Leap Motion, the company behind the weird gesture-tracking controller for PC and VR, is showing off some pretty interesting tech in the form of an AR headset reference design. Whether or not you’ll be able to get your hands on the concept, which incorporates the company’s gesture control hardware, is another story.…
iPhone X owners who still use Snapchat are in for a pleasant surprise today. The camera company, famously annihilated by Rihanna after it approved an ad mocking domestic violence victims, is finally releasing its previously announced lenses designed for the iPhone X. The feature was teased nearly seven months ago, so…
At some point, Magic Leap is going to have to let people play around with its ultra-secret mixed reality device. Dev kits are now shipping to select partners, so it would seem that time is now. But the chosen few are required to take extra security precautions that make it unlikely you’ll bump into one of the headsets…
Adam Pickard is a big fan of Ikea’s augmented reality app that lets you try out furniture in your home before buying it. But Pickard apparently thought a smartphone could be just as useful during the assembly process, so he mocked up a demo of an app that uses augmented reality to make building Swedish furniture…
The very first iPhone apps were universally dull. And then Bloom came out. Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers built the app and released it just a few months after Apple opened the App Store in July 2008. It was immediately obvious that something special was happening. The app was interesting on an artistic level, one that…
Augmented reality experiences are oftentimes a dud, and the really mind-melting ones require hardware that costs a shit-ton of money. But Abhishek Singh seems to have figured out a way to make AR both accessible and really fucking cool. His latest project brings the classic arcade game Street Fighter II to life as a…
There are no practical applications yet for AR—your mom isn’t using it to navigate a grocery store—but AR has become wildly popular in the tech community. Slap AR on a pitch and get some VC funding. Or, slap AR on the side of a product and bask in the AR buzz from tech publications. Bose, a company known for nice…
After a few years of running around outside catching wild Pokémon, fans will soon have the opportunity to do the same with dinosaurs.
At this point, augmented reality has mostly been too gimmicky or too good to be true. But a group of internet artists just gave the technology what might be its coolest use case yet: a tool to stick it to the man.
Augmented reality promises to deliver us a future in which we can simply look through our screens to magically transform the world around us. It also has the potential to really fuck your day up.
Kids today want more from social technology than seeing something new—they want a new way of seeing themselves. Snap and Instagram’s augmented reality lenses transform users into puppies, fairies, monsters, Wonder Woman, storied Jamaican singer-songwriters, and the like. It’s as if there’s a vibrant but invisible…
It makes absolutely perfect sense that augmented reality would find its way into an Iron Man toy. Tony Stark and AR go together like peanut butter and jelly. The Iron Man films, borrowing inspiration heavily from Minority Report, show an alternate universe where a man can slap on a tiny headset and get a cool computer…
Intel thinks it’s figured it out. The company that makes the CPUs in most of our computers has produced a set of glasses that could do what Google Glass could not—and what Magic Leap desperately wants to. It’s produced a pair of “smart glasses” that look like something you might actually wear.
To date, the best use of augmented reality has been running around parks trying to capture virtual Pokémon. But as that fad has (mercifully) faded away, a company called AstroReality has come up with a more compelling use of AR technology that works with an astonishingly detailed replica of the moon that’s as much a…
Yes, 2017's biggest tech story was probably about the ways in which social media forced us to rehash old culture wars and question who was guiding our political discourse. Rather than seeing technology facilitate greater communication, economic opportunity, and leisure, it seemed that it was exacerbating our…
After months spent in limbo and not a single new compatible device, Google is finally shutting its Tango augmented reality platform down for good, effective March 1st, 2018.
Federico Ciccarese and his company, Youbionic, imagine a not-too-distant future where everything we see is enhanced through augmented reality, and our body’s ability to interact with the world is upgraded through augmented physicality. What does that look like? For starters, a $2,000+ 3D-printed glove that puts two…
After the relative success of Apple’s front-mounted 3D sensor on the iPhone X, which is the component that enables Face ID and the company’s playful Animojis, Apple is reportedly aiming to complement 2019 iPhones with similar tech on their backsides, too.
When you think about the early days of virtual reality, you either think of the movie The Lawnmower Man, or that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the crew gets addicted to an augmented reality game that almost kills everyone. Which, by the way, you can now play on Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset.
The iPhone X is selling well, and Apple profits are just fine, but Tim Cook has been explicit in saying that augmented reality is the next big thing. And now we have a load of new details about the AR device that Apple is reportedly building.
