BitFenix Portal is a mini-ITX case with style and room to show off your gear

Why it matters to you

If you’re looking for a mini-ITX case but don’t want to give up easy access to components or good looks, then the BitFenix Portal might just be your best bet.

Just because you need a smaller PC doesn’t mean you want to sacrifice performance or easy access to components. BitFenix seems to understand this, and its new Portal mini-ITX case is a testament to that fact.

From the looks of the space-age design and the all-aluminum build, BitFenix clearly was thinking about more than merely the size of the case when putting together its design. It’s smaller, yes, but it also incorporates some interesting features that set it apart from many other mini-ITX cases.

More: There is hope for your tiny PC with Elsa’s new single-slot GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Perhaps most interesting is the Dual Frame Design, as the company calls it, which makes accessing the components easy and smooth. The smoothness is thanks to the ball bearing runner that allows the frame to track easily in and out, making component access quick and easy.

The Portal uses an SFX power supply that further allows a thinner and more svelte tower design. The case is large enough inside to house a 300mm graphics card, along with a pair of 3.5-inch drives. External connectivity options include two USB 3.0 ports along with 3.5mm microphone and headphone ports.

The case’s good looks are enhanced by a convex design with stands that give the appearance that the case is hovering off of the ground and come in black or white. An optional top window rounds out the modern design, with an inverted motherboard tray allowing a clear view of an LED-enhanced graphics card.

In terms of cooling, BitFenix has managed to create an intelligent cooling system that uses an air-permeable inner chamber with air inlets at the case’s four corners. The company promises sufficient airflow even with a single 120mm air intake and 80mm exhaust, but water cooling solutions are also supported for builds that might tax the air cooling designed into the Portal.

If this small and attractive case is on your short list, then you can pick it up today starting at $140 from retailers such as Newegg. It comes either with or without a window.

Find a security bug in Office Insider builds, and Microsoft will pay up to $15,000

Why it matters to you

If you’re a heavy Office user, then you can join the Office Insider program and potentially make some real money finding vulnerabilities in slow ring builds.

There’s probably no better way to find security bugs than to offer money to the people who actually use software on a daily basis to do just that. That’s why companies like Microsoft and Google offer increasingly significant amounts of money through reward programs aimed at discovering and then fixing vulnerabilities.

Microsoft has its lucrative Bug Bounty program for Windows that just saw its reward double to $30,000 for anyone identifying a verified exploit. Now, the company has announced a new program that offers some serious cash to users of its Office productivity suite for Windows Desktop.

More: Microsoft and Google paying more than ever for bugs found in their systems

The new Office Insider Bug Bounty program will pay anyone using the Insider slow ring builds up to $15,000 for finding security bugs before they have a chance to make their way to the production version. The kinds of bugs for which Microsoft will pay out include:

• Elevation of privilege via Office Protected View.
• Macro execution by bypassing security policies to block macros.
• Code execution by bypassing Outlook automatic attachment block policies.

Go here to dig into the details of how Microsoft will determine eligibility and how you need to submit your bugs. These particular bugs are viewed as likely to be the most prominent and most likely to affect Office users. Macros and email attachments are common vectors of attack on all Office platforms.

Before you spend too much time looking for bugs, here’s a list of vulnerabilities that will not be covered:

• Vulnerabilities in anything earlier than the current Office Insider slow build on Windows Desktop.
• Vulnerabilities in user-generated content.
• Vulnerabilities requiring extensive or unlikely user actions.
• Vulnerabilities found by disabling existing security features.
• Vulnerabilities in components not installed by Office.
• Vulnerabilities in third-party components that might be installed on the system that enable the vulnerability.
• Vulnerabilities about escaping Protected View where Protected View is explicitly not activated in Office code or enabled by default for the reported scenario.
• Vulnerabilities in the Application container.
• Any other category of vulnerability that Microsoft determines to be ineligible, in its sole discretion.

The Microsoft Office Bug Bounty program will last from March 15, 2017, through June 15, 2017. Payouts will range from $500 to $15,000, and of course, there are important terms and conditions to keep in mind. You also need to be a member of the Office Insider program utilizing an Insider slow ring build of Office for Windows Desktop.

