Marshmallow arriving for the HTC One M9 (unlocked) within 24 hours
As promised earlier in the month, an Android Marshmallow update is on its way for this year’s HTC One M9 flagship, along with a smaller update for the One A9. HTC’s Mo Versi has just announced that the two updates will be going live any time now.
Well, any time in the next 24 hours, according to the tweet. Also, there appear to be two slightly different updates heading out to the smartphones. The HTC One A9 will be bumped up to Android 6.0.1, complete with all those extra emoji’s, while the One M9 will receive the original 6.0 Marshmallow software.
Happy Holidays! Updates to the Unlocked A9 6.0.1 and Unlocked M9 6.0 will be able to be downloaded within next 24 hours! Enjoy 
— Mo Versi (@moversi) December 23, 2015
http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The update only appears to be heading out to US customers who own unlocked versions of the handsets too, so we’ll have to wait for news on when the upgrades will arrive for customers in other countries. As usual, carrier branded handsets will lag further behind.
HTC seems pretty hot on the updates, having rolled out Marshmallow to its One M8 smartphone back at the start of December. Keep an eye out for that OTA notification any time now.
Virtual Reality: The Ice Cave
This blog was written by Kapileshwar Syamasundar during his summer placement at ARM in the ARM Mali Graphics demo team. Kapil did some great work at ARM porting the Ice Cave demo to VR using Unity, we hope you can benefit from this too.
Ice Cave, the latest demo from ARM Mali Ecosystem, has been shown with great success this year in such major events as GDC, Unite Europe, and Unite Boston. The demo has been developed in Unity and aims to demonstrate that it is possible to render high visual quality content on current mobile devices. A number of highly optimized special effects were developed in-house, specifically for this demo, some of which are based on completely new techniques, for example the rendering of shadows and refractions based on local cubemaps.
The Ice Cave demo was released at a time when Virtual Reality has become the centre of attention in the game development community, and related events and media. A number of VR demos and games have already been released but VR performance requirements can limit the complexity of VR content and therefore the visual quality of the final VR experience.
It is in this landscape that the Ecosystem demo team decided to port the Ice Cave demo to Samsung Gear VR and this task was assigned to me. In this blog I describe my experience in porting the Ice Cave demo to VR during my eight weeks summer placement in the Ecosystem demo team.
By the time I joined the demo team, Unity had just released a version with VR native support for Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR. Previously, VR support was only available by means of a plugin based on Oculus Mobile SDK, but this had some obvious limitations:
- Each VR device has a different plugin
- Plugins may conflict with each other
- Release of newer VR SDKs / Runtimes can break older games
- Lower level engine optimizations are not possible with plugin approach of two separate cameras
Conversely, the newly released Unity VR native integration lacked both support and sufficient information for developers, and experienced many unresolved issues. Nonetheless, the team was convinced that with the native integration in Unity we would be able to achieve the best possible performance; a key point in guaranteeing a successful VR user experience.
Samsung Gear VR
The Samsung Gear VR for Samsung Galaxy S6.
The Samsung Gear VR headset does not have a built in display but has instead been designed to host a mobile phone. At the time of writing, the Samsung Gear VR comes in two versions; one for Samsung Note 4 and another for the latest Samsung Galaxy S6. Some of the main specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S6 version are listed below:
- Sensors: Accelerator, Gyrometer, Geomagnetic, Proximity
- Motion to Photon Latency < 20ms
- Manual Focal Adjustment
- Main Physical UI: Touch Pad
- Oculus’s Asynchronous TimeWarp technology
Samsung Gear VR is powered by Oculus VR software and incorporates the Oculus Asynchronous Time Warp technology. This important feature helps reduce latency, or the time taken to update the display based on the latest head movement; a key issue to avoid in VR devices. Besides the Time Warp technology, the Samsung Gear VR has several sensors which it uses in place of the ones incorporated in the phone.
The Samsung Gear VR has its own hardware and features a touch pad, back button, volume key and, according to the specifications, an internal fan designed to help demist the device while in use.
The key point here however, is that you can insert your Samsung Galaxy S6 into the headset and enjoy an immersive experience with just a smartphone. We are no longer limited to the screen size of the phone and can instead become completely immersed in a virtual world.
Main steps to port an app/game to VR in Unity
VR integration in Unity has been achieved following one of the main Unity principles, that it must be simple and easy. The following basic steps are all that are needed to port a game to VR:
- Unity 5.1 version with VR native support (or any higher version).
