There are a dozen new ideas at GDC 2017’s Indie Megabooth

Indie Megabooth has become something of a haven for gamers looking for fresh experiences and new ideas. It’s become a staple event for indie games at shows like PAX, Gamescom and, of course GDC. This year’s developer conference is no exception, featuring a dozen games that defy control conventions, make players question their identities and explore possible futures with fun sci-fi settings.

There’s plenty of simple and fun experiences, like Super Slime Arena, the one-hit-KO multiplayer fighting game — but a surprising number of the games in this year’s booth have a futuristic vibe. Cosmic Express, for instance, is a puzzle game about building train routes that just happens to take place in an adorable, brightly colored space colony. Lightfield is a racing game akin to F-Zero, but one that lets you fly a spaceship-like racer over almost any surface on the course. There’s also _Transfer, a game of mystery, memory and text-based storytelling with an insidious, post-apocalyptic backdrop.

Even the games that weren’t necessarily science fiction related were a little spooky, including a horror thriller about a blind heroine exploring a haunted house and a surprisingly delightful, local multiplayer comedy dating sim about monsters who forgot to get a date to prom. It’s a refreshing look at some of the industry’s most creative projects. If you ever stumble across an Indie Megabooth showcase at a convention or tradeshow, make sure to stop and check it out.

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

Jessica Conditt contributed to this report.

A haptic wristband could help the blind ‘see’ the world

Technology to help the blind navigate usually focuses on replacing the sight they’re missing, or by adding auditory cues to an already cluttered soundscape. But for many sight-impaired individuals, the sense they rely on most is one that tends to be ignored by a lot of tech-based solutions: touch. It’s a subtle way to convey a lot of information and the design company WearWorks is looking to take advantage of this with its new haptic wristband, guiding people around via simple vibrational cues.

WearWorks is based out of Urban-X in Brooklyn, a new accelerator focused on startups that make cities more livable. That includes tackling issues like pollution, energy and transportation. Walking is something we all do, and there’s already existing infrastructure to help the blind get around, like traffic lights that announce when it’s safe to cross and braille plaques on subway platforms. Rather than try and upgrade or expand these existing systems, WearWorks decided to focus on something most individuals carry around with them: a phone.

The wristband connects to a handset, and there’s even a little haptic feedback to help navigate the purpose-built app. Once set up, there’s no need to fuss with the screen. Simply tell it where you need to go, and the wristband will vibrate to guide you there. It creates a virtual “wall,” buzzing when you’re facing the wrong way and going silent when the right path is ahead, as if there’s an open door waiting. WearWorks CEO Keith Kirkland said that in testing they found that something like 80 percent of users preferred the haptic feedback for where they shouldn’t go, and that everyone found the binary of buzzing/no buzzing pretty intuitive.

I tried the wristband myself, turning circles around the Urban-X lab. It went absolutely crazy when I faced south, a nonstop clatter in my hand. But, once I turned 180 degrees, it went silent. Though I eventually figured out what it wanted, the virtual wall concept wasn’t immediately apparent to me, and I was confused as to which direction it wanted me to walk — perhaps I’m part of that 20 percent who prefers to be prodded.

The band I was shown was an early prototype, and there’s still a lot of design work ahead before its probable launch in 2018. Despite its primary audience, WearWorks is still concerned with making sure it looks fashionable. But a lot of attention is being paid to how it feels — not just making it comfortable, but also tactilely pleasing. After all, it’s meant to be touched.

Apple Met Paramount and Sony Executives Last Week as it Flirts With Original Content

Apple senior executive Eddy Cue, who oversees services such as iTunes and Apple Music, held discussions last week with Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures, two of the biggest film studios in Hollywood, according to the New York Post, but the iPhone maker’s exact ambitions in the content space are still uncertain.

The report suggested Apple is looking for a “transformative acquisition” and “not just a deal to buy TV shows,” while an unnamed source is quoted as vaguely saying Apple is “preparing something big.”

