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).
AR.js is a new JavaScript solution that offers highly efficient augmented reality features to mobile developers. With HoloJS released back in December, there is a potential that the free AR.js, developed by Jerome Etienne, one of Next Reality's 50 people to watch in augmented and mixed reality, could work with the Microsoft HoloLens as well.
Last month, Dr. Sung-Hoon Hong, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, announced at the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego that Samsung would be moving into the augmented reality market. According to a recently published patent application, that move has begun.
In addition to trying to give Pokémon a life on the HoloLens, Sky Zhou, a founding member of mixed reality studio Matrix Inception, won Microsoft's Actiongram Fantasy Contest Quest last month for his video concept on slaying dragons. But fantastical creatures aren't the only thing Sky can whip up on the HoloLens.
It's 2017—new year, same us. We vow to keep scouring the net for the best how-tos and feature the makers and doers who create mind-blowing projects.
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.
Frosty the Snowman is a fairy tale they say, but this microscopic snowman is very real and just broke the record for the world's smallest snowman. (Though, it's not Guinness-official yet.)
Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper, which has been around since the 1600s. The word origami comes from the two Japanese words ori, meaning "folding," and kami, meaning "paper."
For those of us that were blown away by the spatial mapping and user experience in Fragments and Young Conker, the version of spatial mapping that came stock in the HoloToolkit was lackluster at best. It became apparent really quick that to get an amazing presentation would require some heavy shader knowledge and some badass mesh culling skills, at the very least.
Windows Insiders running Build 14971 of Windows 10 in the Fast Ring can now look for the "Windows Holographic First Run" app to check to see if their PCs are up to the task of running Windows Holographic. It won't detect your VR headset yet, but at least you'll be able to see if your computer will be compatible.
It's no surprise that the Microsoft Kinect can provide far better motion tracking than the HoloLens currently can on its own, but at least one developer didn't want to wait for the company's own eventual implementation. Kyle G, founder and CEO of Wavelength Studios, projected his movements using a Kinect into a holographic zombie.
Autodesk offers some of the most popular software for computer-aided design (CAD) projects, which involve all sorts of 3D rendering. Their tools are clearly suited for use with the Microsoft HoloLens, but so far very little supports HoloLens development outside of Unity. Why is that?
Apple released Portrait mode for the iPhone 7 Plus in the iOS 10.1 update, which creates a simulated bokeh effect that blurs out the background and makes the subject pop out in the scene. It's still technically a beta feature since Apple does have some kinks to iron out, but it's ready to use as is.
Augmented reality (AR) holds much promise for how we'll interact with technology in the future, but we still have many hurdles to clear before that dream fully comes to fruition.
Logan's Run is one of my favorite movies of all time. The dialog is cheesy, the set design and special effects are wonky, and the main villain looks like he was conceived and built by an eighth grader in shop class—oh, and his name is Box.
What's up, peeps? In this quick tutorial, we will be looking at structs, a special kind of data type.
You just bought a new loose-knit sweater, slipped it on, and your ring, earring, smartwatch, or even your fingernail snagged a piece of thread yanking an entire loop loose in the fabric. It's happened to me more times than I can remember, and if you cut that eyesore away you're asking for trouble. However, there is a quick way to fix it while maintaining the longevity of your sweater—without giving money to your dry cleaner. Begin by assessing the size of your sweater's damage; is the snagged...
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!
Ah, the art of the April Fool's Day prank. It has to walk a fine line: not enough prankish flair and the joke falls flat. If it's too mean, then you've just bummed everybody out.
Vacuuming is an easy, almost effortless task. With a few pushes of the vacuum, we can pick up pet hair, loose fluff, and other dirt and debris tracked across our floors. Yet there's one culprit that's harder to beat than all others—long strands of human hair.
We use the cameras on our phones to become Instagram-famous, direct Snapchat videos, and post pictures for all our Facebook friends to gander at. Needless to say, camera technology in smartphones has come pretty far in a fairly short amount of time. In fact, a film shot entirely with an iPhone 5S was just accepted into the Sundance Film Festival.
