Pizza Hut’s smart shoes will order a pie for you

Pizza Hut is no stranger to using tech as a promo tool, but its latest may be particularly appealing if you’re looking for new footwear. It just unveiled a pair of Bluetooth shoes, Pie Tops (yes, we know), that order a large pizza for you at the press of a button on the tongue — think of them as Reebok Pumps that fill you up instead. As you might guess, there’s a mobile app to both set your order defaults and change the button push requirements. You don’t have to worry that you’ll accidentally order a Super Supreme while you’re out playing basketball.

Like most of the company’s publicity grabs, you won’t get to buy these yourself. However, Pizza Hut tells us that there will be a “handful” released to the public at some point in the future. Will these be as coveted as the latest pair of Yeezys? Almost certainly not, but it’s safe to say that you’ll be the only kid on the block whose hi-tops can order dinner.

The hunt for Windows Phone

MWC — the world’s biggest phone show — is happening all around me. Nearly every new phone that’s been announced here in Barcelona is Android-powered, while the ever-influential iPhone keeps other halls filled with cases, add-ons and every color of Lightning cable imaginable. But where is Windows Phone? We know it still exists, somewhere between dead and living. If you browse through Microsoft’s Windows Phone store online, you’ll see HP’s Elite X3 take pride of place (with a tiny Lumia footnote) … but that’s about it. A Microsoft spokesperson told me that the company “remain[s] committed to our universal Windows platform. We will continue to support and invest in these types of mobile experiences for Windows 10.” But c’mon, this is MWC. There must be something here, right? Here’s what I could find.

Nokia has nothing to do with Windows Phone now

Yes, the return of the 3310 as nostalgia-bait scored some early headlines at MWC, but the company’s return as a global smartphone maker made one thing clear: It’s all-Android now. When I talked to Nokia and HMD execs about its new smartphones, they were careful to be diplomatic, saying that Android “is a brilliant mobile platform for us” and that it would be focusing on Google’s mobile OS at this time. Also, alternative options are scarce when it comes to phone operating systems. Just ask BlackBerry.

Niche phone makers are distancing themselves from Windows Phone

One of the last Windows Phones to appear, NuAns’ Neo came from Japan, a country with a strong tradition of businesses buying into enterprise hardware. The device was also one of the prettiest Windows Phones ever to surface, with interchangeable backs of various materials, textures and colors. Sure, it was a little chunky, but it also handled Continuum, one of Microsoft’s mobile trump cards. The phone is apparently still on sale, but its Kickstarter campaign failed to reach its funding target for an international launch last year.

That brings us to MWC 2017 and the company’s new phone: the NuAns Neo Reloaded. It sounds like a Matrix sequel, and it looks just as charming. The team behind the Neo has upgraded almost everything: There’s a faster Snapdragon processor, a 1080p 5.2-inch display, and dustproofing and water resistance as well as a faster, Sony-made camera sensor. The biggest “upgrade,” however, is Android 7.1. It also keeps the quaint recess under the two-tone covers for your contactless payment (or metro) card of choice.

It’s not for you

Late Monday afternoon, I got a lead. HP’s Elite x3 was the last big Windows Phone launch, built for power users and those tempted by Continuum. It launched at last year’s MWC, and this year it’s back. Well, kind of. HP has added a companion bump for its Windows Phone: a chunky high-end bar code scanner for … scanning bar codes. It’s an enterprise accessory aimed at health care workers and retail. HP teamed up with Honeywell to make a bar code scanner that, while useful, is unlikely to interest mainstream shoppers.

Windows 10 is an increasingly mobile OS

Here’s the rub: MWC had plenty of tablets running full-fat Windows 10. There were convertible, detachable Windows devices, and many of them had LTE radios built in (including the 12-inch Samsung Galaxy Book and Lenovo Miix). This is Windows 10’s current mobile form — even if the resulting devices don’t generally fit in your pocket.

The irony, of course, is that this new wave of devices reduces the need for the Microsoft faithful to invest in a dedicated Windows Phone. You’ll have less desire for Continuum and a completely portable desktop experience when your ultraportable notebook is thin and light enough to carry around everywhere anyway. Windows Phone as we know it is gone. What comes after this? Only Microsoft knows, but for its sake, it will have to stick the landing.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from MWC 2017.

‘Please Knock on My Door’ is a digital life of depression

At first, depression doesn’t sound like the most thrilling topic to explore in a video game. It’s antithetical to the boisterous, action-packed, neon-tinted tone that generally dominates the industry — but that doesn’t mean depression doesn’t make for a compelling game. After all, video games are immersive experiences that can open up new worlds to people across the globe, inviting players to feel what life is like in another body, on another planet, in another universe. In another mind.

