Facebook is launching a new app for Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TVs

Facebook may be coming to a TV near you.

Facebook thinks you need more of its app in your life, so it’s starting to roll out a new TV-centric app for set-top boxes like Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, as well as the Apple TV.

This is all part of Facebook’s evolving plans for its video platform, which was announced at the Code Media conference by Facebook’s VP of Partnerships, Dan Rose. The conference is sponsored by Recode who first reported this news.

Rose described how Facebook imagined users might use this new Facebook app to catch up on all that Facebook content they missed during the day:

“A lot of people when they’re watching video on News Feed during the day will save it for later because they don’t have time to watch that three-minute video. Now it’s easy to go on your TV if you want to do that at night.”

The new app will begin launching over the next few weeks, and will offer Facebook users a new way to digest video content from their favorite content creators. As reported earlier by Recode, Facebook is also looking to pivot away from paying publishers from posting live video and instead encouraging content creators to post longer, premium video content.

While there’s no denying that videos dominate the news feed these days, we’re not sure if Facebook on TV is a top priority for most people. But we sure are curious to see how Facebook continues to develop its video content strategy moving forward. No word on when an Android TV version will hit, if ever.

BlackBerry’s Notable app lets you quickly annotate screenshots

BlackBerry may not be making its smartphones anymore, but it’s still producing productivity-focused apps.

To help extend the excitement of the forthcoming BlackBerry Mercury, the company has launched BlackBerry Notable for BlackBerry Hub+ users. The app allows you to annotate screenshots before opening them up in other applications, or you can start with a blank canvas. You can draw, add text, and make collages. It’s a fairly simplistic app that looks and functions a bit like Google Keep. As an added bonus, you can program it to open up with a gesture or the press of a hardware shortcut key.

At present, the app is only available for BlackBerry device users, including the DTEK60, DTEK50, and the Priv. The company says the app will eventually come to other devices with a subscription to BlackBerry Hub+, but you don’t have to wait: there are already plenty of apps in the Play Store that offer similar functionality.

Are you a Netflix cheater?

In an effort to help you determine how unfaithful you are, Netflix has released a “Netflix Cheating” test.

Netflix recently announced that “Netflix cheating is on the rise globally and shows no signs of stopping”, claiming 46 per cent of users have done it and 81 per cent have done it more than once. What does that even mean? Well, it’s when one part of a couple watches a movie or skips ahead in a series they were supposed to watch together.

• READ: Netflix hidden tips and tricks: Master your binge watching

Now, to bring awareness to the issue (and just in time for Valentine’s Day), Netflix has released a test that asks whether you have “cheated” on your viewing buddy by streaming a program ahead of them, how often you committed the act and when (like while your partner is at work), and whether it was premeditated or spontaneous.

Pocket-lint

Netflix said 80 percent of cheating is an impulse decision, and 45 percent of cheaters never confess to the act. It surveyed subscribers in 29 countries and found instances of cheating everywhere, with Brazil having the highest number of cheaters (at 58 per cent), while the Netherlands had the lowest (at 27 per cent).

But, no worries: Netflix also found that many of us are in open Netflix relationships. Forty-six per cent of people surveyed said Netflix cheating wasn’t a big deal to them. Phew.

AI is learning to speed read

As clever as machine learning is, there’s one common problem: you frequently have to train the AI on thousands or even millions of examples to make it effective. What if you don’t have weeks to spare? If Gamalon has its way, you could put AI to work almost immediately. The startup has unveiled a new technique, Bayesian Program Synthesis, that promises AI you can train with just a few samples. The approach uses probabilistic code to fill in gaps in its knowledge. If you show it very short and tall chairs, for example, it should figure out that there are many chair sizes in between. And importantly, it can tweak its own models as it goes along — you don’t need constant human oversight in case circumstances change.

Gamalon’s technology is already in use, although you probably wouldn’t notice. Bloomberg notes that the AI is currently helping companies like Avaya correct ambiguous data like names and addresses within a matter of minutes. However, the fledgling outfit isn’t shy about this being used for image recognition and other machine learning tasks. You could have a personal AI that you train yourself, for instance, and it’s easy to see this as helpful for robots that may need to account for the many, many object variations that they’ll encounter in the real world.

