Google’s handy ‘Instant Apps’ feature for Android looks set to launch soon

Why it matters to you

The new feature offers smoother app interaction and saves space on your device by doing away with the need to install unnecessary software.

Google’s time- and space-saving Instant Apps feature may be on the verge of a proper rollout, giving the majority of Android users a much more efficient user experience when it comes to app interaction.

The Mountain View company is already conducting limited testing of the feature, but a recent APK teardown of the Google Play Store by XDA Developers has revealed that work is afoot to finally launch Instant Apps for one and all.

The site came across new lines of code apparently directed at making it easier to opt-out of Instant Apps, while also revealing that an app’s Play Store listing could come with a symbol of sorts indicating whether it supports Instant Apps.

For those not in the know, the Instant Apps feature — unveiled at Google I/O 2016 and designed for Android devices running Android Jelly Bean 4.1 or up — enables an app to run immediately, without the user even having to download it if they don’t already have it. So if, say, a friend sends you a link to a really cool camera accessory on B&H’s site and you tap on it, you’ll be taken to the product page inside the B&H app, even if you don’t have the app installed. This is able to happen because the app has been split into modules and only downloads the part needed to display the relevant information.

Without Instant Apps, tapping on the link would’ve taken you to the web version of the site, likely offering an inferior user experience compared to the slicker app. Alternatively, you could download the app, but that’d take time to do, and also takes up space on your device. Of course, downloading the full app is fine if you’re a regular B&H shopper, but it’s not much use if you’re not.

The official Android Developers site describes Instant Apps as “an evolution in app sharing and discovery” that lets you “experience what you love about apps — fast and beautiful user interfaces, high performance, and great capabilities — with just a tap.” The feature is set to dramatically transform the way we interact with apps on our Android devices, though hopefully the experience will be so smooth we won’t even notice.

The current roster of compatible apps is likely to be limited at the start — Google has already announced B&H Photo Video, BuzzFeed, Medium, Hotel Tonight, Zumper, and Disney as early participants — but it shouldn’t be long before other developers adapt their own software to allow them to function as part of Instant Apps.

Xiaomi Mi 6 photo samples prove it can compete with the best cameras today

The dual-camera configuration in the Mi 6 is a step up from previous generations.

The Xiaomi Mi 6 is going to be a noteworthy phone in Asian markets. Imaging prowess is an area that Xiaomi’s rivals have banked on for several generations — OPPO brands its phones as Selfie Experts and Vivo calls its devices Camera Phones — and with the Mi 6, Xiaomi is catching up.

The Mi 6 has a dual camera setup that’s similar to that of the iPhone 7 Plus, with a wide-angle 12MP imaging sensor augmented by a secondary 12MP telephoto lens with 2x lossless zoom. Xiaomi managed to cram the sensors in a smaller frame — the Mi 6 has a 5.15-inch screen whereas the iPhone 7 Plus comes with a 5.5-inch display — and the manufacturer also figured out a way to eliminate the camera bump at the back.

The 12MP wide-angle lens has an f/1.8 aperture with 1.25-micron pixels and 4-axis OIS, and the imaging sensor is a Sony IMX386. The 12MP telephoto lens has an f/2.6 aperture (52mm effective field-of-view) with 1.0-micron pixels, and uses Samsung’s S5K3M3 ISOCELL sensor. Up front, the Mi 6 offers an 8MP Sony IMX268 sensor.

We’ll be taking a look at how the camera fares next to the Galaxy S8 and the Pixel over the coming weeks, but for now, here’s the Xiaomi Mi 6 in action.

If you’re interested in taking a look at the full-size photos, head here.

Dual camera

The dual camera setup works as intended on the Mi 6, with the camera providing 2x lossless zoom. The ISP also lets you zoom in 10x digitally, but the resulting images aren’t going to be great.

Outdoors

Like its predecessor, the Mi 6 excels at taking photos in bright conditions. Auto HDR plays a big part here, with the Mi 6 automatically switching modes when needed. Overall, the phone does a great job of capturing detail and colors while outdoors.

Low-light

Low-light images come out much better than last year’s Mi 5, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in this area. The phone struggles with detail, and you also get a lot of noise. This is where the Mi 6 loses out to the likes of the Galaxy S8 and the Pixel.

