PlayStation VR add-on experiences ranked!

PlayStation VR add-on experiences deliver new content in ways you might not expect.

There are already plenty of new games available on PlayStation VR, but what you might not expect are the new VR add-ons to PlayStation 4 games you’re already playing. There aren’t many of these floating around, but we’ve got the details on each PlayStation 4 add-on experience here today.

Read more at VRHeads.com

What I learned from playing Pokémon Go for 6 months

Catching Pokemon in the real world brought childhood dreams to life.

I am what you might call a member of the Pokémon generation. I played Pokémon Red on Gameboy Color, I collected the cards, and I definitely watched the television shows and spent what little money I had on checking out the movies. So when plans for Pokémon Go were released by Niantic, I was all in to play. I spent hours hunting for Pokémon, walking miles along the way, and exploring my neighborhood in a way I never had before. I also happened to learn a few things in the process.

It was awesome

I actually got started a few days late, since Pokémon Go premiered while I was camping on top of a mountain that had no internet access. As soon as I got home, I took a quick walk with my dog around the block and got way too excited. In 15 minutes I’d caught a Psyduck, an Eevee, and a handful of Pidgeys and Rattatas.

It’s such a small, silly, little thing, to take a walk and see pocket monsters pop up on your phone screen. I may have actually squealed out loud the first time that my favorite Pokemon — Vulpix — popped up for me to capture. This wasn’t just true for existing Pokémon fans like me. My mother was playing, her mother-in-law was playing, and everyone was having an absolutely amazing time. The sheer amount of people who were playing turned this game into an amazing experience that brought camaraderie to thousands of people worldwide. I know i wasn’t the only one who felt this way either.

I found so much

One of the coolest parts for me was finding so many neat places around my neighborhood and my city. PokéStops were set up at a variety of places from schools and post offices to art installations. I live just south of Baltimore, and while it gets a bad rap for a lot of things, there are some amazing art installations in the city.

I spent a full day wandering around with my phone, a portable battery, and tons of places to explore. From beautiful murals that stole my breath away to a tiny little café tucked into a corner. While Pokémon Go definitely got me out of the house and exploring my surroundings for the first time, it did more than just that. It got me looking up from my phone to take in everything around me happily. I’d never noticed just how much of the world I was missing and more to the point, how much was tucked into my little suburban neighborhood.

It was totally worth it

While there were definitely some issues that I found with Pokémon Go — namely the relative dearth of interesting catches near to home — overall it was an absolutely amazing experience. I walked more than I have since I got hooked on Run, Zombies, and I got so many ridiculous memories from it. I met neighbors while playing at a local playground, and going to venues with multiple PokéStops meant I ran into literally dozens of other Pokémon Go players.

When the weather turned cold and the teams became more entrenched in the territories they controlled, I slowly stopped playing so much. There’s every chance that when the weather warms back up I’ll boot the app back up and enjoy it anew, but I doubt the massive outpouring of players will ever return. Even if the craze only lasted a few short months, I had more fun with an app than I have ever had before, and it was totally worth every moment of a dying battery or my feet hurting after a 4-mile hike.

Are you still playing?

Have you been playing Pokémon Go through the winter? Has the novelty worn off? Will you play again when things warm up? Let us know in the comments below!

Pokémon Go

• Join our Pokémon Go forums!
• How to deal with GPS errors in-game
• Which team should you choose?
• How to play without killing your battery
• The Ultimate Pokémon Go Game Guide!
• Listen to the Pokémon Go podcast!

YouTube mobile live streaming is here, starting with channels above 10,000 subscribers

You can now go live with just a few taps.

YouTube has been talking about live streaming straight from your phone since mid-2016, and now it has expanded to make it available to everyone … who has more than 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Thankfully, this is only a limited-time restriction, as the ability to live stream directly from your phone will expand to everyone very soon.

Live streams can start up right away with just a few taps in the standard YouTube app, and videos that are created live are treated the same as any other uploaded video. They can be found through search, recommendations and playlists — so people don’t necessarily have to find them directly on your channel. YouTube also claims to have done plenty of optimization to make sure your feed gets out clearly no matter what network you’re on, including slowing down incoming live chat to prioritize your video bandwidth.