Via: Bloomberg

Source: BusinessWire, Gamalon

‘Outlast 2’ is all about documenting your own mental breakdown

Philippe Morin wants to break your brain. As a creator of the grotesque, critically acclaimed horror series Outlast, he delights in dissecting the psychology of terror and dreaming up new nightmares for video game fans.

Look at Outlast 2. Morin’s latest project — due out for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 this spring — promises to play with the idea of isolation in unexpected ways. The game throws players in the middle of the sprawling Northern Arizona desert, but the setting isn’t designed to generate the feeling of freedom. If Morin gets his way, this vast environment will make players feel claustrophobic, crushed by all the open space and consumed by fear of the horrors it might be hiding.

“This time we could afford to pursue a little more thoroughly the psychological layer,” Morin says. “Internally what we’ve been saying is, the first Outlast was meant to take away your physical integrity, and the second Outlast will take your mental integrity.”

Morin is a veteran game designer who’s worked on major franchises including Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted, but recently he’s made a name for himself as a master of horror. He’s a co-founder of independent Montreal studio Red Barrels, the home of Outlast.

The original Outlast is a first-person, exploration-heavy game that hit PC in late 2013, followed by a debut on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2014. It follows a journalist as he investigates a dilapidated psychiatric hospital overrun with homicidal former patients who have been subjected to inhumane experiments in nanotechnology.

Players have a video camera equipped with night vision, allowing them to peer down dark hallways with an eerie green light and capture written journal entries pertinent to the story. The game features winding basement passageways, tight corridors guarded by monstrous killers, severed limbs and buckets of blood. It’s tense, gory and terrifying the entire way through, as is the follow-up Whistleblower DLC mission.

A particularly memorable scene from the original Outlast (Image credit: Red Barrels)

Outlast was a grand success for Red Barrels, but it wasn’t the game Morin thought it would be. For one thing, it’s more reliant on jump scares and disturbing imagery than it is on a compelling narrative. Red Barrels was a new, small studio, so tight budget and schedule constraints meant the team had to ditch some of the game’s more complex themes.

“A lot of things came out the way we intended to, but we also had to make a lot of choices based on timing, schedule and budget,” he says. “So that psychological layer — we wanted that to be a part of the first Outlast, but sometimes you have to go with the flow and the game just becomes whatever it wants to become.”

Outlast 2 is Morin’s chance to get psychological horror right.

The sequel ditches the cramped corridors of Mount Massive Asylum for a vast desert landscape dotted with dusty cornfields, cactuses and craggy mountains.

The game’s mechanics have evolved as well: The camcorder isn’t just a night-vision flashlight this time around. Instead of finding written documents with the camcorder and reading them later, players will actually record segments of their gameplay and be able to rewatch scenes complete with the protagonist’s commentary.

The story itself weaves in religious imagery and supernatural elements like giant, undulating tentacles that burst through the ground to suck the protagonist down a well.

At one point, the main character finds himself in a Catholic school, chasing the ghostly image of a young girl he once knew down the abandoned hallways. Spoilers: Before their game of cat and mouse can finish, that little girl is also plucked out of sight by a bunch of demonic tentacles.

This scene might be something Morin calls a “what the fuck?” moment.

“I think what we like to do with the series is just bring players into this very uncomfortable zone where they — internally we call it the ‘what the fuck?’ moment,” he says.

Usually, Morin explains, horror games begin with a scene that makes players ask, “WTF is going on?” Outlast certainly has this moment in the first few minutes, but Morin says he would have liked to see it repeated a few more times throughout the game.

With Outlast 2, Morin made sure there are plenty more WTF moments sprinkled throughout the 10-hour horror fest.

“We wanted to make sure with the second game, every hour or so you would get that ‘what the fuck?’ moment at least once, to keep on renewing the feeling of insecurity and take you out of the comfort zone,” he says.

These WTF moments are a large part of Outlast 2’s attempts to manipulate players’ emotions. Morin wants to make players feel powerless and uncomfortable, but he isn’t relying on jump scares alone to achieve these effects. One thing he learned while working on the original Outlast was the concept of “less is more,” at least as it applies to horror.

