The Latest from Next Reality: Page 46

Spending time in a holographic environment brings the virtual world to life, but it doesn't actually create much interaction with your physical environment. So Daenet created a concept app called HoloTwin to demonstrate how holograms and real-world devices can interact with one another.

If you've been to the doctor enough, you know that the medical staff can make a variety of mistakes from time to time. They're human and that's normal, but errors in the medical field can often have significant negative impacts. At Boston's 2016 HoloHacks event, a team of developers created HoloHealth to mitigate human error in common healthcare tasks.

Microsoft's HoloLens has many applications in the business world, both large and small, but what about gaming? Initial demos gave the impression that we could expect amazing first person shooters, platformers, and even Minecraft. Yet, as Newsweek noticed, the HoloLens was nowhere to be found at E3 this year.

Microsoft's HoloLens comes with helpful features for capturing video and photos, but sharing whatever you record isn't as straightforward as you might expect. So here are the many ways to get your media off the device to share with the world.

Apple's plans for virtual, mixed, and augmented reality have remained a mystery for some time, but now we at least have some idea of what they're thinking about. UploadVR uncovered a patent showing a VR headset design that looks like a thick pair of sunglasses and utilizes an iPhone to provide an experience similar to the Samsung Gear VR.

Card games like Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, and the like have offered engaging fantasy worlds for players—but not without significant help from their imaginations. Video games and cartoons may have helped build these worlds, but mixed reality finally offers an opportunity to make the player's imagination real.

The human body is amazingly complex, and seeing inside one poses a variety of challenges whether you're dealing with an actual human or some kind of facsimile. Mixed reality offers the ability to get the best of both worlds by creating a holographic teaching tool for human anatomy.

Complex games in mixed reality require a pretty detailed scan of the room, and getting this process right can be both time-consuming and annoying. Computer science students at the University of Washington decided to fix that by turning it into a game.

We're already glimpsing the future when we look at mixed reality through a headset, but is the real evolution of this technology something that will exist as part of our bodies? As intense as that may sound, TechCrunch's Jay Donovan offers compelling reasons why it's not such a crazy idea:

One of the major criticisms of virtual reality, and much modern technology in general, is the antisocial nature it creates. But vTime wants to overcome the isolating nature of VR headsets with a virtual hangout space for you and your friends.

In the wake of Google Glass' failure, we can expect other companies to fill the void in due time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Snapchat may be one of the first.

The world of augmented reality has seen a myriad of different products, from sensor-laden smartphones to robust holographic headsets, but Google Glass's failures nearly killed the middle ground.

We've heard a bit about Google Daydream—the new smartphone-based virtual reality platform that is supposed to provide a markedly better experience than Cardboard—but don't really know what it'll look like. Engadget claims we could find out in just a couple of weeks, since Android Nougat is already out, a necessary component of Daydream.

Most popular virtual reality headsets, like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, require a tethered connection to the computer and that imposes some obvious restrictions on how much we can move in our space. We'd all prefer a simpler, untethered option, and Intel wants to provide just that.

With developers already figuring out how to use the HoloLens for home improvement tasks, it's no surprise that the device has greater applications in construction. Tech blog Digital Trends points out that holograms are a natural evolution of the blueprint, and several other aspects of construction work.

Mixed reality (MR) feels like an amazing, almost mind-blowing futuristic technology—but only once you've experienced it for yourself. Words, images, and even videos simply cannot describe the experience in full. If you want to really peer into the future and experience MR for yourself, you can sign up and just go in many cities.

Our future technology has a lot of amazing possibilities, and few have more promise than augmented and mixed reality headsets. But these advancements come with several concerns over privacy, and if we don't understand them, we may lose control of our own data without even knowing.

We've experienced the HoloLens, learned a lot about the Meta 2, but almost nobody knows exactly what to expect out of Magic Leap's mixed reality headset. Thanks to a patent dug up by Quartz (which we saw first on Tech Insider), we now might have a better idea.

Augmented reality began on smartphones but technical limitations have prevented further development. Google's Tango (formerly Project Tango) aimed to change all that, and with Lenovo's help, they now have their first device.

