Users of Epson's smartglasses can now tell their devices to "talk to the hand" when it comes to passwords and authentication. The Moverio BT-300 smartglasses now support PalmID, a biometric authentication platform from Redrock Biometrics, for device unlocking. Using the front ...more
Microsoft's Monday keynote introduced the fourth generation of the company's Kinect sensor during Build 2018 in Seattle. The latest iteration, Project Kinect for Azure, gives enterprise companies the power of spatial understanding for connected devices in their factories and ...more
During Snap Inc.'s quarterly earnings report, released on Tuesday, the company disclosed that it snagged a revenue total of $230.8 million for the first quarter of 2018, an increase of 54% compared to last year, largely fueled by its augmented reality offerings and other adver ...more
Magic Leap loves to stoke mystery around its still unreleased product, the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition, and now we've found yet another piece of the puzzle in the form of an Easter egg on the company's website. When you hit one of Magic Leap's 404 error pages, you see a s ...more
If you've unlocked your iPhone lately and noticed some apps aren't fully installed anymore, you're not alone. After updating my device recently to a newer version of iOS 11, I didn't immediately understand what caused a few of my games to uninstall themselves. It turns out, th ...more
Another AR cloud candidate has emerged in YOUAR, a startup that has developed a new system that enables persistent augmented reality experiences on iPhones and Android devices. Compatible with ARKit, ARCore, and other computer vision systems, YOUAR's UberCV system uses comput ...more
While Magic Leap may have plans to eventually introduce sign language translation for smartglasses in the near future, students at New York University have demonstrated that such a feat is possible today with a smartphone and a prototype app. Using computer vision and augment ...more
When I'm with my friends on the weekend, we always end up Snapping shots of one another, adding in whatever stickers and lenses we've accumulated over the last week. But these filters are fleeting, so it's always a challenge to keep up with the best new ones. If you want to ge ...more
In the weeks following Google's AR toolkit launch last month, the availability of quality ARCore apps has been somewhat limited. That changed on Tuesday, as a flurry of new and updated apps arrived on the Play Store, including some AR experiences available exclusively on Andro ...more
The NCAA College Basketball Tournament, colloquially known as March Madness, is arguably the most exciting postseason format in US sports, and the team behind Thyng want to take advantage of the annual event with AR content. The Thyng app for ARKit-compatible iPhones and iPad ...more
The S9 and S9+ are both fantastic phones. However, there's no getting around the fact that the S9+ has its advantages. In fact, it's an objectively better smartphone than its smaller counterpart — Samsung has given the S9+ features not found in the S9, meaning you'll be missin ...more
Before you read further, you may want to make sure you're wearing brown pants if you scare easily. Developer Abhishek Singh conjured an augmented reality experience that recreates the spine-tingling scene from The Ring where (spoiler alert) the ghost of Samara (or Sadako, fro ...more
A recent update to Facebook's News Feed could significantly broaden its reach when it comes to delivering augmented reality content. In a post on its developer's blog on Tuesday, the company announced that it has adopted the industry-standard gITF 2.0 format for 3D posts on i ...more
A relatively new feature in Snapchat, having been first introduced in February 2018, is GIF support. These new animated stickers, straight from a partnership with Giphy, came to the app about a month after Instagram received GIF capabilities. If you've used Instagram's version ...more
The Microsoft HoloLens has a fairly passionate, yet relatively small group of users pushing the developer-centric device forward, mostly spreading the word about the device through word of mouth and meetups. But this weekend, during the annual NBA All-Star festivities, we got ...more
As a developer, before you can make augmented-reality robots that move around in the real world, controlled by a user's finger, you first need to learn how to harness the basics of designing AR software for a touchscreen interface. In recent years, the vernacular for referrin ...more
Before The New York Times brought augmented reality to its iPhone app, the only way Winter Olympics fans could get this close a view to the world's best athletes would be to acquire a press pass. Just days after previewing its augmented reality content strategy, the Times has ...more
Fans of The Walking Dead can now kill time until the series returns from its winter hiatus by raising walkers from the labels on bottles of wine influenced by the show. With the Living Wine Labels app for iOS or Android, fans can unlock augmented reality content embedded in l ...more
If you love to hear yourself talk, you can now enjoy seeing your words materialize in augmented reality with an ARKit-compatible iPhone or iPad. A new app called Word Vomit 3D uses the speech recognition API of iOS to take in what the user says and regurgitate it into the rea ...more
Following up on a preview of the deal we reported during last week's CES, Dell has officially announced the details around its role as the first company to resell the Meta 2 augmented reality headset. The partnership gives Dell an AR offering, alongside its bread and butter P ...more