The deadly cornfields of Outlast 2 (Image credit: Red Barrels)

“You’ve got to leave room for the player’s imagination before you hit them with something,” he says. “It’s something we have to remind ourselves constantly because it’s kind of the opposite of what you learn as a game designer. In most games, you want to throw a lot of stuff for the player to do so they’re almost over-stimulated, and when you’re working on a horror game, you have to unlearn all these things. Especially if it’s the kind of horror game where it’s about making the player feel powerless.”

Horror is a strange genre where creators actually want their audiences to feel disgusted, uncomfortable and terrified. Powerless. Despite these inherently unappealing advertising qualities, the market for horror games is strong heading into 2017.

Gaming’s horror industry has been steadily expanding since the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010. Amnesia proved there was an audience for horror games in the modern era, but at the time there simply weren’t many other similar games on store shelves (yes, people still went to stores to buy games in 2010).

More recently, the genre has been bolstered by popular, mainstream titles like Outlast, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Layers of Fear, Until Dawn and even the PT demo, a project from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro that rose to cult status after Konami suddenly cancelled the full game (Silent Hills) in 2014. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard came out at the end of January — complete with PlayStation VR support — and within weeks, Capcom had shipped more than 3 million copies of the game worldwide.

Perhaps Outlast entered the market at a fortunate time, but it succeeded because it’s a heart-pounding, polished horror experience. Outlast’s success gave Morin a chance to breathe, grow his team and plot the sequel he really wanted.

The desert isn’t always dry in Outlast 2 (Image credit: Red Barrels)

Morin and the Red Barrels crew chose Arizona precisely because it was so different than the asylum, and they craved a challenge. The team spent roughly a year tweaking the landscape until they found a “sweet spot” where the open canyon felt as claustrophobic as the halls of a fortified, bloody hospital. This was a necessary creative step.

“I think it’s important, whether you are working on a new IP or a sequel, you gotta find ways to put you as a developer a bit on edge, so that you don’t feel too comfortable,” Morin says. “Because that stimulates creativity. You have to give yourself these challenges, even if you don’t have any idea of the solution.”

In making Outlast 2, Morin purposefully designed a scenario where he would be challenged, lost and out of his comfort zone — just like his players will be.

‘Rocket League’ blasts into 4K with PS4 Pro support

With the launch of the PlayStation 4 Pro in November, Sony promised a more powerful console with a boost in framerates and resolution pretty much across the board. Of course, that shiny new hardware doesn’t do much good if the games themselves don’t support those 4K resolutions. Now, with the impending release of the PS4’s 4.50 system update, some of the biggest titles are ready to officially support the Pro in all it’s 4K Ultra HD glory.

First up, wildly popular hot rod soccer game Rocket League announced PS4 Pro support will arrive in an update coming on February 21st and push the game to 60 frames per second at 4K resolution in every arena for single and two-player split-screen games. In three or four-player mode players should hit that all-important 60 fps, but Psyonix can’t guarantee those framerates in every single arena.

As for the rest of the platform’s marquee titles, support varies from game to game, but expect Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Hitman, Horizon: Zero Dawn and Fallout 4 to get improved textures and sharper renderings. According to Guerrilla Games, Horizon: Zero Dawn will even be able to render minute details down to the stitching on lead heroine Aloy’s clothing. And for fans of more lifelike motorsports, Gran Turismo Sport will finally be able to accurately show off the proper Ferrari red. Gamespot is keeping a running tally of supported PS4 Pro games, but even if your favorite title didn’t get the patch, any game can still get bump in framerate thanks to the PS4 Pro’s new Boost Mode.

Source: PlayStation Blog

Facebook videos in your News Feed soon autoplay with sound

The age of scrolling through your Facebook News Feed past mercifully silent autoplaying videos is over. The social media giant is showering its users with unasked-for love by automatically triggering sound when hovering over a movie, and will soon begin rolling out the change it started testing last August.

In a blog post, Facebook portrays the change as a quality of life improvement: People just expect sound to play when they show interest in a video, and this makes the experience more seamless. It also makes sure advertisement audio hits your ears. Fortunately, it won’t play on phones set to silent, and you can opt out of autoplaying sound permanently by toggling off “Videos in News Feed Start With Sound” in Settings. Facebook is planning a slow rollout that will eventually be global by the end of the year, the company told Recode.

