This Augmented Reality Climbing Wall will let you play Pong while holding on for dear life

Climbing walls on their own can be great fun, if not exhausting. Augmented reality gaming, that is, games that require you to interact with everyday objects is an innovative way to get you away from the console. What about if you combine the two?

• What is the difference between VR and AR?

That’s exactly what Valo Motion has done, and installed the first working augmented climbing wall in Finland. The system is made up of a few components, including an Optoma X605 projector with 6,000 lumens lens, an Xbox Kinect to provide the motion tracking, which works with Valo Motion’s own algorithms and an Intel-powered PC to run the software.

Games can be either one or two player, and they include Climball, which is climbing wall version of the classic game Pong and Spark. Spark is a one-player game that projects a constantly rotating triangle onto the wall, it’s your job to climb around to stay inside the triangle, if you go outside it, you lose.

The motion tracking system is relatively versatile in terms of placement, as it can either be mounted on a pylon with adjustable reach and tilt, or it can mounted to the wall or ceiling. Valo Motion is also confident the touchscreen interface to get the system up and running is simple enough for children to use it, as well as adults.

You don’t need to have a wall of any particular size to use the system, as it can be adjusted to fit whatever space you have. Dr Raine Kajastila, the man behind the augmented climbing wall said: “Even small walls can have hundreds of distinct routes and games that create new, fun challenges for climbers.”

The augmented climbing wall system has been adopted all over the world, and is installed in centres in Norway, Sweden, Russia, Finland, Germany, Canada, the USA, South Korea and the UK.

Pokemon Go rocks! You can nab more rock-type Pokemon for one week only

Pokemon Go is holding a special event for the entirety of next week.

To encourage you back out onto the streets, with Pokemon Go running on a smartphone, Niantic and the Pokemon Company are holding a special week of rock. From 18 May 2017 through to 25 May, you can discover more rock-type Pokemon in your area than before.

This will include Pokemon such as Omanyte, Onyx and Sudowoodo.

What’s more, you will also get more candy from your buddy Pokemon. They will give you a candy after walking the quarter of the distance as normal.

It’s not great for the fitness levels, but a real treat for persistent players.

• Pokemon Go: How to play and other tips and tricks
• Pokemon Go Plus explained: Release date, price and everything you need to know
• Pokemon Go: How to catch Pikachu as your first Pokemon

PokeStops will give you more items during this time too. And Poke Balls will be discounted by a half, with prices slashed by 50 per cent in the in-game shop.

Pokemon Go was a massive hit last summer, with players around the globe constantly out and about to “catch ’em all”. It’s popularity might have waned a little since, but this latest promotional week might encourage to put your Pikachu pants back on and go out a’hunting.

There are plenty more Pokemon out there to be found these days. Rock and roll.

Blow-up dolls, vibrators and the sex robot’s uninspired origins

Just a few days before Christmas 2015, I found myself staring down the silicone mouth hole of the “world’s first blowjob robot.” I’d set out to find the future of sex but quickly realized that: 1) The Autoblow 2+ wasn’t a robot at all, and 2) I’d be better off sticking to a grapefruit for simulated fellatio. My encounter with the Autoblow 2+ was both disturbing and fascinating and sparked a 15-month exploration of male sex toys that came to a head in a small sex-robotics R&D lab in Southern California.

NSFW Warning: This story may contain links to and descriptions or images of explicit sexual acts.

The lab is staffed by a small group of artists who meticulously craft individual body parts en masse. There’s a man painting erect penises, another carving the contours of a cheekbone, and in the far right corner sits an empty workstation for the lab’s dedicated eye technician. Just across from a makeshift collage of immediately recognizable celebrity eyes are rows of upright canisters capped with muffin-top-shaped silicone mounds and bright red glossy lips.

