Can lightning strike twice? Niantic is betting that it can with its latest augmented reality game based on the best-selling multimedia franchise Harry Potter.
While Apple's smartglasses development reportedly moves forward behind-the-scenes, the company continues to build on its AR software foundation in its mobile ecosystem with further iterations to its ARKit platform and the introduction of new AR development tools.
As the Augmented World Expo (AWE) prepares to open its doors to AR developers and enthusiasts, we sat down with founder Ori Inbar to talk about AR's growth over the past decade, and what the future may hold.
Over the past two years, the tech industry has formed a series of symbiotic relationships that are now converging in the augmented reality space. This week, we took a look at these interrelated technologies and how they are shaping the future of AR.
Just when we thought the AT&T partnership with Magic Leap wouldn't really take off until the latter launched a true consumer edition of the Magic Leap One, the dynamic duo jumped into action this week to offer the current generation headset to customers.
To borrow from the canon of Game of Thrones, what is dead may never die. And while the Meta Company that we knew this time last year is no more, the patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company lives on.
While Magic Leap turned heads at the Game Developers Conference with AR experiences at the Unity and Unreal Engine booths, news broke that the company was the winning bidder for ODG's patents.
Websites are often misconfigured in ways that allow an attacker to view directories that are not ordinarily meant to be seen. These directories can contain sensitive information such as private credentials or configuration files that can be used to devise an attack against the server. With a tool called Websploit, hackers can scan targets for these hidden directories without difficulty.
As Microsoft continues to bask in the glow of its HoloLens 2 unveiling and begins ramping up the hype to launch, Nreal and Vuzix are carving out their own niches in the AR hardware landscape.
NetBIOS is a service that allows for communication over a network and is often used to join a domain and legacy applications. It is an older technology but still used in some environments today. Since it is an unsecured protocol, it can often be a good starting point when attacking a network. Scanning for NetBIOS shares with NBTScan and the Nmap Scripting Engine is a good way to begin.
The hype around augmented reality has risen to a fever pitch over the past two years, and if this week's selection of business news stories are any indication, the din is about to get down right deafening.
Every step in the evolution of computing brings an in-kind leap forward in user input technology. The personal computer had the mouse, touchscreens made smartphones mainstream consumer devices, and AR headsets like the HoloLens and the Magic Leap One have leveraged gesture recognition.
Reading the augmented reality news lately has felt a bit like reading a John Grisham novel, as the business side of things has dripped with legal drama.
Things that are supposed to make life easier for developers and users are often easy targets for exploitation by hackers. Like many situations in the tech world, there is usually a trade-off between convenience and security. One such trade-off is found in a system known as Distributed Ruby, which can be compromised easily with Metasploit.
The emerging narrative as CES begins is that consumer-grade smartglasses require a heavy compromise in functionality in order to arrive at a form factor and price point that appeal to mainstream customers.
All of the the tech industry giants, including Apple, Facebook, and Google, are working on new smartglasses and/or AR headsets, but this week, Google took a major step forward with gesture recognition technology that could make its way into AR wearables, posing a threat to Leap Motion and its hand-tracking controllers.
The augmented reality industry has a bright future built on innovation and growth, but that doesn't mean we can't look back at the close of the year to see what the industry has accomplished from a business perspective.
Users are often the weakest link when probing for vulnerabilities, and it's no surprise they can be easily fooled. One way to do this is called clickjacking. This type of attack tricks the victim into clicking something they didn't mean to click, something under the attacker's control. Burp Suite contains a useful tool called Clickbandit to generate a clickjacking attack automatically.
Signaling a new direction forward for the company, Magic Leap shook up its executive suite by re-assigning to top leaders to new advisory roles. Meanwhile, a new startup backed by Hollywood executives, tech venture firms, and notable angel investors plans to bring new life to AR for marketing entertainment properties.
The recent announcement of a $480 million US Army contract awarded to Microsoft over Magic Leap for supplying 100,000 augmented reality headsets shows just a how lucrative the enterprise (and government) sector can be for AR.
This week, at its developer's conference, Samsung took the wraps off a new tool from Wacom that bestows the S-Pen with AR powers, as well as its own entry to the AR cloud market called Project Whare.
This week, inside sources divulged details of how Apple nearly acquired Leap Motion, twice. Otherwise, companies offering or working on augmented reality technology had more successes than failures to talk about.
