Google Maps will help you park in 25 more cities

Back in January, Google rolled out a “parking difficulty” icon in Maps which, as its name suggests, explains how hard it will be to find a spot for your vehicle. While useful, it was only available in 25 US cities, including New York and San Francisco. Today, it’s being expanded to a further 25 locations around the globe: Alicante, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Cologne, Darmstadt, Dusseldorf, London, Madrid, Malaga, Manchester, Milan, Montreal, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Toronto, Valencia and Vancouver.

Just pop in your destination and you’ll see a limited, medium or easy symbol near the bottom of the screen, next to the estimated journey time. The ratings are based on “historical parking data,” according to Google, and a smidge of “machine learning magic.” Armed with this information, the idea is that you’ll leave a little earlier and prowl around, waiting for a free space, or drive further afield where parking might be more plentiful. Or, perhaps you’ll leave the car at home and find another mode of transportation. Regardless, you won’t be caught off guard anymore.

Today, Google is also introducing a new “find parking” feature. If you tap the card with the parking difficulty icon, you’ll see an option to browse other streets and parking facilities. A small map visualises their locations, with each option listed underneath with an address and estimated walk time. If any of them sound suitable, you can “add parking” and start your trip. Once you’ve successfully parked your vehicle, Google Maps will switch to walking directions so you can easily find your destination.

For now, this feature is only available on Google Maps for Android, and in the following US cities: Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas/Fort Worth, DC, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, New York City, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and Tampa. As always, we suspect it won’t be too long before the feature is rolled out more widely. After all, parking can be a problem in any major city, and regardless of your smartphone operating system of choice.

Source: Google (Blog Post)

Reprogramming the piano

Dan Tepfer is an acclaimed jazz pianist and composer who has played venues from Tokyo’s Sumida Triphony Hall to New York’s Village Vanguard. He also has a degree in astrophysics and writes computer programs.

Born to a mother who sang in the Paris Opera and a plant-geneticist father who brought a Macintosh Plus home in the 1980s, Tepfer sees the worlds of art and science as entirely complementary. Algorithms and improvisation both drive his work.

In his latest project, Acoustic Informatics, Tepfer uses a player piano, the automated instrument that occasionally appears in airports and Wild West saloons. Next month, he will present his first concert in New York City — where he’s lived for more than a decade — to showcase this project at the Jazz Gallery, a venue known for its experimentation.

Essentially, Tepfer has hacked and rewritten the way a piano works.

Every time Tepfer hits a note, the Yamaha Disklavier — his digital player piano — sends the information via MIDI to his laptop, which instantly shoots back an algorithmic response that causes other keys to play themselves.

Using SuperCollider, an open-source programming environment for musicians, Tepfer writes rules that determine how the player piano reacts to his every manual strike of the keyboard. Mostly, these rules create echoes of the melodies Tepfer plays. One algorithm plays the same note but one octave further down the piano; another turns each musical phrase eerie by following it with cascading sets of five notes in a pattern called a minor ninth.

When Tepfer strings together a melody, extra keys start to shimmer on their own alongside his fingers. The effect makes it seem as if he has four hands playing simultaneously, all of them in sync. The architecture of the piece was created by algorithms, but the notes themselves are improvised. “I’m writing how the music works rather than writing the actual music,” says Tepfer. The sounds his Disklavier creates are deeply organic but would not be possible without technology.

“I’m writing how the music works rather than writing the actual music.”

As Tepfer plays, SuperCollider sends the data to a programming environment called Processing, which Tepfer uses to write visualizations. Each algorithm has a different graphical style that maps out both Tepfer’s notes and the player piano’s.

“Dan is, perhaps you could say, part of a new breed of improviser-slash-technologist that really has a strong foothold in both camps,” says Joseph Branciforte, another jazz musician and programmer who has been friends with Tepfer for two years. “I don’t know that there are that many generations of people that would have grown up knowing these types of possibilities from a young age.”

Born to parents from Oregon but raised in Paris, the bilingual Tepfer is predisposed to think outside basic binaries like American versus French, art versus science, structure versus freedom.

“Part of growing up in several cultures at once is that I think I take institutions a little bit less seriously,” he says. “You grow up as a very young kid realizing that all these cultural norms are very relative, and that really influences the way you see things.”

Around age nine, Tepfer began playing with HyperCard, a pre-internet programming tool on early Mac computers. By the time he was in his teens, he was coding in BASIC before teaching himself the programming language C from a book. Tepfer made games of Pong, 3D renders and line art from equations.

