Prototypes

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

It's summer, which means vacations, barbeques, and, most importantly, no school. But that doesn't mean you can't learn something while you lounge by the pool. Schools and organizations all over the country are offering online courses taught by real professors—for free. Here a ...more

Just days after we found out that Apple is working on its own augmented reality headset, we now learn that the company is accelerating its AR headset efforts with the acquisition of Montreal-based hardware maker Vrvana. As Techcrunch reported on Tuesday, Nov. 21, Apple paid a ...more

We've heard a lot about self-driving taxis, as car and ride-sharing companies compete to win the driverless gold rush. But FedEx wants to bring its enterprise into the mix, as the head of its freight division has asked the US government to develop laws for self-driving trucks. ...more

After raising more $100 million in funding from some of the tech world's biggest names, Mojo Vision is finally ready to show the world the building block of its "invisible computing" platform. On Thursday, at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California, the star ...more

One of the defining parts of my childhood was getting extremely frustrated with claw machines at arcades. Usually, that was because as fun as they were, they were probably rigged and wouldn't actually grab anything. Which is why a new claw machine demo made with Apple's ARKit ...more

The longer it takes Apple, Snapchat, Facebook, and other tech giants to build their own version of augmented reality headsets and smartglasses, the longer runway of practical experience Microsoft gains with the HoloLens and its sequel. The latest example: AR cloning. Count Sa ...more

Despite the popularity of Pokémon GO, augmented reality gaming hasn't quite caught on yet. The makers of the popular World of Tanks game aren't taking a shot at Niantic's crown yet, but they are looking at giving spectators a new way to watch the game. The game's maker, Warga ...more

After a little more than a year at motion tracking technology maker Leap Motion, Keiichi Matsuda has resigned his position as vice president of design and global creative director, the company announced on Wednesday. A designer and filmmaker (and NR30 member), Matsuda is perh ...more

On Friday, audio giant Bose emerged as the latest, and perhaps the most surprising company to announce that it's planning to release augmented reality smartglasses. There's just one problem: these smartglasses don't present any visual content whatsoever. The wearable is asso ...more

It's looking more and more likely that rumors stating that the iPhone 7 will not include a 3.5 mm headphone jack are true. Chinese websites Wei Feng and Anzhuo.cn reported that anonymous sources on the supply chain confirmed that the controversial design choice is a reality. ...more

It looks like Samsung was thinking about slapping a little nub of a home button on the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus. This is according to a patent published by the European Trade Mark and Design Network, uncovered by Android Headlines. Despite having a nearly bezel-less display on th ...more

Welcome back to a tutorial on malware. We'll be discovering a method to beef up our little trooper. Without further ado, let's jump right in! Recap In the previous tutorial, we learned how to write a program which opened itself for reading to write to a host file, overwritin ...more

Among all the new Magic Leap app announcements made at the recent L.E.A.P. conference, an update to one of the company's major in-house apps went mostly unnoticed: Create 1.1. For those unfamiliar with Create, the app isn't a game or a productivity app, but more of an incredi ...more

While the world is only recently becoming aware of its existence, augmented reality has been around in some form or another since the '90s. In the last decade, with the advancement and miniaturization of computer technology — specifically smartphones and tablets — AR has becom ...more

HTC is entering the augmented reality market through the back door by giving developers access to the stereo front-facing cameras on the Vive and Vive Pro VR headsets. The company announced on Wednesday, April 11, an update to the OpenVR camera API that will enable developers ...more

It appears that the Project Aero 3D content development tool isn't the only augmented reality project that Adobe has in the works. The software company recently provided a peek at its Project Glasswing, a prototype transparent display that the Adobe Research team will present ...more

In Bhopal, India, a place nestled in between the royally pink city of Jaipur and the dry (i.e., alcohol forbidden) state of Gujarat, is a team of developers determined to make a fully driverless car suitable to the complexities of Indian traffic. An algorithm elaborate enough ...more

The arrival of Magic Leap One is tantalizingly close and, although the company has been saving the last details for launch day, a few of the more important details were found this week hiding deep in the code on Magic Leap's website. While Magic Leap's AR hardware will be her ...more

