‘Secrets of the Empire’ is a new VR experience coming to Disney resorts

Why it matters to you

Later this year, Star Wars fans will be able to experience the force like never before thanks to the virtual reality wizards at The Void.

Disney has commissioned the virtual reality experts at The Void to create a new experience for Star Wars fans visiting the company’s holiday resorts in Florida and California. Secrets of the Empire will offer visitors the opportunity to step into a galaxy far, far away like never before.

Lucasfilm, ILMxLAB, and The Void are all contributing to the project, to ensure that it is both entirely faithful to the franchise, and truly cutting edge in its use of VR technology. Once the headset goes on, everything you see, hear, touch, and even smell will be plucked straight from the Star Wars universe, according to Engadget.

Secrets of the Empire is the first experience that The Void is creating for Disney, having announced its induction into the company’s Accelerator mentorship program in a blog post published in July. Of course, the group has plenty of experience working to translate major franchises into exciting virtual reality experiences.

The Void is perhaps best known for Ghostbusters: Dimension, a VR experience that let visitors to Madame Tussauds New York fulfill their dreams of strapping on a proton pack and bustin’ some ghosts. The company’s edge over other outfits producing VR experiences is the fact that its tech allows multiple users to share the same virtual space.

That looks set to be a big component of Secrets of the Empire. An official announcement on The Void’s website confirmed that the experience will allow participants to interact with their friends, family, and Star Wars characters alike as they explore the virtual world untethered.

“At ILMxLAB, we want people to step inside the worlds of our stories,” said Vicki Dobbs Beck, the executive at the helm of Industrial Light & Magic’s innovation lab. “Through our collaboration with The Void, we can make this happen as guests become active participants in an unfolding Star Wars adventure.”

The Void is set to open gaming sites at Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where visitors will be able to experience Secrets of the Empire for themselves. The attraction is expected to make its debut this holiday season.

Google tweaks Google Play search results to surface best-performing apps

Why it matters to you

Have you ever downloaded an app only to realize that it’s a battery hog and doesn’t run on your phone? This tweak should change that.

The Google Play Store is a big place, but Google wants to help you trawl through all its offerings. How? By updating how it ranks apps to take into consideration how an app performs.

Specifically, the company will take into consideration things like excessive battery usage, slow rendering, and how often the app crashes — all data it collects through crash reports and in app reviews on the Google Play Store. In fact, according to Google’s blog post, around half of the 1-star reviews on Google Play mention app stability in some form or other. And, as a general trend, developers who put their focus on app stability end up seeing an increase in their app ratings on Google Play.

So how will this affect you? Well if you search for an app and there are two that fit your criteria, the more stable app will show up at the top — even if the apps are built to do the same thing. That’s a good thing — the first app may not immediately appear preferable, but in the long run it will use less battery life and crash less.

That doesn’t mean that badly performing apps are doomed — developers can take advantage of Google’s Play Console, which gives them the tools they need to improve the stability of their apps. Using the Play Console, developers can even get a pre-launch report before the app launches to consumers, which will help developers find issues before the app is widely available.

Google has been placing a great deal of emphasis on surfacing only the best apps in Google Play. The company recently launched the “Android Excellence” program, which is aimed at highlighting the best Android apps that meet certain criteria — like great design, optimization across a range of devices, and great performance. The Android Excellence program, however, only really shows apps that Google chooses. The recent tweaks to search in Google Play, on the other hand, will apply to all apps in the Google Play Store.

It will be interesting to see how the changes affect apps across the Google Play Store — and whether these moves will result in better-performing apps in general.

Celebrity Twitter accounts act a lot like bots, study finds

Why it matters to you

The Cambridge team developed an algorithm that can accurately identify Twitter bots, and showed that some celebrity Twitter accounts act robotic.

It doesn’t take much to imagine that, beneath their fancy clothes and sun-tanned skin, many celebrities are actually androids. Their plastic smiles practically give it away. That may be hard to prove but a new study out of the University of Cambridge lends the idea some support — apparently celebrity Twitter accounts behave a lot like bots.

“When I first scraped through Twitter data I found automation,” Zafar Galani, a Cambridge PhD student who led the research, told Digital Trends. “I immediately wanted to see if bots exist on our social platforms because, if they do, that opens up a whole array of questions. What are they doing? Who created them? Are they bad? How do they impact our lives?”

