Night vision goggles are awesome, but the price? Not so much. Luckily, you can make your own pair that will have you sneaking up on your friends in just a few simple steps. For this project, you'll need to get your hands on an infrared LED array, on/off switch, 9.6 volt batte ...more
Using an IR led array and some reflective tape, you can track fingers in thin air using the Wii Remote by Johnny Chung Lee from Carnegie Mellon University. The grid software is a custom program written using a C# wiimote library and DirectX. Take a look at this instructional v ...more
Marketing and healthcare, two of the leading industries in the adoption of augmented reality, continue to demonstrate applications for the technology in their businesses. Meanwhile, improvements to augmented reality devices are just around the corner with new developments from ...more
General Electric isn't known for their Christmas lights, but maybe they should be, because their GE Color Effects are pretty awesome. Especially the LED Color Effects G-35 String sets. And especially when someone named Darco hacks them. Darco, whose real name is Robert Sun Qu ...more
In a previous Nurd Rage video (here), Dr. Lithium showed you that pyrolytic graphite was diamagnetic, and that it could be stably levitated over magnets. It was repelled by a magnetic field, and this repulsion was strong enough to levitate it. In this science video tutorial, y ...more
Simple yet effective, capacitors come in a dizzying array of forms and materials, vital to so many circuits for storage, timing, and filtration - the mighty capacitor! In this installment of the MAKE presents series, Collin Cunningham explains - how to build a Leyden jar, how ...more
New to Microsoft Excel? Looking for a tip? How about a tip so mind-blowingly useful as to qualify as a magic trick? You're in luck. In this MS Excel tutorial from ExcelIsFun, the 613th installment in their series of digital spreadsheet magic tricks, you'll learn how to add sal ...more
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, from the University of Manchester, have just won the Nobel Prize in physics from their work with graphene. They've found a way to isolate graphene from graphite (carbon in pencil lead) and distinguish its behavior, which holds extreme poten ...more
These days, eReaders are everywhere. For die-hard book nerds, eReaders offer the convenience of a full library without having to sacrifice shelf space. Sure, there are the paper buffs who swear that you just can't take an eReader with you into the bathtub, but when's the last ...more
The first day of Hanukkah is here, the day you start lighting the candles of the menorah. So, why not ditch the wax and light the "lights" this year? (Skip ahead to see the LED menorah) Hanukkah is a Jewish festival that lasts eight days from the 25th day of Kislev, which th ...more
New to Microsoft Excel? Looking for a tip? How about a tip so mind-blowingly useful as to qualify as a magic trick? You're in luck. In this MS Excel tutorial from ExcelIsFun, the 247th installment in their series of digital spreadsheet magic tricks, you'll learn how to add lea ...more
And just when you thought it was safe in town, you come back and find out it's like you were never there. Zombies everywhere. Watch this L4D2 walkthrough to play Campaign 4: Hard Rain - Return to Town. Gather any equipment and head out of the safehouse. The suburban neighborho ...more
Learn your way around the saccharine and bloody land of the sugar mill in L4D2. See the whole gameplay for Campaign 4: Hard Rain - Sugarmill. Stock up on weapons and head down the stairs to open the door of the safehouse. Clear out any zombies on the street and go across throu ...more
Solar panels are an amazing invention. Catching energy from the Sun before it even enters Earth's food chain, photovoltaics are like an all-natural nuclear power plant. Unfortunately, the constituted parts of a solar panel are rare, valuable, and subject to the coercive forces ...more
What's the worst place to be when the world is infested with zombies? The cemetery. Fresh graves. Lots of dead. Make your way through L4D2 by checking these tips out on Campaign 5: The Parish - Cemetery. Restock on weapons and health and head outside. You'll find yourself unde ...more
Valentine's Day is almost here, and if you're like me, you're scurrying to do something special for your mate. The standard chocolates and flowers just isn't cutting it anymore, and you can only make so many homemade cards before it becomes banal and meaningless. So, what can ...more
DRUM! Magazine — the leading magazine for drummers and percussionists worldwide — has announced the biggest drumming event ever to take place in Northern California. On Friday, August 13, drummers will descend on the San Jose Repertory Theatre in the heart of Silicon Valley to ...more
Any sufficiently cool new technology will be immediately repurposed to do something even cooler. Such is the case with Apple's iPhone X and its Animoji feature, which has led to something completely unanticipated: Animoji karaoke. The best example of this new pastime being en ...more
The top five apps of the 2010s were all social media apps of some kind, and the fact that's not surprising to you says a lot. We may use them for other reasons here and there, but our phones are social media machines at their cores. The thing is, some make better machines than ...more
