Cardboard VR units now available on Google Store in Canada, UK, France and Germany
After coming to the U.S. Google Store in February, Cardboard VR units are now available to purchase in Canada, the UK, France, and Germany.
Available for $20 CAD, £15 and €20 in Canada, the UK and Germany/France respectively, the unit is the redesigned second-generation Google Cardboard. Google is also selling two-packs of the VR viewer for $35, £25 and €30 in each region.
Google notes that there are now “thousands of VR apps and games and a variety of captivating YouTube videos made to view with Cardboard,” including Paul McCartney, New York Times, and Star Wars.
It’s unclear whether Google plans to stock more versions of the Cardboard VR viewer; additional units, such as the Mattel View-Master VR and Goggle Tech C1-Glass VR Viewer, are for sale on the U.S. Google Store.
Donald Trump has never sounded this good… because he’s been made into an actual speaker
Ever wanted to hear Donald Trump say something sensible? Or maybe just sing a bit of Adele? Well perhaps now you can, for the American political candidate – well known for his controversial speeches and slurs – has been made into an actual speaker. Ok, so he hasn’t, but his likeness has.
Yep, Mr Trump is the latest focus of Russian artist Petro Wodkins, whose Sound of Power speakers – which resemble classic porcelain heads or “busts” – are hand-made in Sweden, limited to 100 pieces, and then put up for auction.
We caught glimpse of the new piece – entitled “Donald the Great” – at CES Asia, based in Shanghai, China. Which is rather apt as we all know just how much Trump “loves China”.
“Play the people who play the world”, reads Sound of Power’s tongue-in-cheek slogan. Other political heavyweights in Wodkins’ limited-edition range have included Vladimir Putin (“St Vladimir”), Kim Jong Un (“Kim Sunshine”), and Margaret Thatcher (“Maggie”).
Each of the pieces is hand-crafted and polished, then sold under auction for varying prices ranging into the thousands of dollars. Who’d have thought anyone would pay so much for a cast of controversial leaders with, um, the side of their heads caved in?
Anyway, back to the tech side of things. Donald the Great sounds pretty good (in this context at least) thanks to an in-built 20W amplifier tucked away into the wooden stand, supporting the head, which carries a 4-inch driver for mono output.
Somewhere between tech, art, politics and comedy, Donald the Great gave us a moment of amusement in among the bustling halls at the Asia show. Especially with a bit of Rhianna blurting out the side of his head. Now there’s two names we never thought we’d type in the same sentence…
‘Goopy’ dark matter could offer a new vision of the early universe
Cosmologists exploring the origins of the universe have a new theory about how dark matter behaves. Although the stuff makes up 80 percent of the matter in the universe, we don’t really have a good sense of what dark matter is actually made of. According to The New Scientist, however, UT Austin professor Paul Shapiro and graduate student Bouha Li believe dark matter could be made up of bosons that clump together in “a strange, goopy state of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate.”
As Shapiro and Li have calculated, the dark matter space goop could actually be behaving differently now than it did when the universe was first beginning. While most researchers believe that dark matter currently acts like weakly interacting massive particles (or “WIMPs”), if Shapiro and Li are correct, dark matter could have acted more like radiation than matter in the past. Looking back even further, to the earliest stages of the universe, and the dark matter in this model actually acts like a fluid that resists compression.
“There’s a pressure associated with trying to disturb it,” Shapiro explained. “When you clump it, it wants to push back. It’s like we filled the universe with a fluid.” The model offers an explanation for why the expansion of the universe slowed down after the period of inflation that immediately followed the Big Bang. It also means primordial gravitational waves — the echoes of the Big Bang that the LIGO team is searching for — could be easier to spot that previously believed.
NBA 2K celebrates Steph Curry’s MVP with a 99 rating
Today Stephen Curry collected NBA’s Most Valuable Player award for the second year in a row, and also became the first unanimous MVP in NBA history. To celebrate that achievement (and his epic return from a knee injury to score 40 points in a playoff win last night) NBA 2K will issue an update to its game on Thursday maxing out his overall rating at 99. It’s part of a promotion along with his shoe sponsor Under Armour and naturally the MVP colorway of his Curry Two will be available in-game. The 99 rating will be in place for 30 hours at 6PM ET (matching Curry’s jersey number) and for a little bit, should make it easier for the videogame to replicate the real-life player’s abilities.
Congrats @StephenCurry30 on back to back MVPs. @UABasketball & @NBA2K #BreakTheGame w/ 99 rating for 30 hrs starting THU 3PM PT to celebrate
— NBA 2K 2K17 (@NBA2K) May 10, 2016
Watch live video from 2K on http://www.twitch.tv
Source: Under Armour
Olympus PEN-F review – CNET
The Good The Olympus PEN-F is fast, delivers great photos in a streamlined body and offers a nice feature set.
The Bad The camera lacks a grip and video is not one of Olympus’ strong suits. Plus, it really should be at least modestly dust- and weather-sealed for the money.
The Bottom Line Excellent photo quality and performance and a system with tiny, fast prime lenses make the Olympus PEN-F a great camera for street photography.
