Google’s self-driving cars now know when to honk
Google’s self-driving cars are not only getting smarter by the day, but they’re also getting a little bit more polite. According to the project’s latest monthly report, the self-driving car team has recently been teaching the car’s AI when and how to honk the horn and give the human drivers on the road a helpful heads up.
In order to train its honking algorithm, the team tested a variety of honk-worthy situations, like a car backing out of a blind driveway or a car headed the wrong way down a one-way street. At first, the car would play a little honk sound inside the vehicle so engineers could record whether there was a legitimate need for a honk and provide teaching feedback. Once they felt the AI was ready, they let it blare its horn to the world.
“Our goal is to teach our cars to honk like a patient, seasoned driver,” the team wrote in the report. “As we become more experienced honkers, we hope our cars will also be able to predict how other drivers respond to a beep in different situations.”
In related, noise-making news: Google also says they’ve essentially sound-designed the self-driving prototype’s “hum” so pedestrians and cyclists around the car can hear it coming. The sound even increases or decreases in pitch as the car speeds up or slows down. To create the basic sound, the team has tried adapting everything from Orca sounds to ambient art sculptures, but they apparently haven’t landed on a distinct “voice” for the vehicle yet. Anything to avoid the silent Prius effect.
Adidas brings its Yeezy reservation app to some European cities
It’s Yeezy Season yet again. Today, following weeks of speculation, Adidas made the release date for Kanye West’s new sneaker official: June 11th. In preparation for that, the company has updated its Confirmed app with a new look and, most importantly, expanded availability. The application, which lets iOS and Android users reserve Yeezys for in-store pick up, will work in Europe for the first time, starting with Berlin, Milan and London.
Additionally, there’s now support for more US regions, including Atlanta, Houston, Las Vegas, Long Island, Miami, North New Jersey, Orange County, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Previously the Confirmed app only worked in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. If you’re hoping to get a pair, this might be your best chance — assuming the app doesn’t crash under pressure, as it has for many people in the past.
Just make sure you’re ready to go once Adidas opens reservations (you’ll get a push notification), otherwise your best bet will be trying to buy the shoes from a reseller. And that won’t be cheap.
Source: Adidas Originals (Twitter)
Samsung Announces Gear IconX Wireless Earbuds and Gear Fit 2
Samsung today introduced the Gear IconX, a set of wireless earbuds that are similar in style to the Bragi Dash. The IconX earbuds have no wires to connect them to one another and no wire to plug them into a smartphone or other device, instead communicating wirelessly over Bluetooth.
Priced at $199.99, the IconX earbuds feature 4GB of internal storage to hold music and use hooks to securely fit into an ear. There are also built-in fitness sensors for monitoring movement and heart rate, with the data able to be synced to Samsung’s S Health app, and there’s a built-in voice coach feature. Touch gestures like tapping and swiping on the earbud are used for skipping tracks and changing the volume.
When not in use, the earbuds can be placed into a pill-shaped case which also serves as a backup battery, offering two full charges. The battery inside the IconX lasts for one and a half hours when streaming music or for three and a half hours when playing music stored on the earbuds themselves.
Samsung debuted the new earbuds at an event in New York and gave several tech sites a hands-on demo, giving us a first look at some early impressions. According to The Verge, IconX is “pretty good” at blocking outside noises, while TechCrunch points out Samsung is marketing the earbuds as a workout-only accessory given the “dismal” battery life.
Gizmodo thought the controls could be a “little unreliable” but thought the audio quality was impressive, and Engadget said it took a minute to get them secured properly in the ear, but once in place, they “didn’t feel like they were going anywhere.”
Samsung’s Gear IconX earbuds come as rumors suggest Apple is preparing to remove the headphone jack from its iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices, set to be released this fall. There have also been rumors indicating Apple is working on its own set of wireless Bluetooth earphones that would be sold alongside the iPhone 7 as a premium accessory with many of the same features in the IconX.
Samsung plans to debut the Gear IconX in blue, black, and white in the third quarter of 2016.
