Deal: LG G6 and V20 on sale at Sprint and T-Mobile

Sprint and T-Mobile are both offering discounts on LG phones.

The LG G6 is nearing five months old, and carriers are already starting to offer discounts on it. Sprint and T-Mobile both announced discounts on LG’s 2017 flagship.

The Uncarrier is offering a free (after rebate) LG G6 or V20 when the user activates a G6 or V20 on another line. The rebate comes in the form of a prepaid debit card.

Sprint is offering the G6 for $20 per month for 18 months, totaling $360, down from the regular price of $480.

Are you interest in either of these deals, or is the LG V30 worth the wait?

Learn more about the LG G6!

Everything you need to know about WebVR

Your web browser is also a VR platform.

Most conversations about VR surround specific headsets, like Oculus Rift or Google Daydream. WebVR, as the name suggests, is bringing immersive experiences to anything with a browser. It’s a lot of fun to explore, and something anyone can try out without a lot of set up or additional hardware.

Lets get to know WebVR together!

Read more at VR Heads!

Which Amazon Music subscription should you get?

Amazon has a really good music service that you might have overlooked. Here’s what you need to know about Amazon Music.

Fun fact you might not be aware of: Amazon has a really good music service. It’s called, as you might expect, Amazon Music. And just like Apple Music or Google Play Music or Spotify or Pandora or whatever, it, uh, plays music. Lots and lots of music.

That’s not really the exciting part. The real reason you might want to consider Amazon Music comes down to the options, and the myriad ways you could end up listening to it.

Let’s dive in.

See at Amazon

Where to get started with Amazon Music

The quick links:

• Android
• iOS
• On the web
• Mac and Windows

What are the different plans for Amazon Music?

Amazon has four plans for its music service. Here’s how they break down.

• Prime Music: This one is free. If you have Amazon Prime, you have Prime Music. It only has 2 million songs, so at some point you’ll hit a wall if you try to listen to something a little more obscure. (Or not supported because lawyers and labels still control this sort of thing.) Prime Music is available on all devices.
• Amazon Music Unlimited Individual Plan: This one runs $7.99 a month (or $79 a year) for Prime members, or $9.99 a month for everyone else. It opens up the library to tens of millions of songs.
• Amazon Music Unlimited Echo Plan: This $3.99-a-month plan attaches to an Echo device and seems like a good deal at first. But keep in mind that it only works with a single Echo. If you have more than one, you’ll need the Unlimited Individual plan.
• Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan: Family plans are great if you’re trying to keep costs down and have more than one person who wants access to a streaming library. This one is $14.99 a month for everyone. Prime members can get a discount if they pay $149 yearly.

How can you listen to Amazon Music?

This is the cool part. Amazon is as good as anyone when it comes to options for listening to its music service. It’s available on your phone or tablet, on Android or on iOS. It’s on the web. It works with Google’s Android Auto or Apple’s CarPlay, so you can do things right while you’re on your drive. You can listen on Sonos.

And of course, it’s available on any Alexa-enabled device. (My personal favorite is the Echo Show, because you get song lyrics along with the music.)

Cool. What about Amazon Music bitrates and file formats?

Amazon streams music directly from the original vinyl, preserving both the fidelity and smoke of the original 1970s pressing and …

OK. Amazon’s pushing songs out as 256kbps MP3 files, encoded with a variable bitrate.

You also can import you own music — so long as it doesn’t have DRM attached. You can upload the following formats: .mp3, .m4a, .wma, .oog, .wav, Apple Lossless, .aiff and .flac.

Plus, you can listen to music offline on Android, iOS or on Amazon’s Fire tablets.

And as an added bonus …

Amazon Music also has this really cool feature called Auto Rip. That’s where a number of CDs and even vinyl records are automatically added to your Amazon Music digital library if you order the physical copy.

And if you’re one of those crazy people (like us) who churns through way too many devices in a year, know this: While Amazon limits the number of devices you can have active on Amazon Music at any one time, it allows you to deactivate as many as you want, as often as you want.

