Tribeca Games returns with a dive into ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’

Last year’s Tribeca Film Festival included a companion festival all about gaming and this year sees the return of Tribeca Games. During the 2018 festival, which runs from April 18th through 29th, Tribeca Games will give attendees behind-the-scenes looks at the upcoming Shadow of the Tomb Raider and God of War reboot as well as a League of Legends tournament.

On April 27th, the creative team behind the latest Tomb Raider installment will discuss the evolution of Lara Croft as well as the techniques and tools needed to create the series and the inspiration that guides it. The panel will include Senior Game Director Daniel Bisson, Franchise Creative Director Noah Hughes, writer Jill Murray, Senior Brand Director Rich Briggs and Camilla Luddington, the performance artist for Lara Croft. There will also be an extended gameplay demo of Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Also on the 27th, Creative Director Cory Barlog will give attendees a look at the creative process behind God of War and will share stories about its development as well as insights into some of the creative decisions that went into the game’s making.

Tribeca Games will also parter with Super League Gaming to host a League of Legends tournament. NYC players who are level 30 and above can take part in online qualifiers starting on April 14th and the top players will compete live at the festival on April 28th.

And lastly, Tribeca Games has invited 15 New York-based independent game developers to build new games within 48 hours using IBM technology. The games they produce will be available for attendees to play during the Tribeca Film Festival.

Tickets for Tribeca Games are free and will be available starting march 27th through the Tribeca Film Festival website. Those interested in registering for the Battle of the Boroughs League of Legends tournament can do so here.

Google rebrands Android Wear as Wear OS

Android Wear, Google’s big attempt to get into the wearables space, hasn’t been the runaway blockbuster hit the company had banked on. In order to give the platform a much-needed shot in the arm, the company has sought to rebrand the software as Wear OS by Google.

The news has dropped in the run-up to Baselworld, the biggest trade show for the watch industry, which takes place in Basel next week. It’s likely that a number of new timepieces that run Google’s software will make their debut at the show, coupled with the new push.

Google’s Dennis Troper hints to the reasons behind the change in his blog post, pointing out that one in three new Android Wear users own an iPhone. By pushing Google’s wearables ecosystem away from Android, it could help clear up any implied confusion that the devices don’t work with rival platforms.

That sentiment was echoed by Fossil’s Greg McKelvey, who said that “many of our smartwatch customers are iOS users.” The rebrand should, therefore, ensure that everyone knows that Wear OS is a broad, and welcoming church.

A new name may not be enough, however, for Google and its numerous partners to reclaim ground on Apple in the watch space. In September of last year, analysts believed that 33 million people had purchased an Apple Watch — compared to just 10 million that run Android Wear.

Source: Google

Spotify is testing in-app voice search

Spotify is currently compatible with voice search, but it only works through integrations with voice assistants, such as Google Assistant and Alexa. That might not be the case much longer. Twitter user Hunter Owens (@Owens) spotted the new feature on the music streaming service. We’ve reached out to Spotify for confirmation that this test is in the works.

I spy @Spotify laying the foundation for a smart speaker… pic.twitter.com/n1slxIFUNA

— Hunter Owens (@owens) March 14, 2018

The feature appears to work by asking the app to play an artist, album, song, genre or playlist. Hunter found it by pulling up Spotify’s search screen. In the bottom right-hand corner, there was a microphone button. Hitting it brought up entirely new voice options.

In the app, from the Search screen pic.twitter.com/a1uofk0Hjh

— Hunter Owens (@owens) March 14, 2018

This venture makes sense, given Spotify’s hardware ambitions. Right now, the streaming music service is dependent on other companies for voice control through Spotify Connect. If Spotify does start manufacturing a smart speaker, these companies will become its competitors. The company recently filed to go public via a direct listing.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Twitter

Movies Anywhere link unlocks a score-only ‘The Last Jedi’ extra

If you watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi and thought “this would be better if we just removed all the words and sound effects” then we have a treat for you John Williams fans. Now that the movie is out for home viewing on digital services (the 4K Blu-ray and other disc versions go on sale March 27th), director Rian Johnson revealed buyers have access to a silent film-style score-only version of the movie. It’s not the first time we’ve seen something like this (having one might have improved the Tron: Legacy home release, but that movie’s director made sure there was a score-only version included with his next movie, Oblivion), but there is an extra wrinkle: Movies Anywhere.

