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It's already been a banner year for mergers and acquisitions in the augmented reality industry, with WaveOptics and Ubiquity6 among the notable companies acquired. Two of the more active M&A players, Snap and Epic Games, continued their respective buying sprees this week with ...more

The close of the second quarter of 2021 brought about a flurry of merger and acquisition and financing activity in the augmented reality industry, headlined by the acquisition of Ubiquity6 and JigSpace's new multimillion-dollar funding round. The week in AR news also saw acti ...more

Over the past few weeks, Google, Snap, and Facebook have all taken their turns to show off their new augmented reality technologies. This week, it was Apple's turn, with new AR features for iOS 15 along with new capabilities for developers. Meanwhile, Facebook's plans to laun ...more

While Apple introduced new AR features for iOS 15 and Object Capture for Reality Kit 2 during the WWDC 2021 keynote, updates for ARKit were curiously absent in the official presentation. That doesn't mean there isn't anything new coming to Apple's toolkit for mobile AR apps, ...more

The Deauther Watch by Travis Lin is the physical manifestation of the Wi-Fi Deauther project by Spacehuhn, and it's designed to let you operate the Deauther project right from your wrist without needing a computer. That's pretty cool if you want to do all the interesting thing ...more

Sure, Microsoft has mostly marketed its HoloLens headsets towards enterprises and developers, but we learned this week that, like every other tech giant, the company is working on a consumer-grade AR wearable. Speaking of consumer smartglasses, Apple made another strategic inv ...more

Niantic first unveiled its AR cloud back in 2018, using it to enhance the immersive capabilities of its gaming portfolio. Now, the company is expanding access to the system, allowing third-party developers to take advantage of next-generation augmented reality features for th ...more

Apple has a sterling reputation when it comes to managing its supply chain; it's where CEO Tim Cook proved his mettle to succeed Steve Jobs. Now, the company has made a strategic investment with a supplier that will be crucial to its future plans for AR wearables. While Apple ...more

Thanks to the grandest of puns, May the 4th is Star Wars Day. And what better way to pay tribute to the space opera than with the augmented reality superpowers of Snapchat. While Disney has used AR via Snapchat, Facebook, and Google, among other outlets, to promote Star Wars ...more

The Chicago Bulls may not be very relevant in the current NBA standings, but they do lead the league in one other area. With an assist from Nexus Studios, AT&T has debuted StatsZone, an augmented reality experience that presents game statistics in an immersive format, in the ...more

The concept of Metaverse, otherwise referred to as AR cloud, where a digital twin of the real world filled with virtual content anchored persistently for all to see, has been a sci-fi dream of futurists for years and an aim for most tech companies who are serious about AR. It ...more

Disney Plus shows WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier are both streaming hits, but the two series could not be more different in terms of giving fans a taste of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, the two titles do have another thing in common: Marvel Studios de ...more

Over the past three years, Epic Games has raised billions of dollars in funding on the success of Fortnite as well as Unreal Engine, one of the top 3D engines available for developing games and AR experiences. But, with its latest massive funding round, it has its eyes set on ...more

As if teasing its own smartglasses weren't enough, augmented reality gaming developer Niantic gave gamers a glimpse of how 5G speeds can revolutionize how they play mobile games in the near future. This week, the company revealed Codename: Urban Legends, a demo game built wit ...more

You might think that you have your microwave all figured out, but chances are you don't know all of its secrets. Some microwave tricks are truly hidden; obscure information nowhere to be seen in the user manuals. Other tricks are hiding in plain sight, often overlooked or toss ...more

Just as the NCAA men's basketball tournament is set to start later this month, USA Today has decided to trot out an augmented reality mini-basketball game to promote its bracket competition. And while USA Today is prolific publisher of AR news content through its own app, thi ...more

The year is still off to a roaring start, with augmented reality at the center of nearly everything, from enterprise solutions, to entertainment, to safety. In the realm of streaming, the Marvel universe got another dose of augmented reality marketing help thanks to Disney Pl ...more

The new WandaVision series is perhaps the hottest TV show on the Disney Plus streaming service since...well, its own The Mandalorian wrapped up its second season late last year. Now, after publishing AR experiences in partnership with Google to promote the latter, Disney has ...more

To assist developers and researchers in their efforts to create apps and services for automobiles, Volvo Cars has launched a new Innovation Portal with useful new tools and assets. Among the free resources featured on the Innovation Portal is a high-quality 3D model of the Vo ...more

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. At Magic Leap, the lemons are the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lemonade is a new solution for virtual meetings born out of social distancing. As reports of Apple's long-awaited AR wearable begin to kick up again (and designers continue ...more