At the same time, he was studying classical piano at Paris’ Conservatoire Paul Dukas music school while learning jazz and writing music. College took him to Edinburgh, Scotland, for a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics before a master’s in jazz at New England Conservatory, in Boston. Today, in his Brooklyn apartment adjacent to Prospect Park, Tepfer keeps photos of pianists Glenn Gould, Thelonious Monk and Igor Stravinsky on the wall beside his grand piano. Next to those are digitally rendered visualizations of harmonic frequencies.

For Tepfer, science and art have always been compatible. “I think you’re greatly enriched if you can go between those two viewpoints,” he says. “There only is a tension between those two ways of seeing the world if you’re approaching music at what I would say is a relatively basic level.”

Music, on one level, is physics — frequencies relating to each other mathematically to create harmony.

His point is that freedom only really exists, and therefore has meaning, within an underlying, objective structure. Unlimited freedom in music would sound like a garble of notes, sheer chaos.

After all, music, on one level, is physics — frequencies relating to each other mathematically to create harmony. Keys and timing create a logical structure in which meaningful sound exists. Classical composers like Bach imposed their own rules, such as playing the same musical phrase over and over but in different timing and different spots across the musical scale — a touchstone for some of Tepfer’s algorithms.

In improvisational jazz, the back and forth between sticking to rules and deliberately flouting them is part of the joy. The musical narrative through which a skilled performer guides the audience, through stability and instability, keeps listeners on their toes.

In Tepfer’s Disklavier project, the algorithms create the structure and stability but are still a creative invention as much as the notes he conjures later have their basis in logic. “You put yourself in a system of constraints and then you see how much fun you can have,” he says. “The question I want to be asking myself is, ‘Here I am in this cage. How much wiggle room can I find?’”

Technology has pushed musical advances in the past half of a decade from the electric guitar in rock to sampling in hip-hop and more or less everything about EDM. Jazz is no exception, even as the mainstream view of the genre is that it emphasizes acoustic instruments, live performance and free-form improvisation.

Algorithmic composition traces back to the 1950s and composer Lejaren Hiller, who founded the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and collaborated with John Cage. In the 1970s and ’80s, trombonist and composer George Lewis pioneered improvisational AI, including his program Voyager, which jams with collaborators as well as on its own. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion, from 2010, involves an entire band of self-playing instruments.

In contrast, Tepfer is always in control of his music. The Disklavier has no agency of its own, no artificial creativity. Though Tepfer may experiment with neural networks in the future, for now he is more interested in the human inspiration that technology can trigger.

The idea is not to use technology as a substitute for his own creativity but as a catalyst. Tepfer wants his algorithms to stimulate new thoughts, shock his system, expand his conception of how the piano can sound.

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One of Tepfer’s improvisations

He started experimenting with the Disklavier four years ago and now ends up trying to recreate its style in solo concerts with an acoustic piano. “Those sounds are in my ears now, and I find myself actually reaching for those sounds that the computer would be creating,” he says. “That’s really what I look for in a situation where I’m using new technology. It’s in artistic results, a window opening up at the artistic level.”

When combining music and technology, the essential question Tepfer always asks himself is: Am I enabling music that couldn’t have been created any other way?

He is conscious that he doesn’t want his programs to be a gimmick or to simply automate the same music he could play without a machine. He wants his music to have “integrity.”

“What is technology on its own, from an artistic perspective? I don’t think it’s anything.”

“What is technology on its own, from an artistic perspective? I don’t think it’s anything,” he says.

“Technology has to be at the service of this artistic impulse. And artistic impulse — at the end of the day, you have to spend a lot of time alone figuring out what it is you want to say,” he says.

Part of his solution is that the more he innovates with new forms, the deeper he digs into musical theory and history. “If you look at a tree, the higher it reaches up, the deeper its roots have to go to support that,” Tepfer says.

It is the classic artist’s tension, provoked by the host of creative technology at his disposal today: To steep himself in the knowledge of his forebears without getting stuck in tradition; to dive into the innovations of his time without privileging style over substance. The tension is one Tepfer may be well positioned to solve as a musician and technologist. Reconciling different worlds seems to be one of his assets.