To identify the Twitter bots, Galani and his team used Botometer, which analyzes a Twitter account’s data in search of bot-like activity. To their surprise, they found the system to be imprecise, so they took a manual approach and instead asked undergraduate students to review accounts, looking out for bot-like signals such as account creation date, the type of content posted, and tweet frequency.

The students analyzed a total of 3,535 accounts, determining that 1,525 were bots and 2,010 we humans. From there, the researchers created an algorithm that uses 21 features to pinpoint bots. Applying their algorithm to Twitter, they were able to identify bots with roughly 86 percent accuracy.

There are some clear signals that can be used to spot bots, such as the number of tweets from a given account. Galani and his team discovered that “celebrity” accounts with ten million or more followers share some of these features.

“Bots typically tweet a lot and upload content … in order to gain attention of their audience,” Galani said. “Celebrities too do exactly that, but instead of uploading depersonalized content, like bots do, they upload and share content and news from their daily lives.”

For Galani, it’s not much of a surprise that celebrity accounts act in bot-like ways. Indeed, seen from another perspective, perhaps it’s the bots that behave like celebrities.

“Bots exist, and they evolve, just like humans do, because we create them,” Galani said. “They behave — good or bad — as humans do. They are a manifestation of our online lives.”

Innovative drone uses microspines to land vertically on walls

Why it matters to you

This unique drone concept could be used for extended missions, such as surveillance to inspection tasks.

When you consider all the incredible things drones are capable of, their most remarked-upon feature is rarely their ability to come in for a landing. That is not the case for the Multimodal Autonomous Drone (S-MAD), a bio-inspired fixed-wing drone that is capable of autonomously perching and taking off from vertical surfaces, both indoors and outdoors.

The drone was developed by researchers at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada, and was recently presented at the Living Machine 2017 conference, where it was received the “Best Robotics Paper Award.” According to its creators, the S-MAD was inspired by birds and flying squirrels, and possesses the ability to perch on rough vertical surfaces using a series of “microspines.” It can do this under a range of different weather conditions. It’s described as the first vehicle of its kind to exploit thrust in order to perform a rapid pitch-up maneuver that lets it rapidly slow its trajectory before touchdown. This allows it to take advantage of thrust assist to create a smooth and controlled descent towards the wall, which reduces the requirements for sensing, control, and energy absorption.

“The maneuvers starts with the airplane flying at cruise speed,” Professor Alexis Desbiens told Digital Trends. “Upon wall detection by a laser sensor, the airplane initiates a pitch-up maneuver to rapidly slow down. During that maneuver, the thrust is increased to maintain a small but negative vertical speed, and the control surfaces are commanded to maintain the perching attitude. In that configuration, the airplane can travel significant distance before touching a wall which reduces the requirements on sensing. Ultimately, the microspine’s feet will touch the wall, and the integrated suspension will absorb the remaining kinetic energy. The impact is detected with an onboard accelerometer to turn off the propeller. The airplane then settles onto the wall and can remain in that configuration, using very little energy or even recharging, for extended duration. When desired, the airplane can then take off again by using thrust and flying away from the wall.”

Desbiens said the drone is designed for carrying out extended missions; an idea University of Sherbrooke researchers have been exploring for some time. Earlier this year, we wrote about a previous drone Desbiens and his colleagues created, designed to fly short distances, land in a body of water like a lake, recharge using solar panels built into its fixed wings, and then take off again. Compared to that drone, S-MAD seems more a bit more versatile, since in most places it is easier to find vertical surfaces than it is evenly spaced bodies of water.

Possible uses for S-MAD, Desbiens says, include long duration surveillance, energy harvesting, inspection of structures, and reconfigurable sensor networks.

Is your selfie game weak? Scientist are building an app that will guide you

Why it matters to you

With this algorithm-powered app, you can remove the guesswork from snapping the perfect selfie.

Since “selfie” was named the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year in 2013, these digital self-portraits have only become more prolific. They’re taken practically everywhere by everyone, from parents to presidents and astronauts to macaques. But with more selfies come worse selfies and more amateurs who haven’t quite mastered the method.

In yet another example of science solving real-world problems, researchers from the University of Waterloo have created a smartphone app that uses an algorithm to guide the perfect selfie.

To find the parameters of a perfect selfie, researchers Dan Vogel and Qifan Li asked thousands of users on Mechanical Turk to review hundreds of artificial selfies, which they generated from 3D digital scans. The Turks were asked to rate the selfies, each of which differed slightly in composition, labeling them as good, bad, or meh.

