When Disney teased an augmented reality game called Star Wars: Jedi Challenges running on a headset from Lenovo, fans had more questions than Disney had answers. When? How much? Can I be a real Jedi?
A developer has previewed a pair of potential applications built on ARKit that can be triggered by Alexa, the resident voice assistant of the Amazon Echo.
An update to the iFramed social media gateway app for iOS adds an augmented reality feature called JuxImage that gives its users Snapchat-like photo and video effects.
Of all the ways I thought I'd be watching my favorite TV shows, on a floating orb was not one of them.
In an early morning blog, Jimmy Alamparambil of the Unity team announced a major new update to their ARKit plugin. Developers now can use Unity and ARKit to create AR experiences and test directly from Unity's editor, without deploying to the device.
It's safe to say that mobile developers are excited about the prospects of Apple's ARKit, with demos popping up seemingly on the hour on YouTube, Twitter, etc.
When you're playing videos, the actual content should be the focus, not the media app's interface. But with VLC's default theme on Android, the bright orange-and-white motif shocks your eyes in a dimly-lit setting and draws your attention away from what really matters. Let's change that.
The Force is strong with Lenovo, who is working with Disney and Lucasfilm to deliver an augmented reality headset and lightsaber handle for the forthcoming Star Wars: Jedi Challenges game.
The new battlefield AR game announced by Skyrocket Toys today is similar to the childhood game "Tag", except the stakes are much, much higher.
Have you ever been on a Netflix binge and thought to yourself "man, these characters are so dumb. Why would you go back to the haunted house, Jenny? You know what's in there, and now you're going to die. This whole situation was so easily avoidable, JENNY." If you've ever thought you'd make better decisions than the characters in your favorite TV shows, Netflix has your back.
Driverless partnerships continue to appear as Continental AG, leading German automotive manufacturing company, has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with global electric startup, NIO. The goal of this partnership is to research, share, and develop autonomous technology, among other developments.
Apple's iOS is a great operating system, but it's not without its faults. Minor quirks have plagued the Apple community for years, such as a general lack of customization, a poor notification system, and some interesting UI choices like the intrusive volume popup. With iOS 11, Apple's tackling many of these pain points, not the least of which is being able to select multiple home screen icons at once.
It wasn't too long ago that Uber threatened to fire star engineer Anthony Levandowski. Eleven days to be exact. If Levandowski didn't turn over the documentation he allegedly stole from Google's autonomous car division, Uber informed Levandowski that they would take "adverse employment action." Today, The New York Times reported the ride-sharing firm has delivered on that threat. In a memo sent to employees Tuesday morning, Uber announced Lewandowski's official departure from the company "eff...
Universal Studios and Cinemark Theaters have enlisted mobile augmented reality game Seek to promote The Mummy, a reboot of the action-adventure film franchise starring summer movie mainstay Tom Cruise.
Google Assistant will be getting an AI makeover with the addition of Google Lens. This new feature is basically a set of vision-based computing capabilities within the Assistant.
Everyone loves emojis, but some folks aren't quite happy with the way the little yellow guys look on their particular phone. In order to replace them, however, your device needs to be rooted, and you'll usually need to perform some complicated procedure that ends up making your phone hard to update since it modified a ton of files on your system partition.
Most music streaming services will either use the stock Android equalizer or their own built-in equalizer. A couple of apps, such as Spotify, bring both to the table. Spotify has a built-in equalizer which kicks into play when a system or third-party equalizer isn't detected. However, other apps such as SoundCloud and Pandora don't use the installed equalizer even if it's a system-wide one.
It was nice while it lasted. Samsung users who managed to get their hands on the Galaxy S8 or S8+ early enjoyed the ability to launch any app through the dedicated Bixby button. Unfortunately, Samsung wasn't all that down with us using the Bixby button for purposes other than its intended use — to provide quick access to Samsung's new virtual assistant.
With products and solutions offered by the likes of Scope AR, Trimble, DAQRI, VIATechnik, and others, augmented reality is becoming a hot commodity for improving productivity while maintaining safety in the construction and manufacturing industries.
While it remains unknown how exactly augmented reality will make its way into the mainstream (the Microsoft HoloLens sitting at $3,000 isn't exactly accessible), many brands have been trying to integrate the tech into their mobile apps, mimicking the success of Snapchat and its popular AR filters. One of those brands going all in on augmented reality is Shazam.