To the best of my recollection, Fruit Ninja was one of the first touchscreen games that appeared to really take advantage of the new paradigm of user input, turning the player's finger into a produce-slicing katana. At first blush, the latest title from Halfbrick Studios, mak ...more

China-based smartphone maker Oppo is ready to put Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon chips in its latest round of smartphones, but, like Qualcomm, Oppo is also preparing to move on to augmented reality wearables. This month, at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Tech Summit, Oppo revealed that ...more

Higher-fidelity 3D content and next-generation AR experiences take more computing power than most modern AR headsets and mobile devices can handle. But Nvidia is introducing a new cloud-based solution to address that need that will stream AR content to modern devices. During ...more

Just as the modern travel experience has improved thanks to the internet, Airbnb wants to make your stay in a stranger's home easier by way of augmented and virtual reality. On Monday, the company revealed that it's working on augmented reality features that, in the future, m ...more

Water makes up about 60% of your body weight. Whether you like it plain, flavored, bubbly, or in beverages or food, we all need water daily to avoid dehydration and stay healthy. For communities in need of clean drinking water, new research using bacteria may offer a simplifie ...more

Google is God of the internet. The clouds in the sky, the light at the end of the tunnel, the all knowing mysterious field of pure white. And soon they will have an optional home page that aesthetically expresses their God-like super spartan minimalism. From Tech Crunch: "Th ...more

Coming into this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the common sentiment among observers was that this was expected to be the big year for augmented reality. But as the biggest tech conference of the year draws to a close, the reality is that 2018 seems more likely to be ...more

Over the past year, two trends have emerged among augmented reality development software: make it easier to create AR content, and give AR apps better environmental understanding with just a smartphone camera. Those two feature sets are about to join forces, as Torch will int ...more

One of the primary assumptions in the world of VR and augmented reality is that the user has the ability to "see" virtual objects and the real world structures around them. But what if the user doesn't have perfect eyesight, or any eyesight at all? A new project from Google c ...more

Augmented reality experiences for consumers, for the most part, are relegated to mobile devices at present, but creation and development of those experiences is still a province of desktop computers. Hold my beer, says Torch 3D, Inc. On Monday, the company introduced a new T ...more

Over the past year, Magic Leap has teased its cross-platform vision of the AR cloud, which it dubs the Magicverse. While the company shared a timeline for its debut next year, it also served up new developer tools for the present. Facebook is also looking to the future of aug ...more

Before smartglasses makers can dream of taking smartglasses to mainstream consumers, they must first determine the right mix of form, function, and price that will drive customers to buy into what they're hoping to sell. Google's AI research team may have part of the solution ...more

A couple of months ago, I got the opportunity to get a sneak peek at a new media interface for ODG's R-9 Smartglasses, and the experience was impressive. Now, after weeks of keeping it under wraps, I can finally show off what I saw. The interface is part of what ODG calls the ...more

In recent years, Apple has assembled its augmented reality team and supply chain through a series of acquisitions, high-profile hires, and strategic investments, but at least one potentially major deal was recently ditched. According to sources in contact with Business Inside ...more

Drone mishaps, such as the collision that scratched a military helicopter in New York, are becoming something of an everyday hazard. And professional drone operators sweat bullets when their drones hover too close to their clients' things — especially their expensive things. ...more

Apple is notoriously private when it comes to perspective products, but the latest leak from their De Anza office in Cupertino suggests that a new augmented reality device could be coming to a store near you. Gizmodo has obtained documents which appear to confirm that the tec ...more

Developers are really having a field day with Apple's ARKit, announced last month. Since it's release to developers, videos have been appearing all over the Internet of the different ways that developers are getting creative with the ARKit using iPhones and iPads. Here are a ...more

Controlling a tiny monster army is not something I'd ever thought I'd be able to do, but it looks like Apple's ARKit is going to make it possible. Microsoft developer Egor Bogatov has been working on a strategy game for the past few weeks and has uploaded demos every step of ...more

Quanergy CEO and founder Louay Eldada is, by any standard of measure, a pioneer in the development of LiDARs for driverless vehicles. Eldada's involvement with designing and engineering optical sensors dates back to his research work on LiDAR (light detection and ranging sens ...more

Augmented reality software maker 8th Wall has closed a Series A funding round of $8 million in capital to feed the growth of its development platform. Founded by former Google and Facebook engineers, 8th Wall uses computer vision to enable six degrees of freedom tracking, lig ...more