With today's augmented reality experiences, we can see and hear virtual content, but Ultrahaptics wants you to be able to feel those experiences, too. The company has partnered with Meta Company to pair its ultrasound-based haptic feedback system with the Meta 2 augmented rea ...more
Just a day after the release of the iPhone X, the music-meets-comedy pastime known as Animoji Karaoke quickly emerged as one of the popular (albeit frivolous) features used to justify spending $1,000 for Apple's newest smartphone. Now, that brilliant idea has been taken to th ...more
To promote Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Disney and Lucasfilm released virtual porgs into the wilds of Snapchat via a Sponsored Lens on Sunday. The Lens placed a porg in your personal space via the rear-facing camera. Using the front-facing camera, the Lens also equipped users wi ...more
Rabbit ears and dog noses are fun and all, but Kay Jewelers is here to class up Snapchat. Claiming a first among the jewelry market, Kay Jewelers has launched a Sponsored Lens that lets Snapchatters virtually try-on three necklaces. A pucker of the lips triggers a virtually-b ...more
Christmas came early for Apple, as the company was awarded more than 40 patents by the US Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday, including one covering a system for compositing an augmented reality construct based on image recognition. The patent (US 9,824,495) covers a syst ...more
One of the best parts of being an Android user is the countless awesome features. Many of these features are well-known and user-facing, like custom icon packs and launchers, but some get lost in the shuffle. Back at Google I/O 2016, Android Instant Apps were introduced to dev ...more
Virtual reality headsets aren't new, but they may be something you or someone on your holiday shopping list hasn't experienced yet. If you're going to dive into the world of smartphone-based virtual reality, the best time to do it is during Black Friday when all the good sales ...more
While AR apps by Modiface and Perfect Corp. have made it easier for people to shop for makeup without setting foot in a store, MAC Cosmetics wants to give its brick-and-mortar customers the same experience. The makeup giant just made its virtual try-on mirror, featuring 29 cu ...more
As if Amazon didn't already make it easier to buy things from home than in a store, the company has now given shoppers yet another reason to avoid the holiday rush with an ARKit update to its iPhone app. While Amazon may have lagged behind IKEA in arriving to the ARKit party, ...more
The Pixel 2 has a number of new unique features. One of the most interesting is the Now Playing option to identify songs you hear on a daily basis. Now Playing displays the artist and title of songs playing in the background of your day and shows this information on the lock s ...more
There aren't many people who will believe that a prosthetic zipper face or gunshot wound to the eye (disgusting as they are) are real, but greyscale from Game of Thrones? That'll really unsettle people for awhile because it totally looks like an actual, honest-to-God infection ...more
With a pair of new APIs and low-latency media servers, Twilio's Programmable Video platform could soon help ARKit and ARCore app developers build shared AR experiences between multiple users. By synchronizing AR content with audio and video communications in real time, Twilio ...more
Leaks are seemingly inevitable for smartphone makers these days. The OnePlus 5T, the successor to the OnePlus 5, is no exception to this rule. Last week, we witnessed leaked photos showing off the 5T's rumored "edge-to-edge" display. Today, leaks on OppoMart's 5T preorder page ...more
IKEA won't be alone among ARKit apps for visualizing home décor and improvements when iOS 11 arrives next week. Unlike IKEA or Lowe's Home Improvement, Cambria and Markilux are hardly household names (no pun intended). Yet, with tools like ARKit and Google's ARCore, AR apps a ...more
When Apple introduced ARKit earlier this year, they trotted out IKEA as one of the companies it was working with to build an augmented reality app that lets customers see furniture as it would appear in their home. While the Swedish furniture monger did not make an appearance ...more
One of the byproducts of the success of Pokémon Go was the viral images that made the rounds on social media of people putting Pikachus, Charmanders, and their brethren in compromising positions. Snapchat has a similar claim to fame, most recently with the inexplicable popular ...more
Two companies behind a number of augmented reality devices have joined forces to develop a 3D depth-sensing camera system that will facilitate computer vision capabilities for augmented/virtual reality experiences and more. Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., whose processors power ...more
Ride-sharing firm Lyft says it will continue to rely on drivers in the near and long term even as it replaces them with driverless cars, Taggart Matthiesen, Lyft's director of product, said during a Podcast with Recode. In other words, Matthiesen says Lyft plans to offer oppo ...more
Drones are a fairly new craze to hit the nation. While they are accessible to the general population, good drones still typically cost a ton of money and despite all the fun they are, it's sometimes not worth it to actually buy one. If you're one of those people who would love ...more
The fourth and final beta version of Android O just made its debut, and the biggest change is what appears to be a new code name. When you access Android 8.0's version number Easter egg, you'll be greeted by ... a cartoon octopus. Octopus starts with the letter "O," and Googl ...more