The company has also announced an updated waterproof Gear Fit 2 fitness tracker with a wider 1.5-inch curved Super AMOLED display, 4GB storage, GPS, a heart rate monitor, a barometer for measuring altitude, and features for automatically detecting exercise activities. The Gear Fit 2 will be available for pre-order starting tomorrow at select retailers and available in stores on June 10.
Tag: Samsung
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72 New Emoji Including Bacon, Shrug, Selfie and Face Palm Coming in Unicode 9
The Unicode Consortium recently approved 72 new emoji for inclusion in Unicode 9, set to be released on June 21. New emoji range from expanded smileys and people to new animals, food, and sports.
Notable smileys include rolling on the floor laughing, drooling face, and nauseated face, while the people/body category gains shrug, selfie, and face palm. New animal emoji include gorilla, fox face, deer, shark, and owl, and some of the new foods include avocado, potato, croissant, pancakes, salad, and bacon.
There are a line of new medals, objects like a scooter and a canoe, and emoji to represent boxing gloves, martial arts uniforms, wrestlers, fencing, juggling, and more. Emojipedia has shared mockups and a full list of upcoming emoji.
The emoji above serve as simple mockups and are not representative of what the actual emoji will look like on various devices, but Emojipedia has created them in the Apple style. Apple and Google’s designers will actually custom design emoji based on the Unicode Consortium’s guidelines for each character, crafting them to fit in with existing emoji.
Though the Unicode Consortium is releasing Unicode 9 on June 21, the new emoji will not be available on iOS and Mac devices until Apple implements support for them, which can sometimes take several months. Apple currently supports Unicode 8, which introduced emoji like taco, burrito, unicorn face, and popcorn, along with emoji skin tone modifiers.
With the release of Unicode 9 on the horizon, the Unicode Consortium has already begun considering candidates for Unicode 10, with dumpling, takeout box, fortune cookie, orange heart, sled, and more under consideration.
Tags: emoji, Unicode Consortium, Unicode 9
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Apple Releases iTunes 12.4.1 With Bug Fixes
Apple today released a minor 12.4.1 update to iTunes, introducing several bug fixes to address issues with VoiceOver and other features.
iTunes 12.4.1 can be downloaded immediately from the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.
This update addresses a number of problems where iTunes doesn’t work as expected with VoiceOver. It also restores the option to Reset Plays and fixes the following issues:
– Up Next may have unexpectedly played songs added together in the incorrect order.
– iTunes was prevented from crossfading between songs.
iTunes 12.4.1 comes just over two weeks after the release of iTunes 12.4, an update that introduced a revamped interface designed to be simpler, with the reintroduction of a sidebar for easier navigation and a redesigned media picker. It also featured safeguards to protect users from an issue that could cause music stored in iTunes to be deleted.
Tag: iTunes
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Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 review – CNET
The Good The Raptor has a subtle, discreet black design that fades into the background. It offers excellent high-end performance and a separate front panel for connecting VR headsets.
The Bad It’s still a little plain-looking for such an expensive PC, and it takes up a ton of space. The front-mounted VR connection panel isn’t sturdy enough.
The Bottom Line The Velocity Micro Raptor Z55 is a VR-ready desktop with a very conservative look, but excellent performance and plenty of configuration options.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
For anyone looking to keep their virtual-reality obsession on the down low, a gamer-centric desktop such as the massive tank-like Acer Predator G6 or the small-but-bold Falcon Northwest Tiki isn’t going to fool anybody. That’s why I was pleased to see an excellent collection of high-end components packed into a very unassuming chassis in the Velocity Micro Raptor Z55.
The minimalist design of this VR-ready PC fades into the background, with a subtle black brushed-metal finish, no flashing lights or crazy angles, and fairly subtle branding. Its only concession to gaming chops are blue-lit fans on the side and back panels, each behind mesh grilles so they cast only a mellow blue glow, and a small Velocity Micro logo on at the bottom of the front panel.
