While Vuzix is beefing up the processing power of its next-generation smartglasses with the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1, the company will also give its devices an upgraded display engine. At the Augmented World Expo today, the smartglasses maker announced that it will pair its wa ...more
Enterprise augmented reality software maker Scope AR is bringing the powers of its two productivity apps together like the Wonder Twins into the form of a single app. Announced at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara on Thursday, the merged app brings together Remote ...more
Apple released iOS 11.4.1 beta 1 to developers on Wednesday, May 30, just one day after the official release of iOS 11.4, which brought Messages in iCloud and AirPlay 2 to the public for the first time. There does not appear to be any new features in this first iOS 11.4.1 beta ...more
Google's MVNO carrier, Project Fi, can save you a ton of money in the right circumstances, but it's always had a limited selection of supported phones. Because the service uses Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular towers as its backbone, you could only use Project Fi with a Pixel ...more
New York-based startup CTRL-Labs has closed a $28 million Series A round of funding from Google parent Alphabet's GV and Amazon's Alexa Fund, among others, for its next-generation neural interface technology for AR/VR and robotics. CTRL-labs offers a twist on the brain contro ...more
As Facebook, Apple, Samsung, and others offer augmented reality selfie effects and content that challenge its platform, Snapchat has continued to innovate with its augmented reality capabilities. The latest example, released to the app's Carousel on Monday, is a Lens that rea ...more
Futureplay has soft-launched Battle Bombers Arena, giving mobile gamers a refreshing twist on MOBA by infusing it with simple but addicting gameplay based on the console classic Bomberman. Though only available in select European countries, this game can be played on your iPho ...more
Android has gotten significantly better at handling intrusive ads over the years. Things have gotten to the point to where these nuisances are largely a non-issue for most of us. However, there are still a few ad-laden apps that fall through the cracks — particularly the kind ...more
Uber is one of the best ride sharing services out there, allowing you to travel without needing to be tethered to a car of your own. Still, if you're a frequent flyer, you may get tired of entering the same few locations into your app every time you use it. Fortunately, Uber l ...more
We're starting to see more WhatsApp integration with apps that Facebook also owns. We got our first glimpse last year with the ability to share Instagram posts directly to WhatsApp contacts. Now, the same is being tested on the Facebook app itself, so users will be able to sha ...more
NBA 2K18 has been out for the iPhone for months, but its $7.99 price tag put it out of reach for many mobile gamers. There's light at the end of the tunnel now, as a free-to-play version is in the works as a soft-launch in New Zealand. If you can't bear the wait, you can play ...more
With the theatrical premiere of Deadpool 2 less than two weeks away, the hype train for the sequel to 2016's surprise R-rated hit is gaining steam, and augmented reality is on board for the ride. The marketing superheroes behind the movie have teamed up with 7-Eleven, which i ...more
Last month, we told you about U2's new augmented reality-powered music tour. But if you don't have the means to travel to the show, the group recently revealed an inside look at what it will be like and what inspired the band to dive into immersive technology. Sitting for an ...more
Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges! That is, unless they have augmented reality content embedded in them and give us full access to Facebook's annual F8 developers conference — in that case, yes, we'll take all the badges. The event kicked off on Tuesday, and continued ...more
In the latest installment in its burgeoning augmented reality journalism practice, The New York Times is bringing its readers closer to Mars and NASA's latest spacecraft set to travel to the red planet. When reading the article through the NY Times app for iOS or Android on d ...more
On Tuesday, on the one-year anniversary of the announcement of its AR Camera platform, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg revealed at the company's F8 developers conference that the platform will be extended to the company's Instagram and Messenger apps. Users of the In ...more
Riding the coattails of one of the biggest movies this year, the first edition of the new Moviebill augmented reality magazine will be available at Regal Cinema theaters nationwide this weekend alongside the release Avengers: Infinity War. Moviegoers will be able to scan the ...more
On Thursday, waveguide maker WaveOptics announced that semiconductor and microelectromechanical systems supplier EV Group (EVG) will provide the manufacturing infrastructure for the production of its waveguide displays designed to support lower-cost, third-party augmented real ...more
