While augmented reality is mostly in the minds of consumers in the form of Pokémon GO, AR has been popular behind the scenes, with AR companies marketing it as a tool to help business operations become more efficient. This business-to-business market is the target of the new app DOTTYAR, which "provides 3D visualization tools for augmented reality viewers."
Sony offers a set of free games to its PlayStation Plus subscribers every month, but it's easy to miss out if you're not constantly around your console. Perhaps you're traveling, or maybe you've stayed up one too many nights playing Uncharted, leading to a period of PlayStation detox. No matter what the case is, the good news is that you can use the PlayStation app for Android or iOS to claim these monthly free games without getting up from your seat.
Apple recently scored a patent (number 9,488,488) to create augmented reality maps, hinting at possible AR integration into the iOS Maps application for iPhone. Does this mean we'll be seeing super visionary projections of places in the app in the near future? Maybe.
The Washington Post believes augmented reality adds an extra layer to stories, and they're doubling down on that belief by adding in new AR features into their already popular "rainbow" news (iOS and Android) and Classic (iOS and Android) news apps.
In February, the popular Facebook-owned WhatsApp Messenger service jumped on the "stories" bandwagon and replaced their in-app, text-based "About Me" status (you know, those lovely little messages where you can say "Sleeping" or "Not Sleeping" under the tiny nub of your profile picture). Taking its place was a clone of Snapchat's Stories feature, continuing the social media giant's recent trend of shamelessly copying Snapchat.
Augmented reality upstart DAQRI announced today that it has strengthened their in-house talent by recruiting renowned physicist Seamus Blackley and acquiring a team of 15 engineers and scientists from Heat Engine, LLC.
In an early morning blog post, Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Partner Program. This announcement comes on the tail of an expanded HoloLens release over the last few months to many countries outside the initial US and Canada.
In a race to make self-driven cars mainstream, Intel announced today that they've bought Israeli microchip technology company Mobileye for $15.3 billion, setting the stage for Intel to dominate a large portion of the driverless market.
Customer service just got a lot more interesting. Construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar just announced official availability of what they're calling the CAT LIVESHARE solution to customer support, which builds augmented reality capabilities into the platform.
In a press event this past week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, Unity Labs, the experimental and forward thinking arm of Unity, announced an upcoming toolset for developers in the augmented, mixed, and virtual reality space called the XR Foundation Toolkit (XRFT).
This morning, in an early morning session at GDC 2017, Brandon Bray, a senior program manager lead at Microsoft, revealed a mixed reality headset made in collaboration with Acer—a different headset than the one we saw from Acer at CES 2017 earlier this year. Also at the event, the name for Microsoft's holographic system seems to have changed from Windows Holographic to Windows Mixed Reality.
In December of last year, UK-based Zappar successfully raise $84,356 for their ZapBox mixed reality headset—over $50,000 more than their goal. Well, they just blew that sum out of the water when they announced this morning that they've closed a Series A round of funding with $3.75 million.
Mimesys, whose core focus has always been about creating holographic representations of humans for virtual and augmented reality, has released a video showing off their holographic communication platform in action. This new communication tool uses a combination of virtual reality, with the HTC Vive and a Kinect, and mixed reality, with the HoloLens, to allow the users to have virtual meetings from anywhere in the world as though they are in the same room.
If you're in the Windows Holographic community of developers, make sure to mark your calendar and set your alarms for February 8, 2017 because it's Windows Developer Day.
Once mixed reality technology is more widely available and realistically priced for consumers, using the tech to create the illusion of a larger space, will likely be a favorite use for mixed reality in places where real-estate is expensive, people tend to live in smaller homes and work in tighter offices.
A few days ago, I pulled up the Windows Store on my HoloLens and saw a few new applications. One that caught my attention was Oriental Museum, which lets you explore China's Forbidden City, and the other one is very similar free demo app called Secrets of Ancient Egypt by Link Development.
Here at NextReality, we talk a lot about the many different ways of controlling holograms in the HoloLens and other augmented and mixed reality devices; New and creative ways are coming more and more every day. Most recently is something called the HoloSuit. In the 25-second clip below, you can see a woman moving the arm of a jacket which in turn moves a 3D model of Darth Vader on the screen. It's a simple idea with big potential.
The one big question remaining about Google's upcoming Pixel phones has finally been answered: Yes, the Pixel and Pixel XL have unlockable bootloaders—at least, if you buy directly from Google.
When Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19.3 billion back in 2014, we all knew this was coming—it just took longer than we thought. But starting today, the data mining became official, and now, information from your favorite messaging app is no longer out of reach for the world's biggest social media site.
