Pokemon GO developer Niantic may be creating a set of augmented reality smart glasses, but it has no intention of building them itself, the company has confirmed. Niantic had announced last December that it would be working on a set of AR glasses using Qualcomm's chipset technology, and with which games like Pokemon GO and Ingress could better integrate into the real world.
Your next AirPods could use bone conduction for enhanced audio transmission. The most recent plans for this AirPods upgrade appears in the form of a patent application from Apple. In the plans, Apple shows a combination of elements, the likes of which would require a bit more than a pair of earbuds - but not quite a whole helmet-bound headset.
Mercedes will use cabin cameras to figure out not only who's inside the car but where they're sitting, and what they're looking at, with the upcoming 2021 S-Class promising new levels of tracking - and convenience - for its high-tech interior. Expected to make its official debut later in 2020, the new S-Class will be Mercedes-Benz's most lavish and technically-complex vehicle so far, though you won't need to read the user guide to figure it out.
Apple's smart glasses lenses have reportedly gone into trial production, as one of the key components for its upcoming AR products apparently makes it past the prototype stage. Based on technology expected to be used first in an augmented reality headset, and then a pair of sunglasses-style Apple Glasses, the lenses will presumably allow apps to project digital graphics into the wearer's line of sight.
Photorealistic games have more or less become a staple of modern games to the point that even smaller studios and indie developers would love to take a stab at it. While there are many tools, both free and expensive, that let game devs create mouth-watering 3D visuals, one aspect of 3D games still escapes the grasp of all but the biggest studios. Mocap, short for motion capture, is tricky and expensive, especially when taking into account believable and totally not-uncanny facial expressions. It turns out that Epic Games has a handy tool for recording facial expressions and all you really need is an iPhone.
Magic Leap has found itself a new CEO, with the beleaguered augmented reality company looking to a former Microsoft exec to help turn itself around. Long the darling of Silicon Valley investors, Magic Leap promised a mesmeric world that blended reality with digital graphics, but its first hardware fell well short on the delivery.
As a smaller company in a sea of big fish, OnePlus is used to doing more with less. Its launch events aren't exactly grand and can even be considered more "grassroots" than large corporate press parties. It does, however, always been more ambitious and daring with those exactly because it can afford to be more flexible and unorthodox. It isn't, for example, unfamiliar with holding events online but since everyone's doing online launches this year, it will reportedly put a hi-tech twist to the OnePlus Nord's debut.
Mercedes-Benz has teased what's possibly the most important car interior it has developed in years, with the new S-Class' tech promising a big upgrade over what you'll find in dealerships today. The new luxury sedan will feature a big new touchscreen display to dominate the dashboard, while the driver will get an augmented reality head-up display.
It's actually not exactly news that Niantic Labs, creators of the famed Ingress, Pokemon GO, and Harry Potter Wizards Unite AR games, have been working on a new title and what that title would be. It is, however, fresh news that it will soon be opening it up for beta testing. While that may already be big news for fans of the board game franchise, what Niantic also mentioned in passing might actually have even bigger implications for the still struggling AR market.
Google users on mobile can now experience a realistic dinosaur in their own environment using the Google Search app. With this new experience, Google offers AR dinosaurs based on the movie Jurassic World to let users experience the extinct creatures in an entirely new way -- and, of course, using the smartphones they already own.
Apple's prospective plans for a "modular system for head-mounted device" were revealed in a newly-public patent posted to the USPTO. The United States Patent and Trademark Office showed this document with inventors Paul X Wang and Dinesh C Mathew, as first filed in April of the year 2019. This could, possibly, point to part of Apple's design language for their eventual release of a pair of smart glasses, imbued with augmented reality abilities and tipped to be called Apple Glass.
The very first iterations of phone-based augmented reality simply slapped floating "stickers" in the camera viewer to give the semblance of a 3D object virtually existing in the real world. That illusion, however, was easily shattered when a real-world object that should go in front of those virtual objects don't. Google's answer to that is ARCore's new depth perception and after half a year of baking in previews and betas, it is finally ready for all developers to create more believable AR illusions.