Indoors

The Mi 6 does a capable job of shooting images indoors, but photos come out overexposed in a few instances.

More to come

We’re just getting started with our Mi 6 coverage, so stay tuned for plenty more in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on the Mi 6 camera in the comments below.

Nougat is now installed on 7.1% of active Android devices

Nougat picks up momentum in April’s platform numbers.

Availability of the Galaxy S8 and LG G6 in global markets coupled with the rollout of the Nougat update to older devices has contributed to the largest monthly gain for Android 7.0. Google’s April distribution numbers show that Nougat is now installed on 7.1% of all Android devices, an increase of 2.2% from a month prior.

Specifically, Android 7.0 is now installed on 6.6% of devices — up from 4.5% in March, whereas Android 7.1 is now on 0.5% of active devices, a minor increase of 0.1%. Marshmallow is holding steady at 31.2%, as with a 32% share, Lollipop is the most widely-used version of Android globally, albeit by a slender margin.

KitKat’s share declined from 20% to 18.8%, and Jelly Bean — versions 4.1 to 4.3 — lost a percentage point and is now at 9.1%. Ice Cream Sandwich also saw a minor decline to 0.8%. Oddly enough, Gingerbread gained a tenth of a percentage point, and now has a 1.0% share.

With affordable Nougat-based devices like the Moto G5 Plus gaining momentum and older phones finally receiving the update, Android 7.0 should see a similar uptick in the coming months.

Android Nougat

• Android 7.0 Nougat: Everything you need to know
• Will my phone get Android Nougat?
• Google Pixel + Pixel XL review
• All Android Nougat news
• How to manually update your Nexus or Pixel
• Join the Discussion

Carry on reading in the bath or at the pool with the Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2

Kobo has announced a new edition of its waterproof eBook reader, that you can use in the bath or by the pool without fear it might get water damaged.

The Kobo Aura H2O Edition 2 is IPX8 rated, which means it’s waterproof down to two metres for up to 60 minutes. Drop it in the pool therefore and you’re likely to be able to carry on reading after fishing it out.

It is similar to Kobo’s current flagship device, the Aura One, although it sports a 6.8-inch E Ink Carta display rather than the massive 7.8-inch version on the One.

It has a resolution of 1440 x 1080 so offers a pixel count of 265ppi, which should keep text looking clean and sharp.

Kobo

There’s Wi-Fi on-board along with a Micro USB port for charging and hooking it up to a computer. Battery is claimed to last a week between charges.

Adjustable built-in lighting is present and the H2O Edition 2 comes with 8GB of internal storage that can contain around 6,000 eBooks. It accesses the Kobo bookstore, which boasts over five million titles for sale.

Kobo’s eBook readers are also compatible with multiple eBook file formats, so you can transfer other digital books from around the ‘net. EPUB, EPUB3, PDF and MOBI are all supported. Comic books in CBR and CBZ format are also recognised, as are TXT, HTML, XHTML and RTF format documents.

The Kobo Aura H20 Edition 2 will be available for £149.99 from 22 May in the UK. It’ll also be available in North America and other select regions. Pre-orders will start from 15 May.

Prey: Release date, videos, formats and everything you need to know

With a 5 May release date, Prey is nearly upon us. And while it shares its name with a game that came out in 2006, it’s a completely different beast.

It has been created by Arkane Studios (of Dishonored and Dishonored 2 renown) and published by Bethesda Softworks (whereas 2K Games put the 2006 game out).

The following is all you need to know about it (beware: we know a lot about it, so if you’re worried about spoilers, proceed with caution).

What is Prey?

Prey is nominally a first-person shooter, although it feels more like a survival-horror game, as the ammunition for its weapons is in very short supply throughout the game.

In keeping with Arkane Studios’ core philosophy, you’re supposed to be able to play it however you want. To enable that, as you play, you acquire powers which can be chosen from an incredibly diverse array, letting you take weapon, hacking or stealth-led approaches. Plus, you can develop the shape-shifting and psychological powers that the aliens you meet in the game possess.

