MightyTV brings Tinder-like swipes to your streaming queue

Swiping to control software existed long before Tinder’s arrival, but the dating tool’s method of showing approval has made its way to another of other apps. Swiping left or right can now help you sort through all of the options in your streaming queue. Thanks to MightyTV, you should spend a little less time scrolling aimlessly through the seemingly endless menu of options.

The app works like Tinder, but for video rather than your dating life. When you first launch the software, you’re greeted with a collection of movie and TV show posters. From there, swipe right to like, right and hold to love it, left if you don’t like it and up to skip for the time being. The more you use it, the better the recommendations get. Based on your likes, loves, and dislikes, MightyTV personalizes suggestions, getting a hand from machine learning along the way. That’s where it differs from other streaming guides that offer mostly search functionality, like Yahoo’s Video Guide app.

The app connects to all of the services you use to show what’s available, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, HBO and Showtime. Alongside the selections, you can watch trailers before you make a decision. Once you find something you’re interested in, you can get to the selection in a click, or save it for later viewing. You can also filter results based on service and cost.

There’s a feature called Mashup that takes into account your friends’ preferences. If you happen to all be hanging out together, the app will show suggestions that fit everyone’s likes and dislikes. As you might expect, MightyTV will also show you what’s popular among your friends list, too. Sound like something you could use? The app is available now on iOS and is slated to make its way to Android soon.

Via: Wired

Source: MightyTV, iTunes

Put words in the President’s mouth with ‘Talk Obama To Me’

Anything sounds weighty when uttered by the President of the United States, which is why a new internet text-to-speech app called “Talk Obama to Me” is such fun. All you have to do is input whatever text you want to make the President himself read it back. According to developer and Stanford Linguistics PhD candidate Ed King, the program is a “video speech synthesizer that automatically chops up video of Barack Obama and puts it in order, so that he says whatever you want him to.”

It works with varying degrees of success — if there’s no clip of Obama saying an entire word, it’s broken into phonetic sounds, which makes for a pretty choppy video. It’s impressive for an experimental app, though, and is pretty fun as is — for instance, we got the head of the free world to recite the Night’s Watch pledge from Game of Thrones (below). Give it a try for yourself right here.

Source: Talk Obama To Me

Motor Trend Shares Purely Imaginative Vision of Futuristic ‘Apple Car’

Motor Trend has published an in-depth article, roundtable video, and spin-off posts that offer a speculative look at the design and features of the so-called “Apple Car.” The renders, which are completely imaginative, were designed by industrial designer Garrett DeBry and rendered by creative studio Mind Over Eye.

While the article is headlined “Apple Car exclusive,” most of the information and images are purely speculative and based on the fanciful vision of a group of automotive enthusiasts. In fact, the design looks largely based on the look and feel of the latest iPhones and iPads, right down to the matching gold color.

The car features a tinted glass windshield and roof with a boxy frame and Apple logos emblazoned on the front, back, and all four wheels. The taillights appear to be one consolidated line of red dotted lights, while the rear wheels have fender skirts that provide further aerodynamic emphasis from the rear bumper forward.

The renders highlight thirteen fun but certainly questionable features, such as a 360-degree augmented reality experience, wireless charging, proximity sensing and wearable technologies, Tesla Model X-like “Falcon Wing” doors, indirect and ambient lighting, and a color-coded light strip that can double as a turn signal.

With few concrete details known about the Apple Car, these images are purely conceptual and, unsurprisingly, should not be interpreted as factual. Dozens of similar mockups are just one Google Images search away, and each offer a fun but likely mostly fanatical vision of Apple’s much-rumored electric vehicle.

Apple Car rumors have gained momentum since early last year, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has hundreds of employees working to develop an electric vehicle under the codename “Project Titan.” The bulk of research and development may be taking place in secretive buildings in Sunnyvale, California, where late night “motor noises” have been heard in recent months.

Multiple sources have indicated that the Apple Car could be finalized by 2019 or 2020, but a more precise timeframe remains unclear due to possible internal setbacks and other unforeseen circumstances. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the Apple Car an “open secret,” as his company aims to begin fulfilling more than 325,000 pre-orders for its lower-priced Model 3 by late 2017.

