Google’s Sergey Brin opens up about self-driving car accidents

Accidents happen, but that hasn’t stopped people being curious about the sort of scrapes that Google’s self-driving cars have gotten into. Sergey Brin recently conceded that there had been a 12th incident involving the autonomous vehicles, one more than the 11 reported at the start of May. The revelation came at the outfit’s annual shareholder meeting, where privacy advocate John Simpson needled the co-founder enough to get him to open up about the autonomous vehicle’s crashes. It turns out, however, that the biggest cause for these incidents hasn’t been hardware or software failure, but the general negligence of California’s drivers.

Brin said that seven or eight of the crashes were caused by human drivers rear-ending Google’s vehicles, presumably while at stop-signs. Another handful were side-swipes and other bumps that were sustained while Google’s pilots were in command of the vehicles. When Simpson asked why this information wasn’t previously made public, Brin basically said that it was to spare the blushes of the errant motorists involved.

He then went on to defend the aims of Google’s project, which isn’t to have “perfect” self-driving cars, but instead to simply be better than humans. The evidence supports Brin’s assertion, since he went on to say that the biggest thing he has learned is that “people don’t pay attention, even trained drivers.” If you want to catch the exchange, spool forward to 1 hour 7 minutes in the video below and watch how awkward the whole thing gets.

Filed under: Transportation, Google

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Via: ABC News, Autoblog

Source: Google (YouTube)

Google’s plan to help make VR a reality

It’s beginning to look like we’re on the verge of an exciting new technology that has the potential to transform the entertainment industry. An immersive experience that will whisk us away to foreign lands, put us right in the action for live events, and maybe even take us beyond the stars. If virtual reality lives up to its promise, we could see mass adoption in the next few years.

It’s by no means a foregone conclusion, but one company doing its part to bring VR to the world is Google. Last year we had Cardboard, this year, at I/O, Google unveiled Jump. There’s a plan at work here to democratize virtual reality, and make sure we’re all on board.

Building momentum

The idea of virtual reality has been around for years. It failed to live up the hype in the 80’s and 90’s, but technology has really moved on since then. Few envisaged the rise of mobile when the personal computing revolution set out to equip every person on the planet with a computer, but that’s the way we’re headed. And we’re still finding new ways to use our increasingly powerful smartphones.

This time around, virtual reality is already being billed as more than just games. It’s not just about exciting adventures to the bottom of the sea or the planet Mars, either. We might use VR to visit famous landmarks, to travel back in time, to attend live music events, or just to hang out with friends, or visit distant family.

As it stands, several big players are working on VR headsets right now. There’s the Facebook-backed Oculus, Sony, HTC and Valve, Samsung, Microsoft, and a multitude of smaller players, ripe for acquisition if they should succeed in creating the definitive experience. Then there’s Google. It’s not yet clear what role Android will play as virtual reality takes off, but Google is determined to be involved. To that end it has developed two important initiatives that make VR accessible by tearing down the main barrier to entry for users and developers – the admission price.

Cardboard

Forget about dropping hundreds of dollars on a prototype, Cardboard allows you to transform your phone into a crude VR headset for next to nothing. There’s a new viewer that fits phones with screens up to 6 inches in size, and it’s very easy to assemble. The Cardboard SDK now supports iOS, as well as Android, and there are hundreds of apps for Google Cardboard in the Play Store already.

There’s little doubt that the wave of VR headsets in development will offer a more polished and immersive experience, but most of them will have to be hooked up to your console or computer. All of them are going to be relatively expensive. If you want a taste of what VR is all about right now, and you don’t have money to spend, Cardboard is a great way to dip your toe in the shallow end.

Jump

There’s another major problem that VR has to overcome in order to hit the mainstream, and that’s content. If you require an expensive setup in order to shoot VR footage, then how many people are going to produce VR experiences? Just like 3D and 4K, many people are not going to rush out and buy VR headsets until there’s plenty of enticing content.

Enter Jump, a complete platform for VR that combines affordable camera rigs, 360-degree video capture, and a platform to share the resulting footage. If you want to get started with virtual reality right now, Jump looks like the easiest way. The fact that YouTube is already so popular, and familiar, makes it ideal for sharing VR video, whether you want to create something privately for friends and family, or try to hit the big time with a VR channel.

Creatives can dive straight in and get their hands dirty, without having to outlay a small fortune on a dev kit, or license an SDK. And because it’s YouTube, you can be pretty confident that the vast majority of VR headsets in the works will support it.

Expeditions

For anyone who thinks VR is all about gaming, the Expeditions initiative should tell you otherwise. Interested schools can sign up for the program, which enables a teacher to use a tablet to control a virtual reality experience on Cardboard headsets which students wear. The teacher can effectively sync and lead the adventure to the virtual world. It could be a field trip to China, a museum, or another planet. The potential is enormous.

Project Tango

Another Google project that could yet play a role in the growing VR field is Tango. It’s really a platform for augmented reality, the idea being that sensors in your smartphone can track the environment around you in real-time and blend virtual objects and characters into it. Google clearly feels it has legs, because the project has graduated from ATAP, and interested parties can now get their hands on developer devices, for just over $500.

