reality

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

Dome tweeters, cone woofers, metal ribbons, planar magnetic and electrostatic panels all do the same thing: They vibrate air to make sound. Those technologies have all been around for decades, but the goal of making a perfect-sounding speaker has yet to materialize, so it's pretty easy to tell the difference between a real piano and the sound of a piano reproduced over speakers. Same for drums, acoustic guitars, basses, violins, flutes, horns and voices.

Electric instruments and synthesizers should be easier to reproduce in part because they don't make sound on their own; we always hear them over amplifiers and speakers. Even so, it's next to impossible to make your home hi-fi sound like a big Fender guitar amp. … 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

Is augmented reality for real? At the annual Augmented Reality Event conference in Santa Clara, Calif., this week, marketers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and science-fiction authors (Daniel Suarez and Bruce Sterling) were all looking for ways to leverage a technology that could change the way we use computers and access data and media. Or not.

The challenge for many of the AR projects being shown and discussed at conferences like this is that to use them, you have to contort yourself around a tablet or smartphone, which becomes the window through which you see the augmented world. You might also have to … Read more

Oakley may be hoping to out-glass Google with its own brand of eyewear that can display information directly on the lenses.

The company's CEO Colin Baden told Bloomberg that it's creating technology to tie smartphone features into eyewear. The project is still in the experimental stage, and Baden wouldn't confirm if Oakley plans to launch its own such eyewear. But he did reveal a few features he'd like to see in the product.

The eyewear would work on its own to display information but also team up with a smartphone through Bluetooth. The device could even … Read more

The Defense Department has reportedly ordered augmented-reality displays from startup Innovega, only a week after Google disclosed its own augmented-reality project.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Innovega has signed a contract to supply the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with a prototype of its iOptik spectacles and accompanying contact lenses, Innovega's CEO Steve Willey told the BBC. The augmented-reality system could improve the awareness of soldiers in the field, he said.

The contact lenses have a filter that allows a person to focus on images at a very close distance and focus on far-away objects at the same time. That … Read more