The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center has long focused on honoring the memory of people murdered during the Holocaust and preserving the stories of those who survived. Now a new pair of short virtual reality films telling the stories of two survivors will enable visitors to hear those stories while experiencing immersive visuals that help explain their experiences. One film, entitled A Promise Kept, tells the story of the late Frieda “Fritzie” Fritzshall, who was impri
Ever get annoyed by the intolerable reading experience on certain websites? By activating your browser’s reader mode, you can make web pages more reader-friendly by hiding ads, menus, pop-ups, and other distractions. Some web browsers even let you switch to reader mode automatically on specific websites. Here’s how: Safari: Long-press the “aA” icon in the address bar to activate reader mode. To load this mode by default on the current website, tap the icon again, then
Google has hired a key architect of Microsoft’s Hololens mixed reality glasses to work on its own “Project Iris” augmented reality glasses project. The hire, first reported by Road to VR‘s Scott Hayden, took place in November. That’s roughly the same time that Google decided to centralize its AR/VR development efforts under the roof of Google Labs (as reported by TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez). Kress’s title is Director of XR (mixed reality) Engineerin
Blockchain may be swimming into the mainstream with the force of a torpedo, but there are dams standing in the way. Among the biggest: its impact on the climate. Take a look at cryptocurrency mining, one of the most widely used consensus mechanisms for determining how blockchain ledgers are written. It’s a greenhouse gas giant that won’t stop growing. Calls to regulate the burgeoning industry are getting louder, and even Congress is listening. It held its first convenings on the to
Last week, when many Americans were waiting in long lines and scouring drugstores for COVID-19 tests due to the spread of the omicron variant, some Googlers were casually testing daily from the comfort of their own home. The device they use, a $249 machine that churns out PCR test results in 20 minutes, comes from a San Diego-based company called Cue Health. The company has been painted as providing COVID-19 testing for the elite, but Clint Sever, one of the company’s cofounders and its c
If you’ve ever wondered about the influence big tech wields in the Capital, you could literally hear it coming out of the mouths of lawmakers on Thursday, as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee met to mark up an antitrust bill that would prohibit marketplace and app store owners from self-preferencing their own products. The bill is Congress’s most serious attempt yet to reign in the power of big tech companies–mainly Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and—potenti
In a new study, researchers and surgeons at the University of Alabama Birmingham were able to successfully transplant a genetically modified pig kidney into the body of a brain-dead human. The surgery adds to a growing body of evidence that xenotransplantation—transplants of live organs, tissues, or cells to humans from nonhuman species—can work. Their use for patients who need kidneys may be closer than previously thought—as soon as five years from now. (Early this month, t
UFC fans who have enviously watched basketball fans jump into the nonfungible token (NFT) frenzy via NBA Top Shot—the massively popular blockchain app that allows basketball buffs to buy, trade, and sell NFT “Moments” of, say, a LeBron James dunk—are about to get their own dose of Web3 fun. On Sunday, Dapper Labs, the Vancouver-based company behind NBA Top Shot, is launching UFC Strike, a similar experience built around digital collectibles—in this case,
It may have started with a dress code. When tech entrepreneur and investor Tom Chavez was a senior at Albuquerque Academy in the 1980s, he bristled at the private school’s clothing rules—no jeans, collared shirts—a holdover from the school’s roots as an elite boys’ prep school. “I thought it created an income-sorting, elitist atmosphere,” he recalls. So Chavez, a straight-A student who attended the school on a partial scholarship, successfully lob