Google Home confirmed to launch in the UK in June

Google Home, Google’s home assistant and rival to the Amazon Echo, will launch in the UK this June, according to the BBC. Home has been available in the US since October 2015 and at the time of launch, Google could only say it was “coming soon” to the UK, but no word on when it would make its way to other markets. Now, Google has confirmed the good news at Mobile World Congress.

• What is Google Home, how does it work, and when can you buy it?

Google Home works in a similar way to Amazon Echo – which has been available in the UK since September 2015 – by acting as a control centre for your entire home. You can use it to control a wide range of smarthome products, such as lighting and thermostats; playback music, with support for Google Cast; and ask it any number of questions with results delivered direct from Google’s search engine.

Baked into Google Home is Google Assistant, Google’s new Siri-like voice assistant that can hold conversations with you and understand follow up questions in context. For example, if you ask “what films are playing tonight?”, it will be able to tell you listings at your local cinema, tell Assistant you want to take the kids, and it will reply with films that are child-appropriate. 

• Google Home review: Better than Amazon Echo?

Other features of Google Home include a built-in speaker and interchangeable bases to change the colour and textured finish. 

Google still hasn’t said when it will go up for pre-order, or how much it will cost, but it’s still good news nonetheless.

Xbox Game Pass lets you play 100 titles for $10 a month

Microsoft received a good amount of deserved praise for adding backwards compatibility to the Xbox One. Today, the company is adding another way to play older titles on its flagship console. The new Xbox Game Pass is another take on the “Netflix for games” concept, and it’s not dissimilar to what Sony has been offering for a few years with its PlayStation Now service. For $10 (£8) a month, Xbox Game Pass lets you access a library of about 100 games, both from the Xbox 360 library as well as newer titles for the Xbox One.

Microsoft hasn’t released a full title list yet, but notes that games from publishers including 2K, 505 Games, BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, Capcom, Codemasters, Deep Silver, Focus Home Interactive, Sega, SNK, THQ, Warner Bros. and Microsoft itself will be available. A few specific games that were mentioned include Halo 5: Guardians, Payday 2, NBA 2K16 and SoulCalibur II.

The biggest difference between Xbox Game Pass and PS Now comes down to how the titles are delivered. PS Now using streaming technology to let you start up games virtually instantaneously, without having to install anything — provided you have a strong internet connection, of course. Microsoft is actually letting users download and install the games. It’ll take longer to get up and running, but you won’t have to worry about the game stream cutting out on you in the middle of a battle. It’s hard to say which is better without having tried Xbox Game Pass yet — but as someone who’s had some frustrating drops in gameplay using PS Now, I’m definitely intrigued at what Microsoft is doing here.

The other major difference is catalog: Sony offers a whopping 450 titles at this point, far more than the 100 Microsoft will offer at launch. But Sony’s catalog is strictly made up of previous-generation PS3 titles at this point; the company hasn’t given any indication that it will bring PS4 titles to the PS Now service. Microsoft, on the other hand, says Xbox One titles will be included and is offering the latest game in the Halo franchise. There’s nothing on the PS Now service that’s close to that fresh.

Another difference is that Microsoft says the catalog of titles available will change over time, with games being removed and added on a monthly basis. But if you fall in love with an Xbox One game, you’ll be able to purchase it fully at a discount and keep it in your library.

From a pricing perspective, Microsoft is keeping it simple at $10 (£8) a month. Sony bests that, but only if you sign up at $100 for a full year. Otherwise you’re paying $20 for a single month or $45 for three months. Unfortunately, interested users will need to wait a bit before trying this out. Microsoft is first rolling out Xbox Game Pass for selected Xbox Insiders; full public availability will come later this spring.

Source: Microsoft

ICYMI: San Diego’s smart street lights and Norway’s robotic sea snakes

Today on In Case You Missed It: AT&T is teaming with GE to install 3,200 smart sensors atop San Diego’s public street lights. These devices, part of a $30 million infrastructure upgrade, will help city administrators better track and manage everything from traffic and parking to weather advisories and even crime reporting.

We also take a look at a new robotic snake submersible from Norwegian manufacturer, Eelume AS. This segmented drone is designed to fit into tight spaces as it cruises around, inspecting submerged oil and natural gas pipelines. Best of all, it never has to surface. Instead, it recharges using a base station anchored to the seafloor.

As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

‘From Other Suns’ lets players move in VR however they want

When I boot up a new VR game for the first time, the same question always hangs in my mind. “So,” I think, “how do you teleport in this game.” It’s become a standard in virtual reality, the go-to movement system that lets players explore the digital realm without contracting simulator sickness. It works, but not perfectly. Warping from place to place avoids the disparity between vision and physical movement that causes nausea, but teleporting across a tiny, walkable distance feels a little weird. From Other Suns doesn’t change the basic function of the teleport mechanic, but adds a nice twist — it lets you see your character actually walk to the teleport location.