Google pulls 300 Android apps used for DDoS attacks

If a random storage manager or video player you downloaded recently has disappeared from your Android device, don’t worry: it might have been for your own good. Google has removed 300 apps from the Play store, which were apparently merely masquerading as legitimate applications. In truth, they were made to hi-jack your phone so it can be used as part of a botnet’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. WireX, as the botnet is called, pummeled several content providers and delivery networks with traffic from the devices it hi-jacked on August 17th, though it’s been active since around August 2nd. In some cases, it also acted as a ransomware, demanding money from its victim.

It was content delivery network Akamai that discovered its existence following an assault on one of its clients. The company then got together with Google and several security researchers from rival companies like Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Oracle + Dyn, RiskIQ, Team Cymru and other organizations to solve the issue. Upon learning that the Play Store is inundated with hundreds of fake WireX apps hiding behind the guise of innocuous programs like storage managers and ringtones, the big G did its part and blocked them all.

Here are a few samples of infected apps:

In a statement, Mountain View said it’s now also in the process of removing applications from affected devices. It’s unclear how long that would take, though, since based on the team’s research, WireX compromised over 70,000 devices from over 100 countries.

Via: CSO Online, The Verge

Source: Gizmodo, Akamai, Cloudflare

Apple TV 4K movies could cost $20, but studios want more

With a new 4K Apple TV on the horizon, Apple has to figure out how much it’ll charge for ultra-high definition films. And, not surprisingly, it’s butting heads with Hollywood. While the iPhone maker wants to charge $20 for 4K films, studios are pushing for it to charge $5 or $10 more, the Wall Street Journal reports. Most new HD films on iTunes sell for $15, but some high-profile titles already reach up to $20, which could be why studios are eager for more. A lower price could convince more consumers to actually buy 4K films, but Hollywood is likely worried about it instantly devaluing an important new revenue stream.

Apple isn’t the first company to offer 4K purchases. Vudu has been selling UHD titles for years, and it typically tags them at $30 (though some newer films go for $25). If Apple wants to have a tactical advantage over Vudu, which is one of its biggest competitors at this point, it’ll definitely want to undercut them somehow. Making things even more complicated, Vudu just recently launched an Apple TV app.

Just like Apple’s earlier battles over music and film licensing, the company has to convince its more traditional partners that a lower price is better in the long run. And as someone who eagerly snaps up 4K Blu-rays, but refuses to spend $30 on 4K digital releases, Apple’s reasoning makes more sense. Most consumers are used to watching video on inexpensive streaming services these days, so they’d probably completely ignore $30 titles.

Source: WSJ

Google unveils ARCore, its answer to Apple’s ARKit

A few months ago at WWDC, Apple unveiled ARKit, the company’s first-ever attempt at an augmented reality platform. With it, developers could weave AR apps with relative ease, especially since any iOS 11 device would be compatible with it. Examples so far include a ‘Take On Me’ style music video, a virtual pet game, a restaurant app that can display virtual food on a plate and many, many more. If that sounds pretty impressive to you, well, Google must’ve thought so too. That’s because it’s coming out with its very own augmented reality platform, and it’s called ARCore.

To be clear, ARCore is not the same thing as Tango, which is Google’s other augmented reality project. While Tango requires specialized hardware like sensors and cameras, ARCore doesn’t. Instead, much like ARKit, ARCore doesn’t require anything else other than your phone.

And while we’re still waiting for iOS 11, and thus, ARKit, to make its public debut, ARCore is available right now. Starting today, developers can use ARCore on the Pixel and Samsung’s Galaxy S8, as long as they’re running Android 7.0 Nougat or above. Eventually, Google hopes for ARCore to run on millions more Android devices from manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, LG and ASUS.

Like ARKit, ARCore works with Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal, and will deliver on three features: Motion tracking (it uses the phone’s camera to detect your position in the room), environmental understanding (so it can detect horizontal surfaces) and light estimation (so that the lighting and shadow of virtual objects matches your surroundings).

Google noted in the release that it’s already been building 3D tools like Blocks and Tilt Brush so that developers can create AR content, which would fit in nicely with ARCore. The company has also been working on other AR tech, like a Visual Positioning Service for world-scale AR experiences, and AR-compatible web browsers. You can see some examples already on Google’s AR Experiments showcase, and it looks like Epic Games, Niantic (the maker of Pokemon Go) and Wayfair are already on board.

When Apple released ARKit at WWDC, Senior Vice President Craig Federighi claimed that it would be the “largest AR platform in the world,” because there are already so many iPhones and iPads on the market. Well, seeing as there are a lot more Android users than there are iOS users, it seems like that will no longer be the case.