Having emerged as one of the leading augmented reality video conferencing apps, Spatial is ready to improve upon the experience. On Thursday, the startup announced that it has closed a $14 million funding round, bringing its total funding to $22 million to date. Don't Miss: ...more
Most augmented reality experiences are purely visual, with spatial audio gaining in popularity to make visual experiences more realistic. However, leveraging the sense of touch may be the next frontier for AR experiences. This week, researchers at the School of Engineering an ...more
If you had a phone in 2004, there's a pretty good chance it was a Motorola RAZR. The iconic phone is the tenth highest-selling of all time, and it marked the height of the flip phone era. Now that the technology has caught up, Lenovo (Motorola's parent company) is bringing it ...more
After teasing what smartglasses powered by Snapchat might look like with two product cycles of camera glasses, Snap has now added augmented reality capabilities to its third take on Spectacles. On Tuesday, the company unveiled Spectacles 3, which packs a pair of temple-mounte ...more
A new contender has entered the mixed reality ring. San Fransisco-based Occipital has just released an "Explorer Edition" of Bridge—an iPhone-based mixed and virtual reality headset that uses their popular Structure Sensor. At a fraction of the cost of a HoloLens developers ki ...more
In the pursuit of large displays with thinner bezels, Samsung has sacrificed some components. While the loss of the headphone jack gets all the attention, there are other victims — namely, the notification LED. Once a staple on all Android phones, this small light would blink ...more
This week, Snapchat parent Snap came closer to fulfilling its smartglasses destiny by adding new 3D content capabilities to its third-generation Spectacles. At the same time, the now defunct Meta Company continued its fall from grace, as a judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff ...more
After years of waiting, Microsoft has finally updated its industry-leading augmented reality device, the HoloLens. During a pre-show event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, HoloLens inventor Alex Kipman, along with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Julia White, ...more
After announcing another massive round of funding to the tune of $502 million, Magic Leap is adding another powerful weapon to its creative arsenal: John Gaeta, the man who helped develop the iconic Bullet Time effect for The Matrix series of films. Gaeta made the announcemen ...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
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
Live theater doesn't typically benefit from the kind of computer-generated special effects that big-budget Hollywood blockbusters deploy, but that could change soon thanks to Microsoft's HoloLens. The device will make its theatrical debut this week at Case Western Reserve Uni ...more
Google just unveiled it's biggest search product in recent memory, except this time the search giant is looking to take over the world of virtual objects. On Wednesday, Nov. 1, Google launched Poly (as in polygon, get it?), a massive database of searchable 3D objects that aug ...more
A new medical development is going to change the way many of us look at getting the flu vaccine. A painless flu vaccine skin patch is making needles and vials a thing of the past. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have shown that a flu v ...more
Today in Santa Clara, California, at the Augmented World Expo, Scope AR revealed a major new update that will add markerless tracking for their remote assistance application, Remote AR, on standard devices. This update, powered by real-time image tracking solution Wikitude, p ...more
Bioluminescence — the ability of an organism to produce and emit light — is nature's light show. Plants, insects, fish, and bacteria do it, and scientists understand how. Until now, though, we didn't know how fungi glow. Now, thanks to research led by Zinaida Kaskova in the I ...more
What's up guys! It's time to discuss strings in more detail. Review Just a revision in case you have forgotten about what buffers (arrays) are. A buffer is a container to hold data which are adjacent to each other in memory (we have seen this in the previous tutorial on memo ...more
We frequently associate plastics with the modern era, starting at around the 1950s with the prevalence of bakelite. However, for all of you "you can't use plastic in Steampunk" purists out there, I have bad news for you: Victorians used plastic! Granted, bakelite is the firs ...more
A good smartphone can be the perfect workout companion. You have music for motivation, videos for pushing through boring cardio sessions, GPS to keep you on course, and even an array of sensors for gathering data about your workout. But not all phones are created equal when it ...more
We've been predicting the rush of augmented reality wearable makers from China for a couple of years, and now it looks like it's in full swing, with one of the most promising entrants coming from startup Pacific Future. The China-based company was on the CES show floor this w ...more
When filtered through the prism of the top stories of the year, the business of augmented reality 2019 was defined as much by epic failures of AR startups as it was by the promising developments that propelled the industry forward into 2020. On the dark side of the spectrum, ...more