Olympus’ street-photography-focused PEN-F is the latest in the company’s line of enthusiast mirrorless interchangeable-lens models, the first of its cameras to use the 20-megapixel Four Thirds sensor and a departure from the PEN line’s viewfinderless design. It’s also the best thus far with respect to photo quality and performance, and is a terrific option in that sense. It lacks a grip, which always irks me, the back navigation control is more suited to a cheap point-and-shoot and Olympus has yet to match the rest of the pack for video quality, but it otherwise delivers an enjoyable and streamlined shooting experience that doesn’t disappoint when you get home and look at your photos.
I have a soft spot for Micro Four Thirds (MFT) cameras. The smaller sensor doesn’t deliver quite as good photo quality as some APS-C-based models, but given the significantly smaller lenses, it tends to be worth the trade-off when the ability to toss several fast lenses in a bag without breaking my back outweighs the slightly increased depth of field (less background defocus) and slightly crunchier look.
At $1,200 (£1,000, about AU$1,800), the camera is more expensive than its nearest competitor, the Panasonic Lumix GX8, but with a slightly less impressive feature set.
First-rate photos
I’m quite impressed with the photo quality from the PEN-F. (Keep in mind, however, that I lab-tested with an excellent lens, the 12-40mm f2.8, rather than the cheaper kit lenses, which can make a big difference.) It delivers excellent white balance, a noise profile that rivals recent APS-C equivalents through about ISO 3200 and the tonal range you’d expect from a camera of its price.
Olympus Pen-F full-resolution photo samples
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JPEGs look clean through ISO 800 and decent through ISO 3200, but beyond that they look somewhat smeary from the noise-reduction artifacts. If you shoot raw you can push that a little more.
Olympus’ video quality doesn’t match the photos, though it’s not bad. Naturally, the HD video isn’t as sharp as competitors’ 4K and there’s quite a bit of edge crawl, especially on fine lines in the background, plus there aren’t any presets to control the video’s color or curve. (You can use Color Creator and trial and error.) But low-light video doesn’t look as noisy as you’d expect and the in-camera audio recording is surprisingly full-sounding.
Analysis samples
The PEN-F’s JPEGs are clean through ISO 800, and you can start to see just a little smearing at ISO 1600. There are few more false color artifacts than usual in the fine details, though.
Lori Grunin/CNET
Note the significant drop in sharpness between ISO 80 and ISO 200.
Lori Grunin/CNET
Up through ISO 6400 you can see smearing from the noise reduction, but it retains a reasonable amount of detail in the in-focus areas.
Lori Grunin/CNET
Olympus’ High Res Shot mode, which combines multiple, slightly offset images to produce a high-resolution photo, does produce much better, more naturally resolved detail. (This shows a High Res image resized to match the standard size.)
Lori Grunin/CNET
Olympus’ Hi Res mode looks nice and sharp at actual size. Unfortunately, you really need to use a tripod for best results.
Lori Grunin/CNET
The PEN-F has excellent, accurate white balance and colors, and its default Natural color settings do a fine job. It does have a problem preserving details in bright, saturated reds, however.
Lori Grunin/CNET
Starting at about ISO 1600, you can do a better job preserving sharpness and texture by processing raw files.
Lori Grunin/CNET
Mobilicity being subsumed into Rogers flanker brand Chatr
The Mobilicity brand is disappearing, subsumed into Chatr Mobile, says parent company Rogers.
According to an FAQ posted on Mobilicity’s website, its 150,000-odd customers will be ported over to Chatr’s billing system with “comparable plans,” based on information sent to MobileSyrup. Mobilicity will stop activating lines on August 15th, and will shut down the brand by the fall.
Rogers purchased Mobilicity in mid-2015 for $465 million after working out a deal with the former Conservative government to sell off a considerable portion of the company’s spectrum to Wind Mobile (which was then purchased by Shaw Communications).
In the subsequent months, Mobilicity customers were incentivized to upgrade their devices in order to take advantage of Rogers’ more robust 3G network, on which Chatr also runs.
Mobilicity notes that “by joining the chatr mobile… you can enjoy larger chatr zones and their consistent and reliable network,” which has been competing with Mobilicity and Wind Mobile since 2009, when the new entrants launched.
Unlike Rogers’ other flanker brand Fido, Chatr has mostly assembled a client base of prepaid users that typically don’t use much data, if at all. The company unveiled a deceptive “unlimited data” plan last month that caps 3G speeds at 3Mbps, up to 1GB per month.
Some Mobilicity stores and dealers will be forced to close, while others will be rebranded as Chatr locations.
Google Developers website now offers Nexus OTA files in addition to full factory images
A small but seriously cool update was pushed to the Google Developers website today, launching a new section that gives Nexus owners download links to OTA (over the air) update files in addition to the full factory images we’ve used before. The website is currently showing the two most recent Android 6.0.1 OTAs for all Nexus devices since the Nexus 7 (2013), as well as the Pixel C.