I’m immediately reminded of my night with the Autoblow 2+, and for good reason: McMullen tells me he’s manufacturing high-end inserts for that lackluster coitus can. Throughout my four-hour tour of the space, I can’t shake the feeling of familiarity. Even when I’m introduced to Harmony, a RealDoll with an AI-equipped, robotic modular head, I get a sense of deja vu.

While male sex toys have reached their technological zenith in Harmony, the basic driving design principle is centuries old. Left to their own devices, men have routinely reached for anthropomorphic masturbation aids. Meanwhile, women have their choice of Rabbits, Magic Wands and all forms of amorphous vibrators. When RealDoll releases Harmony’s robotic modular head later this year, it will be the closest we’ve come to the sex robots of Ex Machina and West World.

And, unsurprisingly, it’s a girl!

“So, the initial rollout will be the female head, and the reasoning for that is, you know, just based on our own product line and what we sell,” McMullen says. “You know, percentage-wise, we sell obviously a lot more female dolls than male.”

For McMullen, it’s simple economics, but it’s less obvious why sex dolls, and presumably sex robots, are more popular with men than women. With that in mind, I called Carol Queen, resident sexologist at the woman-run Bay Area sex shop Good Vibrations, to talk about the difference between men’s and women’s sex toys and, most important, why my first sex robot won’t have a penis. According to Queen, the explanation is a lesson in three parts: history, anatomy and psychology.

In the back of Good Vibrations’ flagship store in San Francisco’s “Tendernob” district (somewhere between the Tenderloin and Nob Hill), Queen has curated perhaps the most comprehensive collection of antique vibrators. For a full history of the vibrator, she’ll tell you there’s no better resource than Rachel P. Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm, but if you want to see that history for yourself, this is the place to be.

Queen walks me through the history of the vibrator, which has its roots in ancient Greece, as, it seems, so many of our sexual preoccupations do. The physician Claudius Galen successfully convinced the medical establishment that women’s uteruses were detaching and wandering around inside their bodies causing all sorts of problems.

According to The Technology of Orgasm, that “condition,” commonly known as hysteria, aka “womb disease,” consisted of a vague set of symptoms found primarily in women, cured through hysterical paroxysm, aka an orgasm. For centuries, doctors gave their female patients handjobs in order to treat a fake disease, but by the mid 1800s they’d grown tired of the finger labor, and the vibrator was born. The first known vibrator, the Manipulator, was a far cry from the discreet devices we have today.

“The first patented vibrator in the United States looked like a massage table with a hole in it, and a Magic-Wand-head-shaped orb coming out that the lady would ruck her bustle up and cuddle right up to,” Queen says. “The doctor would hit the steam and, like a steam-heat radiator, the steam would flow and the ball would vibrate and she’d come back next week a happy camper and want to do it again.”

Queen shows me a series of early hand-cranked vibrators that look like egg beaters and a rare, compressed-air device that immediately makes me think of Whip-Its for your clit, but it wasn’t until the introduction of electricity that vibrations became mainstream household appliances. The first battery-operated vibrator hit the market in the late 1800s and over the next century, the devices would go through a number of iterations. There were the early consumer models of the early 1900s, the design-driven deco stunners of the ’30s and ’40s and the experimental personal massagers of the ’50s and ’60s.

By the time the mother of them all, the Hitachi Magic Wand, hit the market in 1968, vibrators had already gone mainstream, and with the rise of the sexual revolution, we finally started talking about why they’d become so popular: MASTURBATION. While vibrators have taken countless forms, male sex toys never advanced much past their 17th-century origins.

“There’s evidence that seafaring fellows used to take companions with them of the inanimate variety, called dame de voyage, or homme de voyage if they were gay,” Queen says. “And they were created to be inanimate sex companions, which evidently was better than not having any sex companion at all, which is probably something that we could say about the people who purchase the dolls today.”

Over time they would evolve from the makeshift ragdolls to the hyper-lifelike silicone RealDolls, with leather, rubber and latex versions in between, but they all attempted to mimic the human form.