Apple has so far only flirted with original content, which it plans to distribute through Apple Music starting later this year.

It acquired the rights to Carpool Karaoke, for example, the popular segment from The Late Late Show with James Corden, which it plans to reboot as a series of sixteen half-hour episodes on Apple Music. The trailer for the show revealed it has a similar format of celebrity pairings singing along while driving.

Likewise, Apple’s upcoming reality TV series Planet of the Apps will be released on a weekly basis in the Spring. On the show, hosted by Beats 1 radio host Zane Lowe, app developers compete for venture capital while receiving mentorship from influencers Gary Vaynerchuk, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jessica Alba, and will.i.am.

Apple has sent mixed signals to Hollywood about its interest in original programming over the past few years, according to The Information.

Last year, it said Apple has met with film studios and producers about developing original TV shows to offer exclusively on iTunes, but services chief Eddy Cue later said Apple is “not in the business of trying to create TV shows.” Instead, Cue said Apple is willing to offer producers suggestions and guidance where possible.

We’re not in the business of trying to create TV shows. If we see it being complementary to the things we’re doing at Apple Music or if we see it being something that’s innovative on our platform, we may help them and guide them and make suggestions. But we’re not trying to compete with Netflix or compete with Comcast.

The report added that Apple is not interested in getting into expensive bidding wars over content with rivals such as Netflix and Amazon.

The Wall Street Journal recently said Apple plans to “build a significant new business in original television shows and movies,” which it compared to the likes of HBO’s Westworld and Netflix’s Stranger Things. It agreed that Apple is not looking to compete with Netflix, but rather promote Apple Music.

“In terms of original content, we’ve put our toe in the water doing some original content for Apple Music, and that will be rolling out throughout the year,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, on a conference call following the company’s most recent earnings results. “We’re learning from that and we’ll go from there.”

Reports outlining Apple’s interest in original content have gained momentum over the past few years alongside the iPhone maker’s much rumored but since shelved plans for a streaming TV service in the United States.
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DT Daily MWC 2017: VR rides, Google’s Android Garden, and a LG G6 vs. Huawei P10 shootout

It’s the final day of Mobile World Congress, and we’ve been having some fun out on the show floor, and Barcelona itself — illustrating that although there’s plenty of work to be done, we’ve also taken some time to relax and enjoy what both MWC and the city have to offer.

Lots of companies used virtual reality for promotion at their booths at the show, including SK Telecom, but it was Samsung putting on the most spectacular display. Thousands queued over the course of the show for the chance to be flung around on these theme park-style VR rides, but we sought out a cool VR demo by ARWorks that combined an HTC Vive with an EEG, so you can control virtual objects with your mind. The gaming potential of such tech is really exciting.

More: All the Digital Trends awards from MWC 2017

Google took over an area outside the MWC show floor, filling the space with an Android garden of fun, with everything from ice sculptures to Android-themed iced drinks. The purpose of the space is to demonstrate Google’s most recent products, including Google Assistant, Duo, and Google Music; but we could also create our own Android avatars and Android Wear watch faces.

We took two of our favorite smartphones announced at MWC out into the city for a camera shootout. We pitted the Huawei P10 against the LG G6, trying out the various special modes and features that make these two phones so special, and we chose to visit the beautiful Plaça Espanya to do so. Interestingly, both have their own strengths as camera phones, and which one you prefer may depend on what you like to take pictures of.

That’s it for MWC 2017. It has been an exciting show, with some really interesting new smartphones announced, several of which highlight major trends we’re going to see a lot more of over the coming months. Stick around until the end of the video to see a glimpse of some amazing future tech (that may or may not be real).

9 of the worst Android Wear problems, and how to fix them

After a clunky start, Android Wear is now beginning to hit its stride. Smartwatches are improving with every iteration, and Google has rolled out a a host of welcome improvements since the software’s initial release. Despite going in the right direction, however, it hasn’t gotten there quite yet. If you’ve running into Android Wear problems, then you aren’t alone. Thankfully, we’ve put together a list of the most common problems plaguing Android Wear users, as well as bits of advice on how to get around them.

