The next ‘Overwatch’ event is a Blackwatch mission in Venice

After a week of teases, Blizzard has finally revealed what’s in store for the Overwatch Mission Archives, the new title for the events following last year’s Uprising. During the Overwatch League competition, Jeff Kaplan unveiled this year’s event, Retribution, a new PvE brawl that sees four members of Blackwatch (Moira, McCree, Genji, and Reaper) taking on Talon operatives in Venice after dark.

Kaplan also revealed that a daytime version of the new map featured in Retribution will be implemented as an Escort PVP map, although it will appear on the PTR before it arrives on the live game. And of course, it wouldn’t be an Overwatch event without some new skins. The Moira Blackwatch skin, which was hinted at in a Retribution comic earlier today, will be making an appearance, as will a new Reaper skin that features Gabriel Reyes in his Soldier: 24 days. The event will run from April 10th through 30th.

Source: YouTube

Avast claims its secure browser is 30 percent faster than yours

Avast has updated its browser to give users greater control over their online privacy. According to the company, its renamed Avast Secure Browser (formerly SafeZone) is designed to plug the security gaps that result from users’ misplaced protection expectations. Features such as Stealth Mode, HTTPS Encryption, anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting have been designed to account for the 69 percent of UK consumers who believe standard private-browsing modes will anonymize their identity, and the 81 percent who believe their browser would alert them to web-based threats, such as malicious cryptomining and extensions.

Based on the Chromium open source platform, the browser also includes Bank Mode, an extension guard, anti-phishing features, a password manager and Flash Protect, designed to free-up computer resources and preserve battery life. In short, Avast claims it’s a ‘one-stop’ product for online security, and in comparison to its competition — Chrome, Firefox and Edge — its features certainly seem comprehensive. Especially since there’s very little work involved for the end-user — everything’s on by default, and the software will tell you if something’s amiss. Plus, using a sample of 1,000 popular websites, Avast claims it bumps up average browsing speeds by 30 percent.

However, Avast doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to product security. It owns CCleaner, which was last year hit by a fairly substantial malware issue, while a couple of years ago Avast’s Avastium browser (also developed through Chromium) was found to be at risk from security attacks. Nonetheless, Avast Secure Browser does address many people’s lack of understanding when it comes to protecting themselves, so it could make for an important redemption offering.

‘Alex’s Sci-Fi World’ is a beautiful piece of VR animation

Hand-painted VR animation isn’t new. Oculus developed Quill, a 3D painting package for the Rift, back in 2015 for its now defunct Story Studio. It was released to the public in Dec. 2016 and updated with a slew of filmmaking features three months ago. Since then, a small community has blossomed with VR artist Goro Fujita — the man behind the incredible A Moment in Time — at the helm. There are many impressive shorts online, but my favorite is Alex’s Sci-Fi World by Matt Schaefer. It’s a neon-soaked delight that you should absolutely watch on YouTube or using a Rift and the original Quill file.

The animation revolves around a small but densely packed street in a multiplanetary future. An imaginative grab bag of aliens line the sidewalk while surveillance robots hover ahead. Neon lights flicker, and a handful of giant tentacles can be seen writhing out of a nearby alleyway. The loop is relatively short, but the level of detail is staggering. Like Special Delivery, a 360-degree film by Google’s Spotlight Stories, it’s almost impossible to see everything in one sitting. It was only on my second time through, for instance, that I noticed the band and fairy lights inside the main building.

The colorful world was inspired by Schaefer’s close friend Alex Steven Martin. The pair met at college and played music together for many years. “He was outside the dorm playing Marcus Miller tunes on his bass guitar, and I immediately thought, ‘We need to start a band right now,’” Shaefer said. These days, Schaefer is an interaction designer while Martin works as an illustrator and graphic artist in Astoria, New York. In late 2016, Martin posted some illustrations of a graffiti-covered, robot- and monster-occupied city on his blog. They snowballed into a weekly series that Martin uploads to Tumblr and Instagram with the hashtag #scififriday.