- Obtain the signature file for your device from the Oculus website and place it in Plugins/Android/assets folder.
- Set the “Virtual Reality Supported” option in Player Settings.
- Set a parent to camera. Any camera control must set camera position and orientation to the camera parent.
- Associate the camera control with the Gear VR headset touch pad.
- Build your application and deploy it on the device. Launch the application.
- You will be prompted to insert the device into the headset. If the device is not ready for VR you will be prompted to connect to the network where the device will download Samsung VR software.
NB. It is useful to set the phone to developer mode to visualize the application running in stereo without inserting into the Gear VR device. You can enable the developer mode only if you have installed previously a VR application appropriately signed.
Enabling Gear VR developer mode
Developer mode allows you to launch the application without the headset and also dock the headset at any time without having Home launch. |
Side by Side view of stereo viewports captures with VR developer mode enabled.
Not as simple as it seems. Considering VR specifics
After following the instructions above, I saw nothing but a black screen when inserting the device into the headset. It took me some time to get the VR application running in order to establish that some existing features had to be changed and others added.
VR is a completely different user experience and this is therefore one of the key issues when porting to VR. The original demo had an animation mode which moved the camera through different parts of the cave to show the main features and effects. However, in VR this animation caused motion sickness to the majority of users, particularly when moving backwards. We therefore decided to remove this mode completely.
We also decided to remove the original UI. In the original Ice Cave demo a tap on the screen triggers a menu with different options but this was unsuitable for VR. The original navigation system, based on two virtual joysticks, was also unsuitable for VR so we decided to entirely replace it with a very simple user interaction based on the touch pad:
- Pressing and holding the touch pad moves the camera in the direction the user looks.
- When you release the pressure the camera stops moving.
- A double tap resets the camera to the initial position.
This simple navigation system was deemed to be intuitive and easy by all users trying the VR version of the demo.
User interaction with touch pad on the Samsung Gear VR.
The camera speed was also a feature we considered carefully as many users experienced motion sickness when the camera moved just a little too fast. After some tests we were able to set a value that most people were comfortable with.
Additionally, the camera has to be set as a child of a game object. This is the only way Unity can automatically integrate the head tracking with the camera orientation. If the camera has no parent this link will fail so any translation and rotation of the camera has to be applied to the camera parent node.
In VR, as in reality, it is important to avoid tight spaces so the user doesn’t feel claustrophobic. The original Ice Cave was built with this in mind and provides ample space for the user.
The only effect not imported to VR was the dirty lens effect. In the original Ice Cave demo this effect is implemented as a quad that is rendered on top of the scene. A dirty texture appears with more or less intensity depending on how much the camera is aligned with the sun. This didn’t translate well to VR and so the decision was made to completely remove it from the VR version.
Dirty lens effect implemented in the original Ice Cave demo.
Extra features in the Ice Cave VR version
In the original demo the user can pass through the walls to look at the cave from the outside. However in VR this didn’t create a good experience and the sensation of embedding disappeared when you went out of the cave. Instead, I implemented camera collision detection and smooth sliding for when the user moves very close to the walls.
When running a VR application on Samsung Gear VR, people around the user are naturally curious about what the user is actually seeing. We thought that it would be interesting, particularly for events, to stream the content from the VR headset to another device such as a tablet. We decided to explore the possibility of streaming just the camera position and orientation to a second device running a non-VR version of the same application.
The new Unity network API allowed a rapid prototyping and in a few days I had an implementation which worked pretty well. The device actually running the VR version on the Samsung Gear VR works as a server and in each frame sends the camera position and orientation over wireless TCP to a second device that works as a client.
Streaming camera position and orientation from Samsung Gear VR to a second device.
Using the built-in touch pad to control the camera motion proved very successful. Nevertheless, we decide to provide the user with an alternative method of control using an external Bluetooth mini controller readily available elsewhere. This required us to write a plugin to extend the Unity functionality by intercepting the Android Bluetooth events and using them to trigger movement and resetting of the camera. Unfortunately there is not much information available so whilst it was only possible to intercept the messages coming from two keys , this was enough to move/stop and reset the camera.
Conclusions
Ice Cave VR was implemented during my summer placement with ARM’s Ecosystem Demo team in less than eight weeks with no previous experience of Unity. This was possible thanks to the native VR integration Unity released on version 5.1. In principle, just a few steps are necessary to port a game to VR, although in practice you need to do some extra work to fine-tune the specific requirements of VR in your game. With this integration, Unity has greatly contributed to the democratisation of VR.