Please Knock on My Door is a simple game about a person living with depression. The protagonist, a blocky, inky-black character, lives a fairly standard life: Wake up, go to work, come home, repeat. The days are punctuated with mundane tasks like making a sandwich or showering, but each one carries extra weight as it drains — or bolsters — the main character’s mental fortitude.

Please Knock on My Door drives home the feelings of intense lethargy, self-doubt and numbness that can constantly assault someone living with depression. The game focuses on just one person and one story of depression, keeping the narrative contained and powerful.

For creator Michael Levall, Please Knock on My Door isn’t just a story. It’s a way to express to friends, family and even strangers how depression has infiltrated his own life.

“Every single thing in the game that you get to go through or read through or whatever has some kind of connection to either a true experience that I’ve had, just copy-pasted into the game, or it’s based on an emotion that I’ve felt and I’ve extrapolated that and made a story out of it,” he says.

Combined with organizations like Take This, which aims to open up the conversation about mental illness within the video game industry, Please Knock on My Door is part of a quiet movement urging people to discuss the pitfalls of depression before it consumes them or their loved ones. Please Knock on My Door is set to continue this conversation when it hits Steam later this year.

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

Google unveils ‘Meet,’ a Hangouts app for businesses

Google has quietly unveiled Meet by Google Hangouts, a big part of its strategy to shuffle the Hangouts app towards businesses and away from consumers. While it hasn’t made a formal announcement, it launched an iOS app and partially-functional website (spotted by Techcrunch), though it’s not yet on Android, oddly enough. The app will likely become part of Google’s Cloud-powered G Suite, though it’s not yet listed there, either.

Google said last year that it would “increasingly focus” Hangouts for businesses, but it wasn’t clear exactly how. We can now see that there’s a few key changes from the current app, though. It supports HD video meetings with up to 30 members rather than 10, lets you dial in to meetings (for enterprise customers only) and join with a single click. G Suite users also get integration with Gmail and Calendar, making it easy to convert a Hangout conversation into a meeting, possibly using the Google Assistant.

Google recently killed its Hangouts API and said that consumer apps that use it won’t work after April 25th. The search giant said last year that it wouldn’t abandon Hangouts, but it’s not clear if it’ll allow consumers to keep using it or push them over to Duo.

To make the product more professional for business users, it recently acquired Sweden’s Lime Audio to improve call quality, particularly on wonky connections. As with recent moves by Facebook and Microsoft, it will likely integrate its Google Assistant bot into the program to help you schedule appointments, exchange contacts and more.

Via: Techcrunch

Source: Google

Watch Epic Games’ GDC 2017 keynote right here!

Unity already had its moment at GDC 2017, and now it’s Epic Games’ turn to take the stage in San Francisco. The company’s “State of Unreal” keynote will be presented by founder Tim Sweeney, who is expected to share new developments around the Unreal game engine. We’ll probably also hear about Epic’s latest efforts in virtual reality and get some captivating demos from its partners, like the Hellblade real-time motion capture from last year. You can watch the event live at 9:30AM PT/12:30PM ET — we embedded a video of the stream below for your convenience.

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

Source: Twitch (Unreal Engine)

Netflix teases its Brad Pitt film ‘War Machine’

If it wasn’t already clear that Netflix has enough clout to get the biggest names in entertainment, it is now. The streaming service has posted its first teaser for War Machine, a satire of the war in Afghanistan starring a slew of major actors including Brad Pitt (whose company Plan B is involved), Tilda Swinton, Topher Grace, Anthony Michael Hall and Keith Stanfield. The clip offers a good hint as to what to expect from the movie: General McMahon (Pitt) has to fight the war while grappling with the government, the press and the gritty realities of battle.

The movie arrives on May 26th, or well after its originally hoped-for 2016 debut. However, it’s still a coup for Netflix, which also tapped Plan B for The OA and Okja. The company is no stranger to offering well-received movies and even scored an Oscar for its The White Helmets documentary, but projects like War Machine take that ambition to a new level. It’s now offering exclusives that compete directly with the top-tier movies you’d see in a theater, and might just be in the running for the most prestigious awards.

Source: Netflix (YouTube)

Nintendo finally gives us a glimpse at the Switch eShop

The launch of Nintendo’s very hyped (and very strange) Switch is only a couple of days away. And we’re only just now getting our first look at its digital storefront the Switch eShop. If you’ve touched an electronic device at all in the last few years, the interface should seem pretty familiar. It’s clean and simple, with sidebar shortcuts for search, new and upcoming releases and a place to enter download codes. On the right games are listed as a grid of cards with cover art and prices. It’s not all that different from any other app store really, and looks quite a bit like the Google Play store. And you’ll find most of the features you’d expect from a modern console — like a wishlist and the ability to download games in sleep mode — baked in.

