Beijing- and Seattle-based DataMesh have announced the release of a new enterprise geared mixed reality middleware — MeshExpert. This solution for collaborative interaction with dynamic data is made up of two primary components: MeshExpert Live!, a 4K mixed reality capture system built off of the Microsoft Spectator View, and MeshExpert DataMix, which offers the ability to blend different types of data with XR and mobile hardware.
After Ford's CEO Mark Fields' three-year tenure failed to keep up with the driverless industry and resulted in a 40% drop in shares since Field's took over in 2014, Ford is going in a new direction. Jim Hackett, who was previously chairman of Ford's self-driving division, has succeeded Fields as the company's new CEO.
Uber's legal team may have finally sold their engineering golden boy down the river as their war with Waymo continues. Anthony Levandowski isn't your average sacrificial lamb either — given the alleged stealing and all that — but Uber seems set on distancing themselves from this whole fiasco as fast as they can.
At Vision Summit 2017, UK-based Rewind, one of the recent additions to the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Partner Program, showed off a HoloLens application called "Flight Deck" that genuinely blew me away. The idea of watching a live-action sports experience on a coffee table has been explored and mocked up, but Rewind not only has done it, they will be releasing it later this year.
Samsung has some competition as LG may be incorporating OLED panels for their new flagship V30 launching later this year.
Engineer Anthony Levandowski has officially been kicked off Uber's driverless program by a judge as the company's legal war with Waymo continues.
Throughout this NR50 series, we have talked about the incredible growth the augmented and mixed reality space has seen in the last year. More devices, software, developers, and use-cases seem to arrive daily. For this growth to have occurred, it took the work of many people, from many different backgrounds and skill sets — and Next Reality wants to recognize them for all that they have done and are doing.
Intel launched their Advanced Vehicle Lab in Silicon Valley this week, and the tech giant is now on the hunt for potential partners.
While the technology continues to mature, businesses from various industries continue to adopt augmented reality to improve the efficiency of business processes. In this edition of Brief Reality, as conference season continues, we see examples of augmented reality applied to logistics processes and marketing of industrial supplies, as well as the topic of discussion at another trade show.
Verizon could be getting in on the autonomous vehicle party, judging by its recent investment in driverless software company Renovo Motors.
One thing you don't see often in the driverless industry are partnerships. When automakers are in the news together, it usually means drama. However, an important partnership between Nissan and Mobileye was announced today. One that has the potential to make driverless cars on the road better and safer.
Every Friday, Next Reality reviews the latest headlines from the financial side of augmented and mixed reality. This weekly Market Reality column covers funding announcements, mergers and acquisitions, market analysis, and the like. This week's column starts with a stock price that's performing well for one company — one that HoloLens developers should know quite well.
In March, we wrote about the growing threat of yellow fever in Brazil. At the time, the disease had killed just over a 100 people. Unfortunately, the disease has only spread since then with many more people infected and more killed.
The Broadway musical War Paint is teaming with augmented reality cosmetics app YouCam Makeup to promote the show on iOS and Android devices. The musical, which centers on the famous rivalry between Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, two cosmetics industry pioneers, has been the talk of Broadway since its premiere in March 2017.
Hackers are good at what they do—some can even use the way you move your phone to guess a 4-digit PIN in five attempts or less. That's why most of us with compatible hones use the fingerprint scanner. It's just much more secure. Or is it?
It seems nowadays there's no limit to what type of companies are looking to invest in augmented reality. Given both the positive outlook on the future of AR, and its reported benefits for efficiency in employees, this makes sense. Safran, an international corporation with three main sectors—aerospace, defense, and security—is one such company taking the plunge into incorporating AR in their business.
Mercedes-Benz's parent company, Daimler, announced their intention today to put self-driving taxis on the road in three years or less in a partnership with Bosch.
Augmented reality seems to be the talk of the town lately, with everything from glasses to furniture stores prepping to implement exciting, new AR technology. Well now, it looks like even our food is getting a makeover for the augmented reality future.
Google Assistant has introduced tappable shortcuts on the Google app for Android, iOS, and Google.com this week.
Judges at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Accelerator Pitch Event named Lampix the winner in the Augmented and Virtual Reality category, conference organizers announced today. The ninth annual competition, which took place over the weekend in Austin, Texas, pitted 50 startup finalists against each other in 10 technology categories.
Xiaomi phones run a skinned version of Android known as MIUI, which, over the years, has been a popular custom ROM. One of the standout features Xiaomi has added to the mix is something called Quick Ball, which lets you navigate your phone by swiping inward from a small circle that resides on the edge of your screen.