With these OTA files, you can quickly update your Nexus phone or tablet using the “adb sideload” command via your connected computer without downloading a full system image. With the OTA update file you also don’t have to worry about accidentally wiping your data during the update. But most importantly for many folks, the use of adb sideload doesn’t require an unlocked bootloader, saving you yet another step in the process.
You’re still going to have to do a little legwork to manually update your Nexus this way, though, as it still requires the use of ADB. But for those who have previously held out for someone to yank the OTA file each and every time updates roll out to Nexuses, this page will save the hassle and provide a direct download link.
If you need more information on how this process works, Google has the tools available on its website, and we have step-by-step instructions in the guide below.
More: Our full guide to manually updating your Nexus
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Firefox users can try experimental features with Test Pilot
Firefox already has several builds made to test out experimental features, but now you can take some of them for a spin even if you only have the stable browser. Mozilla has re-launched Test Pilot for Firefox, an add-on it first released in 2009 to study how people interacted with their browser. This one comes with three features the team is still in the midst of developing. First is Activity Stream, which turns every new tab into a home-page-slash-news-feed that displays the newest posts from your top websites. It also highlights some of the pages you’ve bookmarked.
The second feature called Tab Center functions like OneTab and other similar third-party add-ons. It displays all your open tabs on the left-hand side of the browser for easy access. Finally, Universal Search gives you recommendations right on the address bar as you type. According to VentureBeat, Mozilla decided to launch Test Pilot to be able to gather more data and feedback about its newest features from more people. If you’d like to try it out yourself, just go to Test Pilot’s official website on Firefox and click “Get Started.”
Source: Firefox Test Pilot
Facebook might have a solution to its free WiFi’s shortcomings
Facebook knows that a key limitation of its Terragraph gigabit WiFi system is how it falls apart over long distances. Line of sight is kind of a pain that way and even a 7GBPS data signal degrades when there’s a nearby object blocking its path. So it’s devised a workaround for it with a code framework that helps nodes on the network make faster, autonomous decisions about data routing. Open/R will eventually be open-sourced (it’s based on open-source code as it is), and Facebook describes the initiative as a way of helping advance Terragraph’s code quickly and thus make the free WiFi project faster and more efficient.
The company further notes that because its network is under full, in-house control, it doesn’t have to be compatible with “every legacy feature” on a given network because it can target the aspects Facebook needs most, and then augment further when the demand arises. If you’ll remember, Facebook can achieve this, at least in part, because access is limited to the social network itself and a few other sites — there’s no need play nicely with the entire World Wide Web at that point.
It’s already in place at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, and, like The Verge notes, a public test is coming to nearby San Jose before year’s end. Outfits like DARPA and Starry, each working on their own variations of this type of tech, are probably pretty interested in seeing what’s what once Zuckerberg and Co. release the code to the masses.
Via: The Verge
Source: Facebook
Hyperloop Technologies gets a new name ahead of propulsion test
The world of Elon Musk-imagined levitating super trains that fly through tubes is finally a little bit less confusing. Today Hyperloop Technologies changed it’s name to Hyperloop One. The new moniker should help reduce any mix ups with competing company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT). More importantly, the company is ready to publicly demo its propulsion system.
Tomorrow, the company formerly known as Hyperloop Technologies will show off its propulsion system in the Nevada Desert outside of north of Las Vegas. The company says that it can currently hit 400 MPH along an open-air test track but is shooting for 700 MPH within the confines of a vacuum-sealed Hyperloop tube. CTO and Co-founder Brogan BamBrogan said that the company would have a full system, full scale test (a pod racing through a tube) by the end of 2016.
During a presentation in Las Vegas the company also announced Hyperloop One partnerships both in the private and public sector. Probably the most important of those is the state of Nevada. In a statement, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval said, “we believe that Hyperloop One will develop the next mode of transportation while also providing a significant revenue stream and job opportunities for Nevadans.”
Because the Hyperloop community loves competition, the company dropped that it’s starting the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. It says the event will be an “opportunity for individuals, companies and governments to develop competitive proposals for using the first Hyperloop One solutions on transport corridors in their regions.” Proposals are due on September 15, 2016 with the winners announced in March of 2017.
At the event the company also announced that it’s taking part in studies to see if routes are feasible in Finland, Norway and between the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports.
But again, the real news is tomorrow’s open-air test of its propulsion system. All the partnerships and competitions in the world won’t matter if the Hyperloop One can’t get its pods through the tubes. While the chances of confusing it with its rival Hyperloop Transportation Technologies have been reduced thanks to the new name, there’s still competition between the two endeavors. Yesterday, HTT announced that it will use the government-developed Inductrack levitation system. It will be partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring the passive magnetic system to its pods.
If successful, Hyperloop One is looking beyond passengers to cargo. BamBrogan even hypothesized the potential of moving an entire port offshore and using underwater Hyperloop tracks and pods to move goods from ships to the land. This would expand the company’s idea to put tubes underwater along the shoreline.
We’ll be covering the Hyperloop One propulsion test tomorrow.
Source: Hyperloop One
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