The eShop has it’s own permanent button on the console’s dashboard, but you can also find it in the news feed. When you first turn on the Switch it presents you with updates and information from Nintendo, including announcements for new releases or promotional sales. And with a quick tap you can go from reading about the latest indie smash to buying it and downloading it.

If you already have a Nintendo Network ID you can link it to your Switch and any funds sitting in your wallet left over from 3DS or Wii U purchases will be added to your account. Sadly, you will have to fire up a computer to do that, there’s no way to merge your various Nintendo IDs from the Switch itself.

Right now it the eShop is a little barebones, for example filtering options are limited to price and genre. And it’s worrying late for Nintendo to be showing off its primary interface buying games online. As our review says, there’s a lot of potential here, but we’ve still got a lot of unanswered questions about the Switch.

Source: Nintendo (YouTube)

Prisma lets you create your own photo filters

If you like to use filters in photo apps, you’ve probably had that moment where the available filters weren’t quite what you were looking for. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could craft your own? Prisma thinks so. It’s updating its service with an option to create your own styles — specifically, you’re training the machine learning system to generate what you want. It’s not the same as making a filter in-app, but it could go a long way toward giving your photos a personal touch.

There’s an upgrade even if you’re in no rush to customize your snapshots. Prisma is launching a filter store in both its Android and iOS apps to greatly expand the number of styles on offer. All of the visuals in the store will be free, the company says. This is more about picking the exact filters you want, and making it easy for the company to add new filters without forcing them down everyone’s throats. Prisma will add styles every week to start, but the eventual goal is to add them on a daily basis. Ultimately, you’ll see user reviews and sharing as well.

The combined features suggest that Prisma might have found an important hook to keep you coming back. While the AI-guided filters are still its cornerstone, the custom filters and store promise constant novelty — there will always be an incentive to come back, even if it’s just to experiment with a style you’ll only use once.

Source: Prisma, App Store

Epic Games shows the potential of high-end augmented reality

Epic Games has a reputation for bringing bizarre demos to its GDC keynotes. The company loves to show developers what Unreal Engine can do, not just in gaming but other genres as well. As such, Epic Games has now demoed “Project Raven,” which makes it possible for content creators to blend real-time visual effects with live-action shots. The technology, created in partnership with Chevrolet and video production company The Mill, was designed to convey the promise of high-end augmented reality.

In typical TV or film shoots, Epic Games says, a single computer-generated frame takes hours to render and requires days of tweaking before it can resemble a “photoreal” image. With Project Raven, directors can add these types of visuals to their digital environments instantly, thanks to Unreal Engine and a proprietary virtual production tool developed by The Mill. To put this tech on display, Epic Games showed what it’s like to change the color of a 2017 Camaro ZL1 in real time, all while the car is speeding through its own short movie.

While today the focus was a Chevrolet product, Project Raven could be beneficial on a much larger scale in the future. That’s particularly true for filmmakers, advertising agencies and others who work with computer-generated imagery. These new capabilities will hit Epic’s platform later this year, though the company wasn’t clear on when, exactly, that might happen. On a consumer level, the company made an experience for Google’s Project Tango that lets users get a 360-degree view of a Camaro ZL1, configure it to their liking and see what it would look like using the 3D depth-sensing features from Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro.

Unfortunately, the Tango app is only only for internal use right now, but Epic says that augmented reality is something that it is very interested in. “We want to go beyond gameplay for AR, it’s more about what’s unreal and real,” Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri told Engadget about the idea behind Project Raven. “The engine is always gonna be a great gaming engine. What we’re really seeing is the gamification of everything else [and] it’s gonna be hugely disruptive.”

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

‘MindGamers’ clip shows off the dangers of wireless neural networks

The upcoming science fiction film MindGamers has an intriguing hook: 1,000 audience members are going to wear cognitive headbands to monitor their brain activity during a screening. And when it’s over, researchers will go over the results of the “mass mind state” they gathered. It’s apparently the first time such a large-scale collection of mind activity has been attempted, and it could potentially lead to new insights around human cognition. If you’re in Los Angeles or New York City on March 28th, you can sign up to wear a headband on the film’s site. You can also grab a ticket to watch the experience live in other locations via Fathom Events.

The film, which stars Sam Neill, centers on a group of students who discover a way to link minds together through a wireless neural network. While they think it could help humanity, things inevitably go wrong. We got a look MindGamers’ trailer last month, but below you can check out an exclusive clip showing off one of the grittier uses for connecting minds.

Source: MindGamers