Soon everyone will be able to go live on YouTube, no matter the subscriber number.

So, how about that pesky problem of monetizing your time on YouTube live streaming? It’s called “Super Chat.” Viewers watching your video can pay to get a front-row seat in the chat room where they can stand out from the thousands watching and get the creator’s attention. Super Chat messages stay on the top of the chat window for up to five hours. YouTube is describing this as “a little money on the side,” so it isn’t likely to add up to the type of ad revenue you can see with millions of subscribers on uploaded videos, but making sure live streaming can be worth a creator’s time is important.

Not many of us have 10,000 YouTube subscribers so we’ll be waiting for a while before we can stream ourselves, but in the meantime you’ll likely start to notice live streams from the people you already follow on YouTube — like perhaps MrMobile and Modern Dad!

Twitter is taking new steps to stop abuse — no, really this time

Twitter has a problem. Well, it has several problems.

The biggest issues that people deal with on a daily basis when using Twitter are unnecessary abuse and harassment. Today, Twitter is announcing three new initiatives it hopes will cut down on theses issues, making the social network a more approachable and inclusive place. It’s calling these steps an update on “safety,” to give you an indication of just how bad the situation is for many.

There are always trolls, mean-spirited replies and passive-aggressive quoted tweets, and unfortunately simply muting and blocking doesn’t always get the job done if the person just creates new accounts. Starting today, Twitter is making it harder for people who have been suspended for harassment to create new accounts — though, of course, Twitter can’t disclose how it’s doing this, for obvious reasons.

In the end, you’re still going to see some portion of the garbage that fills Twitter.

For more casual run-ins with questionable tweets, Twitter is also working on a “safe search” feature that removes tweets that have sensitive content or tweets from muted and blocked accounts. The content will still be there if you want to go beyond the safe search, but it won’t get in the way of general searches anymore.

Finally, Twitter is implementing a system in your notifications to by default hide what it deems “low-quality tweets.” Much like Twitter has tinkered a bit to move away from the purely chronological feed, your replies will now hide mentions that were deemed low-quality or potentially abusive. Just like safe search you can still find these mentions by tapping “show less relevant replies” in the conversation.

These changes are rolling out incrementally over the course of the next few days and weeks, and with any luck we’ll all start to enjoy a cleaner — and dare I say nicer — Twitter experience.

Introducing Ask Daniel, the most caffeinated place to get your questions answered!

AC’s Managing Editor answers your questions in a new forum!

Everyone has a story. How they got where they are, and what they want to do next. I have been very lucky to be able to do a lot of wonderful and interesting things in my life, and it’s a privilege to be able to write for a living, turning some of those experiences into narratives.

The humble editor and his favorite t-shirt.

But tech isn’t all there is, and after the success of Ask Jerry (the dopest place to get your questions answered), we thought it would be a good idea to expand the idea to include some other editors, beginning with, well, me.

Introducing Ask Daniel, the most caffeinated place to get your questions answered!

I love hearing from the people that visit this site every day, and there’s nothing better than building a relationship out of a community that has been here for a long time. Android Central’s forums are vital and alive, and they’re full of inquisitive and intelligent people looking for, and offering, thoughtful and intelligent answers every day. I hope I can add a small amount to that general knowledge base. With ☕️ in hand. I drink way too much of it.

If you’re curious about my first phones or what inspires me to write about Android, join me in the forums!

Join me in the Ask Daniel forums!

US and UK among the most civil nations online, Microsoft says

Today is “Safer Internet Day,” so Microsoft has released some stats showing relative safety and civility by nation. It turns out that people find each other pretty civil online in the US, as the nation placed third on Microsoft’s “Digital Civility Index.” It can’t hold a candle to the UK, however, which has the nicest internet community by a comfortable margin. By contrast, the worst places to be online are South Africa, Mexico and Russia, nations that also happen to struggle with high violent crime rates in the real world.

To come up with the index, Microsoft conducted a study across 14 countries, asking teens and adults about four risks: behavioral, reputational, sexual and personal/intrusive. The top five mentioned were unwanted contact, mean treatment, trolling, unwanted sexts and online harassment. Two of three respondents fell victim to at least one of the 17 risks , and 78 percent said it happened to at least one friend or family member. 62 percent were unsure where to get help.

