Labs

When you drive along the deceptively sedate streets of Silicon Valley, there are few hints that all those nondescript office parks and low-rise buildings contain the very future of the planet, but they really do. On a recent trip to tech's epicenter, I found that out firsthand ...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

The venture arms of Samsung and Verizon Ventures, along with Comcast, are among the strategic investors backing startup Light Field Lab and its glasses-free holographic displays in a $28 million Series A funding round Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital led the funding ...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

In a press event this past week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, California, Unity Labs, the experimental and forward thinking arm of Unity, announced an upcoming toolset for developers in the augmented, mixed, and virtual reality space called the XR Foundat ...more

The development of virtual reality at Facebook has been evolving lightspeed in the last few years. But while a relatively small group of VR enthusiasts and gamers are enjoying the social media giant's dedication to immersive headsets, it is the augmented reality space and its ...more

On Tuesday, Blue Vision Labs, one of three Google-backed companies working on AR Cloud platforms, announced its acquisition by ride-sharing company Lyft. The ultimate destination for the acquisition is autonomous vehicles, with Blue Vision becoming Lyft's London office and jo ...more

Google, Facebook, and Huawei have made an investment in nurturing the future of augmented and virtual reality through $6 million in contributions to the opening of a new center at the University of Washington. The UW Reality Lab at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science ...more

It may sound like deja vu, but neural interface startup CTRL-labs has closed a $28 million funding round led by GV, Google's funding arm, for technology that reads user's nerve signals to interpret hand gestures. That's because GV, along with Lux Capital, led a $28 million fu ...more

While augmented reality is a means for presenting news to their audiences to some media outlets, Bloomberg is interested in how the technology can improve the way journalists work. The Bloomberg AR Fellows, a program hosted by the NYU Media Lab in partnership with Bloomberg a ...more

While the story of augmented reality headset maker Osterhout Design Group has come to an end, the epilogue of its demise continues. After ODG's intellectual property, including patents and trademarks, went up for sale via Hilco Bankstream last month, Heritage Global Partners ...more

The Creative Lab at Samsung, also known as their C Lab, is trying to make wearable fitness devices more inconspicuous with its wearable smart belt, the WELT, but that might not be all. Another of the works in progress the company demonstrated at CES 2016, the TipTalk, could h ...more

Google subsidiary Owlchemy Labs has cooked up an experimental ARCore mobile app that enables smartphone users to follow along with their VR friends as they play games in a head-mounted display. Called Mobile Spectator, the app uses ARCore to track the smartphone's position in ...more

The beginning of autumn has delivered a number of new augmented reality developments, and we're on top of it. This week, NASA launched several major new initiatives that involve AR as an essential piece of the puzzle. Also, Magic Leap's history turned a major new corner, whil ...more

Along with rebranding Magic Leap 1 for enterprise customers, Magic Leap has gifted its developer community with some new toys with a tease of more to come in 2020. On Tuesday, the company not only introduced a consolidated package of new and existing developer tools that it c ...more

THE FILM LAB - We're back on set with our favourite grip department. This time around they let us in on a trade secret: Lighting Gags.

Today Bingo barely scratches the surface of what 'Mise en Scène' is, but you get the idea. It's the sum total of all the parts that make up a film's meaning. Something about a spaghetti shirt ...more

Mike was lucky enough to have Leigh Whannell and James Wan drop by the Film Lab to discuss their new movie INSIDIOUS, which we loved back during Midnight Madness and opens Friday April 1st in theatres everywhere.

If you were to summarize the path Snap has taken towards augmented reality smartglasses with a meme template, how it started would be the first-generation Spectacles camera glasses and how it's going would be the next-generation Spectacles with AR capabilities. However, it ap ...more

Mike breaks it down for you: zoom lenses have their advantages, and prime lenses have their advantges. It's just that prime lenses have more of them ...more

Facebook Reality Labs just experienced its first major executive exit since the pandemic began. Hugo Barra has announced that he's stepping down from his position as vice president of VR at Facebook. Barra's move comes as a bit of a surprise as Facebook and its Oculus brand h ...more

F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology) is a network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians dedicated to the research and development of new technologies and creative media. They are "committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of ...more

Mike's luck has finally turned around as he was finally able to snag an iPhone 4. But what does this mean for the future of THE FILM LAB?

Week 01 : 9/31 - 09/06 Read Chapters 1-2 of Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects Do the exercises from each chapter you read in the After Effects Book in Lab Time. Read - How To Be An Explorer of the World - Pages 1 - 37 Do exercises 1-5 - Please document these in a ...more

Being WonderHowTo staff, I'm not qualified to win this week's Smartphone photography challenge, but I thought I'd share anyway. The (unfortunately) blurry image shown above is a shot of Professor Edgar Choueiri's sound lab at Princeton University. Edgar is a friend, and was ki ...more

Rajo begins investigating the illusive mystery of aspect ratios and just why on earth we're STILL finding black bars on our fancy new widescreen TVs.

This particular chunk of our Gareth Edwards (Monsters) interview contains this message: grab your camera, install some commercial post-production graphics software on your computer and start motion tracking!

Jacob Medjuck, writer/director of SUMMERHOOD talks to The Film Lab about his writing process and the collaboration of his cast and crew in making his film (Part 1).

Happy Hallowe'en! Mike shows us how far a little corn syrup, warm water and food colouring can go, especially if you're looking to save a few bucks in your SFX budget. Fake Blood!

Mike runs down the whys and the what-fors surrounding pre-production scheduling. Surprise: a lot of it has to do with keeping your cast and crew happy.

Here's a quick and dirty little series on the very basics of non-linear editing. If you're not using FCP, don't worry, every non-linear editing software package functions in more or less the same way.

THE FILM LAB - Bingo's back to explain just what the heck a Dutch Angle (or Dutch Tilt) is! Ha ha!

Rajo takes you through the final installment of our ridiculously basic series on non-linear editing with Final Cut Pro. Now you go try it ...more

Gareth Edwards has made a miracle of a film: cheap, gorgeous, smart, super entertaining and, effects-wise, on par with a lot of Hollywood's more expensive sci-fi projects. He talked to Mike at this past TIFF ...more

Continuing his series on the very basics of non-linear editing, Rajo finally gets to the fun part: editing with Final Cut Pro.

Hail to the hardworking facilitators in the production office!

One of our favourite movies of 2011—Manborg, which we saw at Toronto After Dark—has become one of our favourite movies of 2012 with its week-long run here in Toronto at the Royal. A gloriously funny pastiche of ultra-cheap kung-fu, horror and sci-fi, Manborg is also a perfect ...more

Our friends at Graffiti Research Lab were detained in Beijing over the weekend on charges of “upsetting public order”. Founder James Powderly and co. were detained while planning a Students for a Free Tibet protest using GRL light graffiti technology. GRL is an urban art col ...more

ON LOCATION #3 - The misfits, the long-hairs, the toughguys with the tough job. They hold flags, they hold scrims, they hold your life in their hands... come spend a few minutes on the grip/electric truck on location in the Film Lab & see what's what.

Rajo shows off his new favourite iPhone app, the incredibly cheap and easy to use Stop Motion Recorder from bitween. Holy cats is it ever cool...Watch this quick and easy tutorial!