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.
One of the most popular usages of modern-day smartphones is listening to music. It doesn't matter if you download or stream your tunes, you are part of a massive group of users who do exactly the same. While statistics are a bit foggy on how many smartphones users download music, we do know that over 68% of American smartphone owners stream music on a daily basis.
Microsoft recently released "Seeing AI," an app aimed to help the blind understand their surroundings. As Microsoft puts it, "the app narrates the world around you by turning the visual world into an audible experience."
Samsung's Note series is directly responsible for some of the biggest innovations in smartphones. As the first "phablet," it sparked the current craze for bigger screens, and the S Pen stylus has been mimicked numerous times. Even the curved display made famous by the Galaxy S6 edge made its debut on the Note 4, so this is the one smartphone line you want to keep track of if you like to stay on the bleeding edge.
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.
Eating vegetarian isn't just for vegetarians. There are plenty of reasons, health and economics-wise, to consider forgoing the meat for a meal or three. Rather than get deep into the world of fake meat (although there's many a tasty alternative to be found there, to be sure), you should consider getting to know your humble-seeming fungal friend: the mushroom. Thanks to their hearty flavor, cooks tend to treat mushrooms like meat, albeit one with its own unique characteristics. Mushrooms are e...
My years in the restaurant business have taught me many things. Some of those things are best left unsaid and other things require a PhD in vulgarity, but the one thing I learned that I keep coming back to night after night is that you do not have to spend a lot of money to drink excellent wine. This is especially true of champagne...I'm sorry, sparkling wines.
To say we're a nation of coffee-lovers is putting it mildly. Americans consume 400 million cups of joe in one day alone, but how well do we actually know our morning BFF? We know it comes from a bean, and that more coffee drinks exist than there are ways to skin a pig, but what else?
You either love kimchi or you hate it, but for those of us who love it, its salty, briny, spicy crunch is the stuff of life. Honestly, if you're not eating it regularly, you should start, since it's being studied for an amazing list of health benefits, including anti-cancer, anti-aging, and antioxidant properties; obesity and high cholesterol prevention; and promotion of immunity and skin health. The beauty of kimchi is manifold:
When you know how to cook it, tofu is a delicious dish in and of itself—truly. Too many people have been subjected to poor quality or badly cooked tofu and told to eat it because it's a "healthy alternative" to meat. Usually what they bite into is a bland, rubbery mess coated with a random array of flavors.
There are many applications you can use to record and edit audio on your computer. This video discusses two others besides Audacity – QuickTime Pro for Mac and Windows, and GarageBand, which is only available for the Mac.
With a simple web-based tool, you can hide secret messages for family, friends, and fellow spies inside of plain text communications, and anyone that intercepts the messages will be none the wiser.
In mid-2021, TikTok rolled out three-minute videos, but it's not stopping there. The company is rolling out a feature that will let you record up to 10 minutes in a single TikTok video — only the update hasn't appeared for everyone yet.
When it comes to the ever-shifting sands of the augmented reality space, you never know which week will end up being truly historic. Well, this one was one for the history books.
Already among the leaders in AR development tools via its Unreal Engine, Epic Games has added another tanky weapon to its arsenal.
Snapchat parent company Snap has opened up its war chest to acquire yet another company that will play a role in its augmented reality ecosystem.
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.
When we think about operating systems, we tend to view them from the perspective of a user. After all, most of us have spent a substantial amount of time on our computers, and so we've become more than acquainted with the ins and outs of whatever system we have running on our personal device. But there is one operating system that, while being less commonly used on the user side, is behind a great deal of design and business technology: Linux.
The recent announcement that Facebook will begin inserting advertisements into its VR experience on its Oculus Quest headset has set the VR and augmented reality industry into a frenzy.
Learning different coding languages can be difficult. You spend so much time mastering one and getting used to thinking along the channels you need for it that learning something new can sometimes be more difficult than starting from scratch. Starting from scratch, notably, is also difficult.
For most mainstream users, LiDAR sensors for precision depth sensing remain the exclusive domain of Apple iPhones and iPads, but Google is helping Android device makers close the depth gap on the software side via its ARCore toolkit.
In the great smartglasses race, component makers, such as those that supply the crucial waveguide displays that make visualization of virtual content possible, have a vested interest in pushing the industry forward in order to ship units.
Sure, Microsoft has mostly marketed its HoloLens headsets towards enterprises and developers, but we learned this week that, like every other tech giant, the company is working on a consumer-grade AR wearable. Speaking of consumer smartglasses, Apple made another strategic investment this week that has implications for Apple's AR future.
The concept of Metaverse, otherwise referred to as AR cloud, where a digital twin of the real world filled with virtual content anchored persistently for all to see, has been a sci-fi dream of futurists for years and an aim for most tech companies who are serious about AR.
Disney Plus shows WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier are both streaming hits, but the two series could not be more different in terms of giving fans a taste of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
At its height, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many auto showrooms to close their doors. As the pandemic persists, many consumers are still hesitant to let their socially distanced guard down.
We've reached the point in the trajectory of augmented reality's growth where AR advertising experiences are becoming commonplace tactics rather than rare experiments.
Captions are great for catching every word and important sound in a movie or TV show, but now there's a way in Google Chrome's desktop browser to enjoy captions for any audio file or source. You could ensure you never mishear a comment during an online meeting, and you could even follow along to a song's lyrics on platforms that don't already have in-sync lyrics, such as SoundCloud.
The augmented reality industry has grown steadily over the past four years, but now it is on a collision course with uber-popular non-fungible tokens technology, with Looking Glass and music artist Reggie Watts among the latest to strike while the iron is hot.
Just as the NCAA men's basketball tournament is set to start later this month, USA Today has decided to trot out an augmented reality mini-basketball game to promote its bracket competition.
The moment many of the crypto savvy insiders in augmented reality and VR have been waiting for is here: we're finally getting our first big auction of NFT art that exists purely as a hologram.
The year is still off to a roaring start, with augmented reality at the center of nearly everything, from enterprise solutions, to entertainment, to safety.
A year and change into its shift towards enterprise customers, Magic Leap has updated Lumin OS and the corresponding Lumin SDK with some key prerequisites for the business sector.
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.
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.
Keeping your friends up to date is one of the reasons chat apps exist in the first place, but sometimes we're not available to respond to every message or to let all of our contacts know what we're up to. That's where status updates come in handy, and the feature has finally found its way to Signal Private Messenger.
The company augmented reality that Rony Abovitz was trying to build at Magic Leap apparently wasn't working out the way he hoped it would. That company, built on dreams, music, and future-looking entertainment, rather than truly new technology, came with a $2,300 price tag for a device using dynamics most mainstream consumers have never even tried.
Ever since China's Nreal unveiled its Light smartglasses at CES two years ago, an army of look-alikes have emerged from the Asian nation.
Over the past two product cycles, Apple has been rumored to be preparing to reveal its Apple AirTags tracking devices that can help iPhone owners find their possessions with augmented reality.
The past year has revealed a gaping hole of opportunity in the world of business called virtual meetings. Some existing players like Zoom hopped on that opportunity, while others like Skype seemed stuck on the sidelines, and Google Meet just managed to catch up in time to snag some of the shift in remote work.