You can sign up to be an Office Insider here. Go to File > Account and look under Office Updates to check which version you’re running. Click on Office Insider and select Change Level to move from one ring to another or remove yourself from the Office Insider program.

Good, beta, best: How beta tests help shape games like ‘Gwent’ and ‘The Elder Scrolls: Legends’

If you eagerly anticipated any of 2016’s biggest AAA video games, chances are you could have found a way to play it ahead of its formal release.

Street Fighter V, Battlefront 1, Gears of War 4, Overwatch, The Division — No matter the genre, it seems like every big-name multiplayer game has some kind of beta just prior to launch to kick the tires and start converting eager fans into a loyal community.

Beta tests are becoming a bigger part of the development process than ever before — and that’s good news for gamers.

House of Cards

In 2014, Blizzard launched Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. By April, 2016 it had amassed a player base of 50 million players, demonstrating that the digital card game genre had serious potential, and breathing new life into the genre from a wave of developers looking to capitalize on the game’s success.

There are a lot of little knobs and levers that you can turn and pull.

In 2017, we’ll see two of the more prominent projects hit the scene; Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and CD Projekt Red’s Gwent, a spin-off of The Witcher series’ in-world card game. Though Legends just launched last week and Gwent’s formal debut is a long way off, players have been digging into both of these games for months now. You see, like Hearthstone, both projects launched lengthy beta tests far before their official launch.

Announced at E3 2015, developer Dire Wolf Digital rolled out Legends to a select group of players in April 2016. In August 2016, the studio opened the floodgates with an open beta for anyone interested in trying it. By the time the game formally launched March 9, 2017, the game had been widely available for the better part of a year. According to Bethesda Softworks VP Pete Hines, the extended beta period gives the developer information that they couldn’t get otherwise.

Bethesda announces Elder Scrolls: Legends at its E3 2015 showcase.

“We’re trying to find this balance of reward, and challenge, and fun,” said Bethesda’s Pete Hines when he spoke to Digital Trends in late 2016, while The Elder Scrolls’ Legends beta was in full swing. “There are a lot of little knobs and levers that you can turn and pull. I think we have, in a number of cases, done a little more or a little less of various things to see where the sweet spot is — and we’re going to continue doing things.”

Gwent has taken a little bit of a different path. When CD Projekt Red made the decision to spin the card game off into a standalone release, they realized they couldn’t just dump the content from The Witcher 3 into a standalone app and expect people to like it. Gwent had to become a much bigger and more complex, with more cards and more sophisticated mechanics.

“A lot of us on the Gwent team have previously worked on live-service multiplayer games, so we generally knew what to expect,” said Benjamin Lee, the studio’s development director. “When it comes to balancing a live competitive multiplayer game like Gwent, we look at a large amount of data, what the players think, and also our own experiences to determine what changes we need to make. It’s a lot of work and you’re doing that constantly throughout the game’s lifecycle.”

Fresh Eyes

By the time an open beta begins, the game being tested is usually very close to completion. There’s no sense in letting your audience try things out for themselves if the overall experience is undercooked.

In Gwent‘s “keg” system the player receives a pack of cards and gets to choose the final card they want to keep.

No matter how extensive the game’s internal testing has been, there are sure to be flaws in the beta build. Tiny details that went unnoticed throughout development, suddenly often stick out like a sore thumb to players who have never seen the game before.

This is where beta testing comes in very handy, as evidenced by a problem that CD Projekt Red solved in November 2016.

More often than not, the most involved players in a beta test become the game’s most supportive fans.

In Gwent, the process of opening new packs of cards is slightly different to rivals like Hearthstone. When opening a pack of cards —called a “keg” in the game — you are given a random smattering of cards, but are also asked to pick one of three cards offered up on a separate screen. A popular post on the Gwent subreddit pointed out that the system would be better if players could check what cards they already owned when making this decision. “I hope it will be fixed fast,” another player said.