You can keep on listening on any damn thing you want.

Amazon Music

• Get started with Amazon Music
• Which Amazon Echo should you buy?
• All about Alexa Skills
• Top Echo Tips & Tricks
• Amazon Echo vs. Google Home

See at Amazon

Alt-Right network Gab removed from the Play Store

Google has removed alt-right social network Gab from the Play Store.

Google has removed alt-right social network Gab from the Play Store, the social network shared on Twitter. This comes days after Nazis protested in Charlottesville, VA, leaving one woman dead after a protester drove a van into a crowd of counter protesters. Two police officers also perished when a police helicopter crashed during the protests.

Gab stated the application was removed for violating the Play Store’s hate speech policy. That policy states:

We don’t allow the promotion of hatred toward groups of people based on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity.

Android holds around 53% of the market share for mobile operating systems in the U.S, which is not large enough for this to be an antitrust concern. Nor is it a First Amendment issue, as some commenters on Twitter have pointed out. The First Amendment only forbids the government from restricting certain types of speech. Since Google is a private entity, the First Amendment does not apply.

Is Google going too far in removing this application, or should this have happened before lives were lost? Scroll on down and share your thoughts in the comments.

Google uses machine learning to help journalists track hate

Hate crimes have sadly existed long before last weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia but tracking them has been difficult. To help fix that, the Google News Lab has partnered with ProPublica, the New York Times, BuzzFeed News, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the University of Miami’s School of Communications on the Documenting Hate News Index. Machine learning is used to pull locations, names and events from some 3.000 news stories published since this February into an easy-to-navigate feed of articles.

“The feed is generated from news articles that cover events suggestive of hate crime, bias or abuse — such as anti-semitic graffiti or local court reports about incidents,” Google writes. “We are monitoring it to look our for errant stories that slip in, i.e. searches for phrases that just include the word ‘hate’ — it hasn’t happened yet, but we will be paying close attention.”

The web app is available as of today and Google says that it’ll keep tweaking it over the next few months as use-case data starts rolling in.

Source: Google, Documenting Hate News Index

Everyone could soon have the powers of Doctor Octopus

Doctor Otto Octavius may have been a power-mad scientist bent on world domination and the utter ruin of his nemesis, Spider-Man, but the guy had some surprisingly cogent thoughts on prosthetics development. And although mind-controlled supernumerary robotic limbs like Doc Oc’s still only exist in the realm of the Marvel Universe, researchers here in reality are getting pretty darn close to creating their own. And in the near future, we’ll be strapping on extra appendages whenever we need a helping hand — or supplemental third thumb.

Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (SRLs) are not prosthetics. They are designed to supplement a person’s existing full complement of limbs as opposed to replacing the lost functionality of a missing one. That’s not to say that an amputee couldn’t use one of these devices, simply that they’re meant to be used as add-ons to human protuberances instead of stand-ins for them.

Don’t expect to toss cars around like throw pillows while wearing an SRL rig. Well, not initially at least (keep those fingers crossed, though). Rather, they’re built to help people perform tasks that would otherwise be irritating, difficult or outright impossible without them — like twisting a doorknob while carrying armfuls of moving boxes or holding a ceiling panel in place while you nail it in. So, rather than get yourself a helper, you could soon instead get a pair of MIT’s shoulder-mounted SRLs.

This 10-pound assistive device sits atop your shoulders like a horse collar so the load is distributed throughout your core instead of being concentrated on your shoulders. Each arm offers five degrees of freedom and can be equipped with a variety of attachments depending on what your use.

As for control, the SRL relies on a pair of inertial measurement units strapped to the user’s wrists. It figures out how to best position itself through a demonstrative learning process, so depending on where your hands are, the robot will respond accordingly. It can also be pre-programmed to perform specific actions, like pushing the elevator call button for you if your hands are full.

