ARKit is a marketer's dream. By providing tools for creating augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, AR apps can now be deployed easily alongside just about any campaign. As expected, we now have ARKit apps pushing wares ranging from automobiles to tequila. Of course ...more
Most Android launchers limit you to three choices: Icons, widgets, and folders. It's better than nothing, but it's still pretty hard to find the best look without overcrowding your home screen. You could fill everything up with icons, but then you'd have an iPhone. You could t ...more
Apple's iOS 11 release promises many improvements and fresh ideas. One of those new ideas is an image codec called HEIF (similar to HEVC for videos), designed to reduce the space photos take up on your iPhone. But it's so new that it's already causing issues with compatibility ...more
When Apple announced their ARKit platform in June, they immediately staked the claim to the largest augmented reality hardware platform, with millions of iPhones and iPads compatible with iOS 11 becoming AR devices this fall. Not so fast, says Google. Today, Google revealed t ...more
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) drive over eight million people to seek medical attention every year. Almost all — as many as 90% — of those infections are caused by Escherichia coli. Copper can kill bacteria, but E. coli has found a way to capture the copper, preventing its a ...more
The large, dome-shaped LiDARs that have become a fixture on driverless car prototypes are expensive and notably ugly. And yet, these unsightly devices should remain planted on driverless cars, even when they become available in commercial fleet services across the country in a ...more
A recent study offers information that might help combat a deadly virus that affects an estimated 300,000 people each year in West Africa. In late June of this year, the World Health Organization reported an outbreak of Lassa fever with 501 confirmed cases and 104 deaths. The ...more
This fall, DC Comics fans will be treated to an augmented reality experience promoting the Justice League movie. Likewise, history buffs will be able to enjoy their own augmented reality content by way of the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit at The Franklin Institute in Philadelph ...more
If you've received a spam message in Signal Private Messenger, you know that anyone can contact you as long as they have your linked phone number. But when it comes to the people you're actually trying to have a private conversation with, how do you know it's really them? Whe ...more
While HBO Now does not support offline viewing yet, your smartphone is the perfect way to watch your favorite shows and movies on-the-go. Whether you're in a hotel running off Wi-Fi or you have an unlimited plan and are on the bus, if you want to binge some Game of Thrones, th ...more
It's no secret that HBO has some ... mature content. Just watch the first five minutes of Game of Thrones. Yeah, I know. What a ride. But here's the thing — HBO has kids content, too, and it's good stuff! HBO now owns Sesame Street, of all shows. So parents should be allowed ...more
Augmented and virtual reality continues to be a hot commodity among tech investors, with more than $800 million invested in AR/VR companies in the second quarter alone and global tech leaders like Samsung focusing their investment strategies on the emerging field. The investm ...more
It seems almost every carrier now has an unlimited data plan, and free Wi-Fi is now available in more places than ever before. If you want to be connected, it has never been easier — but that still doesn't mean that everyone can stream as much as they please. Many of us don't ...more
Innovation Congress starts tomorrow, but its creator, Jason Keath, spoke to Next Reality today about the future of augmented reality. Innovation Congress is an event meant to discuss strategies for businesses to stay competitive in the future, with technology trends shifting ...more
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get your mind out of the gutter. Search histories can and should be managed. Many folks are uncomfortable knowing that every video they click and every phrase they search is being recorded and saved, and YouTube is no exception. Sure, sometimes, it can be he ...more
Facing claims of misappropriation of trade secrets and confidential information by Meta Company, DreamWorld, led by Meta's former employee, Zhangyi "Kevin" Zhong, has fired back with a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. In case you missed our previous report, Meta's lawsuit cente ...more
The community of bacteria that lives in our gut has a lot to tell us. It can give clues to what we eat, the environment we live in, and diseases and disorders we may have. Now, scientists have linked these bacterial species to how we feel. A new research study found an associa ...more
When I booted up my second Sega Forever title, I wasn't sure what to expect. Sonic 1 was fun, but the controls weren't great. Touch screen controls can be excellent when the game is designed for them, but retrofitting a game designed for a physical controller to be played on a ...more
Snapchat recently updated their Android and iPhone apps with a new feature called Snap Map which lets you share your current location with other Snapchatters, as well as see their current locations. It may sound like an interesting new feature, but sharing your exact location ...more
