Showing results by author "Rachel Metz" in All Categories

Until recently, I didn’t know a thing about how my roughly 25-minute bike commute across San Francisco - or any other part of my day, really - affects my body, other than that I inevitably arrive at work sweaty and a bit out of breath when I’m in a big rush. How high is my heart rate? Do my sleep habits affect it? How many calories do I burn?

Not so far in the future, your doctor might prescribe playing a few games in virtual reality to ease aches and pains, rather than popping a pill. That’s Matthew Stoudt’s hope, anyway. He’s the CEO of AppliedVR, a startup that’s building a library of virtual-reality content for alleviating pain and anxiety before, during, and after medical procedures. The company is working with hospitals and doctors to get patients using the technology on Samsung’s Gear VR headset and to study its effectiveness as well.

This week at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the social network’s plans for the next decade. Here’s how he plans to keep the more than 1 billion people that use Facebook every day engaged - and lure in still more users.

Your next car could have a 3-D dashboard - no glasses required. A startup called Leia, which has already shown a prototype of a 2.2-inch screen that can display holograms, is now working on a 5.5-inch screen that gives a sense of how the technology could look if embedded in things like cars and smartphones.

Having your blood pressure taken by a cuff that inflates and deflates around your upper arm is reliable, but it’s not very fast or portable, and it isn’t able to give you continuous measurements over time. A startup called Blumio is trying a different tactic. It’s building blood-pressure measuring technology that uses radar - typically employed for things like tracking ships or speeding cars by monitoring the phase changes in electromagnetic waves as they reflect off of them.

Researchers have built an emoji video search demo that lets you use tiny pictures to sort through thousands of YouTube clips.

The case that Will Zell slides onto his iPhone doesn't look that unusual, but it's doing something pretty out of the ordinary: capturing some of the radio waves that the phone transmits when connecting to cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi routers, converting them to electricity, and feeding that power back to the phone's battery.

According to Adam Tilton, when you get down to it, there really isn't that much of a difference between estimating the path and speed of a missile and figuring out what kind of exercise you're doing at the gym: it's all about using a sensor to measure a signal, and extracting that signal from the surrounding noise.

I'm sitting in Gordon Wetzstein's lab at Stanford University with a hacked-together prototype of a head-mounted display strapped to my face, using a wireless Xbox controller to manipulate a series of 3-D models: a lion, a chessboard filled with chess pieces, an espresso machine, and so on. The images are fairly simple, run-of-the-mill models—the kind that anyone could download from the Internet. What is interesting, though, is what happens as I stare at the models, turning them with the controller so I can inspect them from different angles.

In just a few months, the Microsoft wearable device that blends virtual reality with the real world seems to have gotten closer to becoming a commercial product.

Though virtual reality is still far from mainstream, 2015 was a big year for the industry as new headsets were introduced - some full-featured and powerful, some simple and portable - and companies announced new ways to control and capture VR imagery, too.

The 3,500 apps available for the Apple Watch show the device’s promise and pitfalls.

Startup Crystal claims it can help you write better e-mails by mining recipients’ online data for clues to their personality.

Despite their ubiquity, smartphones are still not very helpful at getting you information based on what you're already doing. For instance, if you get an e-mail from a friend asking if you want to check out a new restaurant in town, you have to leave the app behind and go conduct a Web search to learn more.