Not content with bringing the first untethered mixed reality headset to market, Microsoft wants to expand their Windows Holographic operating system beyond HoloLens into vastly more robust technologies.

By now, you've likely used or have seen friends and family use Face Swap Live on their phones. It's a fun little app for iOS (and soon to be Android) that harnesses current tech to—you guessed it—swap faces.

Thanks to Snapchat, we're all familiar with face swapping and augmentation thanks to some clever, fun technology. But that's just the beginning, because this kind of augmented reality can do so much more.

To become a tried-and-true Pokémon master in Pokémon GO, there's an incredibly important decision that needs your attention: Team Instinct, Team Mystic, or Team Valor?

While wandering around in Pokémon GO, you'll occasionally see what appears to be leaves fluttering around nearby. This is actually meant to be Pokémon "rustling in the grass," but whatever the intention, it means that there may be a wild Pokémon in that area.

Finding Pokémon in the wild isn't the only way to add to your collection in Pokémon GO—you're also able to hatch your own from eggs that you've gotten from PokéStops.

Like previous installments in the Pokémon series, as you progress through Pokémon GO you'll be able to evolve your Pokémon into more-powerful monsters with new and more-damaging attacks. However, unlike older entries in the series, your Pokémon won't simply evolve when they reach a certain level. Instead, you'll have to "feed" them a certain amount of character-specific candy to induce the transformation.

The easiest way to see which Pokémon are close to your current location in Pokémon GO is by checking the Nearby tracker in the bottom-right of your screen. At least this was the easiest way up until a few days ago. Initially, the Pokémon in the Nearby screen would be marked with between zero and three footprint icons—the more footprints, the further away a Pokémon is from your location. Pokémon with zero footprints should be visible to you.

If you want free Poké Balls and eggs when playing Pokémon GO, you can find them at PokéStops in variation locations around your city, which are marked with towering blue icons on your map. Once you're at Level 5, they'll also grant you Potions and Revives to help you in your battles against other trainers, so they're definitely something you should be visiting whenever you can.

Want to actually catch 'em all? Pokémon GO has long-teased the opportunity to hunt for Pokémon in the real world through augmented reality, but fewhave had the opportunity to actually see it in action.

After a relatively short beta-testing period, Pokémon Go is now rolling out to Android and iOS devices right now. If you want to catch 'em all in the real world, your wait is over.

Pokémon GO, the biggest augmented reality sensation ever, broke app store records this opening weekend. But it also did something even more important: it gamified physical activity.

Do I really need to tell you that it's a bad idea to play Pokémon GO while you're driving? I really hope it's not necessary, but just in case it is, here you go: It's a bad idea to play Pokémon GO while you're driving.

Pokémon GO, the global augmented reality game that's brought fans out of their homes to catch Pokémon across the planet, has brought about plenty of real-world positives. Unfortunately, when players get power hungry and start taking game hacks too far, we all get a little screwed—both digitally and in real life.

We can't be in two places at once, but with virtual touch interfaces we can theoretically use a machine to act as our second body in a remote location. Over at MIT, Daniel Leithinger and Sean Follmer, with the advisement of Hiroshi Ishii, created an interface that makes this possible.

Are there any benefits to watching a movie in a holographic mixed reality headset, or should you just stick with your TV? It's not as cut and dried as you might think. While TVs have some advantages, so does the virtual screen of a Microsoft HoloLens.

Augmented reality has a variety of applications, but lately the face has been a major point of concentration for many companies. We're all pretty familiar with face swapping by now, but ModiFace employs similar technologies for more practical purposes.

Microsoft released a robust version of the HoloLens when shipping the developer kits, but there's still lots of room left to grow. Today, they've released the first update to Windows Holographic, the operating system of the HoloLens, with a whole bunch of cool new features like voice commands and app multitasking.

The HoloLens can do some pretty crazy things such as create a robot invasion in your walls, but it can also help you do simple stuff, like hanging frames, paintings, or anything else on those walls—after you repair them from the robot attack, of course.

If you're standing in a foreign city, surrounded by signage in a language you don't understand, you won't suddenly be able to read it. But with a clever feature in Google's Translate app, your smartphone can.

Microsoft's HoloLens is certainly a leap into the future of mixed reality interfaces, but it's not without drawbacks.