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In addition to trying to give Pokémon a life on the HoloLens, Sky Zhou, a founding member of mixed reality studio Matrix Inception, won Microsoft's Actiongram Fantasy Contest Quest last month for his video concept on slaying dragons. But fantastical creatures aren't the only t ...more

Unity released the Beta 5.6 on December 13 with a bunch of new upgrades in the works, including support for Vulkan, better instancing options, and more improvements to particles—to name just a few that are potentially relevant to the mixed reality community. And today, Decembe ...more

You might not think a mixed reality headset could help kids eat their vegetables, but that's the exact premise behind Habit.at—the app that won the "Social Good" category at the 2016 HoloHacks competition in Los Angeles. Video: . The Habit.at team, consisting of Mariana Acuña- ...more

For the past three or four months, Microsoft has been pushing advertisements onto the lock screens of some Windows 10 users as part of its "Windows Spotlight" feature. This feature normally shows you scenic photographs and gives you the option to learn more about them by launc ...more

Microsoft dropped a couple of huge bombs at their Windows 10 event Wednesday afternoon. Free operating systems and holographic glasses? This must be a Sci-Fi novel or a Hollywood blockbuster, because it reeks of fiction. As it turns out, we are indeed living in a world where ...more

Metro apps are pretty nice, but they absolutely suck on a Windows desktop with a mouse and keyboard. That's to be expected though, since Metro (also known as Modern UI or Microsoft design language) was created mainly with touch input in mind for Surface Pros and Windows Phones ...more

Ah, the age-old problem of sharing pictures with friends and family. Ten years ago, the best method available to us was passing around duplicate photos printed out at the local drug store. As easy as smartphones have made this act, you'd think we'd be satisfied by now. Not Mi ...more

It has been an interesting few days in developer news. The Microsoft blog has been busy with information relative to the augmented reality space. Meta 2 has also announced an interesting development this week. Here is a collection of various tidbits that have been collecting u ...more

On Wednesday, Scope AR, makers of Remote AR, the augmented reality video conference calling and remote assistance solution, announced that the app is finally available for HoloLens. Next Reality had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO/CTO of Scope AR, Scott Montgomerie, ...more

When I first started with HoloLens development last April, one of the first things I created was a window. The purpose of that window was to be attached to a wall and give the illusion of being in a different space—an effect that is often referred to as a "magic window" effect ...more

Verto Studio 3D is a 3D modeling package that has been in the works for a while now by Michael Farrell, the owner of Verto Studio LLC. Farrell has been working toward bridging the gap between XR 3D modeling and what we have become accustomed to with desktop 3D modeling package ...more

Microsoft Build 2017, the first of Microsoft's big developer conferences for the year, is just a few weeks away. This very popular conference, which has been going on since 2011, is known to sell out fast. In 2015, it sold out in under an hour, and in 2016, in less than 5 minu ...more

Trimble is integrating its mixed reality applications into the DAQRI Smart Helmet to enable outdoor and on-site support for design, construction, and heavy industry as part of a collaboration the companies announced today. A provider of advanced solutions for industrial compa ...more

Students from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center have been working on an augmented reality system to help teach music in a project called Music Everywhere. This application for the Microsoft HoloLens would utilize holograms to visually instruct the u ...more

3D modeling is usually a very long and complicated process. Manipulating the thousands to millions of vertices, faces, and triangles to the correct shape you want is just the first part of the process, and can take a good while depending on the level of detail needed. From th ...more

I am often asked about getting started with HoloLens development and most of the time my answer, in short, is: Install Unity, install Visual Studio, install the HoloLens emulator, and make something. I suspect most of the time this advice is ignored, since the idea of develop ...more

As mobile devices become more and more popular, service providers have unfortunately resorted to capping data. What this means is that, depending on the plan you have with your ISP, you could have limits placed on how much data you can use for a set period of time. Once you've ...more

Slowly but surely, Microsoft seems to be steering Windows in the direction of Google's Android. First, they released Windows 10 as a free upgrade, mainly because they wanted to cash in on the revenue that they hoped would come when more users had access to the Windows Store. T ...more

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Besides being one of the most notorious misquotes of all time (the line is "Magic Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all"), it's a question that men and women probably have asked themselves more than once. ...more

If you've been using Windows 10 for a while, you already know that Microsoft incorporated lots of new features into it. So you're probably familiar with Cortana (the new voice assistant), the Edge browser (their replacement for Internet Explorer), the newly resurrected Start m ...more

LOOOK, a Seattle-based mixed reality and development studio, can now peer into the future with their new geotechnical engineering visualization application for Microsoft HoloLens. Developed in partnership with BCG Engineering, a geotechnical consulting firm based in Vancouver ...more

Microsoft's first venture into the tablet market, the Surface RT, combines many of the capabilities of a normal Windows 8 laptop into a super compact tablet, whose super-thin touch cover and kickstand can transform it into a functional mini-laptop, small and light enough to go ...more

It's officially the holiday season, which means everyone will soon be traveling home to spend time with loved ones. And anyone who has any knowledge whatsoever of computers knows what else that means—family members left and right asking you to fix their various technical woes. ...more

There are a bunch of new and interesting features packed inside of Windows 10, but one of the most exciting ones is the Microsoft Edge web browser, the long-awaited replacement of Internet Explorer. While the "e" icon that you know so well will remain the same, albeit with a ...more

For years, PuTTy has reigned supreme as the way to establish a Secure Shell (SSH) connection. However, those days are numbered with the addition of the OpenSSH server and client in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, which brings Windows up to par with macOS and Linux's abili ...more

Way back, life on the range was tough and unforgiving for a HoloLens developer. Air-tap training was cutting edge and actions to move holograms not called "TapToPlace" were exotic and greeted with skepticism. The year was 2016, and developers had to deploy to their devices to ...more