These aren’t the only extra limbs being developed at MIT’s d’Arbeloff Laboratory. Teams there are working on SRL systems that can supplement your stance as well. Boeing helped develop one such device, which is worn around the waist and designed to help with aircraft assembly — specifically to prevent repetitive stress injuries. Its “arms” can either be used to help the assembly worker brace themselves while they work with a piece of fuselage or convert into “legs” that can support the worker’s body weight. The system can even act as a pair of robotic walking sticks, helping the wearer walk faster and with less effort.

Controlling another pair of appendages can prove to be a challenge. And though we are still at least four years from being able to install “wetworks” and control these limbs with our thoughts, the d’Arbeloff Lab has an interesting solution: Command the SRLs by flexing your pecs.

The team, led by MIT PhD candidate Federico Parietti and engineering professor Harry Asada, developed a sensor vest that receives inputs from the user’s pectoral and abdominal muscles. Contracting your left pec moves the left appendage forward, squeezing your left abs to move the appendage back and the same on the other side. This enables the users to reposition the extra arms without having to stop what they’re doing with their hands.

Then again, if you’re not entirely up to having electrodes affixed to your torso, you could always just control your second pair of hands with your feet, like the research team from Keio University and the University of Tokyo do with its “metalimbs” system. Clenching your toes causes the partnered robotic arm to make a fist while lifting your foot raises its arm. The system is primarily designed to assist amputees though it could eventually prove a boon to multitaskers as well.

The same lab is also toying with a simpler SRL design, dubbed the Aucto, that uses a Granular Jamming Gripper instead of a more complex actuated robot claw. GJGs are essentially a balloon filled with coffee grounds that holds objects, like the name suggests, by jamming itself into crevasses and then solidifying by vacuuming all the air out of the balloon. This design reduces the arm’s required degrees of freedom from six to three since you don’t need a complicated robot wrist to align the gripper with whatever it’s gripping.

Of course, sometimes you don’t need a helping hand, just a helping finger… or two. Luckily MIT’s still got you covered. Researchers there developed a robotic glove with a pair of long robotic fingers on either side. “You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally,” professor of engineering Harry Asada said in a statement. “Then the robotic fingers react and assist your fingers.”

The glove’s actions are guided by an algorithm that has been trained on a set of specific movement patterns, which inform it as to what the wearer is trying to do. That in turn enables the glove to most effectively position itself to support whatever you’re grabbing at. This glove has been in development since 2014 and remains pretty bulky, though the team hopes to eventually miniaturize the mechanism down to the point where it can fit in a wristband and then pop out when needed so you aren’t walking around town with 12 fingers.

And if you don’t mind a few extra fingers, why not strap on another thumb? Developed by Dani Clode, a graduate student at the Royal College of Art in London, the Third Thumb is a 3D-printed digit powered by a wrist-worn actuator and controlled by a Bluetooth-connected pressure sensor located under your foot. Much like a piano pedal works, stepping on the sensor causes the Third Thumb to contract. With it, users can play cards, cook and cover more of a guitar’s fretboard than they would naturally. Unfortunately, this device is still only a prototype so don’t expect to be shredding any DragonForce tunes with it in the near future.

These devices, though many are still just prototypes, offer exciting possibilities for human augmentation. Whereas gene-editing techniques like CRISPR are likely to remain ethically tenuous for the foreseeable future, SRLs carry no more stigma than that of conventional prosthetics. In the near future, we may well find ourselves strapping on an extra arm or leg when we need a hand, rather than plying friends with beer and pizza in exchange for their help.

Sprint plans fix for BlackBerry KEYone that reinstalls bloatware

We were pretty impressed with BlackBerry’s newest smartphone, the KEYone, especially given how long the company had gone without a serious contender on the market. But it seems its US versions carried by Sprint have brought something else from the past: Bloatware. Users discovered that certain apps they’d deleted kept reappearing on their phones. Sprint is reportedly working on a fix, but they’ve got a hard-and-fast solution in the meantime: Delete the whole software launcher.

To be clear, this problem only affects Sprint versions of the KEYone. That’s because the carrier loaded each BlackBerry with Sprint Mobile ID, which automatically installs sponsored apps — some popular, like Uber and Facebook, others not — when users first buy the device. Except the latest versions of the service are buggy, re-uploading apps periodically.