While male and female sex toys followed two distinct paths, in both cases form followed function. Both male and female sex toys were historically designed to give the user an orgasm, but only one of us was optimized to orgasm from penetrative sex. As Queen points out, the clitoris and the head of the penis are essentially the same body part. Only the clit doesn’t get the same attention as the dick head during the old in-and-out.

“What optimizes female orgasm is clitoral stimulation, and there isn’t adequate clitoral stimulation during intercourse, and it’s just that simple,” Queen says. “The clitoris and the penis are basically the same thing. If you ask the guy to get off without touching his penis, except sort of randomly a little bit, like he could get as turned on as he wants, but no grabbing, no thrusting into his hand, no back and forth with lube, no rubbing on the sheets even, no any of the things that he usually does. Some men are sexual athletes and could find a way to do it, but most cannot.”

When you consider the statistics, the fact that there’s not a whole lot of demand for toys that look like dicks isn’t all that surprising. In her seminal work on the subject, The Case of Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, Elisabeth A. Lloyd found that only 25 percent of women reported routinely orgasming from vaginal sex. Studies show that women are far more likely, on the whole, to orgasm from masturbation (and you don’t need a penis for that).

If you want to really understand why the world’s first sex robots are basically AI-equipped blow-up dolls, though, Queen says you have to get inside a man’s head — the one on his shoulders. She points to the widely held belief that men are more visual creatures. That ocular preoccupation has been used to explain why we value looks over brains and watch more porn than our female counterparts. Queen believes there’s also a level of pride that limits a man’s imagination.

“When we start to talk to men versus women about the question of using sex toys, there really are a lot of men who are hesitant to use toys because it seems to them second-best, in a particular way,” she says. “There’s a complicated relationship that women might have about this kind of stuff, too, you know. Sometimes people do masturbate because they don’t have a partner, because they’re lonely and sexually frustrated and they want to take care of themselves, but sometimes people masturbate as a liberatory act, to take themselves out of the box of expectation, and there is a lot more discourse about that for women. A lot more.”

Queen argues that women have had to explore their sexuality in more depth as a result of historical sexual repression (hello, Galen). The necessarily politicized discourse that encourages women to explore their sexuality demystifies and even encourages the use of sexual aids that don’t resemble or act like a human at all. There’s also the whole “dicks are easy” thing.

“There’s this kind of encouragement that we give women — not that we don’t give it to men, but it was developed out of this need to talk to women around remedial issues like, ‘I don’t know for sure if I’m having an orgasm,’” she says. “And fellas know, at least if they’re ejaculating. Whether that’s the same as an orgasm is a whole other discussion, but at the very least most men find their penises at a relatively early age.”

Whether it’s simple economics, a history steeped in sexual inequality or our shared anatomy, the most sophisticated sex toys targeted at men today, the earliest manifestations of the sex robot, have all been designed to mimic women. That singular focus not only perpetuates issues of gender inequality, but it also limits the kinds of relationships we can have with our machines. In a world where everything is rife for disruption, we seem perfectly happy with robots that maintain the status quo. Queen believes that the mainstreaming of sex robots is inevitable. She imagines a day when we’ll be able to plug our dildos into our sensory systems and “feel the dildo’s feelings.”

But before we can expect sex machines that do more than serve a stereotypical straight male audience, we’ll have to think outside of the box.

Google Assistant is expected to hit iOS and washing machines

Google’s voice-controlled Assistant has only been available on Android and Home so far, but it might just spread its wings in the very near future. To start, Bloomberg tipsters claim that Google will use its I/O developer conference to launch Assistant on iOS as a free app. It wouldn’t have the deep integration that comes with Android, but you could use it to access content available in YouTube and other Google apps. The app would only be available in the US at first, but you might not mind so much when the same sources also hint that Assistant will also provide a boost to Google Photos and appliances.

Reportedly, Photos will use Assistant to help you create coffee table books from your image library. This will seem familiar to the Mac crowd (Apple offered iPhoto books for years), but the AI would help out by automatically including relevant images. You wouldn’t have to hand-pick snapshots if you didn’t want to. At least one book option would cost $10.

