Mercedes-Benz and Vivint want to power your solar home

Tesla has been dominating home energy headlines in recent months, what with the release of its solar roof panels and residential batteries, but Elon Musk’s company isn’t the only one getting into the home energy game. Mercedez-Benz announced on Thursday that it is teaming with solar-energy company Vivint to develop an all-in-one solar/battery setup of its own.

Essentially, Mercedes is marrying its residential battery technology, which is based on the same designs that it uses for its electric and hybrid vehicles, with Vivint’s existing home solar panel business. Each system will employ 2.5 kWh cells that can be daisy-chained into a 20 kWh array, depending on the customer’s energy requirements. For reference, 20 kWh is enough to run most of your home’s major appliances for 20 hours straight.

Mercedes’ batteries are coming to California first. Starting in Q2, California residents will be able to purchase (or finance the purchase of) the cells, though the offer is currently only valid for new Vivint customers.

Source: Mercedes-Benz

Soon you’ll be able to pay friends by saying ‘Ok Google’

Google will make it harder for that friend in your group to make excuses when chipping in for food. The tech titan’s voice assistant will be able send personal payments for you in the coming months, just like its rival Siri can, so long you’re in the US. Simply tell it to “Send John $10 for pizza” or something similar and authenticate the transaction with your fingerprint or password to send cash. Your recipient will then receive an email about your payment. The big G recently tweaked its API to make any card associated with your account available on all its apps and on third-party applications that use Google Payments. That’s why all you need to do to be able send cash through Assistant is to link a debit card to your system.

Google has also introduced a new way to get offers from your favorite stores. Android Pay will soon show you offers from merchants whose loyalty cards are linked to your account whenever you walk into their shops. One of the first participating companies is Panera Bread, which plans to roll out the capability all over the country. In addiiton, whenever you apply for a loyalty card using your phone number, you’ll get a notification that’ll make it easier to link it to Android Pay for future visits.

Folks in Brazil, Canada, Russia, Spain and Taiwan might be able to enjoy some of these non-US-exclusive features, as well, since Google plans to deploy Android Pay in those countries. Finally, Mountain View promises a streamlined mobile checkout experience for PayPal users, so keep an eye out if you’d rather pay for purchases using your PayPal funds.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here.

Source: Google

Watch an AI teach itself to drive in ‘GTA V’ on Twitch

While automakers are still negotiating with local and state governments to let autonomous cars test drive on open streets, one programmer has found a more accessible proving ground to teach AI how to be a motorist: Grand Theft Auto V. It’s not the first time folks have used the game to train their self-driving vehicles — but you can watch this one learn in real-time on Twitch. One warning: If you’re expecting a graceful, law-abiding AI driver…don’t.

Programmer Harrison ‘Sentdex’ Kinsley created the AI (or “convolutional neural network”), named it Charles, and set it loose in the game to teach itself through deep learning. While that sounds advanced, so far Charles hasn’t quite mastered avoiding collisions with cars, dividers, signs and people. If this AI hit the road today, it would have some real-life police after it quickly — so long as it didn’t hurl itself into the water first (a frequent fate on the livestream).

As Kinsley describes in the Twitch description, Charles “learns and takes all actions based on single frames at a time, and bases his decisions on just pixel data. Charles only sees exactly what you see.” In other words, what a self-driving car would “see” if it just relied on cameras on real roads. What the AI can’t do yet is remember: Kinsley didn’t program in memory, forcing it to make split-second decisions one frame at a time, like so.

If you want to get into the nitty gritty, Kinsley documented his multi-part process building Charles in Python. Whether this AI becomes a better driver and validates educating neural networks through simulation, at least we can chuckle that even machines have trouble driving these games.

Via: Rock Paper Shotgun, Prosthetic Knowledge

Source: Twitch

2017 Google Play Award winners excel in design, functionality, delightfulness

Why it matters to you

Google’s second annual Play Awards competition has drawn to a close, and the winners represent a diverse range of apps and developers.