Before long, a CD Projekt Red representative had taken to the comments section to confirm that the change would be made, and shortly after the game’s first patch, it was implemented in-game.

“With regards to this specific change, I think it was the volume of suggestions surrounding the same idea, both from the community and within the team, and with hindsight it seems very obvious,” Lee said, when asked about this particular fix. “We had no arguments about making the change. It does improve the gameplay experience, especially for newer players, and so we wanted to make sure it was in the game as soon as possible.”

Bethesda’s booth featuring Elder Scrolls: Legends at Gamescom 2016 (Photo: Marco Verch / Wikimedia Commons)

This kind of crowdsourced user experience improvement also played into the way The Elder Scrolls: Legends changed as a result of beta testing. To test the mobile version of the game, Bethesda launched an iPad version in Canada. The team found soon after that creating an account was much more of a barrier to entry on the platform than it was on PC. As a result, they tweaked the mobile version by employing a guest mode that can be converted to a full account at a later time.

“It’s nothing to do with whether the game was fun,” explained Hines. “It’s more about how Bethesda.net currently works, it’s simply some functionality that we currently didn’t have, that we knew we needed.”

More: Hands on: ‘The Elder Scrolls: Legends’

He compared the scenario to a conversation he had with legendary Bethesda designer Todd Howard during the production of Morrowind. “He said, ‘you know, nobody ever spends any time talking about how awesome the installation process for a game is, they just expect it to work — but it doesn’t just work unless you put the time in to make sure that it works.’

“In this case, it doesn’t matter whether Legends is a good game,” he continued. “If we put a roadblock in front of you that you’re not expecting, we have a much bigger problem, that has nothing to do with the game.”

Balancing Act

These tweaks ensured that, when the game officially launches, players’ day one experience will be as smooth as possible. However, launch day isn’t the biggest concern when it comes to a beta test.

Both Gwent and Legends hope to engage an active player base for many years, with regular injections of new content along the way. As players develop new decks and new strategies, the game will evolve organically. That makes it all the more important that the base game is as well-balanced as possible before each game goes live.

“We’ve changed stats, we’ve changed values, we’ve removed abilities, we’ve added abilities,” Hines said. “The team behind Legends is an elite bunch with plenty of experience crafting this kind of game, but they’re not too proud to reassess earlier design decisions if the finished product stands to benefit.

“There’s no substitute for putting it in front of wider and wider numbers of players.”

“These are really good designers and strategy card players who have gone back and changed what they initially designed, because they aren’t beholden to, ‘well, I made it like this so it needs to stay like that.’ We’re going to keep changing it so that the game continues to improve and grow.”

Hines gives the example of an Orc deck that hit the scene around the time the game’s open beta got underway. The deck was easy to use, fairly cheap to build, and proved to be incredibly effective against just about anything that was put in front of it.

“It was just so good, so often, against so many different decks, that it was really kind of out of control,” he remembered. “But, it’s hard to know whether that’s the case until you get a much wider sample size, right? Because if you have all the developers, and the QA and production folks, that’s still — relative to the number of people who are going to play the game — a pretty small sample size.”

Putting the game in the hands of the players allows developers to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t in a scenario that’s much closer to a retail release than internal development. When you’re creating a game that needs to stand up to the rigors of competitive play for years to come, feedback is very important. And opening up your game to the masses gives you feedback that you simply can’t get elsewhere.

“There’s no substitute when you’re trying to figure out how balanced the game is,” added Hines. “There’s no substitute for putting it in front of wider and wider numbers of players.”

Let’s Talk

But even the feedback from players may take a back seat to the community building that occurs when a developer works with the community to polish its game. There’s seemingly transactional relationship that forms between the two: The player gets a sneak preview, at the price of being a guinea pig. The developer gets essential feedback, at the price of letting players see their unfinished product, warts and all. This relationship, however, doesn’t come to an end when the beta is done.

It isn’t always possible to make a game without breaking some hearts.

More often than not, the most involved players in a beta test become the game’s most supportive fans. Whether their interest is in a genre, a franchise, or a particular game, participants sign up for a reason. These players are going to be crucial later on, if the game is going to be a success.