More: Check out 25 of the best Android Wear apps for your smartwatch

Glitch: Rapid battery drain on phone

A lot of users on the Google product forums have been complaining about the battery on their connected smartphone draining faster than it should. This is probably the most commonly reported problem that people are encountering with Android Wear. Take a look under Settings > Battery on your phone and you may be able to see where the problem lies. There are various potential causes.

Workarounds:

• Look for problem apps causing excessive battery drain and consider uninstalling them.
• Some people report a significant drop in battery drain after turning off Google Now. To do this go to Settings > Accounts > Google > Search and tap Now cards at the bottom, then toggle it off.

Potential solutions:

• Start off by rebooting your watch and your smartphone and see if it makes a difference. Go to Settings > Restart on your watch.
• Make sure you’re running the latest version of the Android Wear app that corresponds with Android or iOS.
• Try resetting your watch to factory settings and pairing it from scratch. Remember that you’ll lose any data on the watch, so sync first. When you’re ready, go to Settings > Reset device on your watch. Try uninstalling and re-installing the Android Wear app on your smartphone. Now try pairing your watch with your smartphone again.
• It’s possible that a Wi-Fi network is causing the issue. Some people have discovered the battery drains when connected to specific Wi-Fi networks. Test to see if the problem occurs when the phone is connected to your cellular data network. If the drain occurs when you’re connected to your work Wi-Fi then ask IT if they are limiting outbound connections, it may be that the app is continually trying to connect to a blocked port. You can either persuade IT to open them or use a VPN client to bypass the restrictions.

Best app deals of the day! 6 paid iPhone apps for free for a limited time

Everyone likes apps, but sometimes the best ones are a bit expensive. Now and then, developers make paid apps free for a limited time, but you have to snatch them up while you have the chance. Here are the latest and greatest apps on sale in the iOS App Store.

These apps normally cost money, and this sale lasts for a limited time only. If you go to the App Store and it says the app costs money, that means the deal has expired and you will be charged. 

More: 200 Awesome iPhone Apps | The best Android apps for almost any occasion

Vocal Warrior

This app claims to be the world’s first voice-controlled fighting game. Summon historic icons to fight for you with your voice and customize skill commands based on your own sayings.

Available on:

iOS

Smiley Photo Editor

Create quick photo memories with friends and family, or make poster-worthy collages of your favorite bands and brands. Add awesome stickers, cool fonts, web images, and so on with this app.

Available on:

iOS

Trip Wallet

Trip Wallet helps you keep tabs on your spending whether you are traveling overseas, living in an RV, or in the comfort of your home.

Available on:

iOS

Remote Control

Turn your iPhone or iPad into the ultimate remote control for your Mac. Use your iOS device as a trackpad and keyboard, or launch any app from anywhere within your home.

Available on:

iOS

Epic 28

Alex Nicholas, owner and founder of EPIC Hybrid Training, brings his 30- to 45-minute workouts to your iPhone to help you lose weight, stay fit, or otherwise achieve your fitness goals.

Available on:

iOS

Flightless Little Birdie

In a world where birds cant fly, tap to jump from land to land, collecting gold coins along the way. Use the power-ups while avoiding incoming meteorites to take this flightless, but fearless birdy home safely.

Available on:

iOS

Could roses help solve our big battery problem?

Why it matters to you

Everyone’s on the lookout for alternatives to battery power. Scientists in Sweden think they may have found a potentially great, albeit unusual, one.

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but could it store and release electrical energy? And if it could, what about other plants? Finding new ways to store large amounts of energy is a growing field of research. And if you’re like us, you support finding new alternatives to batteries every time your phone dies on you before you get home.