Last year, Google hosted its inaugural Google Play Awards at Google I/O, its annual developer conference in Mountain View, California, during which it crowned the year’s best Play Store games and apps. And this year, it announced the winners of the second annual competition at an gala on Thursday evening.

The competition was fierce. The contenders were broken out over 12 categories, and had to adhere to a set of criteria for consideration. All had to have high user ratings, pass Google’s bars for technical performance, and have received an update or been launched since April of last year.

Memrise took home the Best App category, thanks to a “beautiful design,” “intuitive [interface]” and “high user appeal.” The judging panel was especially impressed by its creativity — users are tasked with “duping enemy agents” in a “distant Universe” by demonstrating mastery of languages including French, Spanish, German, English, Chinese, Japanese, and more.

The Best Game award went to Transformers: Forged to Fight by Kabam, which won Google’s judges over with “strong mechanics,” “stellar graphics,” “strong engagement,” and “retention tactics.”

In the Standout Indie category, Mushroom 11 took the crown for “artistic design,” “gameplay mechanics,” and “overall polish.” A combination of intuitive touch controls, challenging puzzles, eerily beautiful visuals, and ethereal electronica music by The Future Sound of London sealed the deal.

The Standout Startup category went to Hooked by Telepathic, which “offers a unique experience” while “achieving strong organic install growth.” The Google team was impressed by the app’s innovative method of storytelling — spooky thrillers unfold message by message over a series of texts.

Runtastic got the Best Android Wear Experience award — Google praised its “great design,” ability to “delight,” and “functionality.” The judging panel lavished special praise on its robust activity tracking, audio coach, leaderboard features, built-in music player, and integration with Google’s Fit platform.

The Best VR Experience award went to Virtual Virtual Reality by Tender Claws, which Google’s judges called “highly immersive.” The inventive title, which runs on Google’s Daydream VR platform, tasks players with tasks like jumping between realities and “vacuuming up” worlds.

WOORLD by Funomena won the Best AR Experience. Its “creative” and “imaginative” technology, pioneered with the help of Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, was one of the most effective uses of Googles’s depth-sensing, spatial-tracking Tango technology in Google Play, the judging panel said.

Red Bull TV won the best TV Experience for its “large-screen format” and “intuitive experience.” Google noted that the it adhered closely to Android’s style guideline, and made especially good use of Android TV’s built-in search functions.

The competition’s other winners included ShareTheMeal by the United Nations, which won Best Social Impact for affecting “meaningful” social change for “people around the world”; IFTTT, which took home the Best Accessibility Experience award for “[serving] people with disabilities” and “special needs”; Animal Jam by WildWorks, which won Best App for Kids for encouraging “creativity,” “exploration,” and “education”; and Blizzard’s Hearthstone trading card game, which won the Best Multiplayer Award.

The Google Play store is a big deal — it’s the primary way the more than 2 billion Android users around the world find and update apps and games. It’s estimated to generate more than $3.3 billion in revenue annually, and Google said that over the past year alone, more than 85 billion apps and gamest were downloaded on Google Play.

Duolingo releases a Japanese language course for iOS

The days of teaching yourself Japanese exclusively through Crunchyroll shows are coming to an end. Online language learning company Duolingo announced on Wednesday that it has released a Japanese language course for its iOS app with an Android version dropping soon.

This won’t be some dumbed-down anglicized lesson plan either. Rather than using romaji, which are Japanese words spelled out with Roman letters (ie, “kawaii” or “Hi de koroshimasu”), this language course will teach you to understand 100 Kanji and all the Hiragana characters.

And unlike some of Duolingo’s other language courses, whose exercises sometimes more closely resembled MadLibs entries than anything you’d ever expect to hear someone actually say, the Japanese course features a strong focus on real-world interactions like ordering food and asking directions.

The iOS version is available now though there is no word yet on when exactly the Android version will be released. Either way, you’ve got precious little time to study before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics roll around.

