Play World

Remember portable MP3 players like the classic iPod? Seems like forever ago that they were all the rage, and I don't think I've seen a real one in the wild for a good 5 years now. These devices died out so quickly as a direct result of the onset of smartphones, which allow us ...more

Because timing is everything, the latest entry in the location-based augmented reality gaming sweepstakes, Ghostbusters World, has arrived just in time for Halloween. Launched Monday on the App Store and the Google Play Store, Ghostbusters World shares its perfect timing with ...more

While there aren't as many ways to customize your iPhone like there is on Android, there are still a lot of apps out there that can help streamline and enhance your experience beyond Apple's own default options — and we've hand-picked over 100 essentials. No matter if you've ...more

Alongside Sesame Street, the Dr. Seuss universe has been a constant presence in the formative years of several generations of children in the US. Now, Dr. Seuss's creations are continuing to maintain relevance with today's youth via augmented reality, just as the Sesame Stree ...more

Stories are everywhere in social media today, but that wasn't always the case. In 2013, Snapchat introduced the world to these temporary windows into our daily lives. Since then, stories have infiltrated other popular apps. However, to stand out, you can't solely rely on the a ...more

According to Google's new Android ecosystem transparency report, you're eleven times more likely to be infected by malware if you're running Android Lollipop (5.0) as opposed to Android Pie (9). The same report shows that if you sideload apps, you're almost seven times more li ...more

In the wild world of Snapchat lenses, this week was an especially good one for cool effects. Lens-crafters (really hoping I can get that name to stick) have gotten a lot better at making non-gimmicky lenses that allow you to interact with them in new and unique ways. New to t ...more

Though not quite as agile as the world famous plump plumber Mario, Toad, the lovable fungus, is still one of the most fun characters to use while playing Super Mario Run. Thankfully, he is also by far the easiest character to unlock in the game, requiring no special tasks to c ...more

Blizzard Entertainment, the wildly successful video game developer that brought us World of Warcraft and StarCraft, has finally released their popular trading card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft to the Android platform. If you've never heard of it, Hearthstone is an off ...more

Arcades, Nintendo, Sega, and 16-bit graphics ushered in a new level of gaming that was leaps and bounds ahead of the early Pong days. I remember loading quarters into the machines and playing 2D fighting games until all my money ran out. When I wasn’t in school, you could usua ...more

As if teasing its own smartglasses weren't enough, augmented reality gaming developer Niantic gave gamers a glimpse of how 5G speeds can revolutionize how they play mobile games in the near future. This week, the company revealed Codename: Urban Legends, a demo game built wit ...more

The COVID-19 pandemic has practically shut down all sports except for World Wrestling Entertainment, which has continued staging matches without an audience, leaving us sports fans with nothing much to cheer for. While they can't replace live games, smartphone games provide an ...more

After three years and change, no one seems to be able to knock Pokémon GO off its augmented reality throne. Zombies, dinosaurs, and ghosts have all met defeat at the hands of the pocket monsters. Heck, not even the world's most popular wizard and Pokémon GO's developer can rep ...more

The augmented reality cloud will probably be one of the most important pieces of digital real estate in the next few years, and China has no intention of being left out of the virtual land grab. During Huawei's Developer Conference this weekend, the company took the wraps off ...more

Comparing the present-day states of the consumer and enterprise sectors of augmented reality is like evaluating the merits of sports car versus work trucks. Like consumer AR, sports cars are sexy and exciting, but perhaps a bit impractical at times. On the other hand, enterpri ...more

The Avengers aren't the only shiny new toys available to Pixel handset owners, as the animated stars of the upcoming Pokémon Detective Pikachu movie have arrived in the Google Playground app. Just weeks after bringing the headlining characters of the box office-owning Avenger ...more

Your social security number, credit card information, and medical history can fall into the wrong hands if you're not careful about how and where you share your data online. If you really care about your data, there are tools and techniques you can utilize to protect yourself ...more

In a world where augmented reality is becoming the hero of the movie marketing, Universal Studios has decided to use the technology to reinvent the traditional movie trailer, a time-tested tactic of film promotion, in support of the forthcoming Robert Zemeckis film, Welcome to ...more

It is almost indisputable that smartglasses and head-worn displays are the future of augmented reality. However, at this precise moment, they are still a very niche market. Those who have been in the presence of a HoloLens, Meta 2, or Magic Leap One have witnessed how powerfu ...more