A software update is coming to address the issue, Sprint told Phone Arena, but affected users can try an aggressive fix in the meantime. Go to Settings>Apps>Blackberry Launcher, click ‘View Details’ in the Play Store, and uninstall it. Rebooting the device should re-upload a factory-fresh version of the launcher, which shouldn’t have the issue.

We’ve reached out to Sprint to confirm the issue and workaround steps and will update when we hear back.

Via: The Verge

Source: Phone Arena

Google countdown teases Android O reveal during solar eclipse

Google is capitalizing on the solar eclipse hype to tease out the latest version of Android. On Monday at 2:40 PM Eastern, the internet juggernaut says we’ll “meet the next release of Android and all of its super (sweet) new powers.” Given that the final beta shipped last month, this could mean a few possibilities: either the name will be revealed (my money is on Oreo), or we’ll learn update’s release day. After months of previews and non-final builds, at least we won’t have much longer to wait for when we’ll actually be able to download and install the new OS.

What does Android O entail? Decreased load times, better battery life and lot of onboard AI features like Google Lens (a visual search app), copy-less pasting and a picture-in-picture mode, among other things. None of them immediately call Nabisco’s trademark cookie to mind, but hey, a guy can dream, right?

A bird? A plane? No, it’s #AndroidO, touching down to Earth for #Eclipse2017 & bringing super (sweet) new powers: https://t.co/7nslzmxar3 pic.twitter.com/MFxHxUdiia

— Android (@Android) August 18, 2017

Source: Google

Google Home’s voice controls now work with free Spotify accounts

If you’re a Google Home user without a paid Spotify account, your use of the service on Home has been limited. Up until now, Spotify has only integrated with Home for paid accounts. But at I/O, Google announced that would change; free Spotify users would be able to stream their library to Home. And now, it appears that the integration is now live for US users: free-tier Spotify users can now stream their music to Google Home.

Spotify confirmed to Engadget that the connection is now available for non-paying users and the streaming service’s free tier is currently showing as supported on Home. Deezer, a streaming music service that’s relatively new to the US market, is also now available on Google Home.

It’s worth noting that Spotify’s integration with Google Home will be different, depending on what tier of Spotify service you have. You can see a full list of available commands, depending on tier, at Google’s support page, but while Spotify Premium users can play specific content on demand, free users are limited. You cannot listen to specific songs, artists, albums or personal playlists; instead, you can listen to one of Spotify’s radio stations inspired by the specific song/artist/etc. you want to listen to. You can, however, listen to Spotify’s curated playlists.

It’s not ideal, but Spotify has been enforcing its tiers more as it’s trying to renew licensing agreements and negotiate favorable royalty agreements. While the company had been long resistant to distinguishing between free and paid tiers it looks like the company is starting to chip away at services provided to unpaid customers.

Update: This post has been updated with confirmation from Spotify.

Via: Android Police

Source: Google

The grantees of Engadget’s $500,000 immersive arts program

When we launched the Alternate Realities grant program in May we had no idea what to expect. We saw a need for funding in the arts happening at just the time when new media like AR and VR were starting to go mainstream. So, with support from our parent company, Oath, we set out to fund five immersive art projects that push the limits of storytelling through emerging technologies. The response was overwhelming. Proposals came from as far away as Iran and Australia and ranged in discipline from theater to fashion, documentary to animation. There were multi-million dollar VR productions, animated shorts and escape rooms. (SO. MANY. ESCAPE. ROOMS.)

We received more than 300 applications, which we narrowed to a pool of 80. Those projects were then presented to our selection committee, a group of four technology, art and entertainment tastemakers (more on them here), each of whom recommended five projects to Engadget’s editorial leadership based on their ability to address a short list of predefined criteria.* Engadget’s editorial leadership made its final selections based on those recommendations.