YouTube’s big desktop redesign is now available to everyone

Today, YouTube is rolling out a number of updates across both its mobile and desktop apps. As of now, everyone should have access to the new version of YouTube when you’re viewing it through your computer’s browser. We first took a look at it way back in May, and it’s been gradually rolling out since then. But after gathering feedback on the redesign, YouTube is now ready to make it available to everyone.

It’s not a radically different look, but things are definitely more streamlined and there’s more room for video to shine. That said, there’s at least one big, oft-requested feature everyone can try now: dark mode. As the name suggests, it turns all of the white UI elements and backgrounds black, which definitely makes video stand out more. People who don’t always go fullscreen while watching videos on YouTube will definitely want to give this a shot. Between a simpler UI, bigger video thumbnails and redesigned channel pages, the whole experience feels different but still familiar, a good goal to shoot for when redesigning such an important part of the internet.

A few changes are coming to the iOS and Android YouTube apps, as well. Perhaps most notable is that you’ll be able to control playback speed, just as you can on the desktop. Another big change that YouTube says will roll out soon is a more adaptive playback window — this will let videos shot in portrait mode or in a square aspect ratio use up all the available space on your screen to display properly rather than show up with big black bars. Given that portrait video isn’t going anywhere, any change that makes videos shot like that easier to view is probably worthwhile.

Lastly, YouTube is taking this opportunity to unveil a new logo and icon. The red box that has long surrounded the “tube” part of the logo is now being moved out to the left, with the signature “play” icon showing up in the middle. Given that the red box with the “play” button has been used as YouTube’s icon in various places (including the app you’ll find on your phone’s home screen), it makes a lot of sense to incorporate that into the main brand’s logo as well. At the very least, it’ll likely be a less controversial new logo than the one Google unveiled a few years ago.

Elgato Announces Five New HomeKit Devices Including Connected Radiator Valve and Window Guard

Elgato has announced five new HomeKit-enabled devices coming to its Eve product line, including the Eve Thermo, Eve Lock, Eve Window Guard, Eve Smoke, and Eve Aqua. The announcement was made ahead of IFA Berlin 2017, a consumer electronics and home appliances trade show taking place from September 1-6 where Elgato will showcase the devices in more detail.

The new Eve Thermo marks the second generation of the product line, introducing capacitive touch controls below an integrated temperature display, all on a small device that connects to a home’s radiator to provide smart controls without the need for a bridge. Aimed at European customers, the connected radiator valve detects when users are home and when windows are open, automatically adjusting heat as needed.

With HomeKit, users can set up schedules and timers to activate or deactivate their radiator, and control the temperature through Siri commands. Eve Thermo — which has a battery life of up to 12 months — can be mounted vertically or horizontally, and its touch controls can be locked to prevent kids from tampering with the radiator’s temperature. Those interested will be able to purchase Eve Thermo starting September 26 for £59.95/69,95 Euro.

Eve Lock is a new intelligent, self-locking lock mechanism that automatically secures the lock of a door after users close the door behind them. Additionally, Eve Lock can be controlled through the iOS Home or Eve apps, so users can open the door when they have a visitor or monitor when an unauthorized attempt to open the door has occurred.

The company also unveiled Eve Smoke, which can link with and activate HomeKit scenes whenever it detects smoke within the home, in order to quickly notify residents of a potential fire. The smoke alarm — which also sets off a loud noise like traditional alarms — can be monitored through Apple’s Home app like the other Eve products, and its battery lasts for ten years.

To protect the home from intruders, Eve Window Guard can sense tamper force on a window to detect when someone might be trying to break in, and can even notice if the window is open, closed, or tilted. When it recognizes one of these changes in the window’s state, the device will send a HomeKit notification to a user’s iPhone so they know that there might be an intruder in the home.

Lastly, Eve Aqua lets users water their lawns using HomeKit. After attaching the Bluetooth-enabled controller between a spigot and a hose, they can set up a water schedule to perfectly monitor their lawn care, or ask Siri to turn on the Eve Aqua and immediately sprinkle the lawn or flower beds. The connected Eve app will also track Eve Aqua’s activity so users can discover various piece of watering data that Elgato said will help “better cater to your garden’s needs.”

While the company gave more detailed insight and a price for the Eve Thermo, the four other HomeKit devices did not receive any price points or launch dates at this time. Check out Elgato’s website here for more images and information on the new HomeKit products.

