Lifeboat Foundation

The company’s current Glass hardware is built on Android.

Google is hiring an “Augmented Reality OS” team focused on building software for an “innovative AR device,” according to job listings spotted by 9to5Google. The team is led by Mark Lucovsky, who announced he’d joined the company this week. Lucovsky previously worked at Meta developing an in-house alternative to Android to power the company’s hardware, and also co-authored the Windows NT operating system.

According to Google’s job listings, the Augmented Reality OS team is building “the software components that control and manage the hardware on [its] Augmented Reality (AR) products.” This is far from Google’s first stab at developing AR software, and follows the company’s work on ARCore for Android and Tango. The company’s Google Glass, which is aimed at the business and enterprise market, is currently built on Android.

Continue reading “Google staffs up to build OS for unknown ‘innovative AR device’” »

It’s often said Earth’s resources are finite. This is true enough. But shift your gaze skyward for a moment. Up there, amid the stars, lurks an invisible bonanza of epic proportions.

Many of the materials upon which modern civilization is built exist in far greater amounts throughout the rest of the solar system. Earth, after all, was formed from the same cosmic cloud as all the other planets, comets, and asteroids—and it hardly cornered the market when it comes to the valuable materials we use to make smartphone batteries or raise skyscrapers.

A recent study puts it in perspective.

Continue reading “This Asteroid May Be the Shard of a Dead Protoplanet—and Have More Metal Than All the Reserves on Earth” »

“We will constantly be ‘within’ the internet, rather than have access to it, and within the billions of interconnected computers around us,” Ball wrote in his Metaverse Primer. Mark Zuckerberg described the metaverse similarly, calling it “an even more immersive and embodied internet.” Picture this: you strap on a headset or pair of goggles, flick a switch, and boom—you’re still standing in your living room, but you’re also walking through a 3D world as an avatar of yourself, and you can interact with other people who are doing the same thing from their living rooms.

Being constantly within the internet doesn’t sound all that appealing to me personally—in fact, it sounds pretty terrible—but the good news for those with a similar sentiment is that the “full vision” of the metaverse, according to Ball, is still decades away, primarily because of the advances in computing power, networking, and hardware necessary to enable and support it.

Continue reading “The Metaverse Will Need 1,000x More Computing Power, Says Intel” »

NSO Group, an Israeli tech firm, developed malware to hack iPhones by creating a “computer within a computer” capable of stealing sensitive data and sitting undetected for months or even years, researchers at Google have revealed.

The malware is part of NSO Group’s Pegasus software tool, which it is thought to have sold to countries including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, India and the United Arab Emirates. US law-makers have called for sanctions against the firm.

An incredibly sophisticated piece of malware developed by the Israeli tech firm NSO Group works by creating an entirely separate computer inside the memory of an iPhone, allowing attackers to snoop and steal data.

Continue reading “NSO iPhone malware builds a computer inside your phone to steal data” »

5G will probably not hurt you, but having these products anywhere around definitely will.

5G is rapidly overtaking other wireless technology networks and may very soon become the standard for cell phone coverage. But there has been a lot of backlash with protesters stating the technology might be harmful to human health.

This has resulted in a rise of anti-5G products that claim to protect against the supposedly harmful radiation. A lot of these products have been discovered to be scams and now a new report from BBC reveals they may actually be dangerous.

Continue reading “Beware, That ‘Anti-5G’ Necklace Might Actually Poison You” »

The innovation could be a game-changer for communication technologies, such as phones and internet connections.

A team from UCF has developed the world’s first optical oscilloscope, an instrument that is able to measure the electric field of light. The device converts light oscillations into electrical signals, much like hospital monitors convert a patient’s heartbeat into electrical oscillation.

Until now, reading the electric field of light has been a challenge because of the high speeds at which light waves oscillates. The most advanced techniques, which power our phone and internet communications, can currently clock electric fields at up to gigahertz frequencies — covering the radio frequency and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Light waves oscillate at much higher rates, allowing a higher density of information to be transmitted. However, the current tools for measuring light fields could resolve only an average signal associated with a ‘pulse’ of light, and not the peaks and valleys within the pulse. Measuring those peaks and valleys within a single pulse is important because it is in that space that information can be packed and delivered.

Stacking transistors could be the next big thing in chips.

IBM and Samsung have announced their latest advance in semiconductor design: a new way to stack transistors vertically on a chip (instead of lying flat on the surface of the semiconductor).

Continue reading “IBM and Samsung say their new chip design could lead to week-long battery life on phones” »

Spatial has raised $25 million as it pivots away from augmented reality and virtual reality collaboration to nonfungible token (NFT) art exhibitions and metaverse events.

Spatial started out by providing AR/VR meeting places that people could access with AR glasses, VR headsets, and smartphones. But it found with the NFT art boom that it could provide a way for people to easily view digital art in virtual galleries, said Jake Steinerman, head of community at Spatial, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We changing our direction,” said Steinerman.

Their inner workings reside in the realm of physics, but lasers make everyday life possible. Talking on a cell phone or googling COVID stats while your apples and oranges are scanned at the checkout counter—lasers at every step.

Lasers emit intense light at specific wavelengths. At one wavelength, laser beams etch patterns on computer chips that define their circuitry. At telecom wavelengths, lasers fire the enormous volumes of data through optical fibers that make ours the information age.

In 2017, a new kind of laser invented by electrical engineer Boubacar Kante, Ph.D., was recognized as one of the breakthrough inventions of the year by Physics World. With his Bakar Fellows support, Kante is preparing to fabricate a prototype of the new laser and demonstrate its potential for a range of applications from microsurgery to satellite telemetry.