Smartphones Features
How To: Get Hands Free for Directions & Traffic Info from Waze to Avoid a Crash (Or Ticket)
Drivers the world over are painfully aware of the inherent danger of taking their eyes off the road even for a second. In fact, according to the National Safety Council, 27% of all car crashes result from distracted driving due to attempted cell phone use. Fortunately, Waze comes with a feature that can help keep you from being a part of this grim statistic.
News: Walmart & Target Unwrap New Augmented Reality Features to Bring in Holiday Shoppers
This year's holiday shopping season is shaping up to be fertile ground for augmented reality to show its worth, as both Walmart and Target have crafted immersive experiences designed to engage shoppers in the coming weeks.
HowTo: Make Augmented Reality Cookies
Designer Mike Clare (of my own alma mater, RISD) has extended the augmented reality mania (1, 2, 3) to baked goods. Thanks to the crowd and Josh Delcore at AR World for the find. Here's how it works, via Design Boom:
How To: Install Opera Mini 4 on the T-Mobile Shadow cell phone
Check out this quick video tutorial on how to install Opera Mini 4 on the T-Mobile Shadow cell phone.
News: Realfiction's New Mixed Reality Display Projects Large Scale Holograms Without a Headset
Mixed reality display manufacturer Realfiction has developed a 64-inch display capable of delivering 3D holograms without a headset.
News: Magic Leap's First Twitch Video Show Had Toys, Philosophy, but No New Peeks at the Headset
We watched the first piece of public-facing content Magic Leap has released so you don't have to, and, well, you didn't miss much.
Cheap Mods: Turn Your Phone into a Boombox with a Few Household Items
Even though smartphone audio quality has improved in recent years, the tiny built-in speakers aren't always loud enough. But if you want to turn the volume up to 11, all you need is a few household items to make a rig that will amplify your phone's speakers throughout the whole house.
News: Apple iPhone X App Lets You Wear Your Friend's Face Like a Mask & Put Words in Their Mouth
On Wednesday, Apple released a new batch of Animoji characters that gives iPhone X users more virtual masks to play around with, but what many have been waiting for is an app that lets you put on a virtual mask of another person, not an animated emoji. Well, that day has finally arrived.
News: HoloLens Will Be Your AR Piano Teacher in the Future
You've likely seen light-up musical keyboards that teach you how to play a song with visual cues, but few of those devices exist and have a limited number of songs you can actually learn. But Karl Baumann and his HoloLens Hackathon team figured out that in mixed reality, you can learn music with visual cues with any piano.
Dev Report: Google's ARCore Bests Apple's ARKit with Tracking for Walls, Ceilings, Even Ramps
This morning Google announced ARCore, an SDK for Android devices that will allow augmented reality developers to add new functionality to Android 7.0 and up, all without any special hardware other than the camera of a phone.
News: Facebook Adds Sketchfab, Body & Hand Tracking, Background Segmentation, & More to AR Studio
At its F8 developers conference on Tuesday, Facebook announced new tools and features coming in a new version of AR Studio, including the integration of 3D content aggregator Sketchfab's Download API.
How To: Turn Old Books into an Incognito NFC-Enabled Phone Charging Dock
As a former English major, I have a love/hate relationship with many books. And when I saw that this NFC-enabled charging dock project included a little book mutilation, I was suddenly more interested. Now, for those of you who have nothing against books, this is still a great project to add some style to your tech devices.
News: 3D Scanning App for iPhone Makes Capturing & Sharing AR Content as Easy as Taking a Picture
Augmented reality app developer Laan Labs has shared a preview of a beta app that achieves 3D scanning with just an iPhone and produces highly-detailed models for sharing with others.
News: Magic Leap Made Me Cry, Probably for the Last Time. Here's Why That's the Good News
A lot of digital ink has been spilled heaping scorn on Magic Leap. Much of that media schadenfreude was due to what some believed were unmet promises versus some of the early hype around the product. Others just seemed to be rubbed the wrong way by the startup's Apple-esque secrecy and penchant for attempting to coin new terms and frameworks for things that were, mostly, already in play.
How To: How Much Radiation Does Your Phone Emit?