Unlike the Dishonored games, Prey takes place in a fully open world: Talos I, a space-station. Beyond the story-missions there are plenty of side-missions, which often see you revisiting areas of Talos I, and even involve going outside the space-station.

Although it’s single-player-only, Prey should be a pretty meaty game: Lead Designer Ricardo Bare reckons: “It will take at least 16 hours. But we’ve seen players spend all the way up to 24 or 30 hours on a play-through: it just depends how much of a completionist you are.”

Bethesda Softworks / Arkane Studios

Prey story

In Prey, you play Morgan Yu, whose conveniently unisex name means you can decide whether to play as a male or female character.

At the start of the game, Morgan is in training, preparing for a stint onboard Talos I. But during a routine psychological evaluation test, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. The scientists conducting the test are attacked by an alien which had been disguised as a coffee-cup.

Morgan is gassed and wakes up in her/his apartment. Which, it turns out, was in Talos I all along. So Morgan must find out what the hell is going on and somehow negate the alien threat (which, by implication, could spread to the Earth), by exploring every inch of the space-station.

Prey gameplay

As we mentioned before, one of Prey’s main points is that it lets you adopt your own play-style – and our pre-release hands-on experience with the game suggests Arkane Studios has achieved this aim much more successfully than either of the Dishonored games.

You can focus on improving your weaponry skills, scientific skills, and repair and hacking skills (there are all sorts of consoles and faulty bits of wiring to fix, and the ability to hack locked doors negates the need to find security cards). Then there are the alien attributes you can absorb, divided into Energy, Morph and Telepathy sections.

Bethesda / Arkane Studios

Essentially, much of the gameplay involves solving puzzles to gain access to inaccessible areas; each of those puzzles can be solved in multiple ways. Exploring uncovers access cards, or you can take more inventive approaches, such as reshaping the environment with the GLOO Cannon, which fires out great globs of a foam which dries and hardens instantly. GLOO also temporarily stops electrical sparks and puts out fires.

At times, you will have to make choices about what to do: for example, in one sequence, you find an ex-convict who was an experimental test subject, and you must decide whether to feed him to aliens or spare him. Prey has multiple endings.

Another gameplay element involves surviving encounters with the aliens – which are officially called Typhon. They come in various shapes and sizes, and you can either take them on directly with whatever weaponry you have (immobilising them with GLOO, then smacking them with the wrench is particularly satisfying if you have run out of ammo), indirectly using turrets which auto-detect Typhon – or you can employ stealth to avoid them altogether.

Prey weapons and powers

You can carry — and switch between — a number of weapons and active powers, accessible via a classic wheel interface (some powers are passive, affecting your stats or letting you do things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to).

Bethesda / Arkane Studios

As far as the weaponry is concerned, don’t expect railguns or chainsaws: some of it is pretty prosaic. The first one you find is a wrench, which obviously lets you melee, and can be easily replicated.

We found a pretty handy pistol and shotgun, but they had to be used sparingly due to a general lack of ammo. Refills for the GLOO Cannon, on the other hand, seemed plentiful, but when you encase a Typhon in GLOO (a much easier process for the smaller Mimics than the human-sized Phantoms), it will wriggle free after a while.

There is another weapon called the Huntress Boltcaster which resembles a crossbow but, in use, we found it hopelessly weedy – essentially, it was a toy. There are high-tech grenades, called Recycler Charges, though, which blow Typhon and nearby objects into handy constituents that can be collected and used to replicate objects.

The powers tree is the heart of Prey, and it’s so huge that it will never be possible to unlock everything it contains in a single play-through – as Lead Designer Ricardo Bare confirmed: “Our goal is that you couldn’t possibly find enough Neuromods to unlock every single thing. But if you wanted to complete the entire human side of things or the entire alien side of things, it’s probably possible.”

Neuromods – liquids that your character injects into his or her eye – are what you spend to buy powers. Basic powers might require one Neuromod, whereas more elaborate ones might cost four or more.

The powers tree is huge, and split into the categories Scientist, Engineer, Security, Energy, Morph and Telepathy: the latter three are alien powers.