It may seem obvious, but the software giant recommends living by the Golden Rule (yep), respecting differences, pausing before replying and standing up for yourself and others. The latter is particularly important, says the Tyler Clementi Foundation behind the #endbullying campaign. “We could eradicate most cruelty, bullying and humiliation that occurs online if every bystander became an ‘upstander,’ ” executive director Sean Kosofsky tells Microsoft. “We can interrupt harassment, report it and reach out to the affected person.”

While saying it doesn’t necessarily have the answer, Microsoft published best practices for civility in various industries to kickstart a larger conversation. “Our hope is that policymakers, companies and organizations will consider our suggestions and build on our initial efforts through fresh digital civility-related projects and programs,” the company wrote. What it left unsaid, unfortunately, is that one of the biggest bullies online is now the President of the United States — something that has already trickled down to real and online communities.

Source: Microsoft

Engadget giveaway: Win a Pixel smartphone courtesy of TurboTax!

It’s tax time again, where many fight sloth and memory lapses until mid-April, when procrastinating is no longer an option. Whether you get them sorted early or wait until the last minute, Intuit’s TurboTax is always there to make the process fast, easy and convenient. Using the mobile app, you can take a photo of your W-2 and it will automatically fill in your info. Since the web and mobile experiences are synced, you can even start the process on your phone and finish on your laptop, right where you left off. TurboTax also offers its service for free if you’re doing a basic return and its SmartLook feature offers one-way video assistance if you get stuck. To help brighten up this financially burdensome time of year, TurboTax has provided a Google Pixel smartphone for one lucky reader this week! All you need to do is head to the Rafflecopter widget for up to three chances at winning. So, good luck and get to those taxes, the process could be a lot easier than you think.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

• Entries are handled through the Rafflecopter widget above. Comments are no longer accepted as valid methods of entry. You may enter without any obligation to social media accounts, though we may offer them as opportunities for extra entries. Your email address is required so we can get in touch with you if you win, but it will not be given to third parties.
• Contest is open to all residents of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so direct your anger at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winners will be chosen randomly. One (1) winner will receive one (1) Google Pixel smartphone (Quite Black, 128GB, $749 value).
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of being contacted. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen. Make sure that the account you use to enter the contest includes your real name and a contact email. We do not track any of this information for marketing or third-party purposes.
• This unit is purely for promotional giveaway. Engadget and AOL are not held liable to honor warranties, exchanges or customer service.
• The full list of rules, in all its legalese glory, can be found here.
• Entries can be submitted until Feb. 8th at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!

Control your connected home with a wave of your hand

The IoT-powered smart home has caught the tech world’s fancy for years, promising domestic command at your fingertips. But beyond set-and-forget environmental preferences, connected devices are usually configured via smartphone app or voice-controlled through a hub. But if you want to flick on your IoT machines with a wave or table tap, Hayo will soon launch an Indiegogo to bring spatial remotes to your living room.

Each Hayo device is a camera-equipped cylinder you park in a corner of a room. Turn it on, connect it to WiFi, and it will scan the area, creating a spatial map. You can use its dedicated smartphone app to assign specific triggers corresponding to particular places in the room: Tap the end of the table to flick off the lights, wiggle your hand in front of the TV to turn it on, and so on.

Of course, it’ll still take a minute to link your web of devices and corresponding activation areas, and perhaps tapping your bookshelf might be more of a hassle than walking over to fiddle with the thermostat yourself. It’s also unclear just how fine the gesture control is: Will I accidentally turn off the lights if I dance into its assigned signal window? Is the system sensitive enough to tell that I’m making the wrong hand shape?

Regardless of its sensitivity, there’s no denying the potential to create a masterful setup, like waving to turn on the coffeepot while you’re still in bed or rearranging controls around your workspace so you don’t have to get up to change the room temperature. Finally, this could be a very cool IoT-controlling alternative to voice-control hardware like Echo or Dot for the deaf or vocally-impaired. Or those of us who feel bad yelling at our devices. (They’re trying so hard, you guys.)

Source: Hayo

Fox crime drama sees police turning to the public for real-time alerts

What happens when an eccentric billionaire buys an entire district of the police force and equips it with a gamut of high-tech tools to fight crime? Fox’s latest crime drama, APB, is a timely take on the challenges of privatizing the police force and the implications of fighting crime with invasive technologies.