Within the next few years, we may find the depth and motion tracking cameras Tango needs are standard inclusions in the latest smartphones. Augmented reality has all sorts of potential applications including games, movies, navigation, interactive guides, and remote assistance. It’s possible the boundary between VR and AR will blur further as they develop.

Ready for VR?

The general mood around VR is optimistic. It really seems to have a lot of momentum right now. There’s a sense that developers are taking their time to craft the right experience. The backing of so many major players boosts its chances. But there are still problems to address. The issue of drift and the need for individual calibration is a turn off, as is motion sickness for unfortunate sufferers. A platform war also looks inevitable, as hardware manufacturers try to entice consumers with exclusive content. What will the definitive experience be?

By offering an easy point of entry, Google is helping to spur the movement on. Making VR affordable and accessible is an important step, and you could draw parallels with what Google did for the mobile industry through the release of Android as an open source platform. Ultimately, the faster developers create new experiences and get people trying them and talking about them, the faster we’ll reach the point where virtual reality is a must-have technology.

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Updated Google Keyboard syncs your dictionary across devices

A new update for the official Google Keyboard has landed on the Play Store, bringing with it some useful new features, while simultaneously chucking out a few less popular options. Unfortunately, there’s no sign of Android M’s split keyboard option yet, but that will probably arrive in time.

The most notable and by far the most useful addition with Google Keyboard 4.1 is the ability to sync your dictionary to your Google account. This means that users can share their customized dictionary across multiple device and also means that all your words will be automatically carried over to any new devices that you purchase.

Google has also introduced new a privacy settings menu into the app. From here users can manage their cloud data and op-out of Google’s statistical data collection. There’s also emoji support for physical keyboards too, which can be accessed using the Alt key.

It’s not all new features though, Google has also seen it fit to remove the “Phase Gesture” feature that allowed users to swipe entire phrases out, rather than just words, but swiping over the spacebar in between words. Auto-correction is no longer configurable between modest, aggressive or very aggressive levels of spell checking, the setting has now been replaced by a simple on and off switch.

If you want to enable dictionary sync, simply head on over to the new “Accounts and Privacy” setting from within the app. In this menu you can select the Google account that you would like to use to sync with, just in case you have more than one, and enable the sync option. Simple.

If you haven’t automatically updated the app yet or have been using a different keyboard, you can manually update Google Keyboard from the Play Store for free.

Google makes its case for VR by reinventing the field trip

I was standing on the surface of Mars. The rocky terrain was red and dusty, with nothing above it except the vast expanse of space. “Now if you look over here, this is where the Spirit rover landed,” said a voice. An arrow emerged, pointing to a circle hovering over a sandy spot close to me. Yeah, okay, I wasn’t really on Mars; I was in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. That voice belonged to a Google engineer, who was giving a small group of I/O attendees a brief tour of Mars through “Expeditions,” a piece of VR software for educators. He was holding a tablet, talking us through the different points of interests, while everyone — including me — held up phone-carrying Cardboard VR viewers to their faces.

Expeditions is the third VR-related announcement at this year’s I/O, but it’s arguably Google’s strongest effort yet at mainstreaming it. Essentially a tool for teachers and other educators, a standard Expeditions kit has 30 phones and Cardboard viewers plus a tablet for the teacher, who acts as the tour guide. All of the devices are perfectly synchronized. There are already hundreds of places they can go: the Great Barrier Reef; Verona, Italy; and yes, Mars.

Now, I’m no stranger to VR. I’ve strapped prototypes of the Oculus Rift, Samsung’s Gear VR as well as the recently announced HTC Vive to my noggin and was blown away by the experiences on all of them. Which is why it’s all the more incredible that all it took was a piece of cardboard, a couple of lenses and a phone, to replicate the same thing. Cardboard is cheap. An Oculus Rift? Not so much.

But it wasn’t until I tried out Expeditions that I understood the power of Google’s Cardboard. It’s bringing that same power of VR beyond just playing games and watching a movie. It’s bringing it into the classroom. Education, not gaming, is what will make VR palatable to the masses.

Until Cardboard, virtual reality has been largely inaccessible. The only ways to get into VR was either to get your hands on an Oculus Rift developer kit or one of Samsung’s Gear VR headsets. Both cost hundreds of dollars — heck, the consumer version of the Rift along with a VR-ready PC will likely cost upward of $1,500 — which makes them out of reach of most consumers.

And with the addition of Sony’s Project Morpheus and the recently announced HTC Vive, it’s clear that VR is becoming an important part of the tech landscape, with use cases far beyond just gaming. After all, Facebook has already said that one of the reasons it purchased Oculus was to explore new ways of communicating. But in order for VR to be part of our world, it needs to be easier and cheaper to access.