Between the fact that beta players are supplying crucial feedback, and the fact that the population of a beta test will hopefully stick around to become the game’s initial player base, developers need to maintain a good relationship with their testers.

“We are not doing any resets at all anymore, ever,” Hines said when asked about the prospect of a progress wipe for Legends players while the game’s open beta was still in full swing. “We did a reset several months ago, and when we did it, we said we’re not doing any more resets. The game is just, live, at this point. We’re not going to have anybody — myself included — lose all this stuff that they’ve been working on.”

In games like Gwent and Legends, where players can track their progress by the library of cards they’ve amassed, that can be tricky. It isn’t always possible to make a game without breaking some hearts. When you have wipe players’ progress, it’s in the interest of the studio to keep them in the loop as much as is possible.

“You know us [Bethesda] well enough to know we can hold things fairly close to the chest,” Hines said. “We can go to the E3 before Fallout 4 launched before you even know that that game exists. But at the same time, with a game like this, we do want to be more transparent and let folks know. I think that kind of interaction is critically important.”

More: Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: Our first take

That’s why the team behind Legends has gone beyond their official channels to source feedback. They’re scouring social media, Reddit, and forums like NeoGAF for any mention of their game, good or bad. Any information is good information, and no feedback should go to waste.

Conversation-starters

Modern game development is expensive. Any AAA multiplayer title that suffers from lopsided online play, technical issues, or a lack of players at launch could spell doom for its developer. Beta tests help make sure these scenarios don’t play out. They’re a dress rehearsal, a safety net — and done right, they can make the finished product much, much better.

Beta tests are only going to become more prominent in the gaming industry, and the techniques that companies are using to get your attention before launch are becoming more and more sophisticated. In February, Ubisoft launched closed and open betas for its medieval fighter For Honor in rapid succession, effectively extending the launch coverage of the game for a full week prior to launch, while building a community and circumventing the need for pre-release reviews.

A beta test can serve several different purposes at once, from perfecting a game’s balance, to making sure technical infrastructure is in place, to out-and-out promotion. But all of these purposes really boil down to one goal: making sure the game doesn’t flop when it’s released.

When Gwent and The Elder Scrolls: Legends drop their beta status, they will not only represent the design choices of their creators, but countless hours of test play and lots of feedback. With any luck, all that effort will result in games that can stand the test of time for months and years to come.

EVGA crams G-Sync tech in its overclockable gaming laptop, the SC17 1070

Why it matters to you

PC gamers looking for a new laptop now have an additional choice that features Nvidia’s G-Sync technology for fluid visuals.

EVGA is now selling a version of its SC17 1070 gaming laptop packed with Nvidia’s G-Sync technology for $2,550 after an instant $250 rebate. This should be good news for PC gamers currently looking for the ideal laptop to play For Honor, Ghost Recon Wildlands, or the upcoming game Mass Effect: Andromeda. The new unit joins EVGA’s current SC17 1070 model without G-Sync technology selling for $2,400 after an instant $400 rebate.

Does the $150 price difference make a difference? Simply put, if you’re paying $2,400 for a gaming laptop, will you be likely to go ahead and take the additional $140 plunge?

As a brief review, the graphics chip outputs multiple frames per second (FPS) that are received by the display and flashed on the screen numerous times per second (refresh rate). If the graphics chip and the display aren’t synchronized, then gamers will experience ugly screen ripping, stuttering, and input lag. Annoying stuff.

More: EVGA offers 10 GTX 10-series graphics cards with its new iCX cooling tech

However, G-Sync eliminates these visual problems by dynamically adjusting the GPU’s output framerate with the refresh rate of the display for smooth visuals. But this technology doesn’t simply work with every GPU: it’s developed exclusively by Nvidia for its GeForce graphics chips. G-Sync isn’t something users can simply add to their PC either, as the tech is pre-installed inside displays.