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Otherwise, the front faceplate of the tower is feature-free, except for an EVGA VR-ready panel, with one HDMI and two USB ports, allowing you to plug something like an HTC Vive headset into the front of the system, instead of snaking around to the back ports, which may be hard to get to. It’s a good idea in theory. But the EVGA panel, which comes bundled with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980Ti graphics card included with this configuration, isn’t attached very firmly, and pulled right out of the front drive bay when I tried to use it. In both this system and the AVA Direct Avatar, I switched back to the rear ports right away.
This configuration, with the Nvidia GeForce 980Ti, an Intel Core i7 6700K CPU, and a 1TB HDD/256GB SSD storage combo is priced at $2,799 in the US, which works out to around £1,942 or AU$3,855. Prices and selection for custom PC configurations can vary quickly, and the new Nvidia GeForce 1080 series of cards already costs about the same to add as this very top-end 980Ti card.
Philips Hue White Ambiance Starter Kit review – CNET
The Good The Hue White Ambiance LEDs are reliable and fairly easy to set up and use. Hue’s wide compatibility with third-parties means that you’ll be able to use them with a variety of different platforms, including Nest, SmartThings, Alexa and Apple HomeKit.
The Bad Siri doesn’t recognize the white light spectrum yet, so you can’t ask her to change the tone of your lights without pre-programming a scene first. Also, the bulbs aren’t as bright as advertised.
The Bottom Line The White Ambiance LEDs fill in a gap in the Philips Hue family of smart bulbs, but they didn’t outperform color-tunable LEDs from Lifx and Stack. They’re really only worth it if you’re already committed to Hue, or to HomeKit.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
On one end of the smart bulb spectrum, you’ve got relatively inexpensive lights that don’t change colors. On the other end, you’ve got fancy lights that do. Philips Hue makes both, but for what seems like ages, they’ve been ignoring the middle ground: reasonably priced “color tunable” bulbs that don’t change colors, but instead, offer a full array of natural, white-light tones. In the meantime, competitors like Lifx, GE, Osram, and Stack have all beaten Philips to the punch.
The Philips Hue White Ambiance LEDs aim to change all of that. They won’t put out light in pink, purple, or green like other Hue bulbs, but they will shift color temperatures within that white-light spectrum: warm, candle-like tones at one end and cool, bluish-white daylight tones at the other. The cost per bulb? $30, with a two-bulb starter kit available for $130 (the White Ambiance LEDs aren’t available outside of the US just yet, but other Hue products are — those prices convert to roughly £20/AU$40 per bulb, or £90/AU$180 for the kit).
Philips Hue’s White Ambiance bulbs let you…
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For the extra cash, the starter kit comes with a handy wireless remote as well as the second-gen Hue Bridge, which brings Apple HomeKit support into the picture. That means you’ll be able to control the bulbs with Siri commands alongside other HomeKit-compatible smart home gadgets. And, if HomeKit isn’t your platform of choice, you’ve got a number of other Hue-compatible third parties to work with, including IFTTT, Wink, SmartThings, Nest, and Amazon’s Alexa.
That broad compatibility has always been one of Hue’s best selling points, but keep in mind that the competition has done a lot of catching up in the last year or so. And, as for brightness, almost all of them have flat-out passed Philips by. Specifically, I’d point to the sensor-powered Stack LED downlights and the Lifx White 800 LED as strong alternatives — and arguably better ones if you aren’t married to HomeKit.
The new version of the Hue app offers a refined look and a few new features, including easier controls for crafting automated lighting changes.
Screenshots by Ry Crist/CNET
What’s new with Hue?
Oh, you know, not too much. The new bulbs look like the old ones, and the new white light spectrum controls have actually been a feature of the full-color Hue bulbs since the very beginning. At $30 a piece, they’re essentially taking the place of the soft-white-only Philips Hue Lux bulbs, which were phased out last year.
There is a new Philips Hue app, available for both Android and iOS devices. It adds in new lighting scene presets for your bulbs, including white-spectrum-specific presets like “Concentrate” and “Relax.” It also borrows a page from the HomeKit playbook and lets you group bulbs by room. Aside from that, a lot of the differences are purely cosmetic — though to its credit, it is a better-looking app than before.