Kickstarter gives startups the tools to help prevent hardware flops

Turning a product idea into a real, finished piece of hardware takes a great deal of hard work — just ask the folks behind the Zano mini-drone. A few years ago, an independent study even found that nine percent of crowdfunding projects never even deliver. Now, Kickstarter is finally doing something about the problem with a new program called Hardware Studio that aims to coach new inventors and would-be entrepreneurs through the ins and outs of building a working product they can bring to market.

The Hardware Studio is a partnership between project management consultants Dragon Innovation (which helped shepherd projects like Pebble and MakerBot) and supply chain company Avnet. Together the three companies will lend their expertise on crowdfunding, prototyping, scaling, manufacturing and more. There are parts to the Hardware Studio: The first is a free toolkit with webinars, tools, tutorials and community resources that anyone can access. The second is a more hands-on, application-based Hardware Studio Connection that gives creators direct access to the experts at Dragon and Avnet, as well as discounted pricing and additional support.

Kickstarter is actually has a little bit of catching up to do in this area. Last year, competing crowdfunding site Indiegogo cut a deal with Arrow Electronics to give creators preferred pricing as well as design, manufacturing and supply chain consulting. Earlier this year, Indiegogo and IBM also announced creators on its platform could make use of Watson’s IoT platform.

The Kickstarter Hardware Studio official launches in September, but eager creators can sign up to be notified once its live.

Source: Kickstarter Hardware Studio

MLB’s VR push doesn’t include 360-degree live games

Major League Baseball’s At Bat streaming subscription service and app already adds an extra dimension to watching baseball games on TV or in-person. Starting next month, however, fans will be able to actually take all the live game footage and real-time data from MLB.tv into virtual reality with Google Daydream and MLB At Bat VR.

While Daydream still can’t make your big league dreams and put you on the mound just yet, At Bat VR offers a much more immersive experience than keeping the app open on your phone: live game footage plays in the center of the field of view, with a 3D strike zone map floating just below it. All the stats and data are still there, floating on either side of the footage window. The app also includes a library of behind-the-scenes, 360-degree video clips to explore, but there won’t be any live 360-degree game streams just yet. According to Variety, however, the league hopes to stream a full game in VR sometime before the end of the 2017 season. Elsewhere, the MLB also announced it will be livestreaming weekly games on Facebook without the frustrating blackouts that still apply to some games.

At Bat VR will be live on Google Daydream starting June 1st, with other VR platforms to follow in the future. The app is free to users with an MLB At Bat subscription, but you’ll need a MLB.tv Premium subscription to watch live games. While upgrading to virtual reality will involve buying new hardware for most people, MLB’s VP of games and VR strategy Jamie Leece claims the field of view in VR is equivalent to the biggest HD screens on the market — and it obviously takes up a lot less space.

For all the latest news and updates from Google I/O 2017, follow along here.

Facebook will stream live ‘Counter-Strike’ eSports events

Gaming and eSports have definitely hit the mainstream media. In fact, you can find FIFA tournaments live on ESPN and TBS is hyping Counter Strike: Global Offensive games as if they were championship boxing events. With Twitter and Sony already jumping into the lucrative industry, it was only a matter of time before Facebook joined the fray. In an announcement today, eSports leader ESL announced it has cut a deal with the social networking behemoth to stream exclusive events and content in six languages, all of it centered around the elite Rank S Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competition.

According to a release, ESL will bring 5,500 hours of esports content to Facebook, with about 1,500 of that exclusive to the platform. That content includes the elite Rank S Counter-Strike: Global Offensive matches as well as ESL One and Intel Extreme Masters events, all of it streamed in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and German. The network has also announced an original 30-minute Facebook Live series that will look back at CS:GO match highlights and showcase top players as well as quickly rising talent.

Facebook and ESL’s eSports programming starts streaming in June and fans can tune in on ESEA’s Facebook page here.

