Why are dinosaurs everywhere in VR?
There’s a key scene early in Jurassic Park when the visiting scientists see their first dinosaur in person. Paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) clamber out of their Jeep as they stare at the majestic brachiosaur looming above them. “It’s a dinosaur,” Grant stammers in disbelief. His reaction matches the audience’s: After a lifetime of looking at fossils and picture books, here, in the flesh, is a real, live dinosaur. We’ll never experience this ourselves, but virtual reality can convincingly take us face to face with these extinct creatures.
That’s no coincidence. When done right, VR’s ability to convey presence — the feeling of actually being somewhere — is unrivaled by any other medium. Nowhere is that more apparent than when you’re craning your neck to take in the size of the zebra-striped brachiosaur lumbering through a tar pit in Crytek’s Robinson: The Journey. Same goes for ducking under a bellowing tyrannosaur stomping through a museum hall in an Oculus tech demo. Some 65 million years later, developers love to resurrect nature’s most fearsome creatures in VR. But why?
“Dinosaurs have an epic sense of scale that immediately makes you appreciate the potential of VR,” Derrick Hammond, an environmental artist at Oculus, tells Engadget. For example, one of the experiences in Oculus’ Dreamdeck sampler is set in a museum late at night. The marble hallway is lined with fossils, and a poster proudly proclaiming “Rex Lives” hangs above a relatively small T. rex skull. Then a menacing growl and thunderous footsteps echo in the distance. You’re frozen in place while a hulking version of the real thing stomps toward you, teeth bared, letting out a room-shaking roar that echoes off the museum’s stone and glass. It comes closer, towering over you, allowing an intimate look at its murderous maw before walking over you and offering a view of its pebbled underbelly.
“We made sure that the T. rex gets right up in your face and looms over you so that you could really feel the size of it,” Hammond said. Spielberg doesn’t have a thing on this.
Interacting with one of history’s largest apex predators in VR is very different from playing Turok: The Dinosaur Hunter or passively watching Jurassic Park, though. Your brain inherently knows that you’re playing an old game or watching a movie. “[It’s] so much more powerful than seeing them as a 2D representation on a television screen or monitor,” Hammond said.
Crytek’s Elijah Freeman agrees. When his team was researching potential projects, they discovered that scale and verticality look their best in VR. “It gives you that sense of immersion when you look up to see something large and gigantic,” he said. Hence, going forward with Robinson, a game that finds the player crash-landed on an alien jungle planet where feathered velociraptors are as common as leopards, a juvenile T. rex is a constant companion.
“We made sure that the T. rex gets right up in your face and looms over you so that you could really feel the size of it.”
While we still have grizzly bears and giraffes today, they don’t inspire the same kind of awe. You can watch them pretty much anytime you turn on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel. In contrast, seeing an extinct creature “in person” that you’ve only read about or whose skeletons you’ve seen in museums is almost therapeutic. Witnessing a brachiosaur rear up on its hind legs because you ordered your pet T. rex to roar at it, for instance, immediately transports you back to childhood — a time where anything felt possible if you imagined hard enough.
“It’s the experience that I’m seeing something that no one else gets to see,” Freeman said. “Maybe interacting with an elephant [in real life] could be a cool experience, but you’re risking your life to do it.”
Hammond added that one of the big selling points of VR is the ability to “experience anything, anywhere.” That pitch is a big part of getting people to latch onto the medium. “Dinosaurs offer so many different qualities that fulfill that promise by letting you stand next to a creature you feel as familiar with as an elephant or giraffe but could never actually see at the zoo or in your lifetime,” he said.
Freeman said having a robust narrative adds to the medium’s transportive nature and helps further sell the illusion. We already know what dinosaurs are and why they went extinct. And, thanks to a lifetime of scientific research and pop culture, we have a general idea of how they should act, be they peaceful herbivores or fearsome predators.
A velociraptor from Robinson: The Journey.
Even though both Oculus and Crytek’s dinosaurs differ slightly from what we saw in Jurassic Park, they largely behave in the same ways. Raptors, despite their smaller stature in Robinson, are still vicious pack-hunters. Brachiosaurs are more concerned with being giant, adorable doorstops and eating plant matter than they are with the actions of puny humans. The T. rex, of course, remains the tyrant king of dinosaurs.
“In this world,” Freeman said, “when you see that, given the story that you already know, it helps make it more believable.”
Maybe that’s why when he played an early demo of the game, Freeman reacted the same way Grant and Sattler did upon seeing his first brachiosaur. The 3D model might not have had any textures applied to it yet, but for the test run, it had been animated to have its head buried in the treetops, chowing food. Until a coworker asked him what he thought, he’d lost himself simply watching the extinct vegetarian strip a tree bare.
“I felt special,” he recalled. “I felt like I got to witness something that doesn’t happen anymore.”
Hackers target bank account in ‘tax haven’ Lichtenstein
Tiny Lichtenstein is known for its adorable castles, alpine vistas and, until recently, being an unabashed tax haven for billionaires. However, some customers may regret stashing any funds in the principality because of a hack at the Valartis Bank, according to Bild am Sonntag (paywall). While the attackers didn’t gain direct access to funds, they reportedly stole sensitive banking information. In letters obtained by the German site, they’ve threatened to release the data unless paid a staggering 10 percent of account balances in Bitcoin by December 7th.
Valartis Group was recently purchased by the Citychamp Watch & Jewellery Group Ltd. of Hong Kong. Until recently, the 62 square mile principality was reputed as a tax haven, but it recently eliminated its banking secrecy rules to comply with US and EU regulations, and now calls itself a “safe haven.”
The unknown hackers accessed Valartis’ e-banking system and stole payment order information, according to Citychamp. However, they “did not obtain details of the account statements or asset data,” CFO Fong Chi Wah said in a statement. The company didn’t detail exactly how the blackmailers gained access to its online systems.
Studies by the Tax Justice Network show that wealthy individuals from Russia, China and Saudi Arabia are most likely to stash cash abroad to avoid taxes. Despite strict US rules on disclosure, one US citizen dodged an order to reveal his holdings in a Lichtenstein bank by pleading the fifth amendment, Forbes reported earlier this year. Bild am Sonntag says that Valartis Bank’s customers include actors, politicians and other well-heeled individuals.
Via: Reuters
Source: Bild
Sky Mobile to offer flexible contracts with rollover data
It’s been a long time since Sky revealed plans to become a mobile virtual network operator with the help of O2. The company opened up registrations for Sky Mobile last month, not that those registering really knew what they were expressing their interest in. Today, though, Sky has pulled the curtain aside on its upcoming mobile offering, which will finally go live in mid-December. It would be unadvisable