Niantic's most successful app, Pokémon GO, has become the first app to integrate the company's Real World Platform, the developer's AR cloud technology that enables multiplayer AR, persistent content, and occlusion with physical objects.
Facebook added a new feature that lets you post 3D versions of your portrait mode photos for all your family and friends to see on their smartphones, computers, and virtual reality goggles. These new 3D photos add a whole new dimension to your images with movement and more depth.
Unlike VR, when you're talking about augmented reality, describing what an experience is like can be incredibly difficult — primarily because the experiences are even more contextual than relatively static virtual worlds that don't involve real-world settings.
This week, Next Reality published profiles on the leaders in augmented reality hardware industry, with Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz topping the list. So, it should be no surprise that two app makers want to align themselves with Magic Leap's flagship product.
This week, Next Reality published its annual feature on the leaders in the augmented reality industry, the Next Reality 30. So it's no coincidence that the companies represented in the top four spots of the NR30 also made business headlines in AR this week.
A simple security flaw can allow an attacker to gain a strong foothold with little effort on their part. When a web application permits remotely hosted files to be loaded without any validation, a whole can of worms is opened up, with consequences ranging from simple website defacement to full-on code execution. For this reason, RFI can be a promising path to obtaining a shell.
Despite the launch of ARKit a year ago, and ARCore this year, a true killer app has not arrived for either platform, that's according to the head honcho for one of the leading development environments for 3D applications.
With the rise of website encryption (TLS), sniffing passwords from network activity has become difficult. However, it's still possible to quietly exfiltrate a target's network traffic in real time to extract passwords and sensitive information. Pertaining to macOS, there are two methods for retrieving traffic from a backdoored Mac.
Transferring hundreds of screenshots, webcam recordings, keystroke logs, and audio recordings between your VPS and a local Kali machine can be tricky. Services like Dropbox don't always have the best privacy policies and suffer data breaches just like any other website. To mitigate these risks, we'll use a secure, open source, and decentralized alternative.
When you drive along the deceptively sedate streets of Silicon Valley, there are few hints that all those nondescript office parks and low-rise buildings contain the very future of the planet, but they really do. On a recent trip to tech's epicenter, I found that out firsthand when I got to visit the offices of Meta, the startup that produced the Meta 2 augmented reality headset.
After backdooring a MacBook not protected by FileVault or using a fake PDF to gain remote access, an attacker may wish to upgrade their Netcat shell to something more fully featured. While a root shell allows attackers to remotely modify most files on the MacBook, Empire features some useful post-exploitation modules which make hacking Macs very easy.
Samsung Experience (better known as TouchWiz) can take some time to get used to when you switch to a Galaxy from another Android device. It's a bit heavy-handed with the features, and many consider the UI theme to be a little over the top. Thankfully, there are several stock settings that can dial this back.
Over the years, mobile gaming has become a phenomenon, rivaling in magnitude with its console and PC-based counterparts. We even have mobile versions of Fortnite and PUBG now, games that require lots of processing power to run. But when you just want a quick game to play in the grocery line or even on the toilet, try these simple, quick games that you can play right on your lock screen.
Our phones have evolved past a simple pocket computer. They have become more like Swiss Army Knives, opening up possibilities that were previously considered Sci-Fi material. Thanks to the recent push into augmented reality, a new world of tools is becoming available to mobile users.
Now that we've had a chance to jump into the Lumin SDK documentation at Magic Leap's Creator Portal, we now have much more detail about how the device will function and utilize software than any single piece of content released by Magic Leap to date.
In what's becoming something of a regular occurrence, Magic Leap has yet another internal, unforced error on its hands. Thankfully, this time it's not about legal skirmishes or theft, but a rather unusual break from company protocol that has been quickly swept under the rug.
BlackBerry has formally unveiled its latest flagship, the KEY2, during an exclusive event in New York. The Android-powered KEY2 retains its distinctive BlackBerry aesthetics with a physical QWERTY keyboard. Here's all the juicy details regarding Blackberry's followup to the venerable KEYone.
Because augmented reality is still so new to so many people, there are a number of would-be experts opining online, often repeating basic facts anyone with a spare 15 minutes can find on their own. That's why it's important to point out when someone delivers what could be considered the ultimate cheat sheet for ramping up your AR IQ if you're unfamiliar with the finer points of the space.