“I would describe them as Blade Runner meets Where’s Waldo,” Shaefer said, “with some Moebius and Syd Mead mixed in. One day it just clicked and I thought, ‘I need to bring his universe to life in VR.’” First, Schaefer redrew a picture that Martin had painted of a futuristic crosswalk. It had a blue-windowed music venue called the Corner, a beaten-up camper van and an eclectic group waiting at a holographic stop sign. “I then mined Alex’s body of work for additional elements to complete the out-of-frame areas,” Shaefer explained. Then he integrated his own designs, which included monsters, hoverbikes and a Blade Runner-inspired car interior.

While Schaefer painted, Martin worked on new, inspirational artwork and music that could be layered on top of the piece. It took four months to finish the painting — for Schaefer, Alex’s Sci-Fi World was an evening and weekend project — and 10 to 12 hours of animation work. Movement was created through micro-stories, or loops, that overlap with one another. One loop, for instance, is a clumsy robot crashing into a telephone pole. Another is the resulting shockwave that zaps some unsuspecting birds nearby. “The electricity also flows to adjacent power lines, leading the viewer to other micro-stories in the scene,” Schaefer explained.

“One day it just clicked and I thought, ‘I need to bring his universe to life in VR.’”

The result is extraordinary. Schaefer prefers Quill to traditional CG animation tools such as Maya and Adobe After Effects because it gives his shorts a rougher, handcrafted feel. “In VR, you’re painting and animating spatially,” he said. “You also have physical inputs such as motion controllers and head tracking. This makes the creative process, and the end result, feel natural.” If you like Schaefer’s work, I recommend checking out his website and YouTube channel; the latter has a bunch of interesting VR shorts, including a Sonic and Mario-themed baby-announcement video.

Source: mattschaeferdesign.com, alexstevenmartin.com

Sony will make almost $1 billion on Spotify’s IPO

Spotify finally realized its IPO, after going the road less travelled and listing directly. Shares have already increased in value from $132 initially to settle around $140 for now. For those that already owned some Spotify stock, it was a good day. Like Sony: It held 5.7 percent of the streaming service through its Sony Music Entertainment arm, and sold under 20 percent of that when Spotify was listed, resulting in a payout of roughly $177 million. Good day is putting it mildly.

Sony issued a press release, which is based on stock prices at the NYSE on the close of Spotify’s IPO launch three days ago. “The sum of the unrealized valuation gain (net) and the gain on the sale of shares (net) to be recorded for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2019 would be approximately 105 billion yen in total.” In plain English, Sony could sell all of its Spotify stock and make close to $1 billion from this IPO. It probably won’t do that, but Sony Music Entertainment early sell-off of its shares on IPO day means around $177 million (19 billion yen) right from the outset, regardless of where prices go from here.

Sony is hedging its bets on Spotify for now, but the cash will help bolster the company’s finances for future earnings reports — not that it’s even needed it in more recent times.

Via: Yomiuri Shimbun

Source: Sony (PDF)

iOS Game ‘Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery’ Launching April 25 With Six Actors Reprising Roles

Developer Jam City today confirmed that the new mobile role-playing game “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery” will launch globally on April 25 on both iOS and Android devices. In the game, players will be able to create their own Hogwarts student, go to classes, study spells, build friendships, and make pivotal decisions in a new “encounter system” that influences their personal story in Hogwarts.

Images via Jam City
In addition to the release date, Jam City announced that the mobile game will also have six actors from the main Harry Potter films reprise their roles within Hogwarts Mystery. The actors providing voice work for the game include Dame Maggie Smith (Professor McGonagall), Michael Gambon (Professor Dumbledore), Warwick Davis (Professor Flitwick), Sally Mortemore (Madam Irma Pince), Gemma Jones (Madam Pomfrey), and Zoe Wanamaker (Madam Hooch).

“Our goal with Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery is to make players really feel for the first time like they’re attending Hogwarts,” said Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO of Jam City. “By including these iconic and incredibly talented actors in the game, we come one step closer to truly giving fans their own Hogwarts experience.”