There’s also talk of Assistant reaching GE’s home appliances. You could ask your oven to heat up, for example, or check on the laundry. Details of the integration aren’t clear (can you talk directly to a device, or do you need your phone?), but it’s likely that you’ll only see this in new or very recent equipment. The one certainty: just like Amazon and Samsung, Google is determined to give its AI helper a foothold in your smart home.

Source: Bloomberg

Phishing campaign alerts DocuSign to customer data breach

A bizarre email address or an obvious misspelling are good indicators that the recent email telling you to reset your Apple ID password isn’t what it seems. But there are more sophisticated (and believable) phishing attacks you have to watch out for, like the recent Google Docs scam that linked out to a legit-looking web app. Last week, DocuSign spotted an uptick in phishing emails imitating the company’s branding. Being in the business of secure document management, it’s not uncommon for DocuSign’s name to be on the face of a phishing email; but upon further investigation the firm discovered why this particular campaign was so targeted: It’d been hacked.

As it turns out, “a malicious third party” had managed to break into a “non-core system” that DocuSign uses to send out service announcement emails. This is why the phishing campaign has been so accurately targeting customers, though the red flag here is that emails ask recipients to download a Microsoft Word document (containing malware), which isn’t something a genuine DocuSign email would ever request.

The company stresses the breached system contained only a list of email addresses, that it has since been secured, and that all other data and services were untouched. Obviously it’s still not a good look for DocuSign given data security is an integral part of its pitch, but it’s an important reminder that just because an email looks above board at first glance doesn’t mean it can be trusted.

Via: Krebs on Security

Source: DocuSign

Engadget giveaway: Win a GoPro Hero5 Session and CyberLink software!

With all that’s going on in the world, you could immerse yourself in the media or strike out to define your own narrative. This week’s giveaway is a starter kit for capturing the world as you see it and editing the output to your whims. CyberLink has provided us with its Director Suite 5 software package, including PowerDirector 15 for video editing (including 4K), PhotoDirector 8 for fine-tuning still images and more for audio and color editing. This software, along with a GoPro Hero5 Session for extremely portable capture, can get you started on your next creative project. All you need to do is head to the Rafflecopter widget below for up to three chances at winning this photo and video editing power combo, courtesy of CyberLink.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

• Entries are handled through the Rafflecopter widget above. Comments are no longer accepted as valid methods of entry. You may enter without any obligation to social media accounts, though we may offer them as opportunities for extra entries. Your email address is required so we can get in touch with you if you win, but it will not be given to third parties.
• Contest is open to all residents of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so direct your anger at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winners will be chosen randomly. One (1) winner will receive one (1) GoPro Hero5 Session camera and one (1) license for CyberLink’s Director Suite 5 software.
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of being contacted. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen. Make sure that the account you use to enter the contest includes your real name and a contact email. We do not track any of this information for marketing or third-party purposes.
• This unit is purely for promotional giveaway. Engadget and AOL are not held liable to honor warranties, exchanges or customer service.
• The full list of rules, in all its legalese glory, can be found here.
• Entries can be submitted until May 17th at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!

‘Sonic Forces’ will bring your fanfiction characters to life

Until now, Sonic Forces has looked like Sonic Generations 2 in all but name. With trailers showing off levels that switch between classic side scrolling and the 3D perspective of Sonic’s more modern adventures, you can forgive gamers for thinking they’ve played this all before. Today, however, Sega has revealed a third type of gameplay for Sonic Forces — levels where you control your very own customizable hero.

With Sonic’s cast of supporting characters not getting a lot of love from fans, Sega is throwing down the gauntlet to gamers and challenging them to do better. Players will be able to select one of seven different types of animal: wolf, rabbit, cat, dog, bear, bird and of course, hedgehog. While these options might just look like a way to bring fans’ wildest DeviantArt dreams to life, each animal will also offer their own unique passive ability. Wolf characters, for example, are able to automatically draw in nearby rings while bird-based heroes are blessed with the life-saving ability to double jump.