Tawkon has developed an app for the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry that measures the radiation levels at any given time. The demonstration below shows how the radiation levels go up for each phone when a "death grip" is applied. What's a death grip, you may ask? A death grip is a simple term used to denote a hand that has recently killed. What a troublesome thing to have.
News: A New Age in Wireless Charging Is Here — & It's Not Just Qi
Today could mark the beginning of a new age in wireless charging. The FCC has certified the WattUp transmitter, a revolutionary technology that could shape the future of smartphone charging. This new tech addresses many of Qi charging's limitations, and if things go right, may lead to a truly wireless future.
How To: Use the GPS navigating system on an LG Rumor
Looking for a gas station, or even where to get the cheapest gas? A GPS navigator is already equipped in your LG Rumor mobile phone. Watch this video cell phone tutorial and learn how to use the GPS navigator on an LG Rumor. Use the GPS navigating system on an LG Rumor.
How To: Use the apps and software on an HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 smartphone
Get the most out of your HTC HD7! This guide offers a software tour of the HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 smartphone. Windows Phone 7 novice? Not a problem. This exhaustive, eleven-minute guide will teach you everything you need to know. Become a WP7 pro with this video guide.
How To: Use the Verizon Droid
In this video, get to know the Verizon Droid from Verizon Wireless. In this video, learn about the useful features and functions behind this phone, like watching YouTube videos in high quality, and getting alerts while browsing.
News: Wake Up! Anti Sleep Pilot for iPhone Helps Curb Tiredness Behind the Wheel
Always falling asleep behind the wheel? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that there are over 56,000 sleep-related accidents each year, resulting in 40,000 injuries and 1,550 deaths annually in the United States. Don't want to be a statistic? Then you may want to try out ASP Technology's mobile application which aims to keep you awake when you're fatigued on the road.
News: What We Know About Magic Leap's Amazing Tech So Far
Virtual reality headsets are all the rage these days, and among the menagerie of tech companies gunning for the top spot, there's one mysterious startup that is ahead of the game—Magic Leap—and you can tell just by watching their latest demo video of their product in action.
News: Sony Is Launching a Location-Based Ghostbusters Training Experience in Augmented Reality
We've got almost a full year until the next installment of Ghostbusters arrives, but in the meantime, it turns out that Sony is about to launch an augmented reality experience that will let fans use immersive computing to combat the franchise's whimsical apparitions.
How To: Change the face plate on the Nokia N95 cell phone
Watch this video to learn how to change the fascia, or face plate, on your Nokia N95 cell phone with a T5 Screwdriver.
News: Facebook Adds New Story Time Content to Portal, New AR Features to Portal TV
Friends and family receiving new Portal devices for Christmas will have some extra stocking stuffers in the form of new AR features.
News: Microsoft Adds Spatial App Functionality to Office 365's Teams App, Android & Web Interaction Demoed
Months ago, we showed you some of the powers of Spatial, the HoloLens app that allows groups of workers to collaborate in augmented reality using 3D avatars.
How To: Completely disassemble Verizon's Motorola Droid X
If you can't wait to see what's inside your new Motorola Droid X mobile device from Verizon Wireless, this video will show you the complete dissection process. Just because the Droid X is new, doesn't mean that the cell phone isn't prone to damage or minor repairs, like the touchscreen. Watch to learn the whole Droid X disassembly, and you can get step-by-step text and photo instructions at DroidX.net.
IFTTT 101: Secure Your Automations with 2-Step Verification
If you want to automate tasks with your smartphone, IFTTT is a great app. It does a tremendous job of helping you find applets or creating your own from scratch, so it's easy to connect your favorite online services and make them react to each other. With all this personal information, though, you should ensure that your data is secure by enabling two-step verification.
News: China-Based Startup 0glasses Looks to Challenge Nreal Light with Its RealX Augmented Reality Smartglasses
Brace yourselves: Nreal Light clones are coming. Since the China-based startup wowed the crowd at CES 2019 with its consumer-centric smartglasses, a number of followers from Asia have emerged, and all with very similar aesthetics to Nreal Light.