The next big iOS version for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch was revealed by Apple at WWDC 2018 and dropped for everyone on Sept. 17, 2018, less than a week after Apple revealed the new iPhone lineup. We've rounded up all the big picture items and secret features and changes we c ...more

With the announcement of ARKit 2.0 at WWDC 2018, Apple is bringing some powerful new capabilities to mobile augmented reality apps this fall. Shared experiences, persistent content, and 3D object recognition will enable more social, transcendent, and immersive experiences for ...more

Despite the abundance of sci-fi titles in the iOS App Store, very few of these mobile games ever have the staying power keep us glued for more than a few hours. Enter Space Pioneer, an awesome space exploration game that soft-launched in Canada ahead of a worldwide debut. With ...more

After closing its 2017 financial books on a high note, Snap, Inc. is planning to ride the momentum of its augmented reality products into the new year. That's the main takeaway following the company's 2017 earnings conference call, which was held on Tuesday. While the company ...more

One of the byproducts of the success of Pokémon Go was the viral images that made the rounds on social media of people putting Pikachus, Charmanders, and their brethren in compromising positions. Snapchat has a similar claim to fame, most recently with the inexplicable popular ...more

Windborne microbes shifting in the snows of the great ice sheet of Greenland may be able to neutralize some of the industrial contaminants oozing out of the melting ice. Greenland is a long way off, and we tend to dismiss what happens there as not impacting us here — out of s ...more

Can't wait till Apple's ARKit is released? Me neither. Luckily, a fun new app launched today that is close to what the ARKit promises to deliver in a few months. The app was launched by holographic tech startup 8i and it's called 'Holo'. It was launched on iOS and Google Play ...more

Snap Inc. is no stranger to augmented reality. In fact, AR has been the Snapchat app's most popular feature, as face filters continue to update and change the way we communicate with each other. But in a new move, Snap Inc. is showing its commitment to improving AR and its rea ...more

Augmented reality allows for all kinds of experiences to happen just about anywhere, and that creates some incredible potential for entertainment. While games like Pokémon GO take you out into the world, one crowd-funded game wants to keep you inside—to scare the crap out of y ...more

Pokémon Go takes the popular franchise and brings it into the real world through augmented reality, allowing us to play the game while exploring our physical environments at the same time. It doesn't just put pocket monsters into a more realistic context, but it changes the ga ...more

Want to actually catch 'em all? Pokémon GO has long-teased the opportunity to hunt for Pokémon in the real world through augmented reality, but few have had the opportunity to actually see it in action. Now anyone in the US can sign up for the field test for the chance to get ...more

Greetings my fellow aspiring hackers, Huh :) . Its that part of the year when friends and family come together for reunions and family gathering. Christmas is the only time of the year where the sensation and desire to bond and repair lost and broken relationships becomes str ...more

If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a person makes calls but doesn't have a Facebook account, are they even really a person? Yes, of course they are, but it just makes life easier when you're part of the world's biggest social ...more

There are songs that we love, songs that make us sad, and songs that change the way we view the world—and that's something that Steve Jobs knew all too well. "I was very lucky to grow up in a time when music really mattered. It wasn't just something in the background; it real ...more

By now, nearly everyone with any type of media access is aware that Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked on November 24th. Although there can be many interpretations and lessons drawn from this audacious act, there is one indisputable conclusion: it and its ripples across th ...more

Report: Russia involved in downing of Turkish jet - Israel News, Ynetnews. News, World News: Diplomatic sources say Russian technicians at Syria's missile battery control centers played key role in interception and shooting down of Turkey's F-4E Phantom II

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has practically guaranteed that the virus, along with the phrases "social distancing" and "flattening the curve," will rank among the top search terms of 2020. USA Today combined the phrases in its latest augm ...more

Finland-based Rovio, one of the pioneers of mobile gaming, is now ready to break new ground in augmented reality with its Angry Birds franchise. Along with its AR development partner, Sweden-based Resolution Games, the publisher is following up Angry Birds FPS: First Person S ...more

Publicly, things have been pretty quiet over at Meta, the augmented reality headset and software startup based in Silicon Valley. But that doesn't mean that the company doesn't have a few strong opinions about the state of AR in 2018. In a recent TED talk, one of the company' ...more

Your childhood "social networking" may have been to go outdoors to the neighbor's — and outdoors is a great place for kids to be. But these days, the terms educational, digital media, entertainment, and toddlers don't have to be mutually exclusive. Like most things in life, it ...more

The hunt for the mixed reality use-case that wins over consumers' hearts and creates a critical mass is a problem every developer would love to solve. Not only would they find themselves rich and famous seemingly overnight, but they would also end up making one of the various ...more