One downside to iOS 11's awesome built-in QR code scanner in the Camera app is its only been live for a short while. In its short life, there has already been a security vulnerability discovered that was an issue for at least the last 4.5 months, but Apple has finally patched ...more
Your best chance of getting to a destination on time during rush hour is to drive through relatively empty HOV lanes. Thankfully, if you're using Waze to navigate through traffic, you can easily locate HOV or HOT routes to optimize travel times by adding your toll passes in th ...more
French automaker Renault is tapping into the promotional machine for Solo: A Star Wars Movie by deploying an AR experience through Shazam that's triggered via synergistic advertising. To access the experience, users scan the Shazam code embedded on bus stop advertisements in ...more
Contrary to popular belief, augmented reality apps have been available for a while now. I remember using the Layar app (still available for iOS and Android) to explore nearby businesses and landmarks with varying success via an early-generation Android handset. It would be ha ...more
For social media platforms like Facebook, augmented reality represents a whole new art form with which users can express themselves online. Now, Facebook is giving those users a new brush. A new AR painting tool for Facebook Camera, which began rolling out to users on Monday, ...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
Taking photos that are actually printed and hung on a real wall, versus being shot and shared via a social wall, is a seemingly lost art, but PhotoBloom AR wants to change that with augmented reality. Through an online portal, customers can upload a video and associated targe ...more
One of the earliest players in the social virtual reality space, vTime, has just landed $7.6 million in new funding, which the company says is partially earmarked for developing and releasing an augmented reality version of its platform later this year. "Bootstrapped from lau ...more
Instagram is no stranger to stealing features from Snapchat. Stories, originally a Snapchat invention, feels more at home with Instagram today. Now, Instagram is attempting to repeat this feat with nametags, a way to quickly add new friends akin to Snapchat's Snapcodes. If yo ...more
Just weeks after being acquired by comedian turned producer Byron Allen for $300 million, The Weather Channel has tapped augmented reality studio The Future Group to integrate immersive augmented reality experiences into its broadcast content. Augmented reality made its live ...more
The business of enabling the development of augmented reality experiences appears to be as lucrative as AR app development itself. Apple is already reaping the rewards for its own AR toolkit, with more than 13 million installs of ARKit apps in the six months since its launch. ...more
Google's AI investment arm, Gradient Ventures, has joined a $10.5 million round of funding for Ubiquity6 and its platform for shared augmented reality experiences, just weeks after Google's GV fund backed a competing AR cloud platform. The round was led by Index Ventures, wit ...more
With the Google Maps API giving entertainment brands the means to build their own location-based AR games, Niantic is raising the bar for the genre with new updates to Pokémon GO. In a blog post published on Monday, Pokémon GO announced the addition of research tasks to the a ...more
With its recent acquisition of 3D gaming engine PlayCanvas, Snapchat parent Snap, Inc. appears to be preparing a challenge to the existing players in the world of game development, particularly in terms of augmented and virtual reality gaming. The acquisition appears to have ...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
Sketchfab, one of the leading 3D model aggregators, continues to defend its turf from encroachment by Google. This time, the company has deployed a new API that gives developers even easier access to Sketchfab's extensive library. With Sketchfab's download API, augmented and ...more
Going out to dinner on a Saturday night can be more trouble than it's worth when you find yourself waiting for hours on end just to be seated. Thankfully, Google Maps has some very useful data that can save you from a headache the next time you head out to your favorite restau ...more
Scope AR has decided to take its live remote assistance enterprise application, Remote AR, further into the mobile augmented reality realm by harnessing the powers of Google's recently released ARCore. While previously supporting devices like the HoloLens, ODG R7, as well as ...more
Magic Leap has reached a major milestone in the lead-up to the launch of its Magic Leap One: Creator Edition by opening access to its developer portal and software development kit (SDK) to all developers. In a Twitter post, the company announced that it has made the "technica ...more
The Galaxy S9 is a great phone powered by the Android ecosystem. This includes Google's family of apps — many of which overlap with Samsung's in functionality. This can lead to redundant apps that siphon resources from your phone, but fortunately, there's a way to dull some of ...more
If you have a Mac, you can use Apple's Handoff feature to open one of your Safari desktop tabs in Safari on your iPhone. But if you prefer to use Google Chrome as your desktop browser, whether or not that's because you have a Windows PC, you can't "hand off" open tabs from Chr ...more