One of the biggest hurdles for making touchscreen text input easy on the user has been finding a simple way to move the cursor around. With all the advancements in mobile technology, we're still left fumbling around with tiny arrow indicators or magnifying glasses when we need to add a letter to a word we've already typed. But thankfully, developer Ouadban Youssef has found a better way.
Over a billion people use WhatsApp, which makes it the most popular standalone messaging service out there. But if you're one of the many people whose group of friends relies on WhatsApp for all communication, chances are, you have several years-long messaging threads with all sorts of random pictures and GIFs cluttering up the place.
If you're part of the Windows 10 Insider Program, build 15048 launched this morning, and included a nice big unannounced surprise. You can now launch the Mixed Reality Portal and enable the simulation to try out mixed reality right from your PC, even if you don't have one of the new Acer dev kits.
LineageOS, the successor to the wildly popular CyanogenMod custom ROM, is adding an interesting new feature that could potentially save lots of juice when your battery is running low. When enabling "Extreme power saver" mode, which can be set to kick in automatically at 15%, you'll soon have the option of changing your kernel's performance profile as well.
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.
If your phone has an AMOLED display, it doesn't waste any battery to power black portions of the screen. This is because the individual pixels that make up an AMOLED screen emit their own light, which means the backlight you'd find behind a traditional LCD screen is not present. In other words, showing a full-screen black image on an AMOLED phone is like turning your display completely off.
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.
Leave it to some lazy college kids to attempt to figure out a way to brew a pot of coffee without leaving the couch.
This week, Dr. Sung-Hoon Hong, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, announced at the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego that not only does Samsung have a new virtual reality headset coming, but that Samsung intends to enter the field of augmented reality, too. In fact, Hong talked very little about virtual reality and instead spoke at length about Samsung's move into augmented reality.
Unity released the Beta 5.6 on December 13 with a bunch of new upgrades in the works, including support for Vulkan, better instancing options, and more improvements to particles—to name just a few that are potentially relevant to the mixed reality community. And today, December 15, Unity has just released the EditorVR that we reported on a few weeks ago as a part of their "Experimental" builds.
Today, December 7, it was officially announced that Magic Leap has found their replacement for the recently departed Brian Wallace. Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz has tapped Brenda Freeman, former EVP and Chief Marketing Officer of National Geographic Channel, as their new Chief Marketing Officer.
Microsoft and Unity have been working closely to make sure that HoloLens and Windows Holographic are supported closely with the popular game engine. Unity released a special HoloLens Technical Preview version earlier this year based off of Unity 5.4, but the update today of the main Unity app, version 5.5, has all those Holographic enhancements built right in.
We've highlighted the projects of Wavelength Studios a few times over recent months for their work in the augmented and mixed reality space. Since receiving their HoloLens headsets, they've been hard at work on both development community projects as well as efforts for clients. This brings us to their latest work—a way to control holograms on the HoloLens with our pocket-based modern miracles, also know as smartphones.
According to multiple users on Reddit, the Pixel and Pixel XL's camera can have some serious auto-focus issues if you're using a certain type of case with Google's new flagships. When the problem occurs, your camera app will refuse to settle on a focus point, making almost everything in the frame blurry. Redditor HeshoMike uploaded a video of the phenomenon, and you can see it in action here:
Visualization is one of the obvious commercial applications for technology such as Microsoft's HoloLens. The ability to see the assets of a project in different scales—from micro to larger-than-life—with a quick air tap will play a large part in the coming augmented reality revolution. Whether the assets are art for a game, interior design, raw financial data, or architecture, data visualization will play an important role in the future. This is due, in part, to our ability to absorb informat...
Security journalist Brian Krebs recently suffered a record-breaking DDoS attack to his his website, clocking in at or near a whopping 620 Gbps of traffic. Krebs' site was down for over 24 hours, and it resulted in him having to leave his CDN behind.
The HTC Vive and Valve's SteamVR make for one of the more compelling virtual reality experiences, mixing in real-world motion tracking with the immersive headset. But third-party manufacturers couldn't tap into the Vive's full potential and make creative new peripherals—until now.
When you're on the road, the last thing you need to be doing is fumbling around with your phone. But with online radio services like Spotify and Google Play Music, you almost have to use your phone to play music through your stereo, because the in-dash head units on most cars lack the ability to connect to these services.
You might not think a mixed reality headset could help kids eat their vegetables, but that's the exact premise behind Habit.at—the app that won the "Social Good" category at the 2016 HoloHacks competition in Los Angeles.
