For months, people have struggled to get rapid at-home COVID-19 antigen tests. Now, those tests are coming to Amazon. On Monday, Becton Dickinson and Co. began selling its rapid Veritor COVID-19 antigen test on the ecommerce site. The Veritor test joins Intrivo’s On/Go test, which launched last week. Both tests make use of an app to explain the testing process and help avoid user error. These tests could mark the beginning of an influx of easy-to-use, at-home COVID-19 testing, which exper
It may not be entirely random that 2021 was the year that people started talking seriously about the metaverse. During the pandemic, so many things have gone digital by necessity—from socializing to shopping to work—that it sometimes felt as if we were halfway into a metaverse already. Actually we’re not there yet, or even close. Defined loosely, the metaverse is an all-digital layer of reality that floats above, around, and throughout the features of the real world–o
In the photo, Beyoncé looks beatific, with a closed-lip Mona Lisa smile. But it’s easy enough to give her a toothy grin. Just dial up her “Happiness” to the maximum level using Adobe Photoshop’s Smart Portrait tool, and her face gets a Cheshire cat-like smile, white teeth appearing out of thin air. Smart Portrait, released in beta last year, is one of Adobe’s AI-powered “neural filters,” which can age faces, change expressions, and alter the
After the runaway success of Pokémon Go, Niantic’s next AR smartphone game based on a Nintendo property will try to be a little calmer. Today, the two companies are launching Pikmin Bloom on iOS and Android, based on an offbeat series of games for Nintendo consoles. Whereas Pokémon Go asked players to round up the game’s eponymous monsters at real-world hotspots, Pikmin Bloom is a more passive affair, in which players can grow plant-like Pikmin creatures whenever they go
Oura Health is announcing the third generation of its sleep tracking ring. In its latest iteration, the Oura Ring goes far beyond basic features, such as tracking sleep and counting steps, which were emphasized in previous models. According to CEO Harpreet Singh Rai, that was the long-term plan all all along. “We‘re focused on health—we always have been,” he says. That focus has been evident in the flurry of academic research Oura has been conducting over the past yea
If you’re like most people, you probably use at least a handful of Google services every day—maybe without even thinking about it. But while the company has plenty of high-profile offerings, there are still more Google goodies that are unknown, undermarketed, or underappreciated. Here are some to check out. Family Link If you’ve got kids in the house, sometimes it’s nice to set some ground rules. Google’s Family Link app lets you do just that, by
While playing around with the new Watch Series 7 that Apple loaned me, I stumbled on a surprising feature. You can now interact with the device in a whole new way—using hand gestures. Apple presents this as an “accessibility” feature for people who have trouble using the Watch’s buttons, for which it will surely be useful. But it’s hard to miss the future possibilities in using your hands—as opposed to your fingertips or voice—to communicate with
Despite the boom of the so-called influencer economy over the past decade-plus, creators who make their living posting content on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and more are continuing to face now-familiar challenges: the perils of building a business on the back of an ever-changing algorithm determined by Big Tech companies; the grueling reality of having to post multiple pieces of content a day; and, ultimately, for many, the meager financial reward. Indeed, for every TikTok star that is raking
When Apple revealed that its new MacBook Pros have an iPhone-like camera notch along the top of the screen, the initial reactions were pretty funny. But now that those MacBooks are shipping, the response from early adopters is both amusing and useful. Consider, for instance, a new app called TopNotch, which makes the entire menu bar black so the notch no longer stands out. It’s just a cosmetic improvement, but a welcome one. It also works just as well with notchless MacBooks if you prefer
Thanks to the pandemic, QR codes have popped up on ad posters, restaurant tables, and billboards around the world, inviting people to scan them in order to view menus and marketing information without having to type a web address into their phones. But clicking QR codes too hastily can risk bringing malware to your smartphone, cautions Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.). “If someone just walked up to you on a street