Facebook added improvements to the mobile video experience, too. Now after a few seconds of watching, vertical movies will automatically fill the screen until users scroll away. Folks can also drag the video down to a corner to keep it playing in a picture-in-picture format while they continue scrolling through their feed — or as they navigate out of the app if they’re using an Android device.

Finally, if you wanted to watch Facebook videos on your smart TV, now’s your chance. The social media company made an app that’s debuting on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Samsung Smart TV, and will open up to more platforms in the future.

Via: Recode

Source: Facebook newsroom

Daimler is going all-electric with ‘Smart’ cars in North America

Smart, a subsidiary of Daimlerchrysler, announced on Tuesday that starting in 2018 all of its vehicles sold in North America will be of the electric variety. The company plans to stop selling the gas-powered Fortwo and Fortwo Cabrio in the US and Canada at the end of the 2017 model year.

“Developments within the micro-car segment present some challenges for the current Smart product portfolio,” Smart’s statement read. “As a result, Smart will discontinue sales of the gasoline powered Smart Fortwo and Fortwo Cabrio for the US and Canadian markets after model year 2017.”

If Smart’s sales figures are any indication, one of its biggest challenges is that there simply isn’t much demand for the tiny vehicles. Between low gas prices and America’s overwhelming preference for trucks, crossovers and other large vehicles, Smart only sold about 6,000 vehicles in 2016. That’s down from its 2008 peak when the company sold 24,622 cars, 30 percent of which were EVs.

Still, as the US slowly warms to EVs, this could provide Smart with an important toehold in that emerging market. Questions remain, however, as to whether Smart’s vehicles will ever really gain traction outside of cities or as secondary runabouts. Sure, an electric engine’s ability to instantly produce large amounts of torque will help with the Fortwo’s abysmal acceleration (really, what did you expect from a .9-liter inline-3?) but its 76-mile range is a far cry from what other EVs can offer and drastically limits the car’s usefulness on the open road.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: CNet

The Strong Museum will open a ‘Women in Games’ exhibit in 2018

“Women have indelibly shaped every aspect of the history of video games, and that story needs to be better documented and told.”

That’s Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at The Strong museum in Rochester, New York. This week, The Strong revealed its plans for a Women in Games initiative that aims to document the contributions of women in the fields of computer science and video games. Women are already included in The Strong’s existing exhibits and archives, but Dyson says their work has been “underappreciated” overall.

This isn’t a view that Dyson holds alone. We recently spoke with Anita Sarkeesian, the creator of Feminist Frequency, about the ways women are often underrepresented or misrepresented in the video game industry (and within games themselves).

The Women in Games initiative includes an interactive exhibit set to open at The Strong in September 2018, plus an online companion exhibit designed to be “a resource for scholars, students, and enthusiasts.”

ICHEG Associate Curator Shannon Symonds is leading the Women in Games initiative and she’s put out a call for interested folks to donate relevant materials, help collect artifacts or otherwise collaborate.

“For many decades, women have played key roles in the design, production, manufacture, marketing, and writing of video games, and yet their history in the gaming industry is too little preserved and too often underappreciated,” Symonds says. “The Strong’s Women in Games initiative will document and celebrate these crucial contributions through a concerted effort to collect, preserve, and interpret artifacts and archival material related to women in gaming.”

The Strong is also the home of the World Video Game Hall of Fame and the DICE Awards exhibit, which chronicles winners and stand-out moments from the award show’s 20-year history.

Source: The Strong

T-Mobile’s upgraded phone plan ditches the HD video day pass

Until T-Mobile improved its One plan this week, one of its biggest hassles was the HD video day pass. Even if you paid extra for unlimited HD, you had to enable a pass every time you wanted more than 480p streaming. Thankfully, that’s now in the past — T-Mobile tells Ars Technica that enabling HD will be a one-time affair from February 17th onward. So long as you remain on the same One plan, you won’t have to worry about turning it on again for that upcoming Netflix session.

It’s heartening news if you’re a video buff, especially since it eliminates one more barrier to switching carriers. However, there’s still a big question: if HD video is included and lasts forever, why not enable it by default? We’ve asked T-Mobile for comment, but logic would suggest that it still wants to keep the resolution low for customers that don’t care much about video quality. The approach lets the carrier keep network congestion down without annoying videophiles who want to see every last detail.

Source: Ars Technica