In terms of story specifics, Jam City has said that Hogwarts Mystery is set in the 1980s, after Harry Potter is born but before he enrolls at Hogwarts. Jam City has worked on bringing other popular franchises to mobile before, including the development of “Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow” with the show’s original writers, animators, and cast members.

Another mobile game set in the Harry Potter universe is also in the works at Niantic, called “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite” and previously reported to launch in 2018. Niantic’s game is said to be “significantly influenced” by its previous success with Pokémon Go, allowing players to explore their real world neighborhoods and cities in an effort to discover, fight, and capture the Harry Potter series’ fantastic beasts.

Tag: Harry Potter
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Microsoft vows to let partner companies keep their patents

Microsoft has launched a new policy that means its tech customers will keep hold of any patent rights that come out of its partnerships. In a blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith explained that the Shared Innovation Initiative is designed to reassure customers that the company won’t use the knowledge gleaned from joint ventures to “enter their customer’s market and compete against them.”

Instead, Smith says the company wants to “strike a healthy balance that will both help our customers grow their business through technology and enable Microsoft to continue to improve its platform products.”

Microsoft cited a hospital in South Korea as an example of the policy in action. The facility co-created a motion-tracking AI application that uses sensors to collect data on a surgeon’s movements during operations, in order to identify errors or particularly beneficial techniques. While the technology was developed with Microsoft, the patent and intellectual property (IP) rights remain with the hospital, which plans to now sell the software to other hospitals, creating a new line of business and revenue stream.

As collaborations between tech companies and customers increase, so will the gray area around patent ownership and IP. By having a reassuring policy in writing, it seems that Microsoft is trying to differentiate itself from rival companies (many of which have been plagued by patent litigation), while, of course, encouraging big business to keep using its products.

Source: Microsoft

Apple Shares Photos of New Shinjuku Store in Tokyo, Japan

Apple today shared photos of its new Apple Shinjuku retail store, which will open on Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. local time. The store is located in the Shinjuku Marui main building — a department store in Tokyo — and marks the eighth location for Apple in Japan.

The interior pictures showcase the same neon banner that Apple posted on its website when it first announced the store, which is just blocks from Shinjuku Station in Tokyo’s famous shopping, business and entertainment district.

Also evident in the photos is Apple Shinjuku’s expansive 37-meter glass storefront lined with local Longstock Holly trees, as well as familiar Apple store design elements including the Forum, with a dynamic 6K video wall, and Avenues, with interactive displays for visitors to get hands-on with third-party products and accessories.

Apple’s senior VP of retail Angela Ahrendts commented on the store in the company’s press release:

“Apple has a long and special history in Japan, and Shinjuku marks the first of several new stores we’ll open in Japan in the coming years,” said Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail. “We can’t wait to welcome the vibrant community in Shinjuku to experience all the best Apple has to offer.”

As with other Apple Stores, Apple Shinjuku will offer free daily Today at Apple sessions covering art and design, music, photography, coding, activity and more. Participants start by learning the basics in Quick Start and How To sessions, then dive deeper into their creative interests with Music Labs, Sketch Walks and Photo Walks, including evening walks to capture the iconic neon lights of Shinjuku.

Tags: Apple retail, Apple Stores
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Valve is ‘still working hard’ on Steam OS, Linux gaming

A few days ago Valve reworked the main navigation bar in its Steam Store and removed a direct link to buy Steam Machines, the Linux-based boxes it hailed as an open alternative to macOS or Windows PC gaming. Combined with a lack of recent announcements people figured that meant the end of the project, but Valve employee Pierre-Loup A. Griffais says that’s not so. It was removed based on user traffic, which isn’t surprising considering the lack of post-2016 hardware being offered. In a post to the Steam for Linux page, he explained the current state of things:

While it’s true Steam Machines aren’t exactly flying off the shelves, our reasons for striving towards a competitive and open gaming platform haven’t significantly changed. We’re still working hard on making Linux operating systems a great place for gaming and applications…We also have other Linux initiatives in the pipe that we’re not quite ready to talk about yet; SteamOS will continue to be our medium to deliver these improvements to our customers, and we think they will ultimately benefit the Linux ecosystem at large.

