Amazon’s ‘Bistro’ demo is a great showcase for its Lumberyard VR engine

Why it matters to you

Amazon’s Lumberyard engine is impressive enough to potentially become commonplace in high-end gaming over the next few years.

In the world of high-end game engines, Amazon might not be the at the top of your list of developers, but perhaps it should be. In its latest video showcase of the Lumberyard engine and its virtual reality integration, Amazon has shown off a beautifully designed bistro, complete with drinks on tap, rainy cobblestones, and warm and rich lighting.

With engines such as Unity, Unreal Engine, and Cryengine dominating much of the world of top-tier and indie game development, Amazon is looking to break into a busy market with Lumberyard. Being free from the get go is a good start and in this latest engine demonstration we can see technologies such as specular anti-aliasing, temporal anti-aliasing, and independent transparency in action.

In fact, Amazon is going so far as to claim that Lumberyard is the first engine to directly integrate such features, as per RoadtoVR. While that might be debatable, the demo, shown off as part of Nvidia’s showcase at this year’s Game Developer Conference, does suggest that Lumberyard has some real visual power behind it.

More: Sony’s PSVR Aim looks like a sci-fi prop, morphs into any gun, launches May 16

With support for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and OSVR headsets and accompanying software, that’s good news for those looking to break into VR game development during its nascent stages.

Feedback on the engine seems rather good so far, though commenters on this particular video did note that because Lumberyard is built from an offshoot of the most recent Cryengine release from Crytek, it does have some hangups from older developmental standards. They do point out that the engine has advanced by  leaps and bounds over the past year though, so it is likely to see continued, fast-paced improvement in the years to come.

We’ll have to wait and see whether LumberYard can compete visually with some of the more established engines.

Virginia’s new law will allow autonomous robots to cruise the state’s sidewalks

Why it matters to you

Nonhuman delivery methods are becoming increasingly common, and Virginia might’ve made them more so still by legalizing delivery robots to your doorstep.

Four hundred years ago, it was home to the first permanently settled English colony in the New World and now, it is home to the first legal delivery robots. That’s right — Virginia has passed landmark legislation that will allow delivery robots like those from Starship Technologies make moves on sidewalks and crosswalks throughout the state. The law will go into effect on July 1 just in time for you to get your independence day festivity needs delivered by a rolling bot.

Virginia congressmen Ron Villanueva and Bill DeSteph worked with Starship Technologies to draft the bill, which will certainly benefit the Estonian robotics company as it pushes to bring its bots to the masses. Indeed, Starship has been trying to make moves in the U.S. for quite some time now, recently announcing a pilot program with Postmates and DoorDash that would employ their mechanical fleet to make deliveries. In this program, however, the robots wouldn’t be entirely autonomous, as a human operator would still oversee their general movements.

More: Boston Dynamic’s new 2-wheeled ‘Handle’ robot can handle just about anything

The Virginian law, however, allows robots to move completely on their own.

Of course, a number of limitations have been put in place to ensure that self-driving robots aren’t barreling over pedestrians in Virginia — for example, robots can only go up to 10 miles per hour and cannot weigh more than 50 pounds. And while a human does not have to keep a physical eye on the situation, he or she will need to be able to remotely monitor the bot and intervene should something go wrong.

And local governments within the state will be able to determine exactly how the robots can operate. If, for some reason, a municipality wants to keep the bots out altogether, that will be their decision to make. However, it doesn’t seem as though that will present a problem. “There wasn’t push back [from legislators],” Villanueva said in an interview with Recode. “It was more like intrigue and curiosity about the technology, what the application would be, how it would benefit the citizens.”

Idaho and Florida may soon pass similar laws to Virginia’s, so who knows? We could soon be sharing our sidewalks with Starship Technologies’ robots, and others too.

Hello Labs wants to help procedural developers dodge its own pitfalls

Why it matters to you

Large scale, procedurally generated games could become more commonplace following No Man’s Sky’s financial success, and now with the support of its developer, Hello Games.

No Man’s Sky was a real mixed bag of a game. Impressive technology was arguably let down by repetitive gameplay and a lack of narrative. Taking those issues in mind though, developer Hello Games wants to help other projects avoid those problems, while still continuing to expand upon the idea of massive, procedurally generated game worlds.

Announced by Hello Games’ founder Sean Murray during a talk at this year’s Game Developer Conference, Hello Labs will look to fund and support one to two projects (with one said to already be in development) specifically focused on procedural generation.