In the end, we chose five projects that represent the true potential of art and technology as a unified force. We’ll see humans and flamingos come together in an interspecies, augmented reality-dance off, relive America’s first reported alien abduction in VR, and give birth to new life forms by way of an interactive Cosmo-style quiz. Yes, things are going to get weird. Our grantees, like their projects, are a diverse group working across disciplines. There’s a TV heart throb, a rap historian and the founder of the Stupid Hackathon.

Creating art through technology isn’t cheap, but we strongly believe it’s important to our evolution. We couldn’t be happier to be supporting the arts at a time when funding is so critical. Thank you to everyone who submitted, nominated and participated in this program. The projects will debut at the first-ever Engadget Experience, a one-day event exploring the future of creativity at the historic United Artists Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, November 14th, 2017.**

You can find more information or buy tickets to the event here. And now, the grantees.

Dance with flARmingos

Dance with flARmingos

Dance with flARmingos is a mixed reality experience that features a interspecies dance between humans and flamingos, and pays homage to the flamingo — a consummate showman and embattled victim of environmental neglect — by staging kinship from an ethical distance. To Kristin Lucas, this is an exercise in going beyond a human-centered worldview into a more fluid ecological discourse, through the use of technological embodiment and sensory play.

The Team

Kristin Lucas is an interdisciplinary artist who pairs the intangible with the uncertain in experiential works that are performative and social, circuitous and bittersweet, and that lie somewhere between reality and “reality.” Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, and appears in collections of major institutions, including the Dia Center for the Arts and the Museum of Modern Art. She is represented by Postmasters and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) in New York and And/Or Gallery in Los Angeles and has been featured in Art in America. Lucas earned a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and an MFA in art practice from Stanford University. She lives between Queens and Austin, where she serves as studio-rt faculty for the department of art and art history at University of Texas at Austin.

Regine Basha is the Residency Director at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. For two decades, Basha has worked internationally as an independent curator of contemporary art, writer and radio producer (bashaprojects.com) and is often working closely with artists to explore innovative models of dissemination and alternative forms of direct public engagement. Her exhibitions have taken place in public spaces, private homes, heritage buildings, and within large abandoned heritage sites. Basha was the recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Curatorial Residency at Captiva in 2014.

Tommy Martinez is a New York City based artist and technologist. As coordinator of the Virtual Environments Lab at Pioneer Works, Martinez facilitates a residency and research program focused on emerging technologies in media art. He has performed, exhibited, and served as a collaborator and technical consultant on wide range of projects worldwide.

Thomas Wester works as an independent creative and technical director. Over the last 15 years he has blended digital and physical to create meaningful interactive experiences. His ever curious, ever inquisitive nature results in a wide and deep knowledge of both the creative and technical process with regards to producing for the interactive medium, specifically in the physical space. He has worked with The Royal Shakespeare Company, The National Archives, Library of Congress, Hermès, Coca Cola, Target, MoMA, MFA Boston and exhibited at Tribeca and Sundance Film festivals.

Ben Purdy is a creative technologist focusing on the application of software and hardware for use in all manner of interactive projects. After a decade of corporate software development he later transitioned into the creative industry, eventually working as a Technical Director at Instrument. In 2014 he founded Glowbox, an interactive technology studio in Portland Oregon. Ben is a lifelong advocate of creative curiosity and technical exploration.

Support has been provided in part through an AR/VR Artist Research Residency co-organized by Oregon Story Board, Upfor and Eyebeam; Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center Artist-in-Residence Program; Yafo Creative/Print Screen Festival Digital Arts Residency; BAU Institute Arts Residency at Camargo Foundation, Cassis; and a Pioneer Works Technology Residency; and through the University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History and College of Fine Arts.

Dinner Party

Dinner Party

Dinner Party is a virtual-reality thriller based on the true story of the Betty and Barney Hill UFO-abduction incident, the first nationally known UFO abduction in American history. After an inexplicable nighttime encounter, the Hills, an interracial couple living in 1960s America, sought hypnosis to recover memories of what they experienced. Upon waking from hypnosis, the Hills had no conscious recollection of what they’d said. But their account was captured on tape. Frightened to listen alone, they played the tapes for friends at a dinner party. What the tapes contain will threaten their marriage and raise troubling questions about race and perception that are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s.