The plan moving forward includes more work on the Vulkan graphics API everywhere, including now on macOS and iOS, while also making sure it’s well-supported on Linux so that performance is up to par. It’s not clear what those other Linux initiatives in the pipe are exactly, but hopefully, we’ll hear about them sooner rather than later.

Via: GamesIndustry.biz

Source: Steam for Linux, Steam Hardware, Steam Machines

Windows 10 testers get access to experimental Sets features

Microsoft took some major cues from browsers to create Sets, which lets you group together Windows apps in tabs. Now, the tech giant is rolling out experimental features to testers that give Sets tabs evenmore browser-like behavior. If you’re a Windows Insider who has opted to Skip Ahead, you can now drag and drop tabs within Sets and combine several tabbed app windows into one. Those make it easier to organize open apps, so long as it’s not an Edge tab — you can’t drag and drop Microsoft’s browser tabs into Sets yet and doing so could crash your system.

Microsoft has also made it easier to switch between all those tabs you combined by using the Alt + Tab shortcut. You can tweak the shortcut’s behavior under the new Sets section in Multitasking, as you can see in the image below:

In addition, you’ll find the new “close other tabs,” “move to new window” and “close tabs to the right” options when you right click on a tab in a Set. If you want to bring up tabs you mistakenly closed, you can now choose which Previous Tabs to restore instead of simply reviving them all. Microsoft has also added a quick way to group two File Explorer windows together, introduced a feature in Settings that shows you how much battery your Bluetooth device has left, made sure the Calculator can compute for the accurate square roots of perfect squares and fixed a bunch of bugs and issues. It’ll take some time for all those to be available on the stable version of Windows 10, though, so you might have to wait a while if you’re not an Insider.

Source: Windows Blogs

Google makes good on promise to offset 100 percent of its electricity use

Many of the world’s top tech companies have been striving to reach 100-percent renewable energy usage for their international operations. After making a promise in 2016 to offset 100 percent of its electricity consumption, Google has achieved that goal. On Wednesday, April 4, Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president, Technical Infrastructure, announced that the company had officially purchased enough renewable energy in order to offset — or match — the total amount of electricity the company consumed across 2017. “Google’s total purchase of energy from sources like wind and solar exceeded the amount of electricity used by our operations around the world, including offices and data centers,” Hölzle noted.

The achievement of this impressive feat meant that for every kilowatt hour of electricity the company used, Google also purchased a kilowatt hour of renewable energy from either a wind or solar farm. As of today, the tech giant is planning to purchase an impressive three gigawatts of output from various renewable energy sources, an amount that is unmatched by any other corporate purchaser. And while that’s a huge amount of energy, Google is, needless to say, a huge company.

Like many other big tech firms, Google has a lot of data to handle, which is why it has 13 large warehouses full of servers all over the world. They host everything from Gmail emails to YouTube videos and Play Store content. But all of those servers require power and their vast cooling systems required do, too.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a world where everyone — not just Google — has access to clean energy,” wrote Hölzle wrote back in 2016. And now, the company has taken a pretty major step toward achieving that goal.

To be fair, we should point out that this accomplishment by no means indicates that Google is running off of 100 percent renewable energy. Rather, to counter much-needed ‘dirty’ energy purchases in parts of the world where green power is less accessible, Google is buying up renewable energy and then filtering the excess back into the grid.

Still, this trade-off is genuinely good for the environment. It increases the amount of green energy that is required by the world’s grids and therefore signals there is more money to be made in providing it. That, in turn, drives prices down as competition increases and innovation is encouraged.

In the long term, too, Google says it does plan to quite literally power its entire operation with renewable sources. To do that, it hopes to encourage investment and development of renewable energy in the areas where it operates its major data centers and offices.

The company has also made big improvements in the efficiency of the hardware it uses, partly through upgrades to more efficient modern hardware but also through restructuring its own business and how it moves data around. Part of that will involve machine learning, which is also helping it streamline operations. Google suggests it may make those algorithms public in the future so other businesses can improve their energy efficiency in a similar manner.

Update: Google successfully offset 100 percent of its electricity usage in 2017. 

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