A humanoid is born in a Turkish robotics factory

The Uncanny Valley posits that robots get exponentially creepier the closer they look to humans — take Nadine the social robot, RealDoll and the Geminoids (please). However, a company called Akin Robotics in Turkey has proved that robots don’t need to look like humans at all to evoke the “ugh” factor. It recently unveiled a new factory that will produce an Eyes Without a Face-like model that will surprise, delight and terrify visitors at airports and elsewhere.

The company recently unveiled two new models including the GH5 (not the camera) and ADA Mini, above. With its, er, friendly face, it’s designed to serve drinks, take orders, walk, speak, detect obstacles and move its head across two axes.

The robots can work in shopping malls, hospitals, airports and other businesses to help tourists, patients, visitors and others. The ADA Mini, for instance, will be deployed at an Instanbul airport to provide visitors with check-in information, directions, and more. The ADA GH5 can perform similar chores and even dance, but with a decidedly more Cylon vibe.

A video below features one of Akin’s robots distributing brochures (reluctantly) to amused passersby, while another shows a robotic server distributing drinks to very patient restaurant patrons.

Akin’s robots look more like the kind that would fall down than bring about the downfall of humanity. At the same time, they do fulfill their purpose of providing amusement to human visitors, especially kids. Perhaps more importantly, Akin plans to mass produce the robots in a new factory in Konya, Turkey, so there’s a decent chance that — ready or not — you might actually see one somewhere.

Source: Gety Images

Trump bans Venezuelan cryptocurrency in the US

Back in December, President Maduro of Venezuela tried something new to outmaneuver his country’s economic disarray and sanctions imposed by the US and other nations: Invent a new cryptocurrency. The ‘petro,’ as it’s called, would be supported by the country’s natural resources — specifically, that each token would be backed by a barrel of oil. Whether or not it was on track to help stabilize Venezuela, Trump just issued an executive order banning use of the currency within the United States.

The order bans all transactions happening in the US related to “any digital currency, digital coin, or digital token, that was issued by, for, or on behalf of the Government of Venezuela on or after January 9, 2018” — aka, the petro. Maduro had said that about 100 million tokens of the cryptocurrency would be released, which combined to be worth around $6 billion.

The specificity implies this measure specifically blocks the petro’s use to circumvent US sanctions against Venezuela, but the government has been cracking down on cryptocurrency crime this year. Regulators have been charging fraudsters and scammers, but they still don’t have an overall approach nailed down, resolving to warn Congress about the risks cryptocoins pose to investors and the financial system.

Source: CNBC

Uber stops all self-driving car tests after fatal accident

Uber is putting all of its self-driving vehicle tests on hold after one of its cars struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona Sunday evening. According to ABC affiliate KNXV, the car had a human operator behind the wheel but was in autonomous mode. A woman walking on a crosswalk was struck by the car and she later died in the hospital due to the injuries she sustained. Uber says that it is working with the the local authorities.

While this isn’t the first fatal accident involving a self-driving vehicle, it does appear to be the first resulting in the death of a pedestrian. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family,” Uber tweeted today.

Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We’re fully cooperating with @TempePolice and local authorities as they investigate this incident.

— Uber Comms (@Uber_Comms) March 19, 2018

Some incredibly sad news out of Arizona. We’re thinking of the victim’s family as we work with local law enforcement to understand what happened. https://t.co/cwTCVJjEuz

— dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) March 19, 2018

A spokesperson for the National Transportation Safety Board told us that the agency is sending a team to Tempe to investigate the accident. The Tempe police department has confirmed the reports and has said, “Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation.”

1/2 Tempe Police statement on women killed by one of Uber’s self-driving cars: “The vehicle involved is one of Uber’s self-driving vehicles. It was in autonomous mode at the time of the collision, with a vehicle operator behind the wheel.”

— Dara Kerr (@darakerr) March 19, 2018

Via: Bloomberg

NVIDIA announces exclusive features for GPUs that don’t exist

It’s been exactly five years since NVIDIA announced Volta, its next-generation GPU architecture. The closest thing to a Volta consumer graphics card we’ve seen since is the Titan V, a $3,000 offering targeted at scientists that was announced three months ago. Well, today at GDC, NVIDIA is… still not announcing a new GeForce card based on Volta. What it’s doing instead is teasing that Volta cards will have some exclusive GameWorks features.

The new features are part of “RTX,” a “highly scalable” solution that, according to the company, will “usher in a new era” of real-time ray tracing. Keeping with the acronyms, RTX is compatible with DXR, Microsoft’s new ray tracing API for DirectX. To be clear, DXR and RTX will support older graphics cards; it’s only the special GameWorks features that will be locked to “Volta and future generation GPU architectures.”

