augmented

Hello Internet. Eileen here, Supervising Producer for Always On. Molly is on vacation, so I'm filling in to give you a little background on this week's episode!

This week we get physical! Molly is in the best shape of her life and was inspired by her road test of both the Nike+ FuelBand and Fit Bit Ultra to enter her first half-marathon! She said to me, "I think we need to stay true to the extreme nature of the show. How about I sign up for a half-marathon?!?"

At first I thought she was crazy to … Read more

Why is it that all the geeks of the universe haven't just up and relocated to Japan by now? The latest demonstration that the island nation is a nerd utopia comes in this video of one man's real-world "date" with a programmed augmented-reality girlfriend.

Using a Microsoft Kinect, AR goggles, and some other sensors, the unidentified man in the video goes to the park with a digital representation of virtual pop star Hatsune Miku. Yes, they have virtual pop idols in Japan, too -- it's kind of like if Max Headroom and Katy Perry somehow managed to get together and reproduce a singing anime hologram.… Read more

How often have you looked at the latest, greatest innovation from a big Silicon Valley name like Apple or Google and thought "Pretty cool, but I'll wait to see if Olympus has a better take on it"?

Well, there's a first time for everything.… Read more

App developers know how to plan ahead. Just in time for "The Amazing Spider-Man," which swings into theaters July 3, Disney Publishing and Gameloft have released two very different, but equally great, movie tie-ins.

The Amazing Spider-Man (Android | iOS, $6.99) delivers an action-packed gaming experience, while the Spider-Man AR Book HD for iOS ($4.99) -- unappealing name notwithstanding -- gives kids an interactive storybook to read, hear, and play with.

Let's start with the game, which plays exactly like a Spider-Man adventure should, giving you an open city around which to crawl, swing, and battle.… Read more

Today we're shooting cowboys in the living room and bringing game shows to our tablets:

A leaked PDF document hints at what Microsoft could have in store for the next version of Xbox. If the 56-page document is true, the Xbox 720 has a planned release for 2013 and will play Blu-ray movies, 3D videos and it would work with special glasses for augmented reality gaming. The document also suggests the next version of the Kinect will track four people at once, have improved voice recognition and it could be split into two units on both sides of the … Read more

Opening a new frontier of virtual graffiti, the social augmented reality app Stiktu is now available worldwide, allowing users to tag and add content to any scannable image.

Inspired by street artists, the app allows iOS and Android smartphone users to snap photos of just about anything and then add text, paint, stickers, or whatever their imagination suggests. Additionally, when a tagged image is scanned by another user, that person can see what others have created with the scanned image.

Users can then publish and share their art with other Stiktu users, as well as with friends on Facebook and … Read more

In today's show, the postman always scans twice, a new Kindle could let you read in the dark, and catch all the Pokémon hiding in your living room:

We're keeping a close eye on Facebook as it prepares to go public on the Nasdaq this week. Values for its initial public offering are in the $34 to $38 range. At the high end, it would make Facebook worth more than $100 billion. But we will find out Thursday what the actual initial stock price will be.

But will it keep that high value for long? A poll shows … Read more

Google has received three patents for a "wearable display device" which appear to be the foundation for its Project Glass augmented reality glasses.

Company engineers submitted patent applications for a wearable display device last fall and they were assigned today.

There aren't detailed description attached to the patents, but the patent references the types of inventions you would expect, such as display designs for showing data and playing music.

Google's secretive research lab, Google X, announced Project Glass last month and showed off early prototypes of the device, some of which are now being tested by … Read more

You know what sucks about visiting Google? Seeing the Google Glasses but not being able to try them yourself. Thanks a lot, Vic.

But we are, slowly, learning more about this project. In particular, the prototypes that are appearing in the field, on TV, and in tantalizing interviews with online journalists are not capable of displaying the full-on, in-your-face type of augmented reality that 15 million people have seen in Google's demo video (and all the spoofs).

While Google+ chief Vic Gundotra didn't say much about the Glasses during an interview this morning, a later discussion with another spokesperson confirmed that the popular prototype model, as seen on Gundotra as well as Google X Lab founder Sebastian Thrun in a Charlie Rose interview, shows information above the wearer's usual line of sight, "about where the edge of an umbrella might be." … Read more