Augmented reality avatars that mimic facial expressions are no longer the exclusive province of Animojis on the iPhone X or AR Emojis from Samsung. Camera app Snow has added its own alternative to Apple and Samsung's features, which it also calls AR Emoji, for iOS and Android. ...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
Even in augmented reality, Wile E. Coyote still can't catch the Road Runner. The latest AR experiment from developer Abhishek Singh brings the classic Looney Tunes duo into the real world. A recent demo video shared on Twitter and YouTube shows the pair running around a park ...more
A newly-filed patent application from Disney Enterprises, Inc. teases more augmented reality lightsaber duels, either for at-home gaming or for the media behemoth's forthcoming Star Wars theme park. The patent, titled "Augmented Reality Interactive Experience," describes a sy ...more
A burner number isn't just for criminals and cheating spouses. In this digital world, with many of our interactions being conducted online, a throwaway phone number acts as a buffer — it lets you enjoy the web without having to give out your personal information, such as real ...more
Amazon Web Service's do-it-yourself tool for building augmented reality experiences and VR has graduated from beta and is now available to all interested users. Unveiled at the AWS re:Invent developer conference last year, Amazon Sumerian is billed as software that lets anyon ...more
Incognito Mode is a privacy feature that was popularized by Google Chrome, and it recently made its way to GBoard. Now it's coming to the YouTube app to help make your video watching experience truly private. While Google initially rolled the feature out slowly, Incognito Mod ...more
We've been able to download our Facebook data onto our computers for a while now, but now you can do so right from the comfort of your iPhone or Android phone. With it, you'll be able to integrate your data into other apps that support it or even just download it before you de ...more
While I love Spotify, I don't like it devouring my data plan when streaming music away from a Wi-Fi network. If you have the foresight or time to download Spotify tracks for offline playback later, great. For those of you who like to listen to your music more randomly like I d ...more
Kitten Planet, a spin-off company that grew up in Samsung's C-Lab incubator, has developed a connected toothbrush that teaches and motivates children to brush their teeth better via augmented reality while tracking their performance. Called Brush Monster, the $49 toothbrush c ...more
Another AR cloud savior has emerged this week in Fantasmo, a startup that wants to turn anyone with a smartphone into a cartographer for spatial maps. The company's camera positioning standard (CPS) captures spatial data through your device's camera. With this data stored in ...more
If you are an active player of Pokémon GO, you may soon be capturing more than just virtual pocket monsters. When it comes to mapping the world, Niantic does not have the fleet of mapping cars that its former parent company, Google, has at its disposal. But it does have a com ...more
Smartphones are still "phones," which means communicating with others is usually a primary use. Ranging from a simple "hi" to a more personal conversation and even sharing passwords, our messages should remain private so that only the intended recipient sees their content. Whi ...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
Last week, we told you about Microsoft's Alex Kipman and his nomination for the annual European Inventor Award, presented by the European Patent Office (EPO). And while that's big news in and of itself, it turns out we overlooked a very important detail buried in the EPO's vid ...more
Instagram integrated Stories back in 2016, and it flew right by Snapchat as a whole, becoming a bigger success itself than the whole entire Snapchat app. Still, the constant bombardment of information can be tiring in Instagram, so much so that you may want to mediate what Sto ...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
Following San Francisco-based Occipital's successful Structure Sensor Kickstarter campaign, the release of its Bridge AR/VR headset, as well as a string of technology and company acquisitions, the company has built a rather strong name for itself in the AR community. And now, ...more
You really can't beat Google Photos. Not only does it give you free unlimited cloud storage and let you search for almost any object in one of your pictures, but it also packs a few powerful editing tools. Among these is a dead-simple way to create your own animated GIFs out o ...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
Upon Google's release of ARCore in February, the platform wasn't only playing catch-up with Apple and ARKit in terms of downloads, but it also lagged in capabilities, as Apple already had vertical surface recognition and image recognition on the way with ARKit 1.5 for a March ...more
While some in the augmented reality space are tweeting about future amazing immersive experiences and others are showing off cool experiments, Microsoft continues to move forward with tangible business solutions right now that show how the HoloLens can improve business. In th ...more
Scavenging for weapons and supplies in PUBG adds to the element of excitement and dread of the unknown. But this feeling can quickly turn into annoyance as you attempt to swap your weapon for a better one on the ground, only to automatically pick up the gun you just dropped ag ...more
The latest update to the Christie's app for iPhones and iPads extends its augmented reality capabilities to the famed private art collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller. The overall collection includes the works of Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Diego Rivera, ...more
The annual Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is one of those events that everyone talks about, so an augmented reality experience in the festival's mobile app and from one of its headlining acts, Eminem, basically means the technology is officially cool. The iOS versio ...more
Apple released the second beta for iOS 11.4 on Monday, April 16. Its release comes eighteen days after the company pushed the first 11.4 beta to iPhones, as well as the official build of iOS 11.3. This beta fixes issues with AirPlay, Music, and Keychain, and it also adds a new ...more
On April 3, 2018, Snapchat announced that the phone and video calling feature that's long been a feature of one-on-one calls would be coming to group chats. Well, late on Monday, April 17, the feature was finally pushed out to everyone for Snapchat groups on Android and iPhone ...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