“Our goal with Cardboard was really to make virtual reality accessible, affordable, easy and fun,” said Clay Bavor, a VP of Product for Google. He heads up Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive, which are arguably three of Google’s most important products, but he’s also the guy overseeing Cardboard. “Not only is it made of cardboard, [but] we also deliberately called it Cardboard,” he said. “It’s not meant as a joke. We just wanted to say, ‘Hey, it’s just cardboard,’ you know? Anyone can get into it.”

Google made a few more announcements at I/O that aim at opening up VR to more people: a new Cardboard viewer that’s compatible with the iPhone, a Cardboard SDK that supports both Android and iOS, plus a whole new Jump platform that lets anyone create and share VR videos. It even partnered with GoPro to make a 360-degree circular camera array just for that. The first player to support Jump? YouTube. You can’t get much more mainstream than that.

But the highlight is still Expeditions. During the keynote, Google showed it being used in a classroom, with kids staring in awe at what they saw before them. When I was a kid, I had ambitions of being an astronaut — what little kid didn’t dream of flying to the stars? Still, I never really thought it was possible. But with a VR viewer that showed me what it’s like to walk on Mars? Maybe my young mind would’ve been swayed. Maybe after taking this same virtual field trip, hundreds of other young kids will be inspired to be aeronautical engineers and rocket scientists.

“What’s been really interesting is to see how teachers are using it,” said Bavor. The obvious use case for Expeditions is for a marine biology class to take a tour of the Great Barrier Reef, for example, but Bavor has also heard of an English teacher who brought her class to Verona because that’s where Romeo and Juliet takes place. Or a math teacher who had her kids tour the Great Wall of China in a lesson on estimation, asking them to guess how many bricks there are in the wall.

Bavor tells me that Google also took a GoPro Jump camera to the American Museum of Natural History, filming exhibits like the hall of mammals and the blue whale room, so that kids can have field trips to the museum without ever leaving their classrooms.

With the emphasis on low-cost materials and educational use, Google is enabling VR adoption on a scale that no one else could even imagine. You can’t expect to hand out 30 Oculus Rift or Gear VR headsets in classrooms. It would break the bank and is not something that most schools can afford. But a piece of cardboard? Anyone can manage that. Heck, you could even have the kids make the viewers themselves out of stuff in the recycling bin and make that part of the experience.

A Cardboard viewer will very likely be someone’s first VR experience. And that’s an amazing thing.

“Cardboard is about VR for everyone,” said Bavor. And Google is just getting started. “This is not the end of our ambitions. We have plans far beyond what we showed.”

So, is a VR viewer made of cardboard pretty silly? Sure. But is it also perhaps one of the most interesting things Google has ever done? Absolutely.

Filed under: Google

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Google introducing Street View application later this summer

It’s that time of the year, when the tech giants like Apple and Google are they’re busiest. Not with product releases, but more so with their software and new applications. Google is keeping their fast paced summer with some more goods to be released to the world later this summer.

Last week was of course, Google I/O, where the main feature of the day was the announcement of Android M. Shortly after the end of Google I/O, it was announced that Google would be releasing a new Street View application. The Street View app will be the go-to place for photographers to submit their 360-degree photo spheres for everyone to see.

Currently, the only way to view any of these photo spheres, is through the online community, Views. That service will be shut down in August, coinciding with the release of the updated Street Views app. Previously, the only photo spheres seen within the Maps application, when looking at the Street View option, would be those made by Google or approved contributors.

This isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it can definitely help find that hole-in-the-wall restaurant that you’ve been circling the block trying to find. Or maybe, you’ll be able to go “sight-seeing” directly from your device, if you want to see what a monument looks like or anything of that nature.

Street Views will also allow users to upload their panoramas directly to the application from various 360-degree cameras. With more support being added as time progresses.

One note to be made, any photo-spheres or panoramas that have already been uploaded to Views, will be automatically uploaded and made available for the new Street View application.

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The post Google introducing Street View application later this summer appeared first on AndroidGuys.

Google introducing Street View application later this summer

It’s that time of the year, when the tech giants like Apple and Google are they’re busiest. Not with product releases, but more so with their software and new applications. Google is keeping their fast paced summer with some more goods to be released to the world later this summer.

Last week was of course, Google I/O, where the main feature of the day was the announcement of Android M. Shortly after the end of Google I/O, it was announced that Google would be releasing a new Street View application. The Street View app will be the go-to place for photographers to submit their 360-degree photo spheres for everyone to see.

Currently, the only way to view any of these photo spheres, is through the online community, Views. That service will be shut down in August, coinciding with the release of the updated Street Views app. Previously, the only photo spheres seen within the Maps application, when looking at the Street View option, would be those made by Google or approved contributors.

This isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it can definitely help find that hole-in-the-wall restaurant that you’ve been circling the block trying to find. Or maybe, you’ll be able to go “sight-seeing” directly from your device, if you want to see what a monument looks like or anything of that nature.

Street Views will also allow users to upload their panoramas directly to the application from various 360-degree cameras. With more support being added as time progresses.

One note to be made, any photo-spheres or panoramas that have already been uploaded to Views, will be automatically uploaded and made available for the new Street View application.

Source

The post Google introducing Street View application later this summer appeared first on AndroidGuys.