Tag: Elgato
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Nintendo is killing the Miiverse in Japan

The Wii U will go down in history as one of Nintendo’s least successful consoles. It had one great idea, however: Miiverse. A system-wide message board that players could post drawings, messages and screenshots to. Better yet, some titles displayed Miiverse posts as friendly advice (New Super Mario Bros. U) or expressive speech bubbles (Splatoon) directly inside the game. Now, of course, Nintendo is focused on the Switch, so it’s killing the Miiverse in Japan. On November 8th, at 3pm local time, it will no longer be available on either the Wii U or 3DS family of consoles.

The closure will affect more than 70 Wii U games and 20 3DS titles. Nintendo has released a couple of screenshots that explain how this will affect software such as New Super Mario Bros. U, which baked Miiverse posts directly into the hub world. In short, they’ll disappear, leaving a rather more empty Mushroom Kingdom in their wake. Most games will still be playable, of course, but the experience will be inferior. It’s another example of how the internet is affecting game culture and preservation — whereas a NES cartridge will always stay the same, anyone revisiting Splatoon in a few years will have to imagine what it was like in 2015.

The popularity of the Nintendo Switch means that interest in the Miiverse was going to tail off anyway. With fewer active players, the volume of posts has dropped, reducing its vibrancy and appeal. Still, it’s a shame the Miiverse never lived up to its full potential. The idea that “secret” notes could be left in a game world was novel, especially when combined with the Wii U’s touchscreen GamePad. The crossover between the Wii U and 3DS also provided some intriguing game design possibilities that were never fully explored. Maybe it’s for the best — we suspect Nintendo spent a lot of time moderating the Miiverse for inappropriate scrawls every day.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Nintendo

Intel’s Myriad X chip will give drones and robots better vision

It’s been almost a year since Intel scooped up AI and computer vision chip-maker Movidius. By the time of its takeover, the company had already crammed its Myriad 2 processor into drones, cameras, and USB sticks — making it a good fit for Intel’s beyond-the-PC strategy. The newly-unveiled successor to that chip will continue in the same vein. Only, this next-gen beast is the first to pack a “Neural Compute Engine.” What that essentially means is that it has some pretty powerful deep learning capabilities. If Intel gets its way, the Myriad X chip will help drones, smart cameras, and robots to learn from and interact with their surroundings in real-time.

Just as impressive is the processor’s design. The Myriad X looks about the size of a small coin, meaning placing it on the most compact of devices shouldn’t be too hard. In terms of power, it can deliver over 4 trillion operations per second (TOPS), that’s substantially more than the 1 to 1.5 TOPS offered by its predecessor. It also boasts ten times higher performance for tasks that require multiple neural networks running simultaneously, claims Intel.

“With this faster, more pervasive intelligence embedded directly into devices, the potential to make our world safer, more productive and more personal is limitless,” said Intel VP Remi El-Ouazzane.

Source: Intel

Yuneec’s first commercial drone is ready for filming and rescue

Yuneec may be DJI’s biggest consumer drone rival, but you probably have only heard of its consumer and selfie drones. Now, it’s taking a step into the big leagues with a new model, the H520. The big, six rotor UAV with bright orange visibility is meant for commercial jobs, including video production, public safety, and inspection. It’s equipped with a retractable landing gear, mission planning software and a variety of cameras, including a thermal imaging model and one with a two-inch sensor.

The landing gear allows a 360-degree, unobstructed view, and the stabilizing gimbal can tilt 20 degrees upward for inspections. There are three of hot-swappable camera options, including the E90, with a 1-inch, 20-megapixel Sony Exmor sensor, not unlike what Sony uses on its RX100 models (there’s no mention of 4K support). The other models are a 1/2.3 inch CMOS sensor wide angle camera (for inspection of cell towers, wind turbines, oil & gas platforms and the like), and a dual thermal imaging camera that can shoot regular and thermal video at the same time.

The H520 package includes a “professional grade” Android controller, with a 7-inch display and 720P real-time video download link, and can support external monitors via HDMI. The DataPilot software, meanwhile, lets you do survey and waypoint-based flight. An SDK is included, and the UAV can also be “operated as a closed architecture,” to keep images and data secure, Yuneec says.

To be sure, the H520 drone is a niche product, but it’s a good sign that Yuneec is ready to up its game against DJI by entering its commercial turf. It’s now available for $1,999 to $4,699, depending on the camera and other options, and a service contract is extra.

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