One of the best features in Super Mario Run is the ability to unlock other notable characters from the classic series on iPhone or Android. Each playable character in Super Mario Run has a slightly different skill set — be it speed or jumping — which can come in handy in certa ...more
Germany-based Pupil Labs has jumped into the UX and control deep-end with a range of products that allow the user to add eye tracking to not only their existing augmented and virtual reality head-mounted displays but computers as well. This type of technology can add a new dep ...more
Mira Reality unveiled the Mira Prism yesterday and people immediately got excited about it. The Mira Prism uses no electronics besides your iPhone and it works pretty simply. You have a semi-transparent screen in front of your face. Once you open the Mira app on your phone, y ...more
At the end of June, Unity 2017.1, the newest version of the popular 3D development engine, went live. And with that release, it brought out some very cool new features like Timeline and Cinemachine, to name a few. Now, for those of us that develop with Unity and follow the bet ...more
As we all know, and certainly have marked on our calendars, it's World Emoji Day! Considering that over five billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook Messenger alone, emojis deserve to be celebrated, and Apple's doing just that. On this monumentous day, the tech giant is gift ...more
For those of us on the fast ring of the Windows Insider Program — Microsoft's continual beta program for the Windows operating system — the constant updates can be a bit of a pain. But there is a trade-off. We get to try the new features long before they come out to the public ...more
I can't stand trying to use my phone in direct sunlight. It drives me crazy — I just want to get through a game of Sonic, but I can't see where I'm going. No one has it harder than I do. But my troubles might soon be over, as researchers are developing anti-glare films for sma ...more
There's a general belief that augmented and mixed reality is going tied to enterprise solutions for the foreseeable future, and most developers in the field are focused on business use-cases. Without a dramatic breakthrough in the next couple of years that will likely be the c ...more
Finding the perfect lip color can be a difficult task, to say the least. Thankfully, we're living in a world with augmented reality, where it's possible to try on lipstick from different brands at home. How? It's possible now thanks to Meitu, a company that originally launche ...more
Thanks to a $100 million deal, you could be seeing more original shows on your Snapchat soon. Already, Snap has been producing super short shows in order to compete with social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook who have also been attempting to create their own content. ...more
It looks like all the unregulated fun and games we were having promoting products on Instagram is about to get, well ... regulated. According to a new report by Mediakix, 93% of celebrities on Instagram are not in compliance with the Federal Trade Commission when it comes to p ...more
From Instagram bot farms in China all the way to vending machines in Moscow that promise to sell you fake followers — the Facebook-owned empire is attracting the attention of the world around. When it comes to Russia especially, the country seems to be developing a little crus ...more
You were the chosen one, Snapchat! The new download numbers for the social media app show just how hard it will be to bring them back to the light after the rise of the Instagram empire. Last month we reported that Snapchat's Download numbers had fallen 16%, bringing the num ...more
New York City may not be the friendliest city, but with the apps Via and Curb now letting users ride-share in the city's yellow taxis, New Yorkers can expect to snuggle up close in the back of a cab next to complete strangers. That's right, get ready to feel the love. In the ...more
You're working on your iPhone or playing an awesome game when you receive a notification. You take too long to look up from your activity, so before you get a chance to see what's up, the notification is gone. Persistent notifications won't disappear on you like the default di ...more
A new dating advice site, WittyThumbs, launched today that lets users offer advice to others as well as seek it; the site combines that collaboration with advice from designated dating experts. WittyThumbs lets you upload screenshots of messages to their site and crowdsource ...more
At the 2017 Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara today, smartglasses maker Epson introduced two new augmented reality headsets from its Moverio line of products. The Epson Moverio BT-350 augmented reality smartglasses are aimed to be shared among multiple users. It can p ...more
Nobody likes ads, especially when they're tailored to your browsing history like the promoted content posts on Twitter. These deceptive advertisements are injected into your feed, trying to hijack your attention with clickbaity headlines and distracting images. You most certai ...more
Instagram just added another nail in the coffin for Snapchat. It looks like it's the AR platforms final hurrah as IG has snapped up the app's last good feature: its AR selfie filters. Instagram just combined all the good about Snapchat into one platform eliminating the former ...more
Buying a smartphone used is an excellent way to save money, but those savings come with a risk that your seller isn't as forthcoming as they claim. You don't want to end up buying a stolen smartphone because it might not work correctly ... and, you know, it's wrong. Luckily, t ...more