Some powers have various levels – for example, the most eye-catching one, Mimic, which lets you turn yourself into inanimate objects. The first level lets you mimic small objects like coffee cups (useful for getting through small openings), the second to mimic more sophisticated objects like turrets, and the third to mimic the robotic Operators, which effectively gives you the ability to fly.

Prey characters and enemies

The only choice of playable character is between the male and female versions of Morgan Yu, but Morgan isn’t completely alone in Talos I, even though the vast majority of its staff have been killed by the Typhon. Morgan’s brother Alex – a somewhat portly individual – has survived, and is able to communicate with Morgan. As is a very helpful AI called January, who functions as a sort of tutorial.

There are at least two types of Typhon – and learning about them, via scanning them with an object called the Psychoscope, is a crucial element of the game. The first Typhon we encountered were Mimics: small, black, spider-like creatures that can shape-shift, and attack you in a manner not dissimilar to the Alien films’ face-huggers.

Bethesda / Arkane Studios

The Phantoms are much bigger and more intimidating – also black, but bipedal, like humans, and they pack a much more significant punch. Plus they have psychological and psychokinetic powers which you can acquire and counter later in the game. They are the sort of enemies which are easy enough to take down when they are alone, but when you encounter several of them, you will need the right powers and a much more tactical approach.

Prey graphics and setting

Arkane Studios developed an unusual back-story for Prey, which allowed it to set the game more or less in the present day, but on an elaborate, functional space-station. The story goes that Prey takes place in a parallel universe, in which John F Kennedy’s assassination was averted, so rather than fizzling out, NASA’s space programme continued to gather pace through the 1970s, 80s, 90s and beyond. Although Talos I is run by a private company called TranStar.

Talos I itself often exhibits a visual trait common to Arkane Studios’ games (especially the steampunk Dishonored 1 and 2): Art Deco design influences. For a space-station, it often has a curious Gentleman’s Club-type feel to it, as a result.

Graphically, Prey is mightily impressive: it’s very crisp and high-resolution, and generally acts as a pretty decent advert for Crytek’s CryEngine, which was used to make it.

Bethesda / Arkane Studios

Prey influences

In April, Arkane Studios and publisher Bethesda Softworks ran a number of events designed to get a demo version of Prey in front of members of the public; those events were teamed with films that the development team cited as influences, most notably Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We persuaded Lead Designer Ricardo Bare to open up about his team’s and his personal influences when making Prey: “The artists watch things like 2001 and other films. I like Moon a lot, and it has a lot of elements that resonate with our game very strongly. But other sources of influence for me personally include a lot of scientific literature, because our game is very heavily themed, at least in the background, around neuroscience.

“It feels like it’s one of the frontiers of science right now. And then, I do a lot of reading of classic sci-fi stories, like Solaris – even before watching the movie, I read the novel. I read a Robert A. Heinlein story, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is a really cool tale about a colony on the moon, AI and stuff like that.”

Prey formats

Prey will be released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.

If you pre-order Prey, you will get the Cosmonaut Shotgun Pack for free, which gets you Morgan Yu’s family-heirloom Margrave shotgun, three Neuromods, two Medkits, a Fabrication blueprint for the shotgun and its ammo plus what is cryptically described as: “A unique upgrade to help players preserve their limited resources.”

• Order the PS4 version from Amazon.co.uk here or Amazon.com here
• Order the Xbox One version from Amazon.co.uk here or Amazon.com here
• Order the PC version from Amazon.co.uk here or Amazon.com here

Prey videos and trailers

If you’re keen to have a look at what Prey is all about before deciding whether to buy it, you’re in luck. Bethesda Softworks has been extra-diligent when it comes to creating videos showing pretty much every aspect of the game.

Here’s one that explains the history of TranStar, the company that runs Talos I:

Here’s an extended gameplay walkthrough, narrated by Arkane Studios’ Creative Director, Raphael Colantonio, and Lead Designer Ricardo Bare:

This video shows the Mimic power in all its glory:

While this one focuses on the Typhon aliens:

Entitled “Only Yu Can Save The World”, this video looks at Morgan Yu’s powers, abilities and weapons:

While this one is all about weapon and power combos:

A closer look at some of the powers in Prey:

This is how the Neuromod system works:

A focus on gear, gadgets and weapons:

And finally, an exploration of Talos I itself:

This ostrich robot doesn’t need to think to run

This tiny ostrich bot, unlike rival robots, doesn’t using computers and sensors to balance. It manages to keep running (at up to 10 mph) thanks to its built-in dynamic stability. Jerry Pratt, the senior research scientist at IHMC who leads the team developing the Planar Elliptical Runner (PER) says that lessons learned from it could be applied to more practical running robots “to make them more efficient and natural looking. Running will be eventually useful for any application that you want to do quickly and where wheels can’t work well.”