The show, which premiered on Monday night, is inspired by a real-life story of a wealthy New Orleans entrepreneur who took it upon himself to crowdsource crime alerts through an app. APB presents an exaggerated version of that reality: A tech-billionaire named Gideon Reeves (played by Justin Kirk) witnesses the murder of a close friend in an act of petty violence. Enraged by the tragedy, he seeks justice at Chicago’s 13th police district. Instead, he walks away with the sobering realization that law enforcement is painfully overworked and underfunded.

Reeves, an inventor cut from the same cloth as Tony Stark, decides to fund the district out of pocket, with the idea that the project will be his greatest engineering challenge yet. He takes over the police department with tricked out cruisers, drones and eventually even robots. But his biggest contribution is a crime-crowdsourcing app called APB. It draws knowledge directly from the public and uses advanced GPS mapping capabilities to trace the culprits. So instead of dialing 911, anyone in this fictional world can tap the app for real-time inputs on a crime or a suspect.

From the get-go, the show attempts to tackle the complexities of privatizing the police force, a collaborative effort that already exists in real pockets across America. According to a New York Times report on the real-life New Orleans app, there are 450 such partnerships in place, with one of the largest operating out of the University of Chicago, not far from where the show APB is set.

The show also touches on the delicate relationship between humans and technology. At times, the tools seem to augment the fine-tuned instincts of the cops on the ground, but other times they fail to have an impact without human oversight. While this tension is already widely played out in sci-fi dramas, APB attempts to go deeper into the ethics of using technology. What happens when you use an all-seeing drone to catch a criminal? What’s at stake when you deploy technologies on the streets of a crowded city?

I caught up with executive producer Trey Callaway to find out more about the ways in which APB could take on the strengths and limitations of technology in law enforcement and society today.

As soon as I started watching the pilot, I knew this wasn’t going to be another Minority Report situation. There are body cams, drones and a crime-fighting app. The premise of the show feels current and plausible, even. Was that always the intention?

You’re right. We decided early on that this wouldn’t be Minority Report. This is not science fiction. We want it to feel very real and grounded in terms of the technology that we use in the show. From the fictional aspect, of course, we have this billionaire who has unlimited funds at his disposal. But we really want to use technology that if police departments today could afford it, it’s available to them. But the other side of this is that, as much as we love technology, we don’t ever want it to be a magic wand that fixes all of our problems in this series.

Sometimes technology will fail, like it does occasionally, but we go to great lengths in the writers’ room to come up with tech for problems that are unintended or have unanticipated consequences, like privacy issues or civil liberty issues when it comes to law enforcement. We often say as much as we love Tony Stark from the Iron Man movies what you never see in those stories, because they’re big and broad, are the consequences the day after he blows something up or tears up the city streets. Where’s the line of lawyers that would be outside his door? That’s something we play with heavily in the series. We love and embrace technology but we also want to explore the ways in which it unintentionally hurts us.

For a show that’s pegged as a high-tech series, what’s the balance between conceptual technologies versus more practical tools?

For the most part, at the very least, it has to be beta tested. We don’t allow ourselves to make things up. It has to be something that is demonstrated somewhere. It may not be used for law enforcement purposes. In fact that’s a sweet spot for us. We try and stay away from technology developed specifically for the police or military. It’s frankly more interesting and surprising to let someone like Gideon Reeves bring all kinds of available technology to the department.

At one point we take a new conceptual space shuttle cockpit chair based on actual technology. This shuttle chair is designed to carefully monitor an astronaut’s biometric information but we, in the show, use it to monitor the emotional state of a suspect during an interrogation. That’s a repurposing of a technology that’s designed for a very different purpose but is put to use in an interesting way that’s also problematic. The technology exists but we’re using it unexpectedly.

We’ve also directly played out the conflicts that are inherent within policing right now, that make the headlines. We borrow from the original NYT article, so when Gideon Reeves unveils the APB app, which is powerful in its ability to connect citizens directly to the police in a way that wasn’t possible before, it creates unperceived consequences like holding that technology for just one district against the backdrop of Chicago that is impacted by violence in so many different ways.