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
The augmented reality and VR arm of Verizon, Envrmnt, wants to make it really easy for anyone to create AR apps. AR Designer is a web-based tool with a drag-and-drop interface that enables non-developers to import 3D assets, build ARKit and ARCore apps, and publish them to th ...more
Snapchat has released three new augmented reality Lenses that boast uber-accurate face tracking courtesy of the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X and ARKit. Starting on Friday, professional wrestler-style face paint, a Day of the Dead-inspired mask with gold roses, and a golde ...more
What's black and white, sounds like actress Kristen Bell, and is standing in your living room talking to your kids right now? Don't worry, that's just Genius the Panda, an augmented reality character from the Yakables app for iPhones and iPads. Using ARKit to place the animat ...more
It's no secret that iOS 11 is one buggy piece of software. Remarkably, even after three major updates, we're still seeing issues with our iPhones. This time, the glitches have come for 3D Touch on iPhones running the new iOS 11.3 update. The issue occurs when locking an iPhon ...more
While Apple usually sets the precedent for its consumers to follow, the iPhone SE returned the company's iconic smartphone to a small form factor, one that had been ditched by the iPhone 6 and beyond. However, it appears Apple is finished with 4-inch phones for good, as the iP ...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
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
At Apple's education event in Chicago on Tuesday, augmented reality stood at the head of the class among the tech giant's new offerings for the classroom. The company showcased a number of ARKit-enabled apps that promise to make learning more immersive. For example, the AR mo ...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
For the longest time, the only clickable link you could throw up on Instagram was in your profile's bio, and that's still true for a lot of users. The only way to add a clickable link aside from the aforementioned one is in an Instagram story, where users checking out your sto ...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
Samsung introduced AR Emojis in the Galaxy S9, largely as a response to the iPhone X's Animojis. However, they appear to be taking on a life of their own by integrating a variety of custom AR Emojis. Among those are ones from the PyeongChang Olypmics and even Mickey Mouse. By ...more
Franchises left and right are releasing Pokémon Go-style augmented reality games, and Google is making it even easier to churn out the apps. Announced today via a company blog post, the Google Maps API now enables developers to build their own location-based games using Maps ...more
If you're playing word association with the terms "augmented reality" and "automobiles," your first thoughts probably center on navigation displays in cars or virtual models of exotic vehicles. Capital One plans to shift its customers' preconceptions of AR in cars to the purc ...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
Samsung's Galaxy S9 has the best smartphone display among any in its class, beating out the likes of the Google Pixel 2 XL and iPhone X. However, Samsung doesn't unlock the true power of its screen out of the box. To do that, you'll need to rummage through a few settings on yo ...more
Most Android phones don't even have an Oreo beta yet, but that's not stopping Google from releasing the preview to their next big update. Android Pie is here for developers to test, and with it, one of the more controversial additions in the Android world today — the notch. W ...more
Whenever Japan does something new in tech, the cute factor is almost always taken into account. The same holds true for augmented reality, as Yahoo! Japan has just revealed its take on AR map navigation with a new AR Mode. Like other versions of AR mapping that we've seen bef ...more
For all of its advantages, Facebook Messenger isn't the best for people who like their privacy. The popular app lets all your Facebook friends know when you're online by default, as well as how long you've been idle, making it impossible to check up with one person without lea ...more
The fourth beta for iOS 11.3 was released by Apple to developers and public beta testers on Monday, March 5. The update comes just under two weeks after the company released beta 3 on Feb. 20, which mostly added bug and stability patches. It appears that beta 4 is much of the ...more
It turns out that coming up groundbreaking technology and raising billions may actually be the easy part for Magic Leap, as a new report has revealed yet another legal entanglement at the Florida-based company. In an article posted late on March 2, Business Insider claims to ...more
It's human nature to wonder if the grass is greener on the other side. This is no more true than for people who use iPhones, and those who use Galaxy S phones. While iPhones were initially the gold standard for smartphones, Samsung's phones equal them in many ways and surpass ...more
This week, two companies preparing the most anticipated augmented reality devices for consumers were the subject of reports regarding strategic moves to put them in better positions to move those products forward. Magic Leap is reportedly seeking an extension of its last roun ...more
For quite some time, popular messaging apps like Snapchat have had features that let you place stickers on photos and videos to add time and location-based information. To catch up, WhatsApp has now added the same functionality to its messaging platform in an effort to remain ...more
As far as overall security updates are concerned, we all know that iOS reigns supreme over Android. But just how bad do Android devices fare against Apple in general? A recent report will have you second guessing some companies the next time you're in the market for a handset. ...more
Thanks to Samsung Experience 9.0 on the Galaxy S8 (AKA TouchWiz Oreo), we know the upcoming Galaxy S9 is going to enjoy some of the new keyboard changes coming to Samsung's iteration of Android 8.0. Those who preorder the device on March 2 or pick it up on March 16 can expect ...more
As part of its ARCore release announcement, Google also revealed a forthcoming app that's sure to excite those who celebrate '80s pop culture. That app is Ghostbusters World, which is coming later this year from Sony Pictures Entertainment Consumer Products, Ghost Corps (the ...more