The revamped digital locker service that ties into a number of retailers (including the recently-added Fandango) is your key to the special release. Just make sure it’s linked to whatever account you bought the movie with, and then if you check in the Movies Anywhere app (on iOS, Android, Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku or the web) it will be available. Unfortunately, that means you can’t watch it that way on devices that don’t have the MA app yet (game consoles, Blu-ray players or connected TVs for example), and, as far as we know, isn’t out yet outside the US where Movies Anywhere isn’t available.

This is the full movie, but with no dialogue, fx or backgrounds… just John’s score. I really wanted to put this out, it’s really something to see John’s music play with the movie, like a silent film.

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) March 13, 2018

The one hoop you have to jump through to get it: get the Movies Anywhere app and link whatever account you bought the movie with to it. It’s free, it works pretty painlessly. Kinda a pain I know, but I think it’s worth it to get this version.

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) March 13, 2018

Source: Rian Johnson (Twitter)

The Acura RLX Sport Hybrid is an agile car with some outdated tech touches

Luxury cars need more than a smooth ride to appease drivers. When dropping $50,000 (or more) on a vehicle, people want something that glides but can also quicken the pulse. Audi, BMW, Mercedes and even Cadillac are delivering on all of those fronts. Now with the RLX Sport Hybrid (starting at $61,900), Acura is getting close too.

The top-of-the-line Acura sedan takes cues from the automaker’s NSX supercar. Make no mistake, these are two different cars, and the chances of seeing an RLX drifting around a corner during a track day are pretty much nil. But what the car lacks in pole-position cred it makes up for in solid AWD (all-wheel drive) handling, comfortable accommodations and aggressive styling. Unfortunately, the infotainment system doesn’t live up to the rest of the car.

At its core, though, the RLX has all the attributes of a luxury car: a smooth ride that all but eliminates rough roads, a quiet cabin that forces you to open the window if you want to actually hear the engine and steering that has a casual relationship with the road. During my drives in San Francisco’s city streets and on the highway, I half expected the inclusion of an AWD system to be wasted. What’s the point of added cornering prowess if the car is going to float all over the road? Then I hit the mountains and pressed the Sport button.

In the switchbacks near Muir Woods, the RLX surprised me with its ability to stick to a line around tight corners. Yes, there was body roll but nothing near what I expected. On twisty roads, it’s almost like two cars: an interior that reminds you where all your money went and an AWD system that’s up to the task of keeping the wheels planted onto the asphalt.

That impressive cornering has a lot to do with parent company Honda’s Super Handling All-Wheel Drive (SH-AWD). It might be a feature that sounds like it was coined by an eight-year-old, but the tech behind it (especially in the RLX hybrid) makes a potentially boring car almost exciting to drive in the mountains. The system dynamically sends torque to the wheels to adjust for a corner. At a basic level, it pushes more torque to the outside wheels during a turn. On the RLX the electric motors are used to deliver that extra power. Unfortunately, that power never translates into thrilling forward motion.

The RLX’s combined power output of 377 horsepower and 341 pounds of torque feels adequate. It’s not slow by any means and I had zero issues getting up to highway speeds from a dead stop, but still: It lacks pizzazz. When I stomped on the accelerator, I wanted more.

During my quest for a faster car, the seven-speed dual-clutch transmission worked great on the highway. But during spirited driving I’d recommend switching to the paddle shifters to keep your momentum up.

Because the RLX only has a normal driving mode and Sport, you don’t get a lot of control over the hybrid system. Many hybrids on the road today are giving drivers a plethora of options to fine-tune their gas versus electric driving. The RLX, not so much, but after a day I was fine with it. Sometimes you just want the car to figure it out, and the RLX does that with aplomb.

It also does a fine job pampering its occupants. The seats are plush and comfortable. Long hours in the car melted away with nary an ache or pain while the headrest felt more like a pillow than protection against whiplash (it’s still protection against whiplash). All four seats have adequate legroom and warmers so that driving home after a day on the slopes is an opportunity to raise your core temperature via your butt.

While the car is great at making your rear end feel cushy, its infotainment system is disappointing. With a dated color scheme and design that reminded me of the Windows BIOS screen, it feels out of place in a car with this many amenities. It’s like putting a Compaq computer into a smartly furnished apartment. The information it shares about the vehicle’s efficiency feels cluttered, and the media player looks more like Real Player than anything else on the market right now. Navigating the system is a chore, and it doesn’t get better when you talk to the car.