We create high tech sidearms for the cops as you see in the pilot. We explore that further as the season goes on, we introduce lethal and nonlethal capabilities. They are based on real designs but haven’t been implemented by the law enforcement yet. The benefits are obvious: You get two weapons and have a choice in the moment whether to fire a lethal or nonlethal round. With that kind of choice comes controversy and that’s another sweet spot for us.

The complexities of privatization of law enforcement are briefly touched upon within the pilot itself. Do you flesh out the benefits and the limitations of that through the season?

It’s definitely something we explore further. One of the ways we do that is by exploring the flip side of Gideon’s decision to embark on this bold experiment. All the money he is spending is coming at the expense of the other companies he owns and that creates corporate problems for him and internal strife within the company. Some of the individuals who are part of those previously successful corporations try to figure out if there’s a way they could profit from this costly experiment. That creates a difficult conundrum because Gideon does have responsibilities towards shareholders but also has the personal relationships that he develops in the 13th district with Detective Murphy [played by Natalie Martinez] and Captain Conrad [Ernie Hudson] and the whole force, which meets him initially with some resistance but later come to see the value in his resources and his genius. It puts him in a difficult spot of trying to figure out how to please opposing masters. It gives us an opportunity to explore the problems that privatized policing can create.

“We love and embrace technology but we also want to explore the ways in which it unintentionally hurts us.”

There seems to be an interesting play between human instincts and technology. In what ways will we see that tussle played out further?

It’s always a delicate dance. We explore that through things like body cameras, a controversial issue in the law enforcement. Gideon wants cops connected through audio and video at all times which can be helpful but it can create privacy problems for each of the officers. The notion of repurposing a shuttle chair to try and surreptitiously read the biometric information from a suspect — is that evidence permitted in court? Drones, which are introduced heavily, take on multiple forms throughout the season. Those are opportunities to get a bird’s eye view, literally, on all kinds of crime but again it runs into privacy issues that are very real and not easy to ignore.

This is a delicate dance that has happened historically within the police department even with all kinds of antiquated technologies. Sometimes you have to be sneaky to catch the bad guys but how sneaky can you be legally? That’s a fine line.

What kind of research did you put together to explore those legal implications and ethics of relying heavily on technology?

The show is born from a lot of research and our staff represents all kinds of voices. One of our writers is a ten year veteran of the Chicago police department and so we get a unique perspective there. We work closely with the real Chicago police department and there’s a tech adviser that we work with.

But you know, first and foremost, our job is to entertain and we hope this is the most action-packed crime drama that people have seen in quite some time but the thought provoking part is key for us. That whole notion of how technology helps but how it could potentially hurt us — that’s great food for thought. In the rush for innovation and launching technology, which I am one of the first people to jump on, you can never guess what the hidden costs may be and that’s really fertile territory for episodic crime drama.

The delayed BeatsX wireless earbuds arrive February 10th

If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on a pair of BeatsX wireless earbuds, you’re in luck. Today, Beats revealed on Twitter that the delayed model will arrive this Friday (February 10th). What’s more, in addition to the black and white color options that were previously announced, the company tells CNET that blue and gray versions will follow shortly.

BeatsX is one of three wireless models Apple teased when it confirmed it was killing the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. The three different Beats headphones were meant to give customers some options alongside the newfangled AirPods. Like those AirPods though, the BeatsX was also delayed. The wireless earbuds were supposed to arrive back in the fall, but the company announced in December that they wouldn’t go on sale until February.

In addition to providing a $150 alternative to the pricier AirPods, BeatsX also packs in Apple’s W1 chip for quick pairing via Bluetooth and Fast Fuel quick charging. That latter feature means BeatsX will give you two hours of use on just a five minute charge. It’s something that could come in handy if the earbuds go dead while you’re at the gym. They’re also attached to each other with a cord and in-line remote, if you’re worried about losing individual buds. When the time comes on Friday, expect to nab the new listening accessory via both Apple and Beats websites as well as Apple’s retail stores.

AVAILABLE FEB. 10. #BeatsX @TrvisXX pic.twitter.com/5LBNajwoK9

— Beats By Dre (@beatsbydre) February 7, 2017

Via: 9to5Mac, CNET

Source: Beats By Dre