The Team

Angel Soto is at the forefront of virtual reality, directing and supervising VR content for RYOT News. His VR short Bashir’s Dream premiered at Sundance 2017, was screened at Cannes, and named one of Time Magazine’s “Five Virtual-Reality Films You Should Experience Right Now.” In 2013, he won the prestigious Cannes Lion. He recently completed his first feature film, La Granja, which premiered at Fantastic Fest and competed in festivals around the world. His latest film is the documentary short, El Pugil, which made its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Charlotte Stoudt is a writer-producer on House of Cards. Previous television work includes six seasons of Homeland and development for Amazon Studios. Her VR projects have been workshopped at the Venice Biennale VR Lab and Sundance New Frontier Story Lab. As a journalist, she wrote on politics and culture for The Village Voice, LA Times, Variety and NPR.

Saschka Unseld is a German-born director and writer who cofounded the Academy Award–nominated animation studio Soi, where he directed and produced numerous award- winning shorts and commercials before joining Pixar Animation Studios in 2008. During his six years at Pixar, he worked on Toy Story 3, Cars 2 and Brave, and wrote and directed the 2013 short film The Blue Umbrella. In 2014, he co-founded Oculus Story Studio to help explore the future of VR storytelling and won the first Emmy for original VR content for Henry. His latest VR experiences, the Emmy-nominated Dear Angelica, and his independent VR dance project, “Through You,” both premiered at Sundance 2017.

Laura Wexler is a Baltimore-based author, screenwriter and producer who was recently selected for the Sundance Institute’s 2017 New Frontier Lab. She’s the author of a nonfiction book about an unsolved mass lynching, and journalism published in the Washington Post, The New York Times and elsewhere. She has developed for Amazon and is the co-founder and co-producer of The Stoop Storytelling Series.

Mapper’s Delight

Mapper’s Delight

Mapper’s Delight is a cultural tale representing worlds, experiences and gameplay told through the most-listened-to musical genre on the planet. Part explorer, part cultural critic, part archaeologist, part DJ, the Datanauts of Mapper’s Delight use sight, sound and touch to investigate the global distances traveled by the lyrics contained in each rap artist’s career while exploring the secret flows of hip-hop’s spacetime through a panoptic interface. This exhibit immerses the viewer in an alternate experience of reality by creating a viewpoint that is above this world; by combining two different configurations of space and time: a) that of the geographic reference in the lyric, with b) the viewer’s experience of assessing the visualization of this travel – something that is typically reserved for rappers or for those who perform close, academic readings of rap lyrics.

The Team

Tahir Hemphill is a designer, creative technologist and educator based in New York City. Hemphill’s practice investigates the role systems play in the generation of form and the role that collaborative knowledge production plays in the resilience of communities. Hemphill is influenced by scientific work that pushes investigation to artistic limits and artistic work that pushes repetition toward scientific method. Over the past 20 years, this productive tension between art and technology has been fueled by his reverence for scientific methodologies as well as his irreverent tinkering with them. Since 2010, Hemphill has been operating the Rap Research Lab, a creative technology studio that explores rap as a cultural indicator through educational, editorial and creative interrogations.

David A.M. Goldberg is an accomplished Hawaii-based writer, teacher, programmer and media developer who has used a lifelong interest in art, culture and technology to transform the means by which people access, assess and organize knowledge. Goldberg’s cultural lens was cut from a matrix of liberal arts and hard science. Early on, he spotted profound reiterations of America’s best and worst cultural and social practices in the digital context of video games, chat rooms, mailing lists and the early World Wide Web. That lens was polished by a commitment to writing about these changes, teaching others to recognize them, and lecturing at universities such as UC Santa Cruz, USC, CCA, Otis and Columbia.