The voice control is also frustrating — it forces you to follow a script with multiple choices. It made me pine for the natural voice control found in other cars, smartphones and smart speakers. To make matters worse, the car does not support Android Auto or CarPlay.

But if you can get past the infotainment shortfalls and you’re not expecting too much based on the “Sport” moniker, Acura’s sport sedan makes for a comfortable cruiser. Thanks to Honda’s stellar SH-AWD, the car will pleasantly surprise you in corners. Plus will likely to give you peace of mind in inclement weather.

Source: Acura

GM is spending $100 million on production-ready autonomous cars

If GM is going to release a fully autonomous car in 2019, it has to be ready to build more than just a handful of test vehicles… and it’s willing to spend a fair sum to make sure that happens. The automaker has announced that it will build production versions of its Cruise AV at its Orion and Brownstown plants in Michigan, and will spend over $100 million to upgrade both plants for self-driving car manufacturing. Orion will assemble the cars, while Brownstown will assemble the sensor-laden roof modules.

The Orion plant may be familiar if you’ve kept tabs on GM’s forays into electric and driverless vehicles. It’s best known as the manufacturing home for the Bolt EV, but it has also assembled Cruise test vehicles and the Sonic.

News like this from GM was really just a matter of time, but it underscores one of the major challenges in bringing self-driving cars into the mainstream: companies have to spend hefty amounts upgrading their facilities to produce technology that had never been a factor before. It’s not surprising to see collaborations like the Lyft/Magna partnership, as many of the companies in the autonomous vehicle world might face trouble developing and building vehicles all on their own.

Source: GM

Rihanna slams Snapchat over ad that mocked domestic violence

A few days ago, Snapchat allowed an ad on its platform that plenty of folks thought made light of domestic violence. The ad was apparently for a game and it asked if viewers would rather “Slap Rihanna” or “Punch Chris Brown,” likely referencing Brown’s 2009 felony assault on the pop star. Snap then apologized for letting the ad through, telling the BBC that the ad had been published in error and had been removed immediately. Now Rihanna has seen the ad and responded on her Instagram Story, and Snap came back with another apology.

When Snap pulled the ad, it said, “The advert was reviewed and approved in error, as it violates our advertising guidelines. We immediately removed the ad last weekend, once we became aware.” It also added, “We are sorry that this happened.” The content apparently violated Snap’s advertising policy, which bans content that Snap deems “shocking, sensational, or disrespectful.”

Rihanna’s response says that Snapchat isn’t her favorite app out there, and that the company “spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to [domestic violence] victims and made a joke of it!!” While the ad didn’t originate with Snap, the company did allow it on its platform. “Shame on you,” said Rihanna. “Throw the whole app-oligy away.”

Snap responded yet again today, according to CNN. “This advertisement is disgusting and never should have appeared on our service,” said a company spokesperson. “We are so sorry we made the terrible mistake of allowing it through our review process. We are investigating how that happened so that we can make sure it never happens again.”

Via: Pitchfork

Source: Rihanna/Instagram

Ford’s Co-Pilot360 tech will make driver-assists standard equipment

Contrary to what you might think, Ford isn’t ignoring autonomous and driver assist systems, it just hasn’t talked about them too much recently. As part of its Ford Uncovered event at its Michigan headquarters in Dearborn, the automaker announced its Co-Pilot360 automation suite. The plan is to make automatic emergency braking systems with pedestrian detection, blind spot avoidance, a lane keeping system, automatic high-beam headlamps and backup cameras standard equipment across most of its trucks and SUVs by 2020. If you want a peek at the tech, this fall the Ford Edge and Edge ST will arrive on showrooms with it.

Let’s run through these features, shall we? The emergency braking system was designed to keep you from hitting a pedestrian or another vehicle because you weren’t paying attention to the road, or someone jumped off the sidewalk in front of your bumper. Ford says that before the auto-brake kicks in, an alert will sound in the cabin and there will be warning flashes. If you don’t react fast enough, the car will automatically apply the brakes. By 2020, Ford promises 91 percent of its offerings will have this feature.

A lane-keeping system will vibrate the steering wheel when your car notices you’re riding too close to lane-markers on the road, and applies steering torque to re-center your auto. There’s also a more aggressive function that employs a front-facing camera to detect when you’re doing a bad job at being an “attentive” driver, and will flash lights and play sounds to get your eyes back on the road (or fully open).