Believe it or not, this makes a big difference. For the most part, From Other Suns is a first-person experience — but when the player moves, their character model runs out of the player’s view, pulling the game into a third person perspective. Instead of “teleporting,” this lets the player navigate spaces as one might play a fixed-camera adventure game. This is slower than instant teleportation, but it feels more connected to the game environment.

As a player, you’re not warping around a virtual world, you’re walking through it, albeit in third-person. Feeling connected to the world matters, too — From Other Suns is a huge, open-universe space adventure game with countless procedurally generated environments to explore. Moving around that universe needs to feel natural

The game’s version of teleportation is too slow for the first-person combat sections of the game. It’s hard to strafe and dodge enemy fire with the game’s slow walking animation, a situation worsened by the fact the view changes to third person whenever you try to walk anywhere — making shooting while moving impossible. Fortunately, this restriction only applies to the game’s default “comfort mode.” Turning it off lets the player in first-person mode exclusively, allowing them to move while shooting, strafe away from enemy fire and more quickly navigate the game’s environments.

Offering two movement styles seems reasonable and straightforward, but it’s actually a huge departure from how most VR games are designed. Allowing players to move their in-game character without moving their body risks creating a discrepancy between what the eye sees and what the body feels — a classic recipe for simulator sickness. It’s not an experience all players can handle, but by making it an option that players have to search for, From Other Suns allows advanced players decide for themselves if they can handle a more extreme VR experience. Even if it’s not normal, it’s refreshing — it’s all well and good to cater toward the most comfortable travel mechanic, but it’s nice to have the option for a more immersive experience if you know you can handle it.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!

Games like ‘Augmented Empire’ are why Gear VR needs a controller

If you’ve ever used a Samsung Gear VR before, you’ve probably found yourself awkwardly tapping the side of the headset to issue a command, or fumbling with its four-way touchpad to make a selection in a menu. This inelegant, embedded touch control is a necessary evil — a compromise that allows the headset to be a self-contained VR experience free of the complicated peripherals and set-up required of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. I struggled with its faults at Oculus GDC demo day, as I uncomfortably tapped my way through a battle in Augmented Empire.

Holding my arm to the side of the headset, constantly rapping the side of it to direct characters and attack enemies, I thought that there had to be a better way to control a tactical RPG in virtual reality. Then somebody told me that Samsung hand announced a new Gear VR earlier that morning. One with a motion controller. That sounds so much better.

The new Gear VR’s included motion controller is more than just Samsung’s answer to Google Daydream, it’s a piece that’s been missing from Oculus’ mobile VR platform — and nothing makes that more apparent then a game like Augmented Empire. It’s a tactical RPG akin to games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and tasks the player with leading a soldier through a series of story-driven battles played on a grid. Well, technically, in Augmented Empire the battles are played on a very meta augmented reality hologram platform within the virtual reality experience, but the net result is still a top-down tactical battle game that needs the player to input a lot of commands. The Gear VR is terrible at that.

It’s not that the experience isn’t passable — using the center of the player’s vision as a cursor and “clicking” by rapping the side of the headset is a tried and true Gear VR control setup — but holding up your arm for extended periods of time gets old quick. By the end of my moderately short demo, I was already tired of it. Even just having a handheld button to replace the arm-extending tap would improve the experience by a wide margin.

Fortunately, it’s coming. Augmented Empire’s developer told me they were excited about the new Gear VR controller, agreeing that the game is at its best with a proper input device. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an experience I was able to have: despite announcing the new Gear VR and controller that morning, the new hardware wasn’t on demo at Oculus’ GDC showcase.

Still, it’s a promising development for Samsung’s mobile VR kit, and not just because it will make games like Augmented Empire better. If Oculus Connect 3 taught us anything, it’s that motion controls are a game changer in VR — a seemingly small, but significant tweak that makes even the most basic VR experiences feel more immersive. Bringing a simplified version of that to mobile VR is welcome, and frankly, long overdue.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!

Oculus shows off upcoming VR titles at GDC 2017

It’s the start of the 2017 Game Developers Conference and, as you might expect, it’s an event where VR is likely to take center stage. Kicking it all off is Oculus, which not only announced a new Gear VR plus a new controller this weekend, it also showed off a slew of new games at a special pre-GDC event. From rocking out on a virtual stage to pitting armies against each other in a tabletop strategy game, there’s no shortage of variety in Oculus’ upcoming library. Check out some of these titles in our video above.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!