Unfortunately what the funding and support will amount to is largely unknown at this time. The announcement came at the tail end of Hello Game’s talk and featured just one slide. It did however, include a very specific email address, which suggests that while Hello Labs is already aiding one project, it’s got its eyes peeled for a second,- too (thanks to Ars Technica).

More: How to make everything you need to build an awesome base in ‘No Man’s Sky’

While those who still feel sore about the pre-launch promises and eventual release of No Man’s Sky, may wonder why developers would consider teaming up with Hello Games, the developer did highlight a number of issues it had dealt with around the game. It underestimated the game’s hype which lead to server issues post launch; it bit off more than its small team could chew with some aspects of development, and it didn’t create enough variety in its mathematically generated universe.

That latter point is the one which Hello Game’s stressed during its talk, highlighting how it had improved things by leaps and bounds with the recent Foundation update. It’s that side of development, as much as monetary and business aspects, that it wants to help others with – as well as avoiding the pitfalls it faced through No Man’s Sky‘s development.

Monitor your home office in real time with this $39 Wi-Fi camera

You can’t always be at home to make sure that things are going smoothly, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to easily check in on things? Sure, you could run home on a lunch break, or have a neighbor stop by, but that gets old quickly, and there has to be a better way. Well, there is with Wi-Fi cameras, but some of them are crazy expensive, but luckily not all of them are.

Grab this home security camera for just $39 Learn More

Meet the iON the Home HD WiFi Camera, a fantastic way to easily stream 720p video from your home right to your smartphone. That’s right, you can view it from anywhere, and it holds archives in 24-hour time blocks so you can go back and check on things you may have missed. The app will allow you to view up to 5 cameras at the same time, so you can put them around your house and still control them from one place.

Some of the other features include:

• Stream 720p HD video to your phone to keep an eye on your home or business
• View video footage at night w/ night vision & infrared sensors built-in
• Record & archive 24-hour chunks of time directly to the cloud for free
• Control cameras remotely & receive text notifications w/ the app
• Wide-angle lens lets you capture an entire room from one strategic location
• View up to 5 cameras in the app

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Normally, this camera would set you back nearly $130, but right now you can pay a fraction of that. You can grab one for just $39.99 or two for $74.99, which makes it so you can almost grab four of these for the price of what one would normally cost. This deal won’t last long, so be sure to act quick if you are interested.

Kids can use VR, but be careful!!!

You aren’t going to harm your child by letting them check out VR.

There are few adults out there who climb inside of a VR headset and aren’t smiling the whole time. Fully immersing yourself in a virtual environment is an incredible experience, and the wonder we see from those experiences is a big part of why we’re here. Everyone should have the opportunity to explore VR, especially right now when developers are trying so hard to encourage new experiences at every turn. What about our kids, though? Is it safe for children to use any of these VR headsets? If so, what are the rules for making sure they are using these headsets safely? We’ve asked these questions repeatedly over the last year, especially with Google cardboard headed to classrooms and headsets like the View-Master VR specifically targeting children.

Read more at VRHeads

Supreme Court discusses sex offender’s social media ban

The case of a man from North Carolina brought before the Supreme Court has resulted in an interesting discussion on whether sex offenders should be banned from social media. Lester Packingham was convicted for having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 2001 and was arrested again in 2010 for signing up for a Facebook account and posting on his wall. While his post was harmless — it only said “Praise God, I didn’t receive a ticket, Praise Jesus, thank God.” — a North Carolina law makes it a crime for sex offenders to use Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites.

Packingham’s lawyer David Goldberg argues that the ban covers “vast swaths” of core First Amendment speech, even parts that have nothing to do with preventing child abuse. He agrees that social media ban as a condition of parole is reasonable, but a lifetime ban is a denial of free speech.

Goldberg’s argument has led to the discussion of whether it’s possible to live these days without Facebook or Twitter, especially since numerous politicians use them religiously. “This has become a crucially important channel of political communication,” Justice Elena Kagan said. She reasoned that under North Carolina’s social media ban “a person couldn’t go onto those sites and find out what these members of our government are thinking or saying or doing.”

The justices also questioned the North Carolina law’s exemption of chat- or photo-sharing-only websites. “It just seems to exempt the stuff that’s most easily used to, to do exactly the things that this statute is meant to prevent,” Kagan said. That line of discussion then led to talks on what Snapchat does and if North Carolina’s exemption means sex offenders can legally use it. The Supreme Court is expected to come up with a decision this summer, and according to NPR, the justices seem “ready to invalidate” the controversial law.