Unity VR integration is still in progress and some reported issues are expected to be solved in coming versions. Nonetheless, the Ice Cave VR version shows that it is possible to run high quality VR content on mobile devices if resources are balanced properly at runtime by using highly optimized rendering techniques.
All the advanced graphics techniques utilised in the Ice Cave demo are explained in detail in the ARM Guide for Unity Developers. In the guide it is possible to find the source code or code snippets of these techniques which allowed me to understand how they work.
What I consider the most relevant in all this is the fact that with mobile VR we are no longer limited to the size of our smartphones to enjoy a game. Now we can be part of a limitless virtual world and enjoy a wonderful VR experience from a tiny smartphone inserted in a head set. This really is an outstanding step forward!
If you want to know more about ARM, its microcontrollers, its Cortex-A processors, and its diverse eco-system then be sure to checkout ARM’s Connect Community at https://community.arm.com/welcome
Republished with permission from ARM – Read the original post on ARM’s Connected Community.
6-inch Samsung Galaxy A9 spotted at China’s TENAA
Following a major leak earlier in December, the upcoming mid-tier Samsung Galaxy A9 smartphone has just been spotted passing through China’s TENAA certification center. The latest posting confirms many of the earlier leaked specs.
The listing gives us a nice rundown of the Galaxy A9’s hardware specifications. The phone looks set to ship with a 1.8GHz octa-core CPU, possibly the Snapdragon 620. There’s also 6-inch FullHD (1920×1080) AMOLED display, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal memory. The handset measures 161.7 × 80.9 × 7.4mm and weighs in at 200g.
Previous rumors indicated a 13 megapixel rear camera, 8 megapixel front facing camera, a 4,000mAh battery and Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 technology. Samsung also seems to have made good on its intentions to bring support for Samsung Pay to its mid-tier devices. There looks to be some pretty decent hardware packed into the Galaxy A9, so long as the price is right.
An updated Galaxy A7 was also recently spotted passing through TENAA, which boasts quite similar specifications. Reference to an A5 refresh was also mentioned by China Mobile and both handsets have been spotted in previous leaks alongside the Galaxy A9. Samsung looks to be preparing some new mid-range handsets for next year, and I’m sure we’ll see more of them next month.
All 4 streaming app arrives on PlayStation 4
If your PlayStation 4 hogs the first or second input on your telly, there’s a good chance it doubles as your TV streaming box too. It already has a bundle of apps including iPlayer and Netflix, but today an important service is joining its roster: All 4. The live streaming and on-demand service from Channel 4 (formerly known as 4oD) is now available from the UK PSN store, giving you easy access to programmes like Homeland and Fargo. This particular app only supports catchup viewing though, so you’ll need to use another device if you want to tune in live. Given that Demand 5 is already available on the PS4, that means ITV Hub is the only service from the big terrestrial trio now missing on Sony’s console.
Source: Channel 4
Russian rocket shows up as a streaking fireball over Nevada
The fireball people saw streaking across the sky in Southern California and Nevada earlier wasn’t the Millennium Falcon. According to US Strategic Command spokesperson Lt. Col. Martin O’Donnell, it was a Russian space debris, particularly the burning body of an SL-4 rocket reentering the atmosphere. A lot of people took to social media to report sightings of the strange fireball in the sky, and they offered a variety of explanations, from asteroid chunks to UFOs and Santa dropping off presents a bit too early. The Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center has been keeping an eye out for any debris from the rocket since it blasted off on Monday, so O’Donnell knows what he’s talking about. If you wanted it to be a spaceship full of aliens instead, though, then sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
LOTS of reports of fireball over SW US. Clearly space debris re-entering; I’m looking for more info. Video: pic.twitter.com/0hnxswRIUs
— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) December 23, 2015
[Image credit: NASA Johnson/Flickr]
Via: Phil Plait (Twitter)
The Beatles come to streaming services on Christmas Eve
The rumors were true: music from The Beatles is coming to your favourite streaming service. From tomorrow (December 24th), you’ll be able to listen to all 13 remastered studio albums and four essential collections on Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Groove, Rhapsody, Slacker and Tidal. Put simply: everyone’s invited.