Thankfully, these levels also introduce a few active gameplay tweaks, introducing a slightly different take on your usual rapid ring collection. Instead of just Sonic’s standard platforming abilities, each loveably crafted mascot is also armed with a grappling hook and gadgets called Wispons. While the grappling hook allows players to traverse each level quickly, Wispons are versatile abilities that either come in the form of weapons or powerups that help you get around. It all sounds very Sonic Colors, but from where we’re sitting, that’s definite not a bad thing.

Sonic Forces is coming to PS4, Xbox One, PC and Nintendo Switch this holiday. Let’s just hope there’s some DLC to help gamers create the Sega’s ultimate memeing mascot — Sanic.

Instagram Copies Snapchat Yet Again With Face Filters and Rewinded Video

Instagram today introduced even more Snapchat-like features in the latest version of its app, including face filters, a customizable hashtag sticker, a “rewind” playback option for videos, and an eraser brush.

Just like Snapchat, the face filters allow users to add bunny ears, glasses, tiaras, and other virtual objects to their selfies. There are eight filters to choose from after tapping the new face icon in the bottom right corner of the camera.

The new customizable hashtag sticker can be added to photos by tapping the sticker icon at the top right of the screen. People watching an Instagram story can tap the sticker to visit the hashtag’s archive and explore related posts.

The new “Rewind” option simply enables users to make their videos play in reverse, while the eraser brush can remove parts of overlaid drawings or color.

The new features are available in the latest version of Instagram for iOS rolling out today on the App Store [Direct Link].

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Behind-The-Scenes Look Into Apple Park Shares Up Close Photos, Sketches, and History of New Campus

In a new article by Wired today, Apple has shared the first in-depth look inside its new Apple Park campus, providing glimpses into the “Ring” building’s original design, up-close images of the campus’ construction and interiors, and even personal tidbits about former CEO Steve Jobs’ connection to Apple Campus 2. As construction and updates on the site have stretched out over the years, current Apple CEO Tim Cook referred to Apple Park as the company’s “biggest project ever.”

Jobs’ vision of the campus dates back to 2004, when he and Jony Ive began discussing a reimagined headquarters, but it wasn’t until the company hired architect Norman Foster in 2009 that the plans began to ramp up. Meetings that Jobs had with architects working on the project lasted five or six hours, “consuming a significant amount of time in the last two years of Jobs’ life.” Jobs was so deep into the project that he even knew at what time of year he wanted timber for the campus’ walls to be cut.

He also had an idea for creativity-boosting “pods,” which would be specified for work, teamwork, socializing, etc, that eventually led to the original design of Apple Park to be represented as a clover leaf, or a propeller. Multiple factors eventually caused Jobs and the designers to push for a basic, circular shape, including the fact pointed out by Jobs’ teenage son that the propeller looked like male genitalia from an aerial perspective.

As with any Apple product, its shape would be determined by its function. This would be a workplace where people were open to each other and open to nature, and the key to that would be modular sections, known as pods, for work or collaboration. Jobs’ idea was to repeat those pods over and over: pod for office work, pod for teamwork, pod for socializing, like a piano roll playing a Philip Glass composition. They would be distributed demo­cratically.

Not even the CEO would get a suite or a similar incongruity. And while the company has long been notorious for internal secrecy, compartmentalizing its projects on a need-to-know basis, Jobs seemed to be proposing a more porous structure where ideas would be more freely shared across common spaces. Not totally open, of course—Ive’s design studio, for instance, would be shrouded by translucent glass—but more open than Infinite Loop.

