Lifeboat Foundation

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

PRESS RELEASE — It is hard to imagine our lives without networks such as the internet or mobile phone networks. In the future, similar networks are planned for quantum technologies that will enable the tap-proof transmission of messages using quantum cryptography and make it possible to connect quantum computers to each other.

Like their conventional counterparts, such quantum networks require memory elements in which information can be temporarily stored and routed as needed. A team of researchers at the University of Basel led by Professor Philipp Treutlein has now developed such a memory element, which can be micro-fabricated and is, therefore, suitable for mass production. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

Samsung ended its Unpacked event with a teaser showing a new Galaxy Ring.

Details on the Galaxy Ring are still slim.

The Galaxy S24 will also have a new feature called Circle to Search, which will let users search anything on their screen using Google. Users can press the bottom edge of the screen, where the Google logo and a search bar will pop up, and draw a circle around anything they want to search. The feature will work on most content, except for those protected by DRM or screenshots, such as banking apps. Once the selection is made, a panel will slide up showing the selection and the results from Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), similar to image search via Google or Lens, but without needing to open another app or take screenshots. Users will be able to circle items in YouTube videos, Instagram Stories, and more.

The Galaxy S24 will also benefit from Google’s Imagen 2, a text-to-image model that can generate realistic images from text descriptions. Imagen 2 will power the photo editing features in the Galaxy S24 Gallery app, such as the Generative Edit feature which also debuted on the Pixel 8 series. It can automatically fill in missing parts of images based on the surrounding context. Imagen 2 was unveiled at Google I/O last year and recently launched in preview on the web.

They’re working on it.

A Chinese company has announced they’re planning to mass-produce tiny nuclear batteries that can last up to 50 years, possibly beating both a British and an American company who have tried to put those on the market for several years. What does that mean? Will we soon all power our phones with nuclear power? Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “This New Nuclear Battery Could Soon Go On the Market” »

A couple of new features are coming to Google Search, starting with the self-explanatory Circle to Search — but only on a handful of Android phones.

It’s hard to think of a more self-explanatory feature than Circle to Search: it does exactly what it sounds like it does.

It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Continue reading “Google’s Circle to Search is a dead-simple way to find what you’re looking for” »

Light pulses can be stored and retrieved in the glass cell, which is filled with rubidium atoms and is only a few millimeters in size.

Light particles are particularly suited to transmitting quantum information.

Researchers at the University of Basel have built a quantum memory element based on atoms in a tiny glass cell. In the future, such quantum memories could be mass-produced on a wafer.

Continue reading “Scientists build mass-producible miniature quantum memory element” »

Viewers will find out Samsung’s game plan for Galaxy AI and see the new Galaxy S24 lineup.

A few months ago, developers with access to an Apple Vision Pro Developer Kit were given access to the App Store to download compatible iPhone and iPad apps. As Vision Pro arrives in stores in February, Apple has made it possible for developers to submit their apps to the App Store. Starting today, these visionOS apps are now rolling out to users.

Developers who submitted their visionOS apps for App Store Review earlier this month are now receiving emails from Apple telling them that the apps have been approved and are now available for download on the visionOS App Store.

As noted by developer Dylan McDonald, the iOS App Store is now showing which apps are compatible with Apple Vision Pro, although screenshots have yet to be made available.