Earlier today, Alphabet announced that the Self-Driving Car Project has officially graduated from their innovation factory (X) and will now operate as an independent company called Waymo. The new Waymo CEO, John Krafcik, sums up the name and the mission in his blog post on Me ...more

One of the hallmarks of augmented reality's coming of age is that the technology is starting to find a home in business categories that are less obvious compared to typical AR enterprise use cases. The latest example comes from Qualcomm and Accenture, who have collaborated on ...more

During the Tuesday launch of Google I/O, the company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, pulled off a Steve Jobsian "one more thing" move near the end of his keynote address that was simply stunning. It's called Project Starline, and it's a (for now) internal project working to make remote ...more

The world of gaming has never been cooler thanks to Apple's ARKit. From AR arcade games to giant god battles to Pac-Man, we've seen our fair share of awesome and innovative games. Now, ARKit developer NK has created a location based gaming platform that molds aspects of the g ...more

DVice posts six of the world's most powerful telescopes and, man, they are HUGE. Check it out. The Keck I and Keck II "Built in 1993 atop the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii at an altitude of nearly 13,600 feet, the W. M. Keck Observatory pioneered the use of robotic assistanc ...more

LG literally rolled out a prototype of its cutting-edge flexible display at CES 2016 in Las Vegas. The company showed off an 18-inch screen with 1,200 x 800 pixel resolution that you can roll up like a magazine or newspaper and take with you. And while an 18-inch HD screen tha ...more

When the iPhone first came out, using them seemed like an impossibility to the visually impaired. Luckily, the iPhone now provides a multitude of resources to make sure that the visually impaired have accessibility to the phone. In fact, many blind people use their iPhone to ...more

Coming up at the end of May is the world's largest conference and expo dedicated to all things augmented and virtual reality, the Augmented World Expo, more commonly known just as AWE. And this year, a few of us from NextReality are going to be there. This year's AWE USA will ...more

A team of Japanese researchers have developed an airbag system for the exterior of the car, rather than the interior, with the purpose of protecting pedestrians. Via CrunchGear: "The airbags deflate rapidly upon impact, just like conventional airbags, to soften the effects o ...more

As if answering Apple's major iPhone event on Tuesday, Chinese mobile giant Xiaomi held its own product launch event the following day. And while the various smartphone offerings from the tech giant were impressive, it's the smartglasses product that the company revealed that ...more

Another day brings another Apple ARKit demo, this time for a first-person role playing game that inserts villagers, vendors, and villains into real world locations. Finnish developer Lauri Rustanius shared a series of videos via Twitter for a game called Genereal World that i ...more

Last week it was announced that Waymo, the former Google Self-Driving Car project, had graduated from Alphabet's X innovation center. This graduation had been in the cards for many months with senior members of the project team and X hinting that it would be soon. John Krafci ...more

The world of Lego is timeless primarily because everyone, regardless of age or background, can build a wide variety of amazing things with the simple component blocks from the classic toymaker. But now that Snapchat has brought that dynamic to augmented reality via the Rebuil ...more

As the level of data being generated grows exponentially, past the Information Age and into the coming Hyper-Information Age of immersive computing — as resistant as many of us are to the idea — personal data security is becoming a necessary consideration in our everyday lives ...more

The Audi A8 may be short on the wow factor as the industry's first Level 3 car, but Audi has revealed some interesting details about one stand-out feature underneath the hood: the car's ability to self-pilot itself at stop signs and lights. Indeed, when the A8 goes on sale th ...more

Investment in augmented reality remained robust in 2019. For the third consecutive year, we looked back on the biggest funding deals in the AR industry this week, and a familiar name came out on top. One of the companies investing in AR, Qualcomm, announced its new chipset fo ...more

When it comes to the business of augmented reality, companies that aren't already introducing new products or apps are focused on producing the AR technology of the future. But in the realm of real products and apps, Magic Leap continues to show off what its headset can do, th ...more

Apple continues to build its augmented reality hardware and software team in stealth mode. The latest addition comes via the hiring of a former DAQRI user experience designer and VR app developer. First reported by Variety, Sterling Crispin joined Apple in May as a prototypin ...more