Related Roundup: Apple Car
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Watch Game of Thrones intro in 360-degree VR for some cool easter eggs, right here

Ever wondered what you’d see if you looked up while passing under the legs of the skirt-wearing Titan at Braavos? Now you can as the entire Game of Thrones introduction sequence has been rendered in 360-degrees for a virtual reality experience.

Fans of Game of Thrones can now take a closer look at the Westeros lands through this video. This is the result of a team-up between HBO, Facebook, Oculus and the show’s intro designers, Elastic.

There are reportedly plenty of easter eggs hidden in the video for you to find. While the perspective is moved about the world, from King’s Landing to Dorne, you can get a good look around each place as you fly through.

Without giving too much away, be sure to look up under the Braavos Titan, or maybe not if you’ve just eaten. Another thing to keep an eye out for is dragons. Being a bit more specific, make sure to look for your shadow as you fly about Westeros.

If you want to find new spoilers and easter eggs you’ll need to move fast as this video was viewed 1.7 millions times within three hours of going live.

Game of Thrones season six will start on 24 April on Sky Atlantic and HBO.

READ: This Batmobile concept is the best we’ve ever seen, please use it Batfleck

Gears of War 4 multiplayer preview: Grinding those gears

The chainsaws are back. Gears of War 4’s multiplayer is due to go into closed public beta from 18 April, to give a taster of all the duck-and-cover, shotgun-to-the-face, third-person shooter mayhem. And ahead of time we got to play a couple of hours of the new Xbox One exclusive, exploring new weapons, new moves, new maps/arenas and new team games.

Frantic and fun for existing Gears heads (especially if you’re playing Ultimate Edition already), yet designed for players across all disciplines – the development team is targeting, beginners, social players, competitive players and esports pros this time around, with a matching system to suit all – you’ll need team play tactics and cunning to not get your head stomped in repeatedly.

Just like any multiplayer other game, it has all the potential to grind those gears with repeat deaths just as much as you’ll be smug as heck when you get the drop on your opponents. Especially if it’s a special kill.

After a decade of Gears games, can Gears 4 keep things fresh and fanciful in among the glut of competitive multiplayer titles out there? Or will it be all about the as-yet-unplayed single player?

Gears of War 4 preview: New moves

To begin our multiplayer mission we limber up in the training area, because Gears 4 has some new moves for close-quarters cover-based combat. It’s still a cover-based shooter at its core, but has tried to open up the possibilities for more fluid play.

There’s the “yank and shank” where you can pull an opposing player into your cover and, you guessed it, shank them; there’s also the “vault” where you run at cover and do a flying kick before, you guessed it, shanking some more.

The key here is that you can decide between more aggressive forward attacks, or more contained defensive moves to keep within your existing cover. Unlike in Gears 3 you don’t have to settle into cover first to set these moves off. Or, at least, the potential for it.

There are some issues though: it’s possible to deflect one of these attacks with a well-timed tap of the B button (it’s displayed so rapidly, though, it’s tricky to keep up); placement of your character is crucial otherwise you’ll end up yanking at thin air and exposing yourself for an attack; but most problematic in our view, from the maps we played, is that very little cover is “thin” enough to benefit from such new moves – something that is likely to differ depending on the play arena.

The Coalition / Microsoft Xbox

Gears 4 preview: Guns, guns, guns

While Gears 4 relies on a spate of familiar weapons – chainsaws still included in the lancer rifle, but of course – there are some special new weapons too.

And the one that’s going to get everyone talking is the Dropshot. Unlike a standard missile this launcher hurls a single explosive device that can hover over terrain/obstacles and then, upon releasing the trigger, drops it vertically downwards. Boom.

It’s fairly tricky to predict if you’re going to make a critical strike given these right-angle logistics, and the blast radius isn’t nuclear in scale, so every strike – typically unbeknownst to the receiving player – feels like a victory. And the results are often hilarious as everyone tries to leg it.

If you have the Dropshot in play and get into close-quarters combat then it can even be used to impale and enemy and send them launching into the air with, um, explosive results. Oh, digital violence, you strangely satisfying thing you.