“We focused on basic principles of composition,” Vogel, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, told Digital Trends, “face size, face position, and lighting direction. These parameters are very fundamental to any photograph. On a technical level, we could also control them very accurately in the thousands of ‘virtual’ selfies we created using 3D computer graphics, and we could recognize them in real time when a person was taking a selfie [by] using computer vision techniques.”

By mathematically modeling the selfie scores, Vogel and Li were able to create an algorithm that can guide a user in how to move his or her camera to take the best selfie. To demonstrate that the algorithm was indeed a good director, the researchers asked real people to take selfies under the app’s guidance and again asked Mechanical Turks to rate them. With the algorithm’s assistance, selfie takers saw a 26-percent improvement in their photos, according to the study.

The researchers are now considering ways to commercialize their technology, both as an app for selfies and to guide photos of other kinds.

“We’ve talked about applying our virtual photo methodology to photos of products for buy-and-sell auction sites like eBay, or real estate photos, vacation landscapes, you name it,” Vogel said. “It really comes down to generating thousands of highly controlled photographs than can be rated by thousands of people so we can generate mathematical models.”

With smart underwear, engineers hope to fend off debilitating back pain

Why it matters to you

This pair of smart underwear could help reduce back pain and strain.

Imagine getting dressed in the morning but, before you pull on your pants and jacket, you slip into a pair of smart underwear.

Engineers at Vanderbilt University have developed a powered undergarment, which they say can limit back pain and strain. In a recent study, the mechanized clothing was shown to decrease stress on lower back muscles during bending and lifting tasks.

“The way in which this smart undergarment reduces stress on the low back takes advantage of natural leaning and lifting biomechanics,” Karl Zelik, the principal investigator on the project, told Digital Trends. “As a person leans forward or lifts an object, his or her trunk and hips flex, and buttocks naturally protrudes backwards. When wearing the smart undergarment, these motions stretch the embedded elastic bands which run in parallel to the spine.”

The elastic bands in the smart underwear take over some — but not all — of the work that usually falls on lower back muscles and ligaments.

Joe Howell / Vanderbilt

To test the underwear, the researchers gave them to eight subjects, who were asked to lift 25-pound and 55-pound weights, while bending at 30, 60, and 90 degrees. The underwear was shown to reduce lower back muscle activity by between 15 and 45 percent on average.

Although some of us may bend and lift throughout the day, we are not constantly in need of assistance, so Zelik and mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Erik Lamers, who helped design the device, embedded a small electromechanical clutch into the underwear that allows it to be turned on and off at its wearer’s discretion.

“When performing daily tasks that do not put heavy strain on your back you can disengage … the elastic assistance, such that the smart garment just feels like normal clothing,” Zelik said. “If you are about to lift something heavy or you need to lean for a prolonged period of time, then you can simply engage the elastic bands to assist you.”

The wearer can either use an app or double tap the chest to engage and disengage the clutch.

Smart, powered clothing — from undergarments to this modular exoskeleton lets disabled children walk on their own two feet to exoskeletons — have emerged as a promising way to take the strain off of our bodies both at home, in public, and in the workplace.

“Currently we have smartphones and smartwatches,” Zelik pointed out. “Smart clothing may be the next big thing because it has the potential to do a whole lot more in terms of improving societal health and preventing injuries.”

Newton adds a useful Tidy Inbox feature to its email client

Email just got a whole lot better because it’s so much less noisy.

Newton, a simple and powerful email platform, has released another one of its so-called Superchargers to clean up its users’ messy inboxes.

Formerly called CloudMagic, Newton has transformed into one of the most elegant and powerful email platforms out there, and it’s available on practically every platform, including Android. With today’s update, the Tidy Inbox feature brings Google’s email tabs to any account, from Gmail to Outlook to Yahoo, and it works really well.

Like Outlook’s Focused Inbox, Newton tries to determine whether an email should be filtered to one of currently two sub-categories — Social or Newsletter — or pass through to the main inbox. The feature works on the server side, so the same results show up on all platforms at once. If an email gets filtered by mistake, it’s easy to just make that correction and future emails from that sender will go directly to the inbox.

Newton comes with a 14-day free trial and is $49.99 after that — and in my opinion is worth every penny. I’ve gone through nearly every email platform out there, and Newton is the only one I’ve stuck with.