If you know that ticks spread Lyme disease, you may already know you might also catch a bunch of other infections from them. One of the lesser-known diseases spread by ticks is infection with the bacterium Anaplasma phagocytophilium, called anaplasmosis. The disease is danger ...more
While restaurants and classrooms have enacted policies banning cell phones, one father has had enough of his kids' obsessive phone habits. Dr. Tim Farnum is now seeking to ban the sale of smartphones to children under 13. Yes, you read that right. Farnum was inspired to propo ...more
This week's Market Reality covers a variety of business news from acquisitions and partnerships to competitive and technology assessments to quarterly financial results. Upskill Bolsters Product Portfolio with Pristine Acquistion Enterprise augmented reality software provide ...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
Sometimes it's impossible to concentrate — let alone direct your personal assistant Siri — when someone is blasting music on their phone or talking to thin air. I mean I'm loud, but not that loud. So, it's a relief to hear that this could be changing for the better. According ...more
The Samsung Galaxy S8's almost bezel-less display is truly a sight to behold, especially when set to Immersive Mode. While transparent when on the home screen, the navigation and status bars on the S8 will often turn opaque depending on what app you're using at the moment. Thi ...more
Globes used to be standard in households, usurped in many ways by modern mobile and desktop applications. But one company believes they can upgrade the globe for the 21st century. PlayShifu has developed Orboot, a globe that is brought to life through their corresponding augm ...more
The sun-drenched people of Phoenix can now sign up to ride in an automated car, for free, courtesy of Waymo. The Alphabet affiliate announced its "early ride program," which will (hopefully) demonstrate how self-driving cars will fit into people's everyday lives. Highlighting ...more
Update Feb. 2020: Google has removed the feature flag to move the address bar to the bottom of the screen. We've out to see if they have plans to bring it back, but received no comment. In the meantime, you can use the new Chrome Duet bottom bar instead. End update. In this ...more
The squiggly guys in this article's cover image are Propionibacterium acnes. These bacteria live in low-oxygen conditions at the base of hair follicles all over your body. They mind their own business, eating cellular debris and sebum, the oily stuff secreted by sebaceous glan ...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 group of researchers from Stanford University and Princeton University has put together the largest RGB-D video dataset to date with over 1,500 scans of over 700 different locations across the world, for a total of 2.5 million views. This dataset, called ScanNet, has been s ...more
At a global security conference in Munich, philanthropist and businessman Bill Gates spoke about the next pandemic and a dire lack of global readiness. Here's how his statement could come true—and how to be ready when it does. On Saturday, Bill Gates joined hundreds of heads- ...more
Now that Android Nougat lets you add your own custom Quick Settings tiles, your pull-down menu is probably getting a lot more crowded than it used to be, with all sorts of new and useful toggles. But the trouble is, you can only add up to nine entries before your Quick Setting ...more
"Necessity, not novelty," is a phrase I use often when it comes to HoloLens development. It would be fair to call it my mantra, or mission statement, as I prototype and explore software creation on this new frontier of mixed reality. "What kind of experiences will keep people ...more
The largest and arguably most widely known event of its type, especially in the US, the Sundance Film Festival is an annual celebration of independent film—ones made outside the Hollywood system. This year, a new type of experience appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in an ...more
Using extreme time-lapse microscopy, scientists watched a virus take over a bacteria to create a cell that looked and functioned more like a plant or animal cell. True story. In a study published in Science, researchers from the Division of Biological Sciences and Department ...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
Dutch filmmaker Anthony Van der Meer published his 2015 thesis short from Willem de Kooning Academy in South Holland online in December 2016. It's a brilliant piece of work that managed to be touching, alarming, and informative at the same time. His documentary, which already ...more
If you really want to play Gran Turismo or Castlevania on the go, Sony's PlayStation Portable is a great way to do it. But it gets harder and harder to justify carrying around a PSP handheld gaming console when you've got an equally powerful Android phone in your pocket alread ...more
When you do an internet search, you'll see ads that are relevant to your query mixed in with the rest of your results. Nothing surprising there—it's how the internet is funded. But then, when you click one of the search results, you'll also see ads that are related to your ini ...more
