Imagine if your doctor’s office was more like an Apple Store mashed up with a fancy gym: a modern white-and-wood aesthetic, replete with fancy gadgets and gleaming touch screens, for which you paid a monthly fee to visit as often as you …Continue reading
Control Your Smartphone with Your Eyes
Researchers are making mobile software that could let you rely on eye movements to play games (or do other things). In an effort to make eye tracking cheap, compact, and accurate enough to be included in smartphones, a group of researchers is …Continue reading
Mobile This App Knows Just the Right Emoji for Any Occasion
Emoji add pictorial sparkle to typed conversations; an image of a tiny slice of pizza or a cheeseburger, for instance, makes a simple question like “What’s for dinner?” a little more fun to ask. Hunting for the right one to express a …Continue reading
Why Oculus and HTC Need to Watch Out for Sony in VR
Sony announced earlier this week at the E3 gaming trade show in Los Angeles that its forthcoming virtual-reality headset, PlayStation VR, will come out on October 13. At $399 (or, more realistically, $500 for a bundle that includes a pair of motion-tracking …Continue reading
My Life, Logged
always knew I was short, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized exactly how short. That’s because I’ve been trying a couple of life-logging devices—gadgets that clip to my shirt or hang around my neck, automatically taking photos of the world …Continue reading
How Shining a Laser on Your Face Might Help Siri Understand You
From Siri to Alexa to Cortana, we’re talking to virtual assistants more than ever before. They can still have trouble understanding simple commands to play music or look up directions, though, especially in noisy places. Rather than focusing on cleaning up the …Continue reading
Google’s Android Is Mega Popular, but It’s Got a Big Problem
Since it was first rolled out on a side-sliding QWERTY keyboard-wielding smartphone back in 2008, Google’s Android operating system has grown into the most widely used mobile OS. Today, it runs on well over a billion phones made by a variety of …Continue reading
Facebook Plans to Boost Its Translations Using Neural Networks This Year
Facebook is working to get significantly better at automatically translating updates from friends not written in your native language. The social network plans to roll out a new translation system later this year. It is based on artificial neural networks, an approach …Continue reading
Magic Leap’s Latest Surprise: It’s Working on Robots
A two-year government study has found a small increase in two types of cancer in male rats exposed to the kind of radiation that cell phones emit. Given the ubiquity of cell-phone usage, the implications of the findings are substantial, if they …Continue reading
These Headphones Know Your Ears Better than You Do
Kyle Slater’s headphones look a little weird. They’re big, like a pair of Beats with large cups that cover his ears, yet they also have earbuds in the middle of each cup that fit into his ear canals. They also work differently …Continue reading