While most established media brands are satisfied with copying Pokémon GO to jump into augmented reality gaming, at least one property is taking a slightly different approach. Launched this week, Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up is a mobile game fitting into the life simulati ...more

The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been felt in practically every business sector. Now, as we look back at the top augmented reality investments of 2020, the AR industry has been no exception. While the overall dollar value of this year's top 10 investments wa ...more

The USB Rubber Ducky is a well-known hacking device in the cybersecurity industry, but it needs to be preprogrammed before it can be used. That means it's not easy to issue commands to a target computer since you can't interact with it from afar after plugging it in. And if yo ...more

At the beginning of every year, Samsung drops a fantastic phone in the Galaxy S series, and then tries to top it with the Galaxy Note series in August. This year, Samsung had their work cut out for them. But they managed to improve on their predecessor and properly challenge A ...more

If you're a tech-savvy coding pro, you have a virtually limitless number of great career choices to choose from. Whether you're interested in working at a small tech startup, freelancing as a cybersecurity specialist, or founding the next Google, having a solid understanding o ...more

For over three decades, Microsoft's landmark program, Excel, has helped businesses accomplish tasks and problem solve quickly and efficiently. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or navigating a remote career, Excel can help you apply your business skills at a higher level. ...more

The Digispark is a low-cost USB development board that's programmable in Arduino and capable of posing as a keyboard, allowing it to deliver a number of payloads. For only a few dollars, we can use the Digispark to deliver a payload to a macOS computer that will track the Mac ...more

With the nation facing a shortage of ventilators for COVID-19 patients and no apparent ramp-up in the production of new ones, engineers, medical resistents, and do-it-yourselfers are sharing plans for homemade versions. But before you go online to start ordering parts for any ...more

An attacker can repurpose public MyBB forums to act as command-and-control servers. It only takes a few lines of code to configure a MacBook to fetch commands and send responses to any website the attacker desires. Before you keep reading, know that this project is not geared ...more

Despite making great phones for years, Sony continues to struggle to penetrate the US market. Sales volume has fallen year after year, with 2019 limited to only 5 million units sold globally. To help alleviate this drop, last year, Sony released the Xperia 5, the return to com ...more

It seems like all tech companies want to know where we are. Even Apple and Google have been caught abusing their location access on iOS and Android. Luckily, there are apps that can trick your phone into thinking it's somewhere it's not. As The New York Times recently detaile ...more

When Facebook launched its first hardware products last year, the Portal and Portal+ smart displays, the company mostly touted its video-calling features as it faced off against Amazon and its Echo Show. But Facebook also had an interesting feature that mostly flew under the ...more

A little over a year after emerging from stealth, augmented reality gaming startup Illumix has launched its first title using a familiar formula, but with a new twist. On Monday, the company, working in partnership with Scott Games, launched Five Nights at Freddy's AR Special ...more

They say it is always darkest before the dawn. If that's the case, then perhaps there's a light ahead for Magic Leap after more unfavorable news in the form of executive departures. One of Magic Leap's legal foes, Nreal, is already seeing brighter days, with Epic Games workin ...more

After three years and change, no one seems to be able to knock Pokémon GO off its augmented reality throne. Zombies, dinosaurs, and ghosts have all met defeat at the hands of the pocket monsters. Heck, not even the world's most popular wizard and Pokémon GO's developer can rep ...more

In a bold move, Samsung has decided to forgo the Galaxy S11 moniker and jump straight to the S20. Perhaps it's marketing for the new 20:9 aspect ratio and 120 Hz display, or maybe it's just the fact that it's releasing in 2020. Besides the number, Samsung is borrowing from Ap ...more

At Next Reality we mostly focus on augmented reality, but that doesn't mean we're not also absolutely obsessed with virtual reality, too. If the thing that's been keeping you from diving into the deep end of VR has been clunky tethered headsets or the expensive but necessary g ...more

It looks like Jaunt's pivot from VR to volumetric captures services for augmented reality experiences has paid off. That's because Verizon has now acquired the company for an undisclosed amount, per a brief announcement issued by Jaunt on Monday. Don't Miss: The Future of Au ...more

Unless you've been hiding under a (moon) rock for the past month, you already know that Saturday, July 20 is the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 lunar landing. And while it has been 50 years since man first visited the moon, no human has set foot on its surface since 197 ...more

Microsoft.com is one of the most extensive domains on the internet with thousands of registered subdomains. Windows 10 will ping these subdomains hundreds of times an hour, making it challenging to firewall and monitor all of the requests made by the operating system. An attac ...more