Paranoid Android has always been one of the most popular custom ROMs because of the inventive features its developers add to Android. Two of the biggest draws in particular have to be the "Halo" notification bubble, and the "Pie" navigation buttons, which can both fundamentall ...more
Google's new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones are available for pre-order right now, but the general public won't start to get their hands on these devices for another week or two. Tech reporters got some hands-on time at Google's launch event on October 4th, but camera testing ...more
Google has a habit of starting on new projects for Android, then hiding them away if they didn't quite complete them in time for a major release. We saw this with multi-window mode last year (which is now an official Nougat feature), and this year, there was the hidden night m ...more
Whether you made the switch from iOS, or you came from a different Android device, there's a lot to learn about your new Galaxy device. Samsung does things a bit differently, and thanks to their TouchWiz interface, there are tons of added features to take advantage of—though s ...more
When Google released the first Developer Preview build of Android 7.0 Nougat, users were happy to see that a new "Night Mode" was included among the changes. The feature would cancel out any blue light emitted from your screen to help you get to sleep a bit earlier, quite simi ...more
We love shredded chicken in our tacos, casseroles, quesadillas, salads, sandwiches... okay, we just love shredded chicken. What we don't love is the actual process of shredding it. Don't Miss: Save Money by Breaking Down Your Own Chicken Often, we use the ol' forks method o ...more
In Pokémon GO, having an in-depth understanding of your Pokémon's stats and abilities is crucially important to becoming a better player. Not all Pokémon are created equal; as such, it's critical that you look at each of your Pokémon—even duplicates—with a keen eye. Every Pok ...more
When the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge came to market in 2016, they were universally praised as being the pinnacle of Android smartphone design, even topping Consumer Reports' smartphone ratings. Why? Well, for once, we finally had a smartphone, or in this case, a pair of sma ...more
Considering how much smartphones cost in the first place, we're understandably reluctant to throw them out when we've bought a newer model. And this is probably the best practice, too, as there are many great uses for an old Android device. Don't Miss: Turn Your Old Android i ...more
The magic of an ice cold popsicle on a hot summer's day is undeniable, whether you're a child or a kid-at-heart. Neon-colored, store-bought popsicles may have a special place in your memory, but homemade popsicles are pretty hard to beat. Here's how to create delicious frozen ...more
With each update, Apple Music continues to become a bigger part of iOS. It's gotten to the point where you have to fend off multiple requests to subscribe to the streaming music service before you can listen to your own songs on an iPad or iPhone, but as it stands in iOS 10, m ...more
When it comes to Android automation apps, Tasker has never had much competition. But considering how difficult it can be for a novice user to get the hang of things, and factoring in Tasker's drab and complicated interface, there's definitely room for another developer to step ...more
Google Photos is one of the best photo management services out there. It allows you to back up an unlimited amount of high-quality images without ever paying a dime, the photos and videos sync flawlessly across all of your devices, and its neural network-powered visual search ...more
Why, for the love of God, do people keep inventing ridiculous devices that make the simplest things more complicated in the name of convenience? This may be a rhetorical question that will forever go unanswered—because these crazy gadgets just keep rolling out, one after the o ...more
The Galaxy S7 edge comes with a feature called Edge Apps that lets you quickly launch your favorite apps by swiping in from the edge of your screen. It's a natural and intuitive gesture, and as a result, we've seen a recent influx of apps that look to emulate this feature. Bu ...more
Virtual reality is all the rage these days, especially with devices like the Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and HTC Vive hitting shelves lately. But before any of those fancy, expensive headsets ever made it to the market, Google came up with a thrifty and inventive substitute in the f ...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
One of the best uses for an old Android device is to turn it into a security webcam that can be accessed over the internet. But most of the time, this is a rather difficult process, because existing apps usually require you to mess around with network settings and configure a ...more
Welcome back, my budding hackers! One of the most basic skills the forensic investigator must master is the acquisition of data in a forensically sound manner. If data is not captured in a forensically sound manner, it may not be admissible in court. In my Kali Forensics seri ...more
The Google Play Store hosts the largest collection of mobile apps on the planet, and it's the default app store for almost all Android devices. Ironically, though, while Google made its name with a powerful search engine, it can sometimes be difficult to find what you're looki ...more