By June 2010, Apple Park began a renewed life as the Spaceship building, or “Ring” as Apple calls it internally, that is now standing in Cupertino. Wired’s article goes into the day in 2011 when Jobs, weeks before he passed away, pitched the campus to the Cupertino City Council. “I think we do have a shot,” Jobs told the council, “of building the best office building in the world,” after mentioning that if Cupertino failed to approve of the company’s plans Apple could simply sell all of its property and move to somewhere nearby, like Mountain View.

A sketch of Apple Park’s evolution by Norman Foster
Looking back at the fall of 2011, when he succeeded Jobs, Tim Cook remembered the last time he held a conversation with Jobs. Cook said he and Jobs were watching Remember the Titans and discussing the mundane aspects of Apple Park — like figuring out which employees would reside in the main building — that nevertheless “was something that gave [Jobs] energy.”

Cook recalls the last time he discussed the campus with his boss and friend in the fall of 2011. “It was actually the last time I spoke to him, the Friday before he passed away,” Cook says. “We were watching a movie, Remember the Titans. I loved it, but I was so surprised he liked that movie. I remember talking to him about the site then. It was something that gave him energy. I was joking with him that we were all worried about some things being difficult, but we were missing the most important one, the biggest challenge of all.”

Which was?

“Deciding which employees are going to sit in the main building” and which would have to work in the outer buildings. “And he just got a big laugh out of it.”

The rest of the article goes into deep detail about the design and building materials Apple gathered when constructing Apple Park, and of course all the problems that came with construction. One roadblock was the canopies that are now adorned on the sides of the building, which Jobs was originally not a fan of, but were required to protect the all-glass building from the California sun.

Apple designers, including Ive’s own design team, and Foster + Partners architects had to overcome problems like finding the perfect color tint to the canopies, and ensure they had the right curve to deflect rain.

The purpose of the giant glass sliding doors of the Ring’s café — for which Apple even patented a take-home pizza container — was also inquired about by Wired:

“This might be a stupid question,” I say. “But why do you need a four-story glass door?”

Ive raises an eyebrow. “Well,” he says. “It depends how you define need, doesn’t it?”

Ultimately, the current designers and architects working on the campus believe that its end result represents Steve Jobs’ vision exactly as he had it all those years ago. “I would say that the big picture has not changed at all,” Foster mentioned. “If Steve could reappear, it would be as he conceived it when he last saw it as drawings. He’d find some of the details that were not addressed in his lifetime, but I believe he’d approve them.”

The rest of Wired’s look into Apple Park is worth a read, as it explores nearly every aspect of the campus’ construction, from the staircases, ventilation, door handles, text fonts in the elevators, and more. According to Ive, “This is our home, and everything we make in the future is going to start here.”

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Giphy iOS App Gains Ability to Turn GIFs Into Live Photos

A new update to the popular GIF-finding service Giphy this week has introduced Apple’s Live Photo support into the iOS app, letting users convert any GIF they want into a Live Photo (via Mac4Ever). This allows users to more easily see what is a GIF in their camera roll, since GIFs saved as images still don’t move when looked at in Photos. Giphy said the main point of the new update is to allow for custom animated iPhone lock screen wallpapers.

To create a Live Photo, users will need to first find a GIF they want in Giphy, tap on it, then tap the ellipses button underneath it to expand the sharing options. From there, Live Photos are represented by the same circular icon that Apple uses in the main Photos app, and tapping it will bring up two options: Save as Live Photo in Full Screen or Fit to Screen. In the Photos app, users can tap the image, tap the share sheet, and choose “use as wallpaper.”

There are a few compromises to using and saving GIFs as Live Photos, mainly including the low-quality nature of many of the GIFs on Giphy’s service, which won’t result in the best-looking iPhone wallpapers. Saving a GIF as a Live Photo also prevents it from being used natively as a GIF in Messages, where it would normally play on repeat. As a Live Photo, the image will move but only when pressed upon, as with any other Live Photo.

For those interested, Giphy is free to download on the iOS App Store [Direct Link], and anyone with an iPhone 6s or later can try out the new Live Photos feature.

Tag: Giphy
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