More than anything, the new app seems to be optimized around Hue’s integration with HomeKit. There’s an expanded section in the settings that’ll hand control of your bulbs and scenes over to Siri, complete with instructions on how to help Siri understand your lighting commands. When you want to add a new room in the app, it asks if you’d like to import a room from your HomeKit setup. You can run HomeKit-esque lighting “routines” for things like waking up and heading to bed. If last year’s debut of the second-gen Hue Bridge represented a marriage of sorts for Apple and Philips, then the new app reaffirms the vows.
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Control your tone
You can change the color temperature of the Philips Hue White Ambiance LEDs with just a few taps in the app. Like in the old app, you’ll drag a little cursor to the specific tone that you want, though the new app omits the full RGB color spectrum with these white-light-only bulbs, and gives you a full-screen white-light spectrum, instead. Nice touch.
But a good smart lighting setup shouldn’t be too reliant on an app — ideally, you’ll be able to automate lighting changes that anticipate your needs, saving you the trouble of pulling your phone out of your pocket. To this end, Hue’s new timed routines are a good step in the right direction, especially the location-aware routines that track your phone to run automatically as you leave and come home.
Siri doesn’t have a vocabulary for the white light spectrum.
Screenshot by Ry Crist/CNET
It also helps that Hue’s LEDs are about as bullish on voice control as bulbs come. Aside from the integration with Siri, Philips Hue setups enjoy native support from Alexa, Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant. Philips is wise to position itself at the front of the curve here — voice-activated lighting can quickly make app controls feel antiquated.
I’ve got just one qualm here: Siri doesn’t have a vocabulary for the white light spectrum. Ask her to set a bulb to “daylight,” or “soft white,” or “2,700 K,” and nothing will happen. She has no idea what those terms mean.
That’s a bit baffling, frankly. Philips Hue was an early and enthusiastic member of the HomeKit bandwagon, and that white light spectrum’s been there from the beginning. Maybe teaching Siri to recognize thousands of specific color temperatures is a bit much, but would it have been so hard to let her know what “daylight” means? The color tunability and the Siri compatibility are the two top selling points here — why is there a wall between them?
Audi A5 Coupé (2016) preview, in pictures: Flexing those German muscles
This is the new Audi A5 Coupé (well, actually you’re feasting your eyes on the sportier S5 Coupé edition). Which, if you squint a little, could be considered as the German brand’s version of the Ford Mustang. With some added pep. An apt arrival year, then, given Ford’s recent imminent push in the UK with its muscle car.
Shown in this sport trim – and complete with all the trimmings, no less; someone went wild in ticking all the options boxes for sure ‘cos it’s full to the brim with tech and details – and dressed in red, this is one coupé that’s hard to ignore given the way it looks.
Audi has been going from strength to strength on the bodywork front of late, with panel creases that are sharper and more angular than, well, any other maker out there. Just look at the A5 Coupé’s dome bonnet and sharp lines that lead from the low-to-the-ground hexagonal honeycomb face.
‘The new Audi’ has designs that are getting more aggressive in their appearance too – in a good way. The A5 Coupé has squat headlamps and a low-to-the-ground front grille that give it a snarling presence, countered by a degree of elegance to the bodywork and overall finish. It’s a tug-of-war between the two, one that’s well balanced.
Pocket-lint
Small details such as the chrome-style polished aluminium window-line frames, which give the car a defining shape to the side, are standard for the entry-level A5, not just the S5 Coupé. There’s even a third brake light, tucked under the rear window line (like in the S7). And slight bodywork bulges – described by Audi’s designers as “muscle” – add a subtle shape to the car, when caught from the right angles or under the right light.
The 2016 A5 Coupé is an entirely different beast to its 2007 predecessor. Built on the new MLB Evo platform (as per the A4/S4 models), its wheelbase is 12mm longer than the earlier model, resulting in slightly more space inside – despite the body length remaining similar to the last-generation A5 Coupé.