One the leading game developers for the PlayStation 4 and Oculus Rift platforms, Insomniac Games, is finally releasing its first major augmented reality title: Seedling for the Magic Leap One. Back in November, we gave our impressions of the game after sampling it at the L.E. ...more
A week after the L.E.A.P. Conference, our cup of Magic Leap news continues to floweth over, with the company's content chief giving us some insight into the company's strategy, and Twilio sharing what its virtual chat app looks like. Elsewhere, the demand for AR among busines ...more
While you were busy browsing Instagram, composing tweets, or chasing Snapchat updates, an eight-year-old ARKit developer was hard at work on her first step toward taking over the tech world via augmented reality. A new app called A.R.tist, created by Nova Fleming, allows user ...more
It seems like each day new rumors and leaks come out for Huawei's upcoming P series devices. Everything from its name change to its specs has been leaked, sometimes with contradicting rumors. One of the biggest leaks is the inclusion of triple rear cameras, a first for smartph ...more
Researchers have created a possible replacement for traditional camera lenses, using an "optical phased array" to function as both a lens and sensor of a camera. The project from researchers at the California Institute of Technology is the first ever camera that works without ...more
At the moment, it would be safe to say that demand for devices running Tango, Google's augmented reality smartphone platform, is relatively low among consumers. Kaon Interactive, a B2B software company who has built more than 5,000 interactive applications for use at trade sho ...more
Intel, the company which is mostly known for creating computer processors, once again showed off their Project Alloy "merged reality" experience, this time during their CES 2017 press conference. Intel's Chief Executive Officer, Brian Krzanich, stated that they will be "produc ...more
One of the many perks of being a Nexus user is that Google bakes in all sorts of goodies for use on its dessert-themed OS. From an easily unlocked bootloader, to a smooth and well-crafted "stock" UI experience, to being one of the first devices to receive updates straight from ...more
The iPhone doesn't stop at last year's excellent iPhone 12 lineup. Apple's been developing its iPhone 13 models for a while now, and there are a lot of rumors already with eight or nine months still to go until a release. This year, we're expecting four new models with similar ...more
Java is one of the world's leading programming languages thanks to its virtually endless array of applications. Since Java's initial release in 1998, this Open Source platform has become beloved by coders for its speed, flexibility, and dependability. The 2020 Java Bootcamp B ...more
Just as predicted (but perhaps with less fanfare than usual), Apple has made the move of adding a depth sensor to the rear camera of its latest edition of the iPad Pro. What is surprising is the type of sensor it is, and that plot twist raises the level of intrigue for Apple' ...more
Samsung decided to jump into the foldable category early, announcing the Galaxy Fold in February 2019. After a major hiccup, Samsung released the phone four months later to praise. But Samsung's not finished with foldables, as the new Galaxy Z Flip is just on the horizon. Sam ...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
Sorry, Galaxys S11–19, Samsung's jumping straight to Galaxy S20 this year. They're also going with essentially three base models before accounting for niche variants. Of these three models, it's clear which one's the best: the Galaxy S20 Ultra. We've rounded up all the specs ...more
In recent weeks we've talked about the growing trend of smartglasses makers moving the brains of their devices to smartphones, and now a veteran of the space has joined that movement. On Wednesday, Epson revealed the Moverio BT-30C, the company's first truly affordable smartg ...more
To borrow from the canon of Game of Thrones, what is dead may never die. And while the Meta Company that we knew this time last year is no more, the patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company lives on. Elsewhere in the AR world, news was more optimistic for Snap In ...more
The ongoing war between Apple and Samsung fans will rage on once again. With the release of the iPhone XS Max, Apple has presented a stronger adversary for the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, released earlier. Both stack up well against each other, providing two of the best experiences ...more
On Wednesday, the tech world woke up to fairly shocking news with the announcement that AT&T would be the exclusive wireless carrier for the forthcoming Magic Leap One, as well as an investor in Magic Leap. The deal harkens back to the introduction of Apple's iPhone, the devi ...more
During its presentation at Unite Berlin, Magic Leap gave attendees a crash course in developing experiences for Magic Leap One (ML1), we found out quite a bit more about how the device works and what we can expect to experience with the device. Alessia Laidacker, interaction ...more
Thanks to ever more powerful smartphones — the iPhone X with its advanced A11 processor and the Galaxy Note 8 powered by Snapdragon's 835 come to mind — the mobile industry is fast closing in on consoles and PCs with regards to gaming. Game developers have been aware of this f ...more