Selfies' reign on social media and pop culture has not really lost any steam since it was declared the word of the year back in 2013. We've had the much-mocked selfie stick, and even an ill-fated TV show named after the term. So what's next? Well, if you're phone maker Oppo, you're banking on the next big selfie-thing being the dual selfie camera.
Legacy Games, developer of mobile games for children, has just updated Crayola Color Blaster, an augmented reality Android adventure for Google Tango devices, with new content.
Selecting text on a touchscreen device has always been a major pain point. Those tiny little arrows that let you adjust the selection area are always too hard to actually adjust, making precision all but impossible. Then there's the issue of some apps not even allowing text selection in the first place, so the entire experience is basically a big mess.
Want to go to Seattle and meet the Actiongram team?
Whether you're riding the subway on your way home from work, or stuck in the backseat of the car on a long road trip, there are times when you need to entertain yourself without a mobile data connection. A good mobile game would pass the time perfectly, but not every game works without an internet connection.
HoloMaps, an application by Seattle-based Taqtile, is available for free on the Windows Store. Taqtile, whose Vice President of Product Management was Microsoft's former Director of Business Development, is one of the few partners currently in the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Program. This interactive 3D map they have created, powered by Bing, offers more than just a top-down view of the world on the HoloLens.
Google Assistant just got a lot more powerful thanks to IFTTT. The automation platform, whose name stands for If This, Then That, connects your favorite online services and smart devices to one another, allowing for a seamless experience with many different gadgets—and Google Assistant is officially supported.
We've already seen how VR can have some therapeutic benefits, but not the dramatized version. A play called Ugly Lies the Bone emotionally examines how war veterans can heal (or at least treat) their PTSD using virtual reality.
Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive tether to desktop computers with robust GPUs in order to harness their power. The free-roaming, cordless Microsoft HoloLens forgoes those chains but loses a bit of graphical processing power in the mix. However, a recent report suggests we may get the best of both worlds.
Jurassic Park makes a great (and sometimes mediocre) action movie, but hopefully isn't the sort of thing we're dumb enough to actually make. Fortunately, on the HoloLens, you can now walk with the dinosaurs with no risk to your life and limbs.
Unless you had a master of visual effects for a parent, you had to imagine the floor was actually lava when playing the classic furniture-hopping game. With a Microsoft HoloLens, however, you don't have to imagine anything.
After updating your iPhone to iOS 10, you may have noticed that your screen will wake up whenever you pick up the device to look at it, or even when it's just in your pocket or dangling in your hand.
There are two types of bad USBs out there. One lets you trick the computer into thinking it's a keyboard or other USB device, and the other goes straight over malicious into computer killing territory.
LARPing, or live action role-playing, can look a little silly because it requires a lot of imagination to suspend reality. But mixed reality technology like the Microsoft HoloLens can change all of that with voice commands and special effects.
Data visualization has many applications in virtual and mixed reality, since a third dimension literally adds important depth to the represented information. A new app called HoloFlight is a good example of this, combining flight-tracking data and the Microsoft HoloLens to surround you with a look at every plane in the sky.
We've seen how mixed and augmented reality can offer better shopping experiences for consumers, and even how Magic Leap wants to make advertising a non-intrusive experience. So it's no surprise that Magic Leap seems to have partnered up with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba—one of their largest investors—to create an augmented reality shopping app.
If you want to quickly understand EtherWars, imagine a game like StarCraft where you build out your base on your living room floor instead of on a computer screen. Before we had computer games to help us imagine what space wars might feel like, we played with toy ships and used our imaginations. EtherWars combines those two elements by replacing toys with holograms that actually react to your choices.
When you're browsing the internet on a computer, you just need to hit Ctrl F (or Command F) and type something out to find all instances of that word in the webpage. It's a handy feature baked into most browsers (nearly all mobile browsers have a "find" feature, too), but unfortunately, it doesn't work with real-world documents, signs, and menus—or at least it hasn't, up until now.
Opioids, or narcotic painkillers, serve as our primary method for alleviating physical distress. They also happen to be a leading cause of death due to their addictive nature. AppliedVR hopes to introduce a safer alternative: virtual reality gaming. They utilize the existing Samsung Gear VR for the hardware, but provides specialized software that offers up a distracting experience that fosters greater pain ignorance.
With the next iPhone release around the corner, Apple is hard at work getting iOS 10 squared away. On Monday, July 18, they issued the third beta of iOS 10 to developers, which should be released within a few days to those using the iOS 10 public beta.