That said, G-Sync is highly desirable given that it improves visual fluidity on-screen. In EVGA’s laptop, it’s backed by Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB of on-board GDDR5 memory. This GPU is based on Nvidia’s latest “Pascal” graphics chip design, and resides at the top of the bottom half of the Pascal totem pole, residing between the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1060. At one point, the GTX 1070 was Nvidia’s second-fasted graphics chip, until the company unleashed the Titan X (2016) and the recent GTX 1080 Ti (2017).

Still, the GTX 1070 remains a great graphics chip that’s backed by other excellent components in EVGA’s laptop:

Operating System:
Windows 10 Home (64-bit)
Display Size:
17.3 inches
Display Resolution:
3,840 x 2,160
Display Type:
IPS with G-Sync
Processor:
Intel Core i7-6820HK (unlocked)
Graphics:
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5)
System Memory:
G.Skill 32GB DDR4 @ 2,666MHz (2x 16GB)
Storage:
256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD
1TB 7,200RPM SATA 3 HDD
Connectivity:
Intel Snowfield Peak AC-8260 (Wireless AC)
Bluetooth 4.2
Audio:
Realtek ALC 255
Battery:
Info not provided
Camera:
1,920 x 1,080 webcam
Keyboard Lighting:
White
Ports:
1x Gigabit Ethernet
2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A
1x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C
1x HDMI 2.0b
2x Mini DisplayPort
Dimensions:
16 x 11.6 (L) x 1.07 (H) inches
Weight:
8 pounds

Outside the specs, enthusiasts should love the notebook for its aluminum unibody design, the rich colors generated by the IPS screen, and its dedicated buttons for immediately overclocking the processor and clearing the CMOS. It also includes a BIOS with a full GUI to provide complete control over the laptop’s CPU multipliers, voltage, graphics chip speed, and more.

“Overclocking on a laptop? Seems like a myth but we have nothing to hide here,” the company said.

EVGA crams G-Sync tech in its overclockable gaming laptop, the SC17 1070

Why it matters to you

PC gamers looking for a new laptop now have an additional choice that features Nvidia’s G-Sync technology for fluid visuals.

EVGA is now selling a version of its SC17 1070 gaming laptop packed with Nvidia’s G-Sync technology for $2,550 after an instant $250 rebate. This should be good news for PC gamers currently looking for the ideal laptop to play For Honor, Ghost Recon Wildlands, or the upcoming game Mass Effect: Andromeda. The new unit joins EVGA’s current SC17 1070 model without G-Sync technology selling for $2,400 after an instant $400 rebate.

Does the $150 price difference make a difference? Simply put, if you’re paying $2,400 for a gaming laptop, will you be likely to go ahead and take the additional $140 plunge?

As a brief review, the graphics chip outputs multiple frames per second (FPS) that are received by the display and flashed on the screen numerous times per second (refresh rate). If the graphics chip and the display aren’t synchronized, then gamers will experience ugly screen ripping, stuttering, and input lag. Annoying stuff.

More: EVGA offers 10 GTX 10-series graphics cards with its new iCX cooling tech

However, G-Sync eliminates these visual problems by dynamically adjusting the GPU’s output framerate with the refresh rate of the display for smooth visuals. But this technology doesn’t simply work with every GPU: it’s developed exclusively by Nvidia for its GeForce graphics chips. G-Sync isn’t something users can simply add to their PC either, as the tech is pre-installed inside displays.

That said, G-Sync is highly desirable given that it improves visual fluidity on-screen. In EVGA’s laptop, it’s backed by Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 with 8GB of on-board GDDR5 memory. This GPU is based on Nvidia’s latest “Pascal” graphics chip design, and resides at the top of the bottom half of the Pascal totem pole, residing between the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1060. At one point, the GTX 1070 was Nvidia’s second-fasted graphics chip, until the company unleashed the Titan X (2016) and the recent GTX 1080 Ti (2017).

Still, the GTX 1070 remains a great graphics chip that’s backed by other excellent components in EVGA’s laptop:

Operating System:
Windows 10 Home (64-bit)
Display Size:
17.3 inches
Display Resolution:
3,840 x 2,160
Display Type:
IPS with G-Sync
Processor:
Intel Core i7-6820HK (unlocked)
Graphics:
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB GDDR5)
System Memory:
G.Skill 32GB DDR4 @ 2,666MHz (2x 16GB)
Storage:
256GB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD
1TB 7,200RPM SATA 3 HDD
Connectivity:
Intel Snowfield Peak AC-8260 (Wireless AC)
Bluetooth 4.2
Audio:
Realtek ALC 255
Battery:
Info not provided
Camera:
1,920 x 1,080 webcam
Keyboard Lighting:
White
Ports:
1x Gigabit Ethernet
2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A
1x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C
1x HDMI 2.0b
2x Mini DisplayPort
Dimensions:
16 x 11.6 (L) x 1.07 (H) inches
Weight:
8 pounds

Outside the specs, enthusiasts should love the notebook for its aluminum unibody design, the rich colors generated by the IPS screen, and its dedicated buttons for immediately overclocking the processor and clearing the CMOS. It also includes a BIOS with a full GUI to provide complete control over the laptop’s CPU multipliers, voltage, graphics chip speed, and more.

“Overclocking on a laptop? Seems like a myth but we have nothing to hide here,” the company said.

Amazon Alexa comes to iOS devices: How does it work and what can it do?

If you own an iPhone, you now have access to Alexa voice commands.

No, that doesn’t mean you can replace Siri with Alexa. In order to access Amazon’s voice assistant, you have to go inside the company’s main shopping app. Here’s everything you need to know about Alexa on iOS, including how it works and what it can do.

Amazon

How does Alexa work on iOS devices? 

Inside of the Amazon app for iOS, you will see a microphone icon near the top of the screen. Simply press it to activate Alexa. You can then ask the assistant almost anything you’d normally ask Alexa via an Amazon Echo device, including asking her to make purchases for you and look up facts. Unfortunately, you have to open Amazon’s app to use Alexa, and there is no “Alexa” hotword voice activation.

What can Alexa do on iOS devices?

Shop

Because Alexa is inside the Amazon shopping app, of course you can use her to shop. Just say “Search for paper towels” or “Reorder batteries” or “Add shampoo to my cart”. You can also track your orders by saying “Track my last order”.

Play media

Alexa can stream books from your Kindle library or music from Amazon Music Unlimited, Prime Music, or purchased music. Amazon Prime members also get access to music included in their subscriptions. Just say “Play the Beatles” or “Play my Kindle book”. When you ask Alexa to play media, player controls will appear on the screen.

Questions

Alexa can answer all the same questions you’d normally ask her in via an Amazon Echo device. Amazon said you can ask about people, geography, dates, music, sports, and more. She can also define words, complete conversions, make calculations, and provide updates on the news, weather, and traffic. But to check weather and traffic, you need add your address and destination, respectively, in the main Alexa app.

Skills

Alexa in the Amazon app supports voice-driven skills already set up in the the Alexa app or on alexa.amazon.com.

Smart home

Amazon said Alexa in the Amazon app supports “smart home capabilities”. But Engadget noted you can’t yet use it to open door locks with your voice.

What can’t Alexa do on iOS devices?

This is not a full-featured version of Alexa. It can’t be used as a replacement for Siri, since Apple’s assistant is built into the operating system. Still, you can now use Alexa on the iOS platform, and it lets you leverage skills and smart home capabilities. But you do need the main Alexa app installed to continue managing Alexa on all your devices.

When will Alexa arrive for iOS devices?

The feature is now rolling out and should be available to all US users by late March 2017.

Want to know more?

Check out Pocket-lint’s Amazon Alexa guides: 

• 12 best Amazon Echo compatible devices you can buy today
• Amazon Echo: First 7 things you should do to get Alexa started
• Amazon Echo tips and tricks: Getting a grip on Alexa
• Amazon Echo: What can Alexa do and what services are compatible?

Latest Samsung Galaxy S8 leak shows phone in deep black colour

Want to see the Samsung Galaxy S8 in black?