The Beatles’ mini site says that the global launch will be staggered, with streams going live at 00:01am in your local timezone. Even if you’re not signed up to one of the listed services, some will let you listen to John, Paul, George and Ringo for free as part of their ad-supported tiers — just in case you needed something to listen to while entertaining over the festive period.
Source: The Beatles
LG to launch high-end appliance lineup at CES
You wouldn’t usually associate LG with luxury appliances, but that could change with the introduction of its new lineup. The Korean company is preparing to launch premium home appliances at CES 2016, and the products will be released under a distinct brand called “LG Signature.” It’s keeping details hush-hush as of now, but it did reveal that the first appliances out of the lineup are a television, a refrigerator, an air purifier and some washing machines.
The company’s blog post says LG formed a team within the company to create those devices with input from “leading design experts.” Also, the upcoming appliances have apparently been “stripped of all features that detracted from the brand’s spirit,” which could mean sleek, minimalistic designs. CES 2016 is only a couple of weeks away, but if high-end appliances get you going, you can view some vague silhouettes of the upcoming products on the new brand’s website.
Source: LG, LG Signature
London adopts e-paper signs for real-time bus schedules
Picture the scene: it’s raining and you’re waiting for a night bus in London, with very little charge on your phone. Wouldn’t it be great if the bus stop had some up to date arrival times? So you didn’t have to pull out your phone and refer to Citymapper or Google Maps? Transport for London (TfL) is now trialling e-paper displays at a small number of bus stops which show timetables, route maps and real-time travel information. The screens are roughly the same size as a conventional bus stop sign — equivalent to three A4 sheets of paper, stacked on top of one another — and include some colourful buttons for illumination and page switching.
The hope is that the new displays will be both readable and environmentally friendly. Like a Kindle, they should be readable in bright sunlight and require less power than a conventional full-colour screen. TfL says they can be charged from a solar panel too, and retrieve bus arrival information over 3G. For now, it’s only available in one location, near Waterloo Bridge, although the plan is to introduce a further three in Parliament Square, Piccadilly Circus and Sloane Square next month. They’re be trialled until the autumn — a full roll-out would probably be too expensive, but this should give TfL a better idea of its future viability.
Via: BBC
GAME takes a hit as Brits stop buying for PS3 and Xbox 360
The video game business can be cruel at times, as British retailer GAME knows all too well. After weathering a complete collapse and returning to the London Stock Exchange in recent years, the company has reported mixed success as consumers gets to grips with newer consoles like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. In its latest financial results, however, GAME has been forced to admit that its sales and profits have been heavily impacted by a “challenging” UK market, one that has finally begun moving away from older hardware.
In the 21 week period ending on December 19th, the company says revenue fell 6.7 percent to £466.8 million. It blames the “reduction in low margin console sales,” which were down 20.3 percent, as demand for older Xbox 360 and PS3 games fell through the floor. Sales of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games did rise, helped by better-than-expected Black Friday trading, but UK consumers aren’t switching to next-gen consoles quick enough to make up the difference.
The retailer now believes its half-year earnings will reach £30 million, compared to £43 million in 2014. “The switch over from the older gaming formats to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One software has impacted profitability across the UK market,” says GAME CEO Martyn Gibbs. “The extent of the impact of this switch over has only become apparent in December which has been compounded by lower year on year high street and shopping centre footfall.”
At the beginning of the year, GAME admitted it was killing itself by pricing console bundles lower than the competition. Hardware sales rose by more than 25 percent but takings were still down compared to previous holiday sales. With the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One continually falling in price, the retailer knows that console margins are thin and games are where money can be made. However, digital sales and online competitors can impact game sales too, which means GAME has some very tough times ahead.
Source: GAME PLC
‘Katamari Damacy’ making clicky comeback on iOS and Android
That one game where you roll about and everything sticks to you, Katamari Damacy, is making a comeback on iOS and Android. The original PlayStation 2 game won over many hearts with its simple but charming world, and was followed up by sequels for numerous platforms, although series creator Keita Takahashi was only involved with the first two games). The iOS and Android title will be called Tap my Katamari, and is the first game in the series since the 2012 Vita title Touch My Katamari.
So that’s the good news; now here’s the bad. Tap my Katamari seems to discard the best thing about the series — rolling around 3D world collecting stuff smaller than you — in favor of an incremental “clicker” model (think Cookie Clicker). Maybe it’s just the trailer. Maybe there will be more to it. Let’s hope?
Via: Polygon
Source: Ludophiles (YouTube)
AIVAnet 