Players who have stuck around with location-based game Jurassic World Alive just got a new treat that makes the augmented reality experience even more fun. Available in an update (version 1.8) of the app via the App Store and Google Play, the game gains a new feature called S ...more

With the new navigation gestures in Android 10, you reclaim a lot of screen real estate that used to be occupied by the back, home, and recent apps buttons. But there's still a small bar on the bottom edge of the screen, and in most apps, it still sits atop a black background. ...more

During the recent Augmented World Expo (AWE), we had a chance to try out the Lenovo ThinkReality A6 AR headset. Unfortunately, the experience was all downhill from there. Meanwhile, Vuzix continues to pursue both enterprise and consumer customers with Vuzix Blade, with a new ...more

Motorola is a shell of its former self. In 2010, it had just released the Motorola Droid, a phone so popular it led to all Android phones being called "Droids" by non-techies. But there have been some rough years between then and now, and Motorola's latest "flagship" doesn't l ...more

Magic Leap and Samsung are putting their money where their augmented reality plans are, with the former acquiring an AR collaboration technology and the latter funding a waveguide display maker. Meanwhile, Lenovo and startup Tilt Five are preparing their own augmented reality ...more

The Windows 10 desktop and microphone can be livestreamed without using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) software and without opening any ports on the target computer. A hacker with low user privileges can monitor and exfiltrate a target's every move and private conversation in r ...more

While North has yet to add third-party app support to its Focals smartglasses, the company has been diligent as of late in its efforts to add more functionality to the bare-bones AR device. This week, North released the latest set of new functions designed to keep users enter ...more

Finland-based Rovio, one of the pioneers of mobile gaming, is now ready to break new ground in augmented reality with its Angry Birds franchise. Along with its AR development partner, Sweden-based Resolution Games, the publisher is following up Angry Birds FPS: First Person S ...more

The hugely successful S10 series of flagships may be a tough act to follow, but Samsung has proven that it's up to the task with the Galaxy Note 10. The latest phablet bearing the Note name is the first of its line to come with an even larger variant, and boasts an eye-pleasin ...more

Giving up your Wi-Fi password can be giving up more control than you think. Because of the way Chromecast and other IoT devices communicate, anyone on the same Wi-Fi network as your device can often make it do whatever they want. With a script called "Cast All the Things," we ...more

If you've ever spent any serious time examining the Chinese tech startup world, you know that it moves fast — very fast. The tech startups hailing from Beijing and Shenzhen are moving so fast that they're now in serious competition with Silicon Valley. The latest would-be com ...more

Signal is one of the best end-to-end encrypted messengers on the market. It offers robust security, keeps minimal information about its users, and is free to use. Switching to it as your main messenger can be a bit daunting, so to help, we created a guide to walk you through t ...more

The recent pitfalls and media fallout hitting Facebook hasn't stopped the social media giant from looking to the future. On Friday, the company revealed the acquisition of visual search startup GrokStyle, whose tool allows users to point their smartphone camera at objects lik ...more

The latest film addition in the American-produced Millennium series, The Girl in the Spider's Web, was just released on Blu-ray a few days ago. As you could expect, the movie has many hacking scenes throughout, just like the previous English and Swedish language movies centere ...more

Directory traversal, or path traversal, is an HTTP attack which allows attackers to access restricted directories by using the ../ characters to backtrack into files or directories outside the root folder. If a web app is vulnerable to this, an attacker can potentially access ...more

In 2018, augmented reality went from the vague promise of interesting things in the near future to tangible developments in software and hardware, proving that immersive computing is indeed the future. Traditional mobile apps on smartphones continued to maintain user attentio ...more

Magic Leap continues to launch new AR apps on its fledging app store before the door closes on 2018, and this time the app is a sequel from a veteran VR developer and early Magic Leap development partner. On Tuesday, Magic Leap announced via blog post that Luna: Moondust Gard ...more

Another contestant has emerged in the race to deliver a mainstream augmented reality car navigation system, with Silicon Valley-based Phiar picking up $3 million in seed funding to launch its own artificial intelligence-based mobile app by mid-2019. The Venture Reality (VR) F ...more

If you've grown bored of day-to-day hacking and need a new toy to experiment with, we've compiled a list of gadgets to help you take password cracking and wireless hacking to the next level. If you're not a white hat or pentester yourself but have one to shop for, whether for ...more

Hundreds of Windows 10, macOS, and Linux vulnerabilities are disclosed every single week, many of which elude mainstream attention. Most users aren't even aware that newly found exploits and vulnerabilities exist, nor that CVEs can be located by anyone in just a few clicks fro ...more