AR

While technology is making strides in absorbing our eyes and ears in virtual worlds, it’s harder to engage senses like touch. Engineers have now developed WeTac, a thin, wearable electronic "skin" that provides tactile feedback to users in VR and AR.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company is rebranding itself as Meta as it focuses its energy on its next great gamble: creating the backbone of an immersive VR/AR "Metaverse" it sees as the next evolution of the Web.

Eye tracking cameras and AI analysis can reveal your identity, gender, age, ethnicity, weight, personality traits, drug habits, emotions, skills, abilities, fears, interests, and sexual preferences, says a rather dystopian research review.

Google's Arts & Culture platform and YouTube have launched a new online exhibition to celebrate the history of electronic music, part of which is an augmented reality experience where five classic synthesizers can be played online for free.

The United States Army is developing augmented reality goggles for military dogs. The technology is being designed to enhance communication between the dog and its human handler, allowing for more remote commanding of the animal.

Mario Kart is the latest game to cross over into the real world via augmented reality (AR). Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit lets you drive a little remote-controlled kart around the floor using the Switch console, dodging virtual racers and items.

Audi isn't going full-time autonomous with its latest concept for CES 2020, but if you do choose to let the AI:ME drive itself, you can strap yourself into a set of VR goggles and swap your dull city crawl for a bird's-eye flight through the hills.

In the age of wearable computers, scientists in the laboratories of DARPA, Google, and universities around the world see contact lenses not as tools to improve our vision, but as opportunities to augment the human experience. But how? And why?

Getting real, physical movements accurately depicted in the digital world remains a challenge for programmers and engineers, but a newly developed glove promises to advance the tech significantly. It's able to capture hand movements with much more detail and nuance than most existing solutions.

As mobile components get more powerful and come down in cost, we're seeing a growing number of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) devices that don't need a computer connection – like the new Rokid Vision glasses, which can project games, phone apps and more in front of your eyes.

Now that VR's initial burst of early-adopter enthusiasm has tapered off a little, there's a temptation to lump it together with recent technologies that fizzled out after being over-hyped. Believe what you want, but VR's standing as the ultimate computing frontier is inevitable.

Reviewing HoloLens is like taking a trip to the future, coming home and then trying to describe it to your friends. Today’s version isn’t quite ready for prime time, and it may even be decades before AR headsets reach their full potential. But holy smokes, has Microsoft started something here.