The Coalition / Microsoft Xbox

Beyond the Dropshot other favourites return. From sticky grenades to the rocket launcher Boomshot, through to sniper Longshot and the must-have Gnasher Shotgun for close-quarters quick kills. Switching between loadouts can feel frustratingly slow using the d-pad, but that’s the usual trickle of fear/anger that pumps around the system when not getting one-up on the opposing team.

Gears of War 4 preview: Rotating maps

In addition to 10 maps from the off (or arenas, whatever you fancy calling them), developer The Coalition will be introducing a new arena on a monthly basis. These DLC maps will be free-to-download each month, but – and here’s the crucial part – not always left in play, rotating on a “curated” basis. The original 10 will always remain in play, but others won’t.

However, you can purchase said DLC maps, making them free to play privately when they’re out of the rotation cycle. We can see competitive/esports players needing to know the full ins and outs of every map; only one player in a team needs to own a map for others to play it. Otherwise, we think it’s good to see some freshness injected into the game to keep things moving forward.

The Coalition / Microsoft Xbox

We got to play on three maps: Dam, a near-water, daytime arena which felt like a shipping yard; Harbour, a nighttime based arena which didn’t really pull on the idea of darkness at all as a play mechanic; and Foundation, a dusky halfway house that, of the three, was our favourite for its more open areas combined with mixed cover – the best play arena to utilise those new moves, take up vantage points or run like hell when you’re outnumbered.

In addition to the usual Deathmatch style games there’s also a “Dodgeball” option where each kill allows one of your team of five to re-enter the game. A Spectator mode is now also available (but wasn’t operational just yet) where two casts are available with camera controls for spectating/viewing/judging.

Gears 4 preview: XP treats

In our play time we didn’t experience any notable issues – a crash-free couple of hours is pretty rare at this stage in the development cycle – although load times are really long at present. Hopefully they’ll be reduced for the public beta, which is where the real testing begins.

By release at the end of 2016 the game will be running in 1080p at 60fps according to The Coalition. Right now, and the same stands for the public beta, that’s not going to be the case. So we can’t comment on how well that transition will occur. As it stands, though, the graphics are fine – but the multiplayer lacks the apparent sheen and dynamics of the single player campaign (as seen at last year’s E3 show, because we sure as heck haven’t played it yet).

The Coalition / Microsoft Xbox

There’s the promise of more too: Gears 4 uses Triton, a Microsoft proprietary sound technology, which bakes reverb into a map. So if gunfire is far away it’ll sound like it; if it’s behind you, ricocheting off the walls a decent headset will feed that back to you realistically. But it’s not implemented properly yet so we don’t know how well it’ll work. The same can be said about character voices: a lot of it’s not done, so there aren’t many “fuck yeahs” to be had just yet (but the promise of plenty come release day!).

And as we’ve been playing offline, we’ve not got to see how XP progression, skill-based matchmaking and so forth will work in the game. There are also cards available in drop crates that open up weapon skins, character skins, bounties and gear – they’re free, but quick-purchase DLC crates will also be available for fast-track access to some.

First Impressions

Not everyone will think of Gears as the multiplayer game of today, with the campaign being a real driver for many classic players. But as The Coalition has already shown with the re-rubbed Ultimate Edition there’s a real appetite for multiplayer Gears.

And Gears 4 shows off its new skills admirably. New weapons, new maps and some new moves (which we’re hoping can be employed more frequently than possible on the current maps we’ve played) all drive the series forward. Whether playing COG militia or one of the Swarm there are the same frustrations and victories as with any multiplayer game, but in third person and with some deft team play and cover tactics it certainly gets the adrenaline pumping.

At Tribeca, this little VR match girl put Penrose on the map

Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, Allumette, the latest virtual reality short to come from Penrose Studios, isn’t some Disney-fied experience for children. Though set in a whimsical, cloud-borne city and populated by charming and mute marionette-like denizens, the short, named after the French word for ‘match,’ is actually a surprisingly mature allegory about love, loss and the sacrifices parents make for their children. It’s but one piece of a greater, interactive virtual world Penrose is in the midst of creating.