So, what’s ray tracing? It’s a rendering technique based on how we see the world. In nature, light photons bounce off of various objects before they hit your eyes. Because simulating every photon in real-time is a little ambitious, ray tracing reverses that process, sending millions of lines outwards from the camera towards the scene in front. When a ray hits something, it then checks the object’s properties as well as the light sources around it to calculate the exact color that pixel on your screen should be.

There’s more to it, of course, but no one wants to read about algorithms on a Monday morning. All you need to know is that it makes scenes look much more realistic. Pretty much all pre-rendered CGI (think, any Hollywood blockbuster) utilizes ray tracing, but it’s been thought of as too demanding for use in gaming outside of certain effects.

NVIDIA says lots of developers are on board and will be showing off real-time ray tracing at the GDC this week. Engine partners include Epic Games (Unreal Engine), EA (Frostbite) and Unity; in addition, EA, 4A Games (Metro series) and Remedy (Quantum Break) are signed up on the development side. As previously mentioned, Microsoft is also an API partner with DirectX. What we probably won’t see on show are the new GameWorks features, which “will support Volta and future generation GPU architectures” and enable ray-traced area shadows, ray-traced glossy reflections and ray-traced ambient occlusion.

GameWorks, for those of you that aren’t into PCs and/or controversy, is NVIDIA middleware that allows developers to add extra bells and whistles to their games. A lot of it is related to physics and lighting, but the features you’ve probably heard of are HairWorks and TurfWorks, which, in games like Final Fantasy XV, allow for richer grass and fluffier creatures. GameWorks is also fairly controversial in PC gaming — the features are heavily optimized for NVIDIA cards, and running them on an AMD GPU often leads to terrible performance, as NVIDIA won’t share its source code with its rival. (Some would argue they lead to terrible performance on NVIDIA cards as well, it’s just not quite as pronounced.)

RTX and the as-yet-unnamed GameWorks features were announced on a briefing call last week. The short Q-and-A session that followed can essentially be summarised as “journalists find creative ways to ask if NVIDIA is going to announce a Volta GeForce card.” Despite some inventive phrasing, none of the question-askers were successful.

Recent rumors suggested that the next GeForce line won’t even be based on Volta, but rather some sort of bridging architecture called “Ampere.” That seems unlikely, given the announcement of Volta-specific features, but the “future generation GPU architectures” mention does mean NVIDIA could announce wider compatibility if and when Ampere is announced. Now that NVIDIA’s GDC is done, the next date for a graphics card announcement would be its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) at the end of the month. GTC is more focused on self-driving cars and AI, but the March 27th keynote could make a nice platform for an announcement.

Google’s instant app tech now lets you try games before you buy

Google doesn’t really make games on its own, but with Android it supports one of the biggest developer communities out there. As such, the company is sharing some news at the Game Developers Conference that’ll be of interest to both players and devs alike: The “Instant App” technology that Google added to Android last year can now be used on games, as well.

Android users can already try a small selection of games in the Google Play Store that load up their full experience without needing to go through the normal install process. Titles include the ever-popular Clash Royale, Words With Friends 2, Bubble Witch 3 Saga, Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire, Might Battles and — of course — Solitaire. We got to try a few games ahead of time, and while you do need to wait a few seconds here and there, getting into the full experience of the game happens quickly and without any major delay, at least on the WiFi connection we were on.

Jonathan Karmel, a product manager for Google Play, explained that the idea for making games work with Instant App technology came from a desire to reduce friction and get users straight into the game, so to speak. That’s particularly true for social games like Clash Royale, where a player can send a friend a link to “join their clan” — which then results in jumping through a series of hoops to actually get the app up and running. With Instant Games, when you click over to a game’s profile in the Google Play Store, there’s a “try now” button that puts you right in the game’s full, native experience quickly. While you can only play a portion of the game like this, you’ll come across plenty of prompts to download the full app if you’re so inclined.

While it’s safe to say that installing an app isn’t a big barrier for most mobile users at this point, there’s definitely something to be said for letting players experience a game before giving up valuable storage space to a full install. And in early testing, it’s been successful. “Users who have historically abandoned instead of installing a game are instead trying the game out and then installing,” Karmel said.

For starters, instant games (or what the company is calling “Google Play Instant”) is in a closed beta, which means only selected developers can use the technology. There are only eight partners in the beta right now, though Google plans to allow more and more developers to use the technology over time. And while it took a full year for Instant Apps to go from announcement to available for all developers, Google anticipates that Instant Games will roll out much faster — Karmel said that general availability would come in a few months. Perhaps not coincidentally, Google’s annual I/O developer conference is also just a couple months away.

