augmented

LAS VEGAS--Cyborgs, meet your gear. The Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses, a wearable Bluetooth/Wi-Fi headpiece with a built-in HD camera and WQVGA floating eyepiece display, are on hand to try out at CES 2013. Previously seen in nonworking prototype form at the end of last year, the M100 Smart Glasses will run on Android and eventually iOS and be available by summer 2013 (fall for iOS, pending app approval).

"It would feel like you're looking at a screen the size of your phone, but the image floats out in space," Vuzix President and Chief Executive Paul Travers … Read more

The Microsoft Bing team is doing more than building a search engine that competes head-to-head with Google.

Part of the team, as I've blogged previously, also built some of the first Microsoft-branded consumer apps for Windows 8.

But it turns out there's another team inside the Bing organization that is working on Windows 8 apps, too. There's an Augmented Reality (AR) team inside Bing that is building both an AR framework and AR applications that will ship on Windows 8 tablets and other unspecified devices.

In keeping with Microsoft's new charter as a devices and services company, … Read more

After downloading Minecraft Reality for iOS, I channeled Queen's epic song "Bohemian Rhapsody" and asked myself, "Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?"

Fortunately, the answer to both questions is "yes." The $1.99 app, released yesterday, gives gamers the opportunity to view their Minecraft creations in the real world -- through the lens of augmented reality. … Read more

Even if you have a dashboard display showing what's behind your car when you back up, it's hard to be 100 percent sure you won't hit something. Or someone. That's why researchers at Japan's Keio University are working on a system that makes the back seat invisible, so to speak.

From the driver's perspective, the back of a car, in this case a Prius, is transparent, thus eliminating blind spots that could conceal hazards. The system is called the "see-through Prius" and it's being showcased this month at the 2012 Digital Content Expo in Tokyo. … Read more

Owners of virtually all Nokia Lumia phones will be able to discover local businesses via the company's new City Lens augmented reality.

Shown off by Nokia last week, City Lens overlays nearby businesses on the screen when you point your phone in their direction. Tapping a specific business reveals full details, including contact information, reviews, walking distance, and directions.

Though demoed for the upcoming Windows Phone 8 Lumia 920, the new app is actually available as of yesterday for the current Lumia 900, 800, and 710 Windows Phone 7 handsets. Owners of any of those phones can download City … Read more

Nokia is touting its City Lens augmented reality app through a brief, teasing video clip.

The clip on You Tube features a woman walking down a city sidewalk as an ad for a nearby shoe store pops up, complete with ratings and recommendations from her socially networked friends. With its emphasis on a local business, the clip seems to be a clear reference to City Lens.

Dubbed an augmented reality app, City Lens displays nearby stores and other businesses when you point your phone in a certain direction. The phone's camera displays the view around you with an overlay … Read more

Do you have a cochlear implant? An intraocular lens in your eye? A prosethetic leg with microservos? You may not realize it, but you're standing on the front line of a new age of medical augmentation, one that's raising a host of complex questions.

Who owns the expensive implant that allows you to hear or see better or the sleek thin blades that let you sprint faster? How are upgrades to your device handled? What happens to you and your device if that company goes out of business? Do the answers change if the procedure is elective rather than life-saving?

No one has easy answers, or even much beyond informed speculation -- certainly not the doctors we spoke to for this article or the medical students who addressed medical augmentation at a Defcon 20 session last month in Las Vegas. But all agree on one thing: A new frontier of medical augmentation isn't just coming sooner than you think. It's already here, as society moves from medically necessary augmentation to elective procedures. Call it human hacking. … Read more

Imagine a future where everything is a game, from cooking to dating, thanks to pervasive augmented-reality technology.

That's the premise behind this deliciously geeky, but ultimately disturbing Israeli short film titled "Sight." This seven-minute flick takes us along for a day in the life of an engineer at a dominant AR company, from breakfast to a date that goes off the rails and has to be "reprogrammed." The concept imagines the merging of big data, social media, gamification, and augmented reality into something that ultimately doesn't seem that far-fetched, or even that far down the road.… Read more

Wouldn't it be handy if when someone was speaking a foreign language, subtitles appeared just below their face? CNET reader Will Powell thought so, so he built some glasses that make you feel like you're in an arthouse movie.

Using some 3D specs, a couple of mics, a smartphone, a few cables, and two Raspberry Pi mini-computers, Powell hacked together a working automatic translation system -- and he's made a video showing it working.

Powell, a programmer with a background is in Adobe Flex and AS3, was inspired by Google's high-concept Glass project. … Read more