Disney Parks are hard at work bringing the technology from a long time ago in a land far away to life for the opening of Star Wars Land parks in Anaheim and Orlando in 2019. Much of the environment, characters, and peripherals can be recreated through construction, costumes, ...more

As Android's official app provider, the Google Play Store is packed with thousands of useful programs. But Google's terms of service is extremely restrictive, which means that countless apps simply don't qualify to be hosted on the Google Play Store. As a result, many great a ...more

Tired of playing old-school Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, Nintendo, and Nintendo DS games on your iPhone? We've got another retro video game system for you to add to your arsenal of emulators—Super Nintendo. Yep, that's right. Thanks to Lucas Menge, you can now play Super ...more

Mystery House by Sierra On-Line was the first game to feature graphics in a text adventure. The game featuring crime fiction, cut scenes and suspense is known to be the first adventure game to feature high resolution graphics. Released back in 1980, the game set a new era for ...more

With Facebook and Twitter dominating the world, playing chess opposite a real, touchable person is no longer necessary. With the ChessBot, you can now play on a real chessboard remotely - the next best thing to in-person play. From Norris Labs: "Although ChessBot by itself d ...more

I for one, doubted the existence of circular breathing. Come on. Breathing in, while also breathing out. That seems as impossible as perpetual motion or urinating while drinking. I stand corrected. This tutorial really tells you how to breathe circularly. And if you still ar ...more

Over the past decade, Marvel Studios has been a dominant force at the box office, raking in more than $21 billion dollars. Averaged out over that span of time, the yearly earnings of those movies outweigh the gross domestic product of some countries. And while those films hav ...more

Even though most phones don't have Oreo yet, Google has released Android 9.0 Pie. It's available on Google's own Pixel devices, and updates should soon be available to partnered devices from Essential, Nokia, Oppo, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi. We're already digging into it to highl ...more

On Oct. 19-20, the MOC Exhibition Center in Munich, Germany will play host to the Augmented World Expo (AWE) Europe 2017. The agenda for the conference includes presentations from AR software and hardware makers like Google, Meta, DAQRI, Osterhout Design Group, Vuzix, Avegant ...more

Now that Google has announced its new Pixel smartphones, folks who rushed to buy an iPhone 7 might be experiencing a bit of buyer's remorse. The new Pixel and Pixel XL are packed to the brim with cutting-edge features and top-notch hardware, and Google seems to be taking direc ...more

As augmented reality continues its collision course with mainstream adoption, the technology will now have a role in one of the most anticipated boxing matches of the year. On Saturday, the much-hyped rematch between challenger Tyson Fury and champion Deontay Wilder (the figh ...more

The Unity 3D engine is not only responsible for facilitating the creation of 60% of AR and VR content but it also plays a significant role in producing the immersive stories that increasingly push the boundaries of cinema. Some of these daring new immersive works will now be ...more

Some people believe that art makes artists immortal, and now one of the best known performance artists on the planet is working on taking that immortality into the realm of augmented reality. Marina Abramovic is using volumetric capture technology, along with the Magic Leap O ...more

Magic Leap is making it easier for developers to share their spatial computing experiments with other Magic Leap One users. On Thursday, Magic Leap has opened up Magic Leap World for developers to publish concepts, which as defined by Magic Leap, are "free apps with limited f ...more

Mobile gaming has exploded in recent years, with experts predicting 2.4 billion global mobile players by the end of 2019. It already accounts for 47% of the worldwide gaming market, besting console and PC. No wonder we've seen the rise of gaming smartphones, a class of phones ...more

Some investors play the short game, placing their bets on industries that show the quickest return on their investment, and, in the augmented reality space, that means the enterprise sector. RealWear is among the smartglasses makers capitalizing on enterprise AR, and the comp ...more

Imagine being able to play a video instantly on hundreds of thousands of devices across the globe. It's totally possible, as long as all of those devices have a Chromecast plugged in. When Chromecasts are left exposed to the internet, hackers can use add them to a botnet that ...more

With Pokémon GO as its cash cow and the forthcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite and Niantic Real World Platform promising future revenue streams, Niantic has convinced investors to bet on its flavor of augmented reality After reports surfaced in December that the developer wa ...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

In a leaked company memo, Snap CEO (and NR30 member) Evan Spiegel has made it clear that the future of the company lies not only augmented reality but also hardware that enables those AR experiences. In other words, Snap is definitely planning on getting into the smartglasses ...more