In addition to the Google Play Instant announcement, Google is also launching a redesigned Play Games app for Android today. The app originally was Android’s answer to the iOS Game Center, with a focus on achievements, matchmaking and playing games with friends, but now it’s been redesigned with a bigger focus on curated content and discovery features.

It’s a direction that the Play Games app has been moving in for a while now, but a stylish new “arcade” area that features more animation and video previews as well as a variety of different categories for players to explore. The app still serves as a home to jump into all your games, but Google’s Benjamin Frenkel says that Play Games is more meant to “focus on curated content and have a stronger editorial voice.” In some ways, it sounds like what Apple did with its App Store redesign last fall; games got their own dedicated tab with more in-depth content and curated categories to help people sift through the insane number of options out there. Naturally, the Arcade section of the app will host instant games so users can jump right into a game.

As we noted, there are only a handful of instant games available at launch — but both the new Play Games app and a selection of instant games are available now for Android users to try. We’ll be keeping an eye on the app to see how quickly Google can get more instant games out in the wild. For starters, they’re only in the Play Store, but Google says the format can be used all over the web, so you might see links to play games in a lot more places soon.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!

Google’s Sidewalk Labs made a map of every good parking spot in SF

Last month, Google’s city-innovating department Sidewalk Labs released Coord, a cloud-based platform that provides data on all the curbs in a city. In practice, businesses can use this to figure out in real-time where to load and unload goods, pick up passengers and park. But to visualize the benefits of chartering its service, Coord has created a free tool that maps all the curbs in San Francisco, which anyone can use to figure out the city’s parking and loading situation.

You’ll have to make a (free) account to use the web tool, but thereafter, you can use it to track status across all days, times, vehicle types and curb use. Want to see where you can park your motorcyle for two hours on a Friday afternoon? Or park your truck for 30 minutes to unload goods? Or pick up passengers in a taxi at 2 AM? Coord’s tool can help.

The Coord team trekked through San Francisco’s streets and photographed curb cuts and prominent intersections, according to The Verge. Then they fed those photos into their internal app Surveyor, which read them using augmented reality tech, estimated distance and combined all the data to make a 3D map…which took about four minutes to create. In short, this is a repeatable process that translates a number of different signs and zone indicators into an easily-readable map.

We hope the information we are making available today will not only help the public and private participants in the mobility market interact with the curb more efficiently and safely, but also enhance cities’ capacity to reshape their regulations and management of curbs,” Coord told The Verge. “We believe that widely distributing accurate information about mobility services, such as the use of a curb, is a key step in accelerating the adoption of a digital mobility market that more effectively matches mobility supply with increased demand.”

Via: The Verge

Source: Coord

Japan’s next-gen bullet train is sleeker and tech-friendly

Japan is still as fond of bullet trains as it ever was, and that’s reflected in its latest and greatest model. Central Japan Railway has unveiled a prototype of the N700S, a ‘Supreme’ bullet train that’s designed to be kinder to both the environment and its passengers. It’s 20 percent lighter, consumes 7 percent less energy and has a boxier nose that promises to cut back on the sonic boom-like effect when the train zips through tunnels at up to 186MPH. Travelers, meanwhile, get power outlets at every seat (not just the windows like before), more comfortable seats and overhead racks that light up at each station to remind you to check for luggage.

You won’t see the N700S in service until 2020, when it premieres on the Tokaido Shinkansen line running between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka. However, there’s an increased chance of finding it outside of Japan. The N700S has a more flexible design with just two kinds of cars versus the six for earlier N700 models, which should allow for shorter 8- or 12-car trains (versus the usual 16) that might be more alluring to other railways. The N700S isn’t as exciting or speedy as a maglev train, but it promises to make high-speed rail that much more viable.

Source: Asahi Shimbun

Ikea’s Place app is now out for the latest Android phones

Ikea’s Place app is heading to Android. The augmented reality application gives you access to 3,200 items from Ikea’s inventory and allows to see what they’d look like in your home by placing their 3D versions over your phone’s live view. Think Pokémon Go, but instead of flinging Poké balls, you position couches in the living room. Place used to be an Apple exclusive, because it was powered by Cupertino’s augmented reality platform for mobile devices called ARKit. Google’s version of the app runs on ARCore, its answer to ARKit that gives Android devices the power to run apps that can superimpose objects over live images even without special sensors or software.

