, Binance is now among the best sites for trading alt-coins like Ripple (XRP), Stellar (XLM), and NEM (XEM) to name a few.