Moto Z2 Force vs. HTC U11: With so much in common, it’s a tight race

There are few ways to stand out in the high-end smartphone market nowadays.

The high-end phone space is amazingly tough to break into in any real numbers, and even established brands like Motorola and HTC find it hard. Both have taken to the strategy of low- and mid-range phones to bolster their business, but at the same time look for the big sales and brand recognition boosts that flagship phones bring — this year, it’s the Moto Z2 Force and HTC U11.

We’ve learned plenty about the HTC U11 already, and in knowing so much about it, it was surprising to see the Moto Z2 Force announced with a large number of similarities to HTC’s latest flagship. So what do we do? Compare them head to head, of course. Here’s what you need to know.

Much about the hardware on the Moto Z2 Force and HTC U11 is extremely similar. They both have a 5.5-inch 16:9 display with a front-mounted fingerprint sensor, leading to near-identical widths and heights. The Z2 Force is of course a few millimeters thinner, though most of the thickness of the U11 is in the middle where it curves to its highest point. Both metal frames are smooth and slick, and both backs are similarly low on frills — the big differentiator being the U11’s sparkling glass back to the mundane and functional metal of the Z2 Force.

It’s surprising just how much is similar between these two.

Even though the U11’s screen is LCD and the Z2 Force’s is AMOLED, both are crisp, bright, and colorful at QHD resolution. I’d give the U11 a slight nod in terms of overall quality on account of the clarity of its Gorilla Glass 5 screen covering, but the Z2 Force of course has a completely shatterproof lens covering its panel. The plastic coating on top is clearly easier to casually scuff and scratch … but when you drop it, it’s going to hold up. While you’re thinking of potential mishaps, you should also consider the U11 has IP67 water-resistance, while the Z2 Force sticks with Motorola’s typical “water-repellant” coating.

The similarities between the phones continue on the inside, where you’ll find the same Snapdragon 835 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and an SD card slot. Things diverge only slightly in battery capacity, where the Z2 Force’s 2730mAh battery is 9% smaller than the U11’s 3000mAh. People have generally expected more battery in both of these phones, and even though either one can give a normal user a full day of life, the Z2 Force offers just a bit less wiggle room for the heavier days.

Those internal specs lead to great performance on both phones, with Motorola having one of the most sought-after “customized” Android experiences available today and HTC continuing to keep its clean, consistent, and simple software approach. Motorola has a slight upper hand here in that it has its hands on far less of the interface overall, only adding where it makes sense, but HTC isn’t far behind — and in both cases you feel like you’re very much still using an Android phone. Novices and experts alike would be happy to use either one.

The U11 has a better overall camera experience, but we still tip our cap to Motorola’s software.

When it comes to cameras, the Z2 Force was coming into a tough battle after everyone has generally concluded that the U11 has one of the best (some would say the best) cameras available in a smartphone today. The U11 keeps things simple with a single lens, all the right hardware and some post-processing that provides amazing shots in all sorts of lighting conditions. The Moto Z2 Force’s main camera just can’t match the U11 in dark or mixed light scenes, though its secondary black-and-white camera is super fun and its software is clean and easy to use.

The final part of the core smartphone experience to compare is audio. That’s where these phones are the same … but also inferior to the competition — neither one has a 3.5mm headphone jack. Most people don’t care what the excuses reasons are; they just want their headphone jack back, and adding an adapter in the box isn’t the fix. Sticking with audio, though, the U11 has a dramatically better speaker offering than the Z2 Force. Its combination of the earpiece loudspeaker and bottom-firing speaker give you stereo separation and much higher volumes than the Z2 Force’s single earpiece speaker that’s just barely loud enough to be acceptable.

As was the case in our last Moto Z2 Force comparison, the Moto Mod aspect is the one true wildcard when comparing to a phone from any other manufacturer. Though it forces the Moto Z2 Force into a very similar design as its predecessors, you can expand and augment your phone experience with swappable Mods to add all kinds of capabilities. Spend $20 to $300 on each of these Mods, and you can get practical things like simple covers, wireless charging, or an extra battery, or more off-the-wall additions like a 360-degree camera or a full-on projector. Moto Mods won’t speak to everyone, but for those who do think they’re neat, there’s nowhere else to go to get that kind of experience.

Deciding between two similar phones

With so much shared between these two phones, it seems only logical to compare them. With the same general size, shape, specs and qualities, if you’re drawn to one you’d likely also be happy with the other. But there are differences to sway you.