Source: ESL Gaming

‘Destiny 2’ has the fundamentals to be a solid sequel

When it comes to serialized media, be it film, comics or video games, rarely does someone say with conviction that “the sequel was better.” The expectations are always too high. A good sequel not only has to embody the best of its predecessor, but also be new and original enough to stand on its own. Destiny 2’s gameplay premiere event didn’t completely assure me that it would surpass the original game, but it’s off to a great start.

It’s an effort borne from Bungie’s vast experience in creating strong sequels. Much like the games in the original Halo Trilogy, Destiny 2 borrows the most iconic elements of its predecessor, but tries to up the ante. The new game still has the same solid gunplay and excellent controls that defined the original, for instance, but gives more control over their Guardian’s loadout — letting them equip multiple weapons of the same type simultaneously. Fighting through waves of enemies still charges a super move, but now each character type has a new, more powerful attack that spawns an ephemeral sword, shield or staff for high-powered melee attacks.

Somehow, these minor changes to the original Destiny paradigm make the new game feel like a larger epic. The the new super moves made me feel ridiculously powerful, and the strong narrative of the demo missions I played did a better job of making my character feel like the hero than any mission I remember from my time with the original game. On their own, Destiny 2’s gameplay tweaks wouldn’t be enough to warrant a full sequel — but the world they’re wrapped in seem to push the experience beyond the purview of a regular update.

The universe just feels larger. The game’s opening mission, for instance, violates the safety of the original game’s Tower hub area, putting it under attack from a new threat and spreading Destiny’s heroes to the far reaches of the solar system. This sets the sequel’s narrative to unfold across four new planets: Titan, Io, Nessus and a new area on Earth. These new maps feel grand in scale, each with their own personality, architecture and breathtaking vistas. This new, spread out universe has the potential to feel more alive.

And that’s the crux of everything we experienced at Bungie’s Destiny 2 gameplay premiere: potential. The game, its characters and the world it’s building bleeds with it. From the PC-version of the game’s excellent keyboard and mouse control implementation (not to mention the gorgeous, ultra high frame rate graphics) and the improved matchmaking and clan management tools, to the deeper narrative the game’s campaign missions tease — Destiny 2 has the building blocks it needs to surpass the original. All Bungie needs to do is stick the landing.

Four-legged, 3D-printed soft robot can crawl over rough terrains like pebbles

Why it matters to you

This versatile soft robot could one day be used to scrabble over rocks as part of search and rescue missions.

Robots are getting better and better at dealing with the real world, but one area a lot can still struggle with is moving on rough surfaces like sand or pebbles. That is a challenge that a new project developed by engineers at the University of California, San Diego tries to grapple with — resulting in a 3D-printed, four-legged soft robot that is designed to be able to crawl over all manner of different terrains.

“Our robot is actuated using compressed air, allowing it to achieve complex motions without a complex control scheme,” Michael Tolley, a mechanical engineering professor at the UCSD, told Digital Trends. “The design was enabled by using a multi-material 3D printer which allows us to fabricate complex geometries made from digital combinations of soft and rigid materials.”

According to Tolley and co-researcher Dylan Drotman, the soft robot was inspired by biological systems like the octopus, which are able to squeeze their bodies through extremely small openings due to their lack of a rigid skeleton. The robot’s walking gait was meanwhile inspired by terrestrial quadrupeds like the turtle.

“Multi-material 3D printing is a key enabler as it allows us to rapidly fabricate much more complex 3D soft designs than previous methods such as molding, which has been primarily used for previous soft robots,” Tolley continued. “We have also demonstrated in related work how multi-material 3D printing can be used to print gradients in stiffness to reduce stress concentrations.”

Next up, the researchers plan to equip the robot with sensors that will let it better understand its local environment and potentially to find a use in an area like search and rescue missions. It is unlikely that the final form of the robot will be exactly like this one but it is still a valuable contribution toward robotics’ eventual goal of creating a robot that is able to deal with any scenario thrown at it.

Tolley and Drotman’s 3D-printed robot will be shown at the upcoming Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Robotics and Automation, running (or should that be crawling?) from May 29 to June 3 in Singapore.