When building anything of a social nature, be it a local roller derby or softball team, a club dance night for chiptune, or building new technology markets, the community around those ideas are an important factor in helping these things not only come into existence but to gro ...more

When the HoloStudy Demo app for HoloLens came out in September, it was a pretty impressive start to what could be a very valuable science tool for education. Now, Moscow-based HoloGroup, makers of HoloStudy, started an Indiegogo campaign to improve their modular teaching app. ...more

The desktop Start menu is finally back! After receiving a lot of negative user feedback, Microsoft ditched the touchscreen-first approach of Windows 8 and went with a more traditional setup for mouse-and-keyboard users in Windows 10. Don't Miss: How Anyone (Even Pirates) Can ...more

If you missed out on Black Friday this year, you've got a second chance at saving some big bucks on apps, mobile devices, HDTVs, and other tech. See below for all of the hot Cyber Monday deals from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other online retailers. This list will be ...more

I am an English major physically allergic to all algebraic formulas, so you're unlikely to get any help from me when it comes to solving any expressions. But in the glorious technological age we live in, there are plenty of apps that actually make math and problem solving fun, ...more

Remote Desktop gives you access to your Windows 8 PC or device from wherever you are to run your applications and access your files remotely. Left an important document on your work computer? Want to run a legacy x86 desktop app from your Surface? You can use Remote Desktop ...more

With the addition of the OpenSSH client and server in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you no longer have to rely on third-party programs to open an SSH server and connect to a Windows machine. While still a beta feature, this represents a long-overdue update fulfilling a ...more

Augmented reality is beginning to leak out into the mainstream world. This is thanks, in part, to ARKit and ARCore. These releases turned the current smartphones owned by millions of Apple and Android users into AR-capable machines. And while there are definitely some awesome ...more

In the past, to see a pre-constructed state of the house that you would one day live in, you had to be able to read blueprints or hire an artist to sketch it out. Later came the ability to have a 3D rendering of that house on a screen, but you'd still have to work hard to envi ...more

If you have a HoloLens, you can now control the lighting throughout your home or office via holographic controls using the free Hue Lights app in the Windows Store. The app, made by California-based AfterNow, works with the Philips Hue colored lighting system and is much more ...more

Beginners luck is a phrase I have always hated. But really, beginners luck comes down to not letting your experience in something get in the way of the idea. This past weekend, I drove to Atlanta for my first ever hackathon, HoloHack, presented by ThyssenKrupp. Twenty hours a ...more

For enterprise augmented reality platform makers, remote assistance apps represent one of the greatest opportunities to show off the power of immersive computing. These apps enable experts to guide front-line workers or customers with AR prompts and other content in the field ...more

Thanks to online music services like eMusic and iTunes, compact discs are becoming a far distant memory, turning local music shops around the country into desolate wastelands. The once mighty movie rental store Blockbuster is now bankrupt because of online streaming services l ...more

I remember a time when I had to rent a VHS from the local video rental store. It wasn't all that bad, with the only real annoyances being the trip to and fro, having to rewind the movie and the possible malfunction of my VHS player, which liked to eat tape from time to time. ...more

Now that the iPhone 4 made its way to Verizon, there's a whole new crowd of smartphone users that are looking for jailbreak methods. And GreenPois0n has come to the rescue (yet again). The Chronic Dev Team recently pushed out GreenPois0n RC5.4 for both Mac and Windows machine ...more

It's that time a year when winter storms begin causing havoc across the United States, and when "rotating outages" are common to help sustain the electrical grid during intense cold periods. That means pretty much anybody with snow and ice in their backyard can succumb to powe ...more

Last week Amazon set their sights on the mobile app market, launching their Appstore for Android. This week they're attacking Android devices once again, but that's not all—they're getting into the online storage biz. On Monday, they launched Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Clo ...more

Over the years, I have enjoyed playing with Asterisk. I have found Asterisk to be extremely powerful and fun to play with. There are several books and many scattered how to articles out there, but most are outdated and the information required to build Asterisk from beginning ...more

Getting used to your new Firefox 4 web browser? If so, you might have seen some improvements in the Location Bar. The updated features make browsing the web a cinch, so it's no wonder why more and more Internet junkies are calling it the Awesome Bar. It's faster and easier to ...more

It's been done for ages, but for most of us, "regift" entered our vocabulary after the 98th episode of Seinfeld—"The Label Maker." In this episode, Elaine calls Dr. Whatley (played by Bryan Cranston) a "regifter" after he gives Jerry a label maker—the same label maker that Ela ...more

For me, the idea of a smartphone with internet access was overkill for a cell phone. Wasn't that what my computer was for? Do I really need immediate access to the web? Must I update my Facebook every hour, from the palm of my hand? Do I need turn-by-turn directions from Googl ...more

In a recent arbitrage tip, we showed you the secret to making money fast by buying and selling the same thing over and over again on eBay. But there's one thing you need to know about the buying part—get the lowest price possible! This article aims to show you some of the best ...more

Nowadays, there's a mobile app for just about everything—but that doesn't mean it should be on your smartphone. Not diggin' what SPB Shell 3D did to your home screen? Accidentally purchased Angry Sperms instead of Angry Birds? Want to try out the upcoming Smuggle Truck without ...more

After years of being a PC technician and Windows System administrator, I had the blind hatred for Apple that I thought I was suppose to have. I swore that I'd never even touch an iPod, let alone buy an Apple product. But I found a new career that drug me out of the Windows ser ...more

We've all been waiting for it, and now it's finally here— Video Skype for the iPhone 4. It's no longer just a voice over the phone, now you can finally see those rosy-red cheeks of your fellow Skyper, and maybe even their underwear. Check out the official Skype for iPhone - no ...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