“Our initial idea is that it’s not just Allumette; it’s about her town,” says Penrose studio founder, Eugene Chung. “It’s about this big, expansive space. … And that’s actually part of what’s coming.”

The 20-minute experience, which follows the titular character to her eventual demise, hews closely to the studio’s recent tradition of mining inspiration from literature’s past. For The Rose and I, the San Francisco-based studio’s first VR short, it lifted elements from The Little Prince. But a reinterpretation of classic short stories isn’t quite Penrose’s aim. Those truncated tales simply fit the bite-sized, serialized format of current VR experiences. In fact, the small studio, which is made up of Oculus VR, Dreamworks and Pixar veterans, among others, is intent on building “persistent worlds” viewers can revisit to eavesdrop on the drama of their inhabitants. It’s a way for Penrose to successively build out a story’s larger narrative in VR. It’s also a clever content play.

The little prince of Penrose Studios’ first VR project, The Rose and I.

“We definitely have other projects in the pipeline that [are] not living in Allumette’s world,” says Chung. “But we definitely think of Allumette’s world as a much bigger thing; a much bigger platform to do a lot more.”

While the Tribeca Film Festival in New York serves as Allumette’s official long-form premiere — prior to this, it’d been demoed in preview form — work on the project is still underway. Chung was able to demo only a portion of its planned interactivity, which puts the “matchstick” (via the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive controllers), in the viewer’s hand as a sort of torchlight to explore the town and light up nearby clouds.

That said, a preview version, Allumette – Chapter 1, will be released “in coming days” to Steam VR and the Oculus storefront as a free, limited time preview. Its final, full 20-minute festival form, however, won’t be made available until later this year. A version for PlayStation VR is also on deck.

“We definitely think of Allumette’s world as a much bigger thing; a much bigger platform to do a lot more.”

Eugene Chung, Penrose Studios

WIth its Tribeca debut barely under Penrose’s belt, already the studio is considering ways to expand upon Allumette’s world of ‘Wake,’ a codename that pays homage to the novel Finnegans Wake.

“The way we categorize our projects internally is by worlds, [rather] than by stories within those worlds,” says Chung. The idea behind this thinking is that it’ll allow Penrose to get VR viewers familiar with its characters and worlds, and then invite them back to experience new installments featuring characters old and new.

The floating world of Allumette’s cloud city.

It also doesn’t hurt that this approach builds upon existing assets — much of which was created within VR — and dispenses with the time-intensive effort of creating entirely new worlds and engines from scratch each time. Of the five planned ‘worlds’ on Penrose’s slate, Allumette’s world of Wake counts as the third. The studio’s next project will focus on world five, the details of which Chung wouldn’t reveal except to say it’d stray from the classic short story format.

It’s not by accident that Penrose parallels Oculus VR’s own animated VR storytelling studio. Chung, who previously worked in venture capital and as a producer at Pixar before that, most recently hails from Oculus VR. In 2014, after a visit to the company’s headquarters for a VR demo and noting his enthusiasm for the burgeoning medium, Chung was asked to join in the newly created role of Head of Film and Media. That role led to the creation of Story Studio, the company’s in-house animation department. There, with a cherrypicked group of eager animators, artists, programmers and developers, Chung set the vision for Story Studio and executive produced its first VR short, Lost, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The Oculus stint, however, was short-lived, as Chung departed a year later to form Penrose.

Despite the studio’s current public focus on VR, Chung’s ambitions for Penrose extend beyond the medium. Its recent round of seed funding, totaling $8.5 million, is proof. He prefers to describe the studio as more of a “tech company” than VR animation house. And rightly so, as augmented reality is listed as one of the studio’s main areas of focus. It’s still early days for those in-development holographic projects and Chung isn’t willing to discuss specifics, but he does highlight proprietary VR creation tools, similar to the ones used to create Allumette, and extensions of existing VR projects as possibilities.

“I think some of the next things you’re going to see from us are going to be quite a bit different,” he says.