How To: Find the percent sign on a BlackBerry devices
This video shows us the method to find the percent sign on Blackberry. The first step involves going to a place on the Blackberry where text can be inserted. This place is ideal for inserting a % sign. Look in the keypad carefully. There are various keys in it. Search for the key named 'SYM'. SYM stands for symbol. This key is helpful in typing various symbols in the text to be entered through the keypad. When the 'SYM' key is pressed, it opens a window containing various symbols. The % sign ...
News: Touch & Feel Things That Don't Exist with Dexmo's Exoskeleton Gloves
One of the disadvantages of the digital world is that you can't pick it up and touch it. While that can feel like less of a problem in virtual reality, where you're already holding controllers, mixed reality environments—like the one you'd experience in Microsoft's HoloLens—suffer from a lack of physical connection with the digital objects that appear in your real world. Dexmo aims to solve that problem with a relatively intimidating new controller that encompasses your hands.
News: Trimble Releases SketchUp Viewer, the First Commercial HoloLens Application in the Windows Store
Visualization is one of the obvious commercial applications for technology such as Microsoft's HoloLens. The ability to see the assets of a project in different scales—from micro to larger-than-life—with a quick air tap will play a large part in the coming augmented reality revolution. Whether the assets are art for a game, interior design, raw financial data, or architecture, data visualization will play an important role in the future. This is due, in part, to our ability to absorb informat...
How To: Get the Most Out of the Gym With These 6 Essential Apps
The gym can be pretty distracting. With the slamming of weights and pieces of equipment, loud music blasting through the speakers, and plain old grunting, it can be challenging to focus on your workout. However, with your just your phone, you can not only eliminate these distractions but make the most of your time there.
How To: Set a song as an alarm on an iPod Touch (1st/2nd gen)
If you own a jailbroken iPod Touch 1G or 2G and have ever wanted to know what it takes to setup your iPod's alarm clock to wake you up with music from your own music library, now you can. First you'll use WinSCP to get connect to your iPod Touch over SSH. Then you'll locate the MP3 file desired for use as your alarm, then you'll convert that file to an AAC-formatted M4A file. After that, you'll use WinSCP to transfer that file to the secret location revealed in the video as the location of au...
How To: Tether an iPhone 3G/3Gs to a PC without jailbreaking
Want to tether your iPhone 3G or 3GS to your home computer without jailbreaking it? It's easy! So easy, in fact, that this home-computing how-to can present a complete, step-by-step overview of the process in about under ten minutes' time! For details, including step-by-step instructions, watch this helpful video guide.
News: Apple Brings New Characters & Features to Animoji — Then Destroys Samsung's AR Emoji with Memoji
Alongside ARKit 2.0, Apple revealed new Animojis alongside new Memoji virtual doppelgangers that compete with functionality quite similar to that of Samsung's AR Emoji.
How To: Text message with an iPhone
Learn how to send an instant message on your iPhone. Tap the Messaging Icon with your finger. To compose a new message, tap the New Text icon in the upper-right hand corner. Enter a phone number or a name from your contact list into the "To:" field. Type in text message using the keyboard at the bottom of the screen. When message is complete, tap Send. To return to message list, tap the Messaging Icon again. To text a reply to a previous conversation, tap on that conversation, add text and ta...
How To: Change your iPod Touch default password
HighQuality Tutorials demonstrates how to change your iPod Touch alpine default password. Changing the default password is useful when using your iPod Touch in a public setting to make it less vulnerable to hacking. To change the default password, first open up your internet connection and search for Putty. Download the Putty program. Open and run the Putty program. Your host name will be your IP address for your iPod Touch. Select port 22 and SSH and open up the program. Log in as root and c...
News: Google's ARCore Will Do for Android Hardware What Apple's ARKit Has Done for iPhones
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.
News: Google's ARCore Updates Bring Scene Viewer for AR on Web & Search, Improvements to Image Recognition & Ambient Lighting
After announcing at Google I/O 2019 that augmented reality content would come to Search, Google revealed how it would make that happen with the latest round of updates to ARCore.
News: Microsoft's Alex Kipman Predicts Three Trends in Augmented & Virtual Reality for 2018
In a LinkedIn post published on Tuesday, Microsoft's leading advocate for the HoloLens made a prediction that the mixing of immersive technologies will define augmented reality in 2018.