Typically, bipedal robots like Agile Technologies’ Cassie need plenty of processing power to run the balancing algorithms, gyroscopes and sensors to keep it on its feet. However, with the PER, it uses an elegant mechanical design, with a single motor that drives the legs in an elliptical motion. The body’s shape adds to its stability and the design means that the robot’s legs have “reactive resilience”: when the legs feel resistance, it adds more power to push through, as well as mechanically adjusting the rear leg to stabilise its sprint. If the robot was scaled up to human size, the speed could reach between 20 or 30 mph.

Biped robots are typically harder to balance, more power-hungry and more expensive, but as they can dynamically balance, like Boston Dynamics humanoid offerings, they can get to places other robots can’t. “Robots with legs will be particularly useful in places where you want a human presence, but it’s too dangerous, expensive, or remote to send a real human,” Pratt told Technology Review.

Source: Technology Review

Indiegogo backers get their smart lock… two years later

Friday Labs has finally begun shipping the smart locks it promised its Indiegogo backers way back in 2015. Long waiting periods like this are definitely one of the most important things to take into consideration when backing crowdfunding projects. But, hey, at least this one didn’t fold without shipping even a single product. In fact, the startup has also begun accepting pre-orders for those who didn’t get to back the campaign. Non-backer purchases won’t ship until next month or so, though, and it will set you back the device’s full retail price ($249).

The company’s smart lock has both WiFi and bluetooth connection. It also supports iOS and Android devices, as well as Apple’s HomeKit home automation platform. The device’s accompanying app can make sure you locked it when you step out and can also unlock your door as soon as you get near enough. You can use it to keep track of who goes in and out of the house and also to give guests temporary access if, say, you’re out on vacation and need them to water your plants.

Since Friday Labs describes itself as a design-driven company, it created the locks to have an interchangeable shell, so you can switch between copper, bronze, gun metal, brass, silver, nickel satin and porcelain, depending on what your home looks like. Based on the the company’s updates on the crowdfunding platform, the first round of shipments for US backers went out on April 24th, while the first units for European backers shipped on April 27th. It aims to deliver all backers’ units by May 12th, so you’ll get yours soon if you took a chance on the campaign in 2015.

Source: Friday Labs

NASA inflatable greenhouse could help feed astronauts on other planets

Why it matters to you

The ability to produce food on a sustainable basis will be an essential requirement of the human colonization of other planets.

If we hope to someday inhabit other planets, astronauts will need more sources of nourishment than the packets of freeze-dried space food they can take with them. It’s not just the nutritional value of fresh produce that has NASA interested in growing greens — researchers think that astronauts would also get a psychological boost from farming.

To that end, NASA collaborated with researchers at the University of Arizona to design an inflatable greenhouse that can be deployed in space and offer astronauts a sustainable bounty of fresh vegetables.

The greenhouse prototype was built as a “bioregenerative life support system” — meaning it recycles air, waste, and water. As astronauts breathe out, they release carbon dioxide, which the plants use to generate oxygen through photosynthesis. Water flows through the roots and back to a storage tank where it’s oxygenated and fortified in a constant cycle. To avoid radiation, the greenhouses would likely be buried under soil, and so would require an artificial light source.

“We’re mimicking what the plants would have if they were on Earth and make use of these processes for life support,” Gene Giacomelli, director of the Controlled Environment Agriculture Center at the University of Arizona, said in a statement to NASA. “The entire system of the lunar greenhouse does represent, in a small way, the biological systems that are here on Earth.”

