Magic and How to Do It

The hype for HBO's Game of Thrones reached proportions as epic as the series itself this week with the latest release of the final season's official trailer, but it's a Snapchat promotion that will truly make fans at SXSW bend the knee. Using what Snapchat calls AR Marker Tec ...more

Halloween will be here in just over a week, which means next week these Scrabble Bingo of the Days will become more horrific. This week, there's just a few relevant Halloween seven-letter words for your Scrabble vocabulary, referencing witchcraft and one of the eeriest horror ...more

TouchDevelop is a browser-based programming tool that allows anyone to build your own Windows 8 apps directly from any touchscreen device, including iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone, Android, PC and Macs. Once the script is created and the app proves to work, it can be placed in th ...more

Snapchat is joining the ranks of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, and Apple in the trend toward streaming original programming, but with a twist that rings true to its roots. Three of the company's new shows debuted Wednesday in the Stories section of the Snapchat app for iOS ...more

The emerging narrative as CES begins is that consumer-grade smartglasses require a heavy compromise in functionality in order to arrive at a form factor and price point that appeal to mainstream customers. China-based startup Nreal is ready to subvert those expectations with ...more

The first headset running on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chipset from an original equipment manufacturer is official. On Monday at the San Francisco Photonics West conference, startup Lynx unveiled the Lynx Mixed Reality Headset. The headset is a $1500 passthrough AR/VR weara ...more

If you follow indie games at all, you've probably heard of Bastion. During its development, it took home numerous Best in Show prizes from E3 and other game conventions while building up an incredible amount of buzz in the games press. Part of what is intriguing about Bastion ...more

Augmented reality startup Nreal was a hit at this month's CES event, with some even calling the device a worthy challenger to the Magic Leap One. However, the company's path to success in the US may not be as smooth as it first seemed, as gaming giant Epic Games has lodged a ...more

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has cleared a path for Google to move forward with hand-tracking technology that could pose a major threat to Leap Motion. In an order issued on Monday, the FCC granted Google permission to run its Project Soli, a sensor that can de ...more

Apple CEO Tim Cook's most recent tech prophecy is that "AR will change everything." And now, that includes Apple's own website. The company has published a new page highlighting its AR apps, specifically, AR content produced by developers using ARKit. "Imagine if the line be ...more

In the wake of Apple and Google pitching augmented reality to schools, McGraw-Hill is stepping up its own augmented reality efforts for education. On Tuesday, the publishing powerhouse announced a partnership with Alchemie, an educational app startup that gamifies learning, t ...more

With the countless daytime talk shows starring and featuring doctors, nurses, and other medical specialists, discovering new ways to live a healthy life is just a remote click away. Although their shows might draw you in with incredible facts and mind-blowing secrets to weight ...more

Historically, Apple loves to drop hints about its major upcoming events through clues included on its invitations. Those invites usually require a good bit of deciphering to connect the dots, but in the case of Apple's upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2018 invit ...more

Apple just released the second developer beta for iOS 14 today, Tuesday, July 7. The update comes 15 days after Apple seeded developers the first iOS 14 beta, which introduced home screen widgets, picture-in-picture, and 4K YouTube support, among more than 200 other features. ...more

When that midday fatigue starts hitting you, sometimes the best solution is to just give in to sleep and nap it off. But how long should you sleep? Nap for too long and you often wake up feeling even worse than before, and it could be hours before you finally feel fully awake. ...more

Job interview success can be a difficult thing to measure. Is confidence a job-winning trait? Or were the interviewer's questions not answered as fully as they had hoped? Maybe you weren't sure how your big, happy smile went over with such a formal setting. While there is a g ...more

From parents and other family members to friends and peers, personalities are built by environment. Though people are important in the development of our own individual personality, there are other, different influences, including what you choose to read. The books you take th ...more

Once you've obtained a 90 skill ranking in any school of magic in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you're able to go questing for the master level spells. What are these? Why, some of the best spells in the game! Now, you won't get any achievements for these, but you will have som ...more

The app that Lego demoed at this year's iPhone launch event is now available in the App Store, and it showcases several new capabilities available in ARKit 2.0. The Playgrounds app enables players to access augmented reality multiplayer games with ARKit's new shared experienc ...more

Microsoft enjoyed a few months in the spotlight after releasing the developer version of the very first mixed reality (MR) headset, but now we're starting to see the competition jump in. The Meta 2 is finally out to the world, with the first wave of preorder shipments imminen ...more

Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) is making it easier for its passengers to travel by employing an incredibly practical new augmented reality feature included an update to its iOS app. Now, iPhone and iPad users can place a translucent virtual suitcase over their own real world lugg ...more

Here at Next Reality, our typical approach to all things augmented reality involves vision combined with remote control, either via a handheld device, gaze control, or hand/finger tracking. But a new dynamic takes the notion of interaction with virtual content into a new real ...more

Most virtual and mixed reality headsets offer unnatural controls, making you use awkward movements or physical devices to control the holographic elements in your direct view. This doesn't make a lot of sense because using your hands is more natural, so Manus developed a set o ...more

With HoloLens 2 (hopefully) just around the corner, Microsoft has announced that it will no longer be providing any major operating system updates to the original HoloLens. The HoloLens 1 was released back in 2016, which feels a bit like ancient history in the ever-evolving w ...more

DigiLens, a company specializing in optical waveguide technology, recently announced that they had closed a $22 million round of strategic investment, also known as Series B funding. This round brought in Sony, Foxconn, Continental, and Panasonic, as well as more traditional v ...more

This week, Dr. Sung-Hoon Hong, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, announced at the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego that not only does Samsung have a new virtual reality headset coming, but that Samsung intends to enter the field of augmented reality, too. In fact, Hong ...more

With all the hype around Magic Leap's recent launch, it's easy to forget that augmented reality hardware is still very much in its infancy. While we marvel at what is available now, researchers are still finding ways to design and produce more sophisticated components for next ...more

Occipital's initial augmented reality module, the Structure Sensor, gave iPhones and iPads the depth-sensing abilities of the HoloLens. Now, the company's latest product promises to do the same for Android devices, as well as augmented reality and virtual reality headsets and ...more

Stormtroopers were once the elite soldiers of the unstoppable Galactic Empire that ruled the Universe. Then little ol' Luke Skywalker came along and destroyed the Death Star, ending the evil empire forever. Since then, poor Stormtroopers all over the world have been left witho ...more

The company behind augmented reality's first real gaming hit, Pokémon GO, is quietly making moves toward supporting the rapidly growing smartglasses space that may one day move its content away from smartphones and tablets and onto AR lenses positioned on your face. On Friday ...more