‘Brass Tactics’ is a VR RTS that puts you in a clockwork battlefield

Real-time strategy and VR don’t seem like they would go together. After all, the key attraction to virtual reality is feeling like you’re in someone else’s shoes in a faraway land of make believe. The top-down view of typical RTS games doesn’t quite lend itself to that level of immersion. Or does it? After a few minutes playing with Hidden Path Entertainment’s Brass Tactics at an Oculus demo event, I found myself so engrossed in a cutthroat tabletop battle that I almost forgot I had a headset on at all.

Now, there have been other real-time strategy games in VR — Tactera and AirMech come to mind — but Brass Tactics has a decidedly more medieval feel. The developers describe it as a “clockwork battlefield,” as your buildings and minions appear to be built out of parts of a clock, gears and all. Yet, the design of Brass Tactics reminds me very much of tabletop war games — living soldiers take the place of miniature figures while 3D-modeled landscapes replace plastic terrain.

Gameplay itself should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s played a real-time strategy. You start out with just your warriors and your archers, but you can upgrade them over time. To attack, you simply direct your battalion to a spot on the table with the Touch controllers. As you capture more regions, you can build more towers to create even more units like a flying squad or cavalry tanks. If you like, you can also use catapults to launch fire balls at your opponent.

With Brass Tactics, you can also actually move “through” the landscape like an omniscient god, so you can get up close and get a better idea of how to manage your resources. You also need to move from region to region in order to build and maintain towers. It was pretty cool to be directly in the middle of everything, sending off troop after troop to capture or defend regions. I felt a little bit like an orchestra conductor, except instead of cueing violins, I was deploying archers.

As engrossing as it was though, I’ll admit it can be a little chaotic. It seems like it would be easier to hotkey or mouse your way through a battlefield than it is to figure out where to flail your arms. That said, it’s probably a matter of getting used to it, and I can see improving my skills over time. If you’re an RTS fan who also likes a bit of tabletop gaming from time to time and you happen to have a Rift, then definitely take a look at Brass Tactics when it comes to the Oculus Store later this year.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!

Renault-Nissan developing a fleet of self-driving EVs

French people love to drive, but with private radar companies set to give out way more speeding tickets, they may be willing to let machines take the wheel. Luckily, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has teamed with a company called Transdev to develop a fleet of self-driving vehicles “for future public and on-demand transportation,” it said in a press release. The project will kick off with autonomous field testing of Europe’s most popular EV, the 250-mile-range Renault Zoe.

Transdev, which will supply the self-driving and logistics tech, recently launched what it claims is the “world’s first” fully autonomous fleet to run on an industrial site. Its systems are used on the “Navya Arma” vehicles, shuttling employees around EDF nuclear power stations every five minutes. Though that sounds slightly insane, Transdev said in a press release that the driverless shuttles are “a pledge of safety” since 80 percent of accidents at nuclear plants are caused by human error.

Renault-Nissan and Transdev are a bit late to the game, as GM and Lyft, Google and Chrysler, Ford and most other automakers now have some kind of self-driving program. However, the alliance has already worked with Microsoft on Cortana car tech and Nissan said its ProPilot semi-autonomous tech would come to the Leaf EV soon.

The vehicles will be tested initially at Paris-Saclay, a public and private research campus and university south of Paris. With the open spaces and access to research facilities, university campuses have been popular spots for autonomous cars — the University of Michigan even created a fake city to test them.

Via: Autoblog

Source: Renault-Nissan

Engadget giveaway – Win a Basslet wearable subwoofer courtesy of Lofelt!

Good headphones can usually deliver a bass-rich sound to your ears, but if you’re interested in bumping up the visceral enjoyment of your beats, the Basslet can help. This haptic wearable delivers a low-end rumble — spanning frequencies from 10 to 250 Hz — to your wrist to enhance your listening experience. A single dongle interfaces with your headphone cable to connect with the Basslet, while two simple controls let you adjust the intensity of the bass. This wearable doesn’t deliver audible low end, rather, the LoSound engine inside translates your current jam’s bass into a haptic rumble to complement the listening experience. The Basslet provides six or more hours of bass-heavy listening before needing a charge, leaving plenty of time to immerse yourself in a groove. This week, Lofelt has provided us with a trio of Basslets for three lucky readers. All you need to do is head to the Rafflecopter widget below for up to three chances at winning!

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. Three (3) winners will each receive one (1) Basslet wrist-worn personal subwoofer ($199 value each).
• 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 March 1st at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!

Sky VR now available on Google Daydream headsets

Sky has slowly been adding virtual reality content to its Sky VR app, but those Star Wars and David Beckham specials have only been available to viewers with Google Cardboard. Fast forward almost five months and the broadcaster has finally done something about that, today confirming that it’s adding support for Google’s other VR platform, Daydream, to its apps. It means that if you own one of Google’s Daydream View headsets or are keen to invest in one, you’ll now have more local content available to stream.

Via: Google Blog

Source: Sky VR (Play Store)