Most popular virtual reality headsets, like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, require a tethered connection to the computer and that imposes some obvious restrictions on how much we can move in our space. We'd all prefer a simpler, untethered option, and Intel wants to provide just that.
Most augmented/mixed reality hardware still exists in the development stage, whether that's one of the more robust headsets or a high-powered smartphone. Most everything else isn't widely used or monetized. Snapchat, however, snuck in under the radar and created the foundation for the first social network to focus on augmented reality.
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.
Since its purchase by Microsoft in 2014, Minecraft has regularly been pushed to new platforms such as Windows 10, Wii U, and Fire TV. In that spirit, Microsoft-owned Mojang has been developing virtual- and augmented-reality versions of the blocky sandbox game.
Without explicit cooperation between Apple and the US government, authorities could still be monitoring Apple users. According to The Information, Apple is worried the servers it has been using might be bugged. We already know the NSA intercepts equipment to install backdoors, so this is a legitimate concern.
Hola my fellow hackers! I promised you the tutorials on setting up RAT's and Botnets, but before jumping into those, i want you to know about the precautionary measures and detection of RATs which might be on the system without your prior knowledge. Of course the Anti-virus do most of the job but there are some RATs which slips past the Anti-viruses (This is where Hacker's skill come into play).
Google's Chrome browser is evolving into a very powerful platform. Not only can it be used to view your favorite website or mirror tabs to your Chromecast, but now that it has an App Engine, more powerful tools can be run within Chrome.
We have all seen videos of people walking off of platforms and into street signs because they were too distracted by their phones to pay attention. This has become such a problem that cities have even considered fining pedestrians for texting and walking.
With platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat available for anyone to take advantage of, I'm all about differentiating from the mundane and repetitive images we see on social media everyday.
Yup, you read that right. As of now, you can actually play the first level of one of the most popular video games of all time—Super Mario 64—directly in your web browser.
Instagram recently rolled out their new Layout app that helps users build photo collages more easily, and it's quick and easy to use with great results. Unfortunately, only those with an iOS device can enjoy Layout at the moment, with the Android version slated for release "in the coming months." Luckily, there are a trove of alternatives that you can use right now, and here are the three we like best.
Thanks to its longevity and familiarity among web designers, Flash is still alive and thriving, but HTML5 is catching up since it can render faster in web browsers, can be customized by developers on a per platform basis, doesn't need a plugin to run, and is less vulnerable than Adobe Flash Player to attacks (for the moment).
Cards Against Humanity is a popular party game with good old-fashioned raunchy adult themes that go quite well with a few alcoholic beverages. Up until now, though, you had to either print out a set of cards or order the official deck to play—unless, of course, all players happened to have devices that sported the same operating system.
When you send an emoji from your Android device to someone that uses an iPhone, they don't see the same smiley that you do. And while there is a cross-platform standard for emojis, these don't work the same way as unicode-based smilies or dongers, so not every operating system displays these little guys the same way.
The bulk of my mobile gaming is done in instances of boredom, like sitting in a waiting room or watching bad TV. So when I heard about a new trivia game that pits every user against each other just once a day, I was immediately intrigued; it's a new spin on a very popular platform.
Surely you're aware of the Sony hacking scandal by now (here's a quick primer if you're not), as well as the multi-billion dollar company initially bowing to threats by canceling the Christmas release of the The Interview, the film at the center of the whole debacle.
Google+ doesn't have quite the user base of Facebook or Twitter, but for Android enthusiasts, it's definitely the place to be. All of the major developers—such as Chainfire and Koush—make their social media home on Google+, and the Android app sports one of the nicest interfaces of any comparable platform, chock-full of Google's Material Design.
A messaging app that blows your mind doesn't come along very often. Yeah, there's WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which are both good for what they are (web-based messaging platforms), but when it comes to interesting or unique features, they're somewhat lacking.
It's hard enough to keep tabs on the battery life of one device, let alone all of the different gadgets that a typical consumer owns in this day and age. Say your smartphone is running low on juice, so you switch to your tablet only to find out that it's almost dead as well. Better hope your laptop is fully charged, right?
Third-party keyboards have become a game changer for iPhone owners since their integration in iOS 8. And while the major players from the Android realm—Fleksy, SwiftKey, Swype—already have their keyboards on the iOS App Store, their products are relatively standard fare.
If you're one of the millions of people who use the WhatsApp service for messaging, you've probably noticed a recent propensity that the app has had for adding buttons to its interface. Two such buttons have made their way into the message thread screen, cluttering up the interface with functionality that is a tad bit redundant.