When you visit a website in Safari, it's most likely keeping tabs on your browsing activity. It could be keeping track directly, or its third-party content providers and advertisers can be spying on you. All three could happen simultaneously. This enables them to serve you con ...more
Spring training has begun in earnest, and to mark MLB's soft debut, GLU has soft-launched a followup to the smash hit MLB Tap Sports Baseball 2017 in Canada. While MLB Tap Sports Baseball 2018 is still technically unavailable outside of Canada, you can actually play this game ...more
In hopes of strengthening its growing augmented reality team, Apple has reportedly hired Michael Abbott, an engineering and investment veteran with past ties to Twitter, Microsoft, Palm, and others. The report was surfaced by MacRumors, which translated a MacGeneration post o ...more
It's been a long time coming, but Tamagotchi has finally ditched its iconic toy egg and arrived as a mobile game. The new iteration is called My Tamagotchi Forever, and though it's currently only available in Canada, you can actually download the game anywhere and care for you ...more
A controversial video from Magic Leap's past has once again surfaced, but this time it comes with a lot more credibility and a good bit of excitement around the Magic Leap One headset. New Zealand's Weta Workshop has revealed that it will release the game "Dr. Grordbort's: In ...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
Master director Steven Spielberg's virtual reality epic Ready Player One is coming to theaters in just a few weeks, but you can get an early look at some of the best parts the latest trailer, "Come With Me," which was revealed on Thursday. But while the film is supposed to be ...more
New emojis are coming with the Android Oreo update for Galaxy S8 and S8+. Samsung Experience 9.0 has been updated to Emoji 5.0, adding 239 brand new emojis when you take into account gender and skin tone variants. While there are minor changes across the board, we wanted to fo ...more
Augmented reality software maker 8th Wall has closed a Series A funding round of $8 million in capital to feed the growth of its development platform. Founded by former Google and Facebook engineers, 8th Wall uses computer vision to enable six degrees of freedom tracking, lig ...more
Facebook just ratcheted up its ongoing augmented reality war against the competition by stealing away Google's director of product for AR, Nikhil Chandhok. In his new role, the executive will serve as Facebook's director of product on the company's Camera/AR team. Over the pa ...more
Over the past few days, we've learned a lot about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones. In addition to a full list of hardware specs, we have complete renders direct from renowned leaker Evan Blass. Of course, Samsung always has a few surprises up their sleeve, and ...more
Unsurprisingly, Google wants to be the caretaker for augmented reality on the web, and its latest move in this endeavor is a 3D model viewer prototype called Article that's designed to work across all web browsers. On traditional desktop PCs and mobile browsers, Article can e ...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
Apple pushed out iOS 11.2.5 beta 6 today for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch to developers and public beta testers. Last week two beta updates were rolled out, and this fast pace may indicate that iOS 11.2.5 is almost ready for prime time. Like most of the previous iOS 11.2.5 be ...more
Digital imaging company OmniVision Technologies and the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited (ASTRI) entered the CES fray this week with a new reference design for an augmented reality headset capable of 60 degrees field of view (FoV). T ...more
Apple released the fifth build of their iOS 11.2.5 beta software on Thursday to developers and public beta testers, just two days after the fourth beta. This quick beta release schedule may mean iOS 11.2.5 is almost ready for primetime. You can download the update right now i ...more
If you've read our list of the best email clients for iOS, you'll know Apple's Mail app doesn't cut it when it comes to third-party integration. If you want to use some of your favorite apps directly in your mail client's calendar, go with Outlook. Outlook will let you connec ...more
While Google has a water-resistant phone in the Pixel 2, its CES booth was anything but. According to Tech Crunch, Google had to shut down its two-level outdoor booth once it began to rain at the Las Vegas trade show. Even though Las Vegas is the driest city in the country, Mo ...more
Last week, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz teased his Twitter followers with some "fun and cool stuff" to share in the coming days. On Monday, he made good on that promise, sort of. If you're a fan of Sigur Rós, he hit the right note, but if you were expecting to see what the com ...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
In the years leading up to the release of the Apple Watch, we were frequently teased with concept designs of what Apple's smartwatch might look like. Of course, many of those outlandish designs were off the mark, but the attention to the idea itself hinted that the public was ...more