Image credits: Penrose Studios

This is what Kobe’s 20-year career in basketball looks like

Information is beautiful, none more so when data is combined with the power of the web to let us visualize the previously unseen. It’s one of the reasons why data journalism is so engaging, since it helps show things that you would have otherwise had to trawl through mountains of spreadsheets to understand. This is one such example, the L.A. Times’ breakdown of almost every shot Kobe Bryant took during his two-decade tenure with the Los Angeles Lakers. Head on over to the Times’ website and you’ll be able to delve into the stats, with each type of shot, the game and the distance all included. Oh, except for two shots from the 2012-13 season which got missed by the NBA’s shot tracking data. But hey, nobody’s perfect.

Kobe!

Source: L.A. Times

Smart mirror scale measures your volume as well as your weight

Guess what fitness startup Naked Labs wants you to do. The company today debuted its first product: a smart scale system that scans users with lasers, enabling them to track their fitness goals in three dimensions. The $500 system is designed for in-home use and is comprised of three parts: the scale itself, which doubles as a turntable; a full-length mirror outfitted with Intel RealSense depth sensors and the “Naked” mobile app. To initiate a scan, users first stand on the scale in their skivvies. It will begin to rotate as the mirror measures their body volume and sends that information to the associated app. The entire process takes about a minute.

The point of doing this is to help keep the user motivated on their fitness regimen by enabling them to accurately monitor and track how their body is changing as they get in better shape. This method closely mirrors hydrostatic testing, which determines your body fat percentage based on how much water you displace. It is far more accurate than the bioelectrical impedance method used by Fitbit’s Aria scale, for example, Naked Labs founder and CEO Farhad Farahbakhshian claimed during a recent product demonstration.

Now don’t freak out just because these models resemble the TSA’s backscatter images: The company has gone to great lengths to anonymize and secure people’s personal biometric data (plus you can always just wear shorts). The models have been given grey skin on purpose because, as Farahbakhshian explained, it provides a “truer” view of the user’s body than they’d get with the room’s natural lighting. Naked Labs also stores and transmits all user data through AES 256-bit encryption and its app allows users to dictate exactly who can see that data. This way, for example, you can share your progress with your doctor or personal trainer if the need arises.

There are some limits to what the system can do, however. Users over six-foot-nine for instance will have to make do with a slightly lower resolution scan since they’ll have to position the rotating scale farther away from the mirror to fit all of themselves within the sensors’ fields of view. That said, the drop in resolution should be minor, Farahbakhshian assured me. The scale set is available for pre-order starting today. The company expects to ship units by March 2017.

‘Gears of War 4’ multiplayer brings the series back to its roots

Excluding Halo, Gears of War is Microsoft’s biggest multiplayer shooter — for many players, multiplayer is far more important than the main story-based campaign. That’s what made Gears of War: Judgement a disappointment for many long-time players. The multiplayer experience was changed enough that long-time GoW fans were left a bit cold. As such, developer The Coalition looked at Gears of War 4’s multiplayer as an opportunity to make the best GoW experience it could while sticking to the formula that previously had made it so popular.

“Judgement was a big change in how Gears played — it was basically Gears meets first person shooter,” Rod Fergusson (studio head at The Coalition) told reporters at a Gears of War 4 multiplayer preview event last week. “It had first-person shooter controls, it had faster movement, human vs human combat… it really felt like it was a move away from what was core to Gears of War.” For the latest entry in the series, Fergusson decided to “double down” on what’s unique to the series rather than chase a trend like making GoW into a first-person shooter. A mantra for the team was “don’t change yourself so much that you lose the people who already love you,” Fergusson said.

As for what defines a GoW multiplayer game, Fergusson referenced “intimate violence” — it’s all about getting right up to your enemy and taking them out in the most grizzly way possible. To that end, The Coalition added some new close-combat moves to vary gameplay and provide new opportunities to get up close and personal with the competition. The “yank and shank,” lets you pull an enemy hiding behind cover over to you, leaving the vulnerable for an up-close kill.

The “vault kick” lets you run full-speed towards a barrier where an enemy is hiding, leap over it and kick them square in the face. Again, the enemy is wide open for a brutal, close-range kill, and that’s not a coincidence. Fergusson said that using cover to get up close to combatants and take them out with your knife or chainsaw was a defining part of the GoW experience that was missing in the last game — that’s where the inspiration for these new moves game from.