On a point-by-point basis, the U11 is probably the better phone — but the Z2 Force is close.

Right off the top, the Moto Z2 Force is the more expensive device by roughly $100 — and that’s before you add in the cost of a Moto Mod to cover the back. And though it offers a shatterproof display, it comes up short of the U11 in terms of battery life and overall camera quality.

The U11 is a far more traditional and conservative phone in that it doesn’t offer any sort of standout features to compete with things like Moto Mods, the front-facing camera flash, or a secondary black-and-white camera sensor. One could also easily argue that HTC’s software, while good, is lacking just a tad behind Motorola’s exceptional offering. But those are small issues on an otherwise exceptional phone.

So which one is right for you? Well, you’ll have to weigh those very specific points listed above to see which speaks to you most. Many will be inclined to go with the HTC U11 because of its lower price and better core experience, and on a point-by-point basis it’s probably the better phone. But with so much shared between the two, the x-factors in the Z2 Force may sway some people the other way if they’re looking for something a bit more unique.

Moto Z2 Force

• Moto Z2 Force reviewl
• Moto Z2 Force specs
• This is the Moto 360 Camera Mod
• The ultimate guide to Moto Mods
• Moto Z2 Force vs. Galaxy S8
• Join the discussion in the forums!

Verizon
AT&T
T-Mobile
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Best Buy

HTC U11

• HTC U11 review
• HTC U11 specs
• Manufacturing the U11: Behind the scenes
• Join our U11 forums
• HTC U11 vs Galaxy S8
• HTC U11 vs LG G6

Amazon
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HTC

New Moto E4 Plus now available as Amazon Prime Exclusive version starting at $139

Here’s another welcomed addition to the low-cost group.

Amazon’s “Prime Exclusive” phone lineup expanded today with the addition of the new Moto E4 Plus. In exchange for taking Amazon ads on your lock screen, you’re getting $40 off of the MSRP, meaning you can get the base 16GB storage model for $139, or 32GB storage for $159. The only limitation at this time is color, where the Prime Exclusive version only comes in grey and not gold.

The Moto E4 Plus made a bit of a splash when it was announced with its massive 5000mAh battery, particularly because its 5.5-inch 720p display and Snapdragon 427 processor aren’t likely to burn up much of that capacity. This is one of the few phones you could easily put in the “two full days of use” camp, and that’s certainly appealing.

The Prime Exclusive model is fully compatible with all four major U.S. carriers, which is a bonus — now you just have to decide if it’s worth saving $40 to take on the Amazon lock screen ads. You could easily argue that even the higher-end model, at the full retail price of $199, is still a great deal.

The phone goes up for pre-order today, August 3, and will ship August 11.

See at Amazon

Google Play has changed its ranking algorithms to surface high-performance apps

There’s more to an app than just its features and price.

How stable an app is, how well it performs, and its consistency are just as important to the app experience as anything else — and Google knows it. That’s why it has announced today that Google Play has changed its ranking algorithms to surface apps that exhibit the best performance, lowest number of crashes, and the highest stability, rather than just the most installs or highest ratings.

Looking at app reviews across the Play Store, Google says that half of 1-star reviews are related to general app stability. These types of apps that have higher crash rates or drain battery consistently won’t be ranked as highly as those that exhibit less of these issues, even if they actually have a relatively high overall rating. Google’s data shows that people consistently use these stable apps more and uninstall them less often, as you’d expect.

In aggregate, it means higher-quality apps for every single Android user.

That all makes sense, but before now, you wouldn’t necessarily be getting the best-performing app if you simply searched and installed the top result for your query. So that’s what makes this change so intriguing, as it hopefully entices developers to focus on the core experience of their app — how much power it uses, how often it crashes, etc. — rather than just adding new features or changing the interface. It’s hard to use “higher app stability” as a selling point for your app, but it does lead to higher overall satisfaction in the end, and Google’s making sure that that counts for something in searches.

If you’ve followed any of the developer-focused talks surrounding Google I/O in the past couple of years, this won’t come as any big surprise. Google’s developer advocates have constantly espoused the importance of making your apps rock solid and mindful of the resources on a user’s phone, only taking up what you need while tracking and fixing problems in the code that lead to instability.

On the end user side of things, the next time you go to the Play Store to search for an app, you won’t necessarily notice anything different at the time — but in the aggregate, you’ll hopefully be installing better apps that do their part to improve your overall Android experience.