One of the main goals of future space travel is to carry as little cargo as possible by using things found along the way, a principle called in-situ resource utilization. It’s expensive to launch a rocket. The lighter the cargo, the cheaper the costs. NASA hopes to collect resources like water from regions off Earth rather than carrying it all along.

Moving forward, the researchers will use similar greenhouse prototypes to determine if produce grown in the eighteen-foot-long, eight-foot-wide cylinders could sustain a group of astronauts.

AI can now duplicate anyone’s voice based on just one minute of training

Why it matters to you

An AI startup called Lyrebird just invented an algorithm that can mimic the voice of any person, based on just 60 seconds of speech.

Do you remember the cool Mission Impossible tech that lets Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt mimic the voice of other characters using some nifty speech synthesis technology?

Well, a Montreal-based startup called Lyrebird (named after the sound-imitating bird) just invented it for real.

“We are developing new speech synthesis technologies which, among other features, allow us to copy the voice of someone with very little data,” Alexandre de Brebisson, one of the PhD students who developed the deep-learning tech behind the project. “Our experiments show that one minute of audio already contains a lot of the DNA of a human voice. We are able to learn a new voice with as little data because our model is able to capture similarities between the new voice and all the voices it already knows. Our models understand the underlying variables that make [one] voice different from another.”

Since the tech was shown off this week, de Brebisson said his team have received dozens of different suggested use-cases by email, some containing applications they’d thought of, and others containing ones that they hadn’t.

Some companies, for example, are interested in letting their users choose to have audio books read in the voice of either famous people or family members. The same is true of medical companies, which could allow people with voice disabilities to train their synthetic voices to sound like themselves, if recorded samples of their speaking voices exist. Another interesting idea is for video game companies to offer the ability for in-game characters to speak with the voice of the human player.

There are plenty more exciting opportunities, which have led to 10,000 people already signing up to be informed of the forthcoming beta version. “We will then add features over time, such as letting companies design a unique voice tailored for their needs, and control the emotion of the [voice] generation,” de Brebisson continued.

While it doesn’t sound perfect yet, it’s not hard to imagine how this might sound in just a few years. Combined with technology such as software for making convincing edits to the moving lips of a person who is speaking, “fake news” circa 2025 should certainly be a whole lot of fun.

Right?

Scientists develop an imaging technique for looking through concrete

Why it matters to you

This lets scientists detect corrosion in steel structures, even rust encased in thick concrete.

Were Superman a building-safety inspector, he’d probably use his powers to pull off something similar to this new technique invented by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). They’ve developed a noninvasive imaging technology, similar to an X-ray or CT scan, that lets them detect corrosion in steel structures like bridges — even when it’s encased in concrete. The Man of Steel would be proud!

“Corrosion of steel, aka rust, is a huge problem worldwide, and costs the U.S. alone over $300 billion per year in prevention and repair,” Dr. Edward Garboczi, an NIST fellow in the applied chemicals and materials division, told Digital Trends. “This includes corrosion of pipes in a chemical plant, corrosion of steel reinforcing bars in a concrete bridge deck, corrosion of a steel bridge, corrosion of automobile bodies, and many other examples.

“When something made of steel is out in the open, it is easy to inspect for rust. But when something covers the steel — such as the concrete cover over steel reinforcing bars, or insulation wrapping cold pipes in a chemical plant — one usually doesn’t know about the existence and growth of corrosion until enough damage has been done, which is usually too late for inexpensive repair.”

The “spectral fingerprint” detection method the team has developed is described in the journal Applied Magnetic Resonance. It involves using terahertz radiation — electromagnetic waves with frequencies 10-100× higher than the microwaves found in kitchens — to uncover corrosion products early in their development. This has an important advantage over current detection methods because it looks for the actual rust compound, not just physical changes like changing thickness in steel support bars.

So what’s next for the project? Getting it to the right people to take advantage of it.

“In many cases, NIST does the basic research, and others develop our basic research into practical tools,” Garboczi continued. “We are looking for people to take our concepts, proven in the laboratory, into the field. We are also interested in extending our technique to the detection of akageneite, another iron corrosion product that is antiferromagnetic. This compound often appears in rebar corrosion in reinforced concrete that has been exposed to a source of chlorine atoms — such as seawater in underwater structures or road deicing salts on highways.”