Nick Fox-Gieg is an animator and creative technologist based in Toronto. His film The Orange won the jury prize for Best Animated Short at SXSW 2010. His films have also screened at the Ottawa, Rotterdam and TIFF film festivals, at the Centre Pompidou and on CBC TV. Fox-Gieg was awarded an Eyebeam Fellowship in 2012, a Fulbright Fellowship in 2006, and has received media-arts grants from Bravo!Fact, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the arts councils of Ontario, Pennsylvania, Toronto and West Virginia. He holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Most recently, he’s been working on virtual-reality projects at Framestore and Google Creative Lab.

Untrained Eyes

Untrained Eyes is a conceptual technology project that takes its inspiration from observing the explicit bias that can be found during everyday image searches within Google and other public-image archives. This interactive installation will expose the problems of our current machine-learning trajectories by revealing the hidden challenges of creating artificial-intelligence algorithms. When viewers enter the installation, they will encounter a salon-style hanging arrangement of dozens of framed images. After a few seconds, the images will all change in synchronicity, as if a new image-search batch was loaded. Each one will display a physically similar face to one “lucky” audience member standing in the center of the room. This sets off an unsettling chain reaction, as everyone in the space tries to find the target person and then focuses in on him or her. It is an exaggeration of our selfie-obsessed culture, which raises a question for all to consider when engaging in a dialog about inclusion: Are you really ready for it?

The Team

Glenn Kaino is an artist with a career that spans a wide range of media and creative activity. In 2012, he was selected by the State Department to represent the United States in the 13th International Cairo Biennale in Cairo and was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the 12th Lyon Biennial in Lyon, France, and Prospect 3 in New Orleans. He has had exhibitions at The Modern Fort Worth, Texas, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and many others. He has upcoming solo exhibitions at the CAC Cincinnati, the High Museum of Atlanta and Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Jesse Williams is a native of Chicago and graduate of Temple University. He began his career teaching at low-income Philadelphia public charter schools. After moving to New York City, he later began his professional acting career. Williams stars in ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and has served as senior producer and correspondent for Epix docuseries America Divided with Norman Lear. He also executive-produced the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement. Williams gained international attention while accepting the 2016 BET Humanitarian Award, where he spoke about police brutality and systemic inequities.

Your Hands Are Feet

Your Hands Are Feet is an interactive room-scale VR experience that places you in surreal realities made up of experiential metaphors. You start out in a kitchen with a carton of six eggs, which can be picked up and thrown or cracked on the countertop. Each egg acts as a portal to a new experience; the room is transformed into a surreal landscape, presenting a reality where your head can be in the clouds, the whole world can crumble around you, you can be all thumbs or have two left feet (but really, though). Your Hands Are Feet is being produced in connection with Egg, an independent feature film created by an entirely female and Sundance-alumni team.

The Team

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a 2017 Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, an artist at the 2017 Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab and a 2016 Oculus Launchpad fellow. She is the founder of the Stupid Hackathon and is the director of Idea New Rochelle, a nonprofit dedicated to creating an alliance of facilities for the immersive tech community in New York. Amelia began her career as an opera singer and became the writer, director and star of productions that were too weird for opera, theater and museums but are quite at home in the bonkers world of VR.

Sarah Rothberg is an artist who works with emerging technologies. In 2014, Sarah became fascinated with Facebook’s new efforts to capitalize on nostalgia and its coinciding acquisition of virtual reality company Oculus VR. This launched her interest in virtual reality and its implications, leading her to create her first major VR experience, Memory/Place, which has been called by Artspace perhaps “the first true virtual-reality art masterpiece.” Her VR artworks Touching A Cactus and Memory/Place were recently included in the Bunker pop-up show at Sotheby’s S2 Gallery. She teaches VR at NYU and has been an artist-in-residence at NYU, Superbright, Mana Contemporary and Harvestworks.

*Recommendations for the Alternate Realities grants program were made by an independent selection committee, but the final selections were made by Engadget’s editorial leadership. Committee members with financial or contractual ties to a project or artist being considered were asked to recuse themselves from recommending those projects to avoid any perceived or actual conflicts of interest.

**Note: The Engadget Experience was originally scheduled for November 16th. Ticket holders have been notified of the date change.