It's becoming more and more apparent that Siri continually drops the ball when it comes to lock screen security. In the past, Siri was exploited in iOS 7.0.2 to send messages without needing a passcode. Then in iOS 7.1.1, Siri was use to bypass the lock screen again to access contacts, make calls, and send emails and texts.
Want to learn how to make Peppa Pig with Play-Doh? Here is our attempt on showcasing a tutorial on how to make Peppa Pig with Play-Doh.
In photography, stereographic projection is a geometric technique that projects a sphere onto a plane, which is mostly used in the mapping of spherical panoramas.
A homemade burger is a delicious thing, but it can be hard to load up with all the fixings. Why? Because said burger is usually wider in the middle and thinner around the edges, like so: Chances are that patty will still be delicious, but your lettuce, tomato, et al. are going to slide off the surface because of this patty's dome shape.
In a flurry of moves today, Microsoft has not only released their suite of Office apps for the iPad, but they also updated their Android and iOS Office Mobile apps to allow for creating and editing documents without requiring an Office 365 account (so long as it's for "home" use). Microsoft Office Mobile for Android & iOS
If you ever find yourself in a car that's submerged under water, your first instinct should be to try and open either the window or the door in the first few seconds of touching water. Unfortunately, if you wait any longer than that, the lopsided ambient water pressure subjected to the car will make it impossible to open the car door, and the now ubiquitous power windows will likely short out. Sure, you could wait until the pressure has equalized on both sides of the car, but this usually hap...
Many people are bored of the typical square-ish icons arranged in a uniform grid on their Android homescreen. I dislike looking at grids of buttons and sometimes I would like to have some really HUGE buttons for the applications that matter the most at any given time.
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.
We've all been in a similar situation before—you set your phone's ringer to silent before heading into class, and when you check your phone hours later, you find that your silenced phone didn't alert you to 8 missed calls and 17 text messages.
While the pope himself may not be Steampunk, you might be amazed at what is: the coronation stove. For those who don't know, it's been a tradition for a very long time to signal the election of a new pope (or the lack of a new pope) via colored smoke. More specifically, once the cardinals have all voted for the new pope during the conclave, the ballots are burned in a special stove in the Sistine Chapel, and the smoke is visible in St. Peter's square.
If there's anything the Internet has taught us, it's the fact that, just because two things shouldn't go together, does not under any circumstances mean that someone won't find a way to make them go together.
With the ever-evolving technology that imbues photography, we are never short of fantastic awe-inspiring shots. Digital cameras can capture things that the naked eye only wishes it could see, like streaking lights, rapid movements, and faraway objects, and it's fairly easy to capture these things if you know the basics.
I collect straight razors from the Victorian era and then add some steampunk style. Step 1: Remove the Old Scales
So a little while ago we covered BUD switches, but there's only so much you can show in one tutorial.
Hello! Today I would like to share a few words about cleaning your crystals. It could be a whole collection or the first shiny object you have ever bought. Here are some hints,...
RFID cards are becoming a fairly common way to purchase goods, but they're already widely used to pay fares on buses, trains, subways, and trolleys across various cities. TAP cards are quick and reliable, but it can be a real pain to remember to bring them with you, especially if you weren't planning on using public transportation that day. Luckily, an intrepid tinkerer at Adafruit has managed to find a way to embed an RFID card into her phone, something you're far less likely to leave at home.
For furniture or wood projects, adding an aged wood look can give real character and interest to an otherwise ordinary object. With a little sanding, stain and lacquer to finish you can transform any wood object.
You can create basic 2D games with Objective C and the frameworks that the Apple iPhone already has, but the cocos2d framework allows developers to make their games much better, with animations, sprites, cool menus, special effects and more! Most game developers for the iPhone start out using cocos2d because it's a powerful tool, and best of all— it's free.
Destroying crowds of little people has been a favorite passtime of dictators since time immemorial, but also a colossal waste of manpower. Now you can get some of the same thrill without all the needless death using 3D Studio MAX. This video will show you how to model, animate, and duplicate with particle flow a series of small robots. Then it will show you how to use a collision object (here a meteor) to destroy them all in fiery glory.