Via: The Daily Dot

Source: NPR

The Engadget Podcast Ep 30: I Can Change

After surviving The Great AWS Outage of 2017, managing editor Dana Wollman and senior editor Devindra Hardawar rejoin host Terrence O’Brien to debate some of the biggest tech stories of the week. First they’ll pit YouTube’s live TV offering against its competitors, then talk through Twitter’s new tools for fighting online harassment. Plus they’ll address the latest controversy surrounding Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and discuss whether or not it’s time for him to resign. Then they’ll turn their attention to Nintendo’s Switch, Zelda and where the console still needs to improve. They’ll also briefly recount their own history with Nintendo’s machines and gaming in general. Plus Terrence threatens to fight Devindra for his Switch

Relevant links:

• YouTube TV is Google’s live TV service
• Twitter offers more controls for muting abusers
• Uber CEO argues with a driver over dropping income
• Nintendo Switch review: revolutionary, but it still needs work
• hat to expect from the Nintendo Switch’s day-one update
• ‘Breath of the Wild’ is the best ‘Zelda’ game in years

The Wind Down:

• Code Switch
• The Good Fight
• The Night of the Gun

You can check out every episode on The Engadget Podcast page in audio, video and text form for the hearing impaired.

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Here’s everything from MWC 2017 in under four minutes

After a week of smartphones, sleepless nights and succulent meals, that’s a wrap for team Engadget at Mobile World Congress! Even though this felt like a more subdued show than in recent years, there was still plenty to ogle at Barcelona’s Fira Gran Via.

Expect a few stories dissecting the trends we felt on the ground to officially put a nail in this show, but they won’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’ve been following the news since day one. Don’t worry, though, if some of the details elude you, we cooked up a quick, four-minute recap of MWC’s highlights to help jog your memory. Oh, and fair warning: There’s singing in this one.

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

NVIDIA’s upcoming tool will analyze your VR setup

The setup for your HTC Vive or Oculus Rift VR headset can make the difference between soaring or puking, but how can you tell if it’s good? NVIDIA is going to release a new tool called the FCAT VR that will take some of the guesswork out of system testing. It tracks four key metrics that can lead to high latency, stuttering and other issues: frame time, dropped frames, warp misses and synthesized frames.

Frame time, the amount of time it takes to render a frame, is the crucial gauge. “The lower the time, the more likely it is that the app will maintain a frame rate of 90 frames per second needed for a quality VR experience,” NVIDIA writes. Dropped frames and warp misses can cause stuttering and other annoying problems, while synthesized frames, rather than true rendered frames, indicate that the system is struggling with the game’s demands.

The tool is not unlike NVIDIA’s original FCAT tool for desktop displays, but adapted to the extra demands of VR. As such, it’ll let virtual reality developers quantify performance with detailed data and charters, rather than just putting on a headset and seeing how it feels. It’ll also let you test your own system to see if you need better hardware or just some tweaks to the setup you have.

Source: NVIDIA

How to Convert AAC to MP3 on Your Smartphone

In this era of digital music, MP3 file is definitely one of the most used music formats. It’s not surprising when music tracks in this format occupy less memory space than some other formats. This is very appreciated by all music lovers who like to have all their favorite tunes by their side on their smartphone.

In favor how widespread and popular this music format is tells the fact that rarely any music file is not in MP3 format by default. However, it doesn’t have to be the case always. For instance, if you have iPhone, then the songs you have purchased from iTunes are AAC digital format. Unfortunately, some music players don’t support this audio file. What should you do in that situation? Find another player or look for another place to buy the desired song?

Luckily, there is a simpler solution to this issue. Only thing you need is one app.

MP3 Converter

MP3 Converter is a helpful music app that converts your music and videos to MP3, and from MP3 files to various formats on both platforms, iOS and Android. Whether your file is incompatible with your phone or your player doesn’t support it, with this converter app you’ll smoothly change its format to fit your phone or player. Here are some useful features:

• No limits on the file size or number of converted files
• Quality of converted tracks is preserved
• You can convert files from your phone, or files from your favorite cloud services directly within our app
• More than 35 file formats supported
• Won’t burden your processor or RAM, nor it will drain your battery

Pretty promising, right? Now let’s see how to convert AAC to MP3 format on iPhone or Android.

STEP 1

Download MP3 Converter from the App Store or Google Play.

STEP 2

Select an audio track you’d like to convert.

STEP 3

Choose AAC to MP3 option and that’s it!

Fun Fact

You probably don’t even know what MP3 stands for and you use it every day. MP3 is an abbreviation for MPEG-2 Audio Layer-3, a digital media standard created by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Mystery solved and now you can enjoy your music! ♫ ♪ ♫ ♬