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The F.D.A. has cleared a path for hearing aids to be sold over the counter. Today, buying a hearing aid requires a trip to an audiologist, hearing tests, and a prescription, followed by a huge expense not covered by insurance. This is set to change as soon as October. Continue Reading →

Want to know how fast virtual worlds are going to appear? TikTok recently added a new effect called "AI greenscreen." Users type a description, then the AI does its best to interpret the prose and output an image that can be used as a background for a TikTok video. Continue Reading →

When someone says "the metaverse," what do they mean? At the moment, the observable metaverse is a continuum that spans experiences from virtual reality (VR) through mixed reality (MR) to augmented reality (AR). The experiences are different, but some of the most successful metaverse projects share many common creative and technological attributes. What are they? To help figure it out, we've been developing a framework we call the Standard Model of the Metaverse. Continue Reading →

Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, has successfully tested the "Merge," which is now planned for mid-September 2022. The Merge is what engineers are calling the transition of the Ethereum blockchain's Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Continue Reading →

Whether or not you have teenage children – even if you don't know a teenager – you must read the results of the latest Pew Research Center survey, Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022. Continue Reading →

Whenever someone is struggling with the multitude of streaming services available on their smart devices, someone inevitably starts to wax poetic about the convenience of cable and the good ol' days (which everyone complained bitterly about back then, BTW). Continue Reading →

The headline says, "Apple Will Ship 1.5 Million AR/VR Headsets in 2023 at $2,000." Wait. What? $2,000? Yep, we all read it right. Continue Reading →

iRobot, the company that makes Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, has agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion, according to a joint statement. If the deal closes, Amazon will have access to the maps a Roomba makes of each room it cleans. Continue Reading →

There's a relatively new acronym in the media business: FAST. It stands for Free Advertiser-supported Streaming Television. For all practical purposes, FAST is good, old-fashioned broadcast television delivered over the public internet (as opposed to via an antenna or cable or satellite). In the not-so-distant past, this kind of delivery was called "over the top" or OTT, but the defining differences are that FAST is free (except for the cost of your internet access), and the programs are scheduled at specific times, exactly the same way linear, broadcast TV channels are scheduled. Does it matter how the signal is delivered to consumers? Think about this... Continue Reading →

Instagram has been rolling out support for NFTs minted on Ethereum and Polygon since May 2022. The company just announced that support for the Flow blockchain is now rolling out in 100 countries, and Instagram expects to support the Solana blockchain soon. Continue Reading →