The big G’s AR toolkit for mobile graduated from preview phase in late February, and is now compatible with phones other than Pixel devices. You can now download and install it if you have a Pixel, a Samsung Galaxy S7, S8, S9 or Note 8, an LG V30, an Asus Zenfone AR or a OnePlus 5. Actually, you’ll have to install it if you want to use any ARCore apps, which are bound to pop up one by one now that the platform works on more devices. That means you won’t be able to run Ikea Place or any other ARCore app if you have a non-compatible phone, but Google says it’s working to bring the platform to more devices throughout the year.

In addition to launching Place for Android, Ikea has also added Visual Search to its apps. The new feature gives the applications the capability to search for items in Ikea’s inventory — you just need to point your camera towards that piece of furniture that caught your eye. Finally, Ikea has launched a new gameshow series called Matchers Keepers that you can play with friends and family. You’ll need to pick pieces of furniture over three rounds for a specific place in your home, and you get points for picking out matching items. All players will need to have access to Ikea Place, though, so any housemate with a non-compatible device will have to sit it out.

Magic Leap releases its first set of AR developer tools

We’ve been anticipating Magic Leap’s as-yet unreleased mixed reality gear for quite some time now. We know that the AR headset will likely be dubbed the Magic Leap One, will cost around $1000 and will have application for music as well as gaming. Still, the number of things we don’t know about the gear is pretty significant. Now, however, the company appears to be lifting the veil a little bit with a new Creator Portal, which seems to contain more information for developers interested in the device as a platform, with a simulator, developer community, learning resources and an SDK to get started making apps for the unreleased device.

It’s pretty easy to sign up, too. Just a simple email authentication and then agreeing to some licensing legal language, and you’re in. Once there, you can check out an entire learning area full of tutorials, best practices and getting started guides to, well, get started. There’s also information on the Magic Leap’s Lumin OS, a custom-built operating system based on open source/Linux tools. There’s even an app store, called Magic Leap World, which might let developers sell their creations directly to device owners. All of this new content makes sense if Magic Leap truly wants to create the spacial computing future it wants to herald in.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Magic Leap

Affirm Announces In-Store Financing Options With Virtual Card Integration in Apple Pay

Affirm is a financial startup that allows users to pay for expensive items from select retailers in monthly installment plans, after they are first approved for a loan on the company’s website or in the app. Today the company announced that users will now be able to secure credit in seconds and then checkout in retail stores thanks to integration of the Affirm virtual card into Apple Pay.

To apply for Affirm financing, customers complete a “simple, five-field” application that provides them with a real-time credit decision (rates are between 10-30 percent APR based on personal credit). After approval, customers use the Affirm app to enter the amount they want to spend by selecting a payment plan on the item (3, 6, 12, 18, or 24 months), and Affirm loads up the cost of the full purchase onto the virtual card, paying the merchant for the item and taking on “all fraud risk for the purchase.”

With the addition of Apple Pay, Affirm’s virtual card can be used anywhere that Apple Pay is accepted.

“People’s shopping habits are evolving very quickly, beyond simply moving online-to-offline or offline-to-online when engaging with merchants,” said Rob Pfeifer, Chief Retail Officer at Affirm. “Consumers are on their phones, online, and in-store throughout a shopping experience. Affirm provides a solution for this omnichannel experience in the form of transparent and honest finance.”

For merchants, Affirm says it provides two options to support the service: integration with the Affirm InStore API with their own point-of-sale system, or support Affirm’s expanded virtual card experience. The company explained that regardless of what method merchants choose, the customer’s retail checkout process is “virtually identical” to Affirm online and in the iOS app.

Affirm founder and CEO Max Levchin told Bloomberg that the company hopes it will continue to expand and that more stores will “embrace” Affirm because of its ability to offer retailers “insights into customer purchasing habits.”

Levchin hopes more stores will embrace Affirm’s approach by offering them insights into customer purchasing habits. With Affirm In-Store, retailers are able to track if someone applies for a loan in the shop but finishes the transaction elsewhere. This is designed to let the retailer better understand the impact of sales staff.

“I’m optimistic there will be a day when shoppers instinctively reach for their phone and the Affirm app, rather than their credit card,’’ Levchin said.

In its press release, Affirm detailed how Apple reseller Simply Mac switched from paper-based applications for loans on its private label credit card, to Affirm InStore’s new process. Tiffany Polmateer, Simply Mac’s director of purchasing and operations, said that since supporting Affirm it has seen a 20 percent increase in average order values, 63 percent more customer financing applications, and 34 percent more approvals per store.

Affirm is available to download on the iOS App Store for free. [Direct Link]

Related Roundup: Apple PayTag: Affirm
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