Inside is a comfy place to be too. All the more if you tick those options boxes. We don’t have a full break-down of what’s available in various packages just yet, or at what level of pricing, but the S5 Coupé we saw came in S Line trim with all the extras: from big-deal features such as the Audi Cockpit driver digital screen, paired with Audi MMI system and 8.3-inch centre-mounted screen, and Bang & Olufsen sound system; to smaller details such as the light-up “S5” panels in the door wells, the interior ambient lighting, and the plush seats with individual electronic adjustment.
Under the hood there are a variety of engine choices. Two TFSI (petrol) and three TDI (diesel) engine options (ranging from 190-286bhp) are available for the A5, with the S5 Coupé also offering up the top-of-the-line V6 TFSI (354bhp). Which to go for will depend on how big your bank balance is, we suspect. Maybe you’re a speed freak, or perhaps you’re keener on economy, in which case the smaller engines will deliver a more appropriate solution. Whichever you choose, each emits lower emissions and has better economy than the last-generation A5 Coupé’s engine options.
Pocket-lint
As a 3-door car you might not expect much space in the A5 Coupé’s rear, but at the very back it’s the boot that serves surprisingly well, offering a 465-litre capacity. That small boot hatch certainly is deceptive, then. You can just about fit another two adults in the back seats too (rather than the boot), although it’s a bit of a squeeze.
Back outside for a moment and the A5 Coupé shows off some other smart bodywork: there’s a four-pronged diffuser/bumper to the rear, shaped rake-like and paired (in the S5 Coupé anyway) no less than four exhaust pipes. Ding ding.
First Impressions
A lot can happen in nine years. The new Audi A5 Coupé and S5 Coupé might not leap out as drastically different from their predecessors at first glance, but this is a show of refinement at its best; all those tweaks and bodywork presses result in one top-drawer Coupé. It’ll be on the road from the autumn, with pricing yet to be announced. And we can’t wait to get this German muscle flexing.
‘Rocket League’ keeps adding players and making tons of money
Not many people would have predicted the success of Psyonix’s Rocket League when it first appeared as a free title on PlayStation Plus. But here we are, 11 months later, watching the game continue to go from strength to strength. In an interview with Forbes, the game studio revealed that the vehicular smash-em-up football game has now sold 5 million copies. Add to that a further 5 million DLC purchases across PC, Xbox One and Playstation and the company has earned more than $110 million — not bad for a game that cost just $2 million to build.
Thanks to its free promotion, PlayStation is the most popular Rocket League platform, accounting for 42 percent of the total player base. PC use is climbing, though, with Steam users accounting for 36 percent of players, and Xbox One comes in last with 22 percent. Don’t let that fool you, though, the game didn’t reach Microsoft’s console until February 2016. “Our numbers are actually going up, not down,” Psyonix vice president Jeremy Dunham told Forbes, “which is not very common for a game that’s ten months old.”
Part of the reason for Rocket League’s success (other than that it’s super fun), is that Psyonix has been quick to update the game as it’s grown in popularity. In recent weeks, the company added a basketball mode and then became the first game developer to integrate cross-play between Xbox One and PC. It’s those features that kept bringing 5 million gamers back to the game in April and 15 million players in total since last July.
Source: Forbes
Twitter’s first 360-degree videos will come from the NBA finals
The likes of Facebook and YouTube have been doing 360-degree videos for some time now. During the NBA Finals that begin tonight, Twitter will also offer the more immersive views for the first time. The social network will post pre- and post-game content, but don’t expect to see any in-game highlights. Samsung is sponsoring the videos, which will be shot with its Gear 360 camera.
The NBA Finals 360-degree videos will be exclusive to Twitter and are expected to include warm-ups, teams just before taking the court, the captain’s meeting and any on-court activity after the game. If you want to follow along, the NBA account will be posting all of the footage and you can expect Samsung Mobile ads promoted tweets with the videos to pop up in your timeline as well. Game 1 between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors tips off at 9 PM ET tonight.
AIVAnet 