The blind spot detection system uses radar to detect when another vehicle enters, well, your blind spot. The alert will come in the form of a light on the side-view mirror. Other automakers including Nissan have something like this in place already, but the light is inside the cabin, near the rear-view mirror. Ford also teased additional, optional driver-assist features would become available, without naming what they would be.

While this sounds like great tech for you and me, the truth is, it could be even more valuable for long-haul and commercial drivers. Ford says that these technologies will also be available across its E-series, F-650, F-750 and F-59 delivery truck line.

With this announcement, it shows that Ford is inching us closer to a world where every vehicle on the road has assistive technologies, not just those owned by folks who want bleeding edge tech in their cars. That’s not to say that these standard features won’t increase the sticker price (they almost assuredly will), it’s just that they’ll be hard to avoid when you’re buying a new ride.

All Ford vehicles will have built-in 4G LTE by 2020

Ford’s vision for the future is electric, connectivity and assisted driving. For the Blue Oval company, that means by 2020 its entire lineup will have 4G LTE connectivity and Waze navigation built in at a system level. The former means that all aspects of a vehicle can be updated over the air rather than just the Sync platform. The latter is a bid to make the road safer by decreasing distracted driving that’s caused by fumbling with your phone while behind the wheel. And after studying how people use their trucks, the F-150 will have an available bed-mounted generator for the folks who need to export power on the job-site — an idea Chevy experimented with on its ZH2 concept truck for the military.

More than that, Ford says it’s making a big push into electric vehicles in general, including plug-in hybrids for the forthcoming Bronco, Escape, Explorer, F-150 and the Mustang. For the venerable F-150, the hybrid powertrain will enable more towing power and low-end torque. That’ll start in 2020 and within two years of that target, there will be six battery-powered electric vehicles on showrooms.

The reason? It’ll help insulate customers from rising gas prices, in part, on models where fuel efficiency typically falls short. Which is important — by 2020 Ford predicts SUV sales will account for 50 percent of global vehicle sales. Speaking of, in two years, the automaker will have eight SUVs for sale total, with five of them being hybrids and one will be full-electric.

Ford has an even loftier goal for this push into electrification: By 2021, it expects that its hybrid sales will surpass that of Toyota’s. Last year, the Prius-maker announced it’d sold 1.52 million units across three models, the standard Prius, the Prius C and the Yaris Hybrid. With the sheer amount of hybrid vehicles Ford has planned for the next few years and the brand’s sales figures, that probably isn’t a hard goal to meet. Previously, Ford said it’d hoped at least 10 percent of its sales would be EVs by 2020. Currently, it’s in second place for hybrid sales.

But it may have some competition. Toyota, of course, is planning more than “more than 10” EVs by 2020, while GM expects to have double that three years later.

US sanctions Russians for cyberattacks and election meddling

The US Department of the Treasury has instituted sanctions against five Russian entities and 19 individuals for their involvement in a number of cyberattacks and online efforts to interfere with the US presidential election. The sanctions prohibit US companies and individuals from conducting business with those named by the Treasury Department. “The Administration is confronting and countering malign Russian cyber activity, including their attempted interference in US elections, destructive cyberattacks and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in a statement. “These targeted sanctions are a part of a broader effort to address the ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia. Treasury intends to impose additional CAATSA sanctions, informed by our intelligence community, to hold Russian government officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the US financial system.”

Among those being sanctioned is the Internet Research Agency, which US officials have said played a major role in the Russian campaign to sow political discord during the 2016 election. The Treasury Department notes the IRA’s efforts to create fake online personas and pose as US individuals and organizations, the ads it bought during the election and the political rallies it organized and coordinated ahead of and following the election. Along with the IRA, the Treasury Department sanctioned an additional two entities and 13 individuals who assisted the IRA in some way.

Russian intelligence organization the Federal Security Service also received sanctions today due to its role in the 2014 Yahoo hack and for using its cyber tools “to target Russian journalists and politicians critical of the Russian government; Russian citizens and government officials; former officials from countries bordering Russia; and U.S. government officials, including cyber security, diplomatic, military and White House personnel.” The Main Intelligence Directorate, a Russian military intelligence organization, also garnered sanctions for its involvement in the NotPetya cyberattack that harmed businesses, hospitals and government agencies in Europe, Asia and the US earlier this year. Six individuals that acted on behalf of the Main Intelligence Directorate were also sanctioned.

Today’s sanctions follow the indictment of 13 Russian nationals who were allegedly involved in efforts to sway the US election. They were indicted last month as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Via: The Verge

Source: US Department of the Treasury