In actual play, however, I didn’t find these moves to be terribly useful. Maybe that’s just due to my relative lack of Gears of War experience, but it felt like both me and the competition used teamwork and surprise flanking to get at warriors hiding behind barriers. That said, the game’s hardcore fans will almost certainly find ways to use these new moves, but they don’t exactly change the core gameplay experience in any major way, at least at first glance.

More notable is a new gameplay mode called Dodgeball. In this mode, once you die, you don’t immediately respawn. Instead, you’re left on the sidelines until someone on your team makes a kill — you then get to jump back in. Every kill your team makes brings back another player from the sidelines, and it makes for some pretty wild changes of pace in a match. You and a teammate could be in a dire two-on-four situation, but one kill both takes out one enemy and brings back one of your companions, making it an even three-on-three match. Wild changes of fortune aren’t common, but in the time I spent playing dodgeball I definitely saw a few comebacks where one team was down to one-on-five, and The Coalition said those types of crazy comebacks are the kind of thing they had in mind when building that new gameplay mode.

Gears of War 4 also makes it a lot easier for inexperienced players to get into multiplayer. There’s a new co-op experience in which you and four fellow noobs take on a squad of five AI players in a match that feels just like a standard deathmatch against human competition. To keep the gameplay from feeling too stale, each AI competitor has its own personality and style, just as human players would, and you’ll still earn experience to redeem for in-game collectibles.

Even if you spend your time beating up on bots, jumping in against human players for the first time could still be a jarring experience. As such, the game will assign each player one of six skill level badges and only put you in multiplayer games with combatants of the same grade. It’s a smart move to avoid getting your clock cleaned and then giving up the first time you try multiplayer. Of course, this will all depend on how good the game is at matchmaking, something that remains to be seen at this point.

The last few additions are designed for the competitive gaming crowd. Another new mode called “Escalation” is meant for eSports-caliber players. The Coalition said it was the most “strategic” GoW multiplayer experience yet, but there weren’t any more details on what it’ll look like, and I didn’t get to play it either. There should be more details on the new mode at PAX East at the end of April, however.

Regardless of what game mode you’re playing, you’ll be able to take advantage of new broadcasting features to make a live streamed match much easier to watch. Broadcasters who control what is seen in a live feed now have more options for switching between various players to keep things from being too jerky and jarring. Previously, if you wanted to cycle from player one to player five, you’d have to hit a trigger and jump quickly through four players to get there, but now you’ll be able to seamlessly switch between any player view or camera angle you want. It’s not something that’ll matter for most players, but if you’re big on watching live streams (or producing your own), they should look better in Gears of War 4.

When the game launches on October 11th, it’ll come with ten maps included, and The Coalition says it’ll release both new maps as well as remastered ones from previous games every month. They’ll be free, but rather than flood the market with dozens of maps, the game will feature a curated “playlist” of ten DLC maps in addition to the core ten that come with the game. They’ll rotate in and out so there’s always a fresh selection — but if you really love one particular map and don’t want to see it leave, you can buy it and run it on your own private server.

If you want to get a look at how Gears of War 4’s multiplayer mode is shaping up, a beta starts on the 18th for anyone who has played Gears of War: Ultimate Edition; it’ll open up to everyone with an Xbox Live Gold account on the 25th. The Coalition warned that this is a true technical beta rather than a polished preview, so things might be buggy or broken entirely. Based on the few hours I spent with it, I’d recommend any Gears fans out there give it a shot and try out a few dodgeball games — it was a clever way of mixing up a formula that’s gotten pretty familiar over the years.

ICYMI: Facebook VR selfies, laser-powered water and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: Facebook is adding VR to the social network and one of the new tricks will let users take a selfie of their avatar selves inside of different tourist spots. Japanese researchers discovered that a water droplet coating allowed water to be controlled by a laser, capable of pulling 150 times its mass when harnessed like a mini oxen. Finally, a backpack on Kickstarter would charge your devices on the move and roughly nine other things.

Guinness World Record fans will want to see this crazy long K’NEX contraption. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.