That’s a conundrum William Shakespeare never had to grapple with, but is being currently explored by scientists at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Sweden’s Linköping University. In a newly published research paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigators describe their work to develop a method of turning roses into supercapacitors (an alternative to batteries), capable of holding energy in their stems and then releasing it. This is achieved by treating the rose with a conductive polymer solution that is soaked up like water.

More: Lightweight, flexible solar panels may be more efficient than competitors’

“When the material goes into the vascular system of the plant, into the channels where the water is usually transported, it initiates a chemical reaction,” Eleni Stavrinidou, lead author of the study, told Digital Trends. “This material initiates a reaction in the plant’s physical-chemical environment. This allows the formation of conducting wires along the vascular tissue of the plant. We’re able to use this to reach every part of the plant, even the petals and the leaves.”

Thor Balkhed, Linköping University

According to Stavrinidou, the conductive solution doesn’t have an adverse affect on the flowers in question.

“For our experiment we used rose stems that had already been detached from the main plant,” she continued. “This was done for practical reasons. However, what we saw was that the rose with our material and the control rose that was in a normal vase of water behaved in the same way. We’ve explored many materials in this work, some of which have been shown to be very toxic to plants, but the material we’re using here doesn’t seem to affect the plant — although we’ve not yet performed a very detailed biological study to look into this.”

So why on Earth would you want to make a bunch of roses that can conduct electricity, short of for a particularly obscure scientific whodunnit plot?

For the potential of being able to later harvest energy that a plant has stored from photosynthesis, Stavrinidou said. While the work is still at the “proof of concept” stage, and there’s still more to be done on improving conductivity and energy storage abilities, this opens up some exciting new possibilities.

“If we were also able to store this energy in the plant, this could have the makings of an alternative energy system,” Stavrinidou concluded.

Samsung’s Galaxy Xcover 4 smartphone might be small, but it doesn’t come cheap

Why it matters to you

Samsung’s Galaxy Xcover 4 will not win any design awards, but at least its ruggedness won’t completely empty your wallet.

Unlike other smartphones, which usually see yearly iterations if they are popular enough, Samsung’s rugged Galaxy Xcover line seems to have a new entry every other year — the Galaxy Xcover 2 and its successor were released in 2013 and 2015, respectively. It is now 2017, which means it is appropriate for Samsung to have announced the Galaxy Xcover 4.

Much like its predecessors, the Galaxy Xcover 4 focuses on ruggedness than anything else. As such, the phone comes equipped with an IP68 rating, which means it is completely sealed against any sort of dust that might try to get in and can remain submerged in just under five feet of water for up to 30 minutes.

More: Samsung doubles down on RCS, brings next-gen messaging to Marshmallow devices

This does not mean you should take the Galaxy Xcover 4 swimming, but you can take the phone with you to ski — the Galaxy Xcover 4 satisfies the U.S. military standard MIL-STD 810G. In other words, the phone can stand up to extreme temperatures, harsh weather conditions, and other standards that the regular person will not find themselves worrying about. If you are into extreme sports or work in construction, however, the Galaxy Xcover 4 looks to fit your needs just fine.

As for actual specs, the Galaxy Xcover 4 features a 5-inch, 800 x 480 resolution display, with a 5-megapixel selfie shooter above it and a 13MP sensor around back. Under the hood, a 1.4GHz quad-core processor and 2GB RAM power the phone, with the 16GB of storage expandable through the MicroSD card slot. The 2,800mAh battery is more than enough to get the Galaxy Xcover 4 through the day, once you consider the hardware, while the phone runs Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.

Overall, the Galaxy Xcover 4 looks to be a solid update from its predecessor, which got a bit long in the tooth. However, the phone’s main sticking point will be its 259-euro ($272) price tag. At that price, there are more powerful options out there, such as the Moto G4, so you really pay into the Galaxy Xcover 4’s ruggedness. If that is something you are into, the Galaxy Xcover 4 will be available in Europe sometime in April, though it is unknown whether it will make its way to other regions.

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.