Feast your eyes above. Days after we saw a gold version of the upcoming phone pop up, we now get to see what it looks like in straight black, thanks to new leaks posted to Weibo. As SamMobile pointed out, the phone is also thought to come in silver and violet colours. Honestly, there isn’t much we don’t know about Samsung’s next flagship, as it’s been fully revealed by reports, rumours, and analysts.

So these new leaked pictures don’t reveal any surprises about the design. Once again, we see minimal bezels, no physical home button, a fingerprint sensor on the back, etc. What’s new is that deep black colour Samsung is now expected to offer. We should know all the official details and specs soon, because Samsung is slated to confirm everything at its Galaxy Unpacked event on 29 March.

• When is Galaxy Unpacked 2017 and can you watch it online?

Weibo

When Samsung formally announces the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus, we will bring you the news as it happens. In the mean time, check out Pocket-lint’s round-up of rumours for more speculation and leaks.

Google: ‘Beauty and The Beast’ message wasn’t meant to be an ad

That didn’t take long. Shortly after Google told us that its Beauty and The Beast ad being read by Assistant was not in fact an ad, the search juggernaut has reversed that stance. “This wasn’t intended to be an ad,” a Google spokesperson told us. “What’s circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content.” Okay, sure.

“We’re continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users and we could have done better in this case.”

A source has told us that the Beauty and The Best message from Assistant has since been removed wholesale.

YouTube kills annotations to make way for mobile-friendly features

If you’ve ever had a grey box pop-up in the middle of a YouTube video to correct spelling, add in some extra information or link you out to another video, you’ve encountered a YouTube annotation. The feature let creators add content to their video after it had already gone live, but it had its drawbacks — annotation boxes weren’t dynamic, and the only worked on the desktop version of the site. Soon, they won’t work at all. Today, YouTube announce that the feature is being retired. Instead, it encourages creators to use its Cards and End Screens features, which work equally well on desktop and mobile devices.

The change is a long time coming — videos that heavily used annotations usually offered sub-par experiences to mobile and TV users, and YouTube says their use overhaul has dropped 70-percent since it introduced End Screens and Cards. Still, the solution isn’t perfect: cards only display on the right-hand side of a video after being expanded, and end-cards can only add links to videos, playlists and subscription buttons for the last 30 seconds of a video. TV users are still left in the lurch too: none of YouTube’s add-on features are available to folks watching on Google TV, Chromecast or other set-top boxes.

Based on the comments on the announcement post, creators are split on the change — but it’s clearly a decision made to benefit users, particularly those who primarily watch YouTube on mobile devices. After all, what good is it to YouTube to support a feature that only works on one of its many platforms?

Source: YouTube

Sony’s mixed-reality ‘cave’ is an immersive experience for groups

Amongst the many oddball exhibits at Sony’s SXSW “Wow Factory” was the mixed-reality “cave.” Unlike many other experiences at Sony’s event, this one didn’t require strapping on some oddball hardware or even a VR helmet. The cave was a square, four-walled room with Sony’s own GTZ1 4K projectors mounted to each wall — the idea is to make an immersive experience that brings you into other places while still letting you interact with people around you. To that end, each demo had a group of six people in it.

The first experience involved letting participants select a city or natural landmark they wanted to “visit” — once picking a location, the screens lit up with the area all around. It felt like Google Maps street view being projected, as there wasn’t any motion in the visual. The floor and ceiling remained just as they were, and the corners of the room made it feel somewhat unnatural, but it was still a neat effect. Sony also showed off how you can do comparison views where two of the walls showed the scene from 2008 and the other two showing the same view from 2016.

The other big trick for the Cave was that its walls also had proximity sensors built in so you could interact with the environment. Running your hands over the screen produced ripples like you were dipping your hands in water; another demo let you select different “beats” to contribute to an audio track being played in the room. This last one was really something that benefitted from having a whole group, as multiple people helped shape the tune. That was really where this technology seemed like it could stand out — you’re not getting the same immersive experience you get with true VR, but being able to interact with real humans was a big bonus. Sony didn’t give any clues about how it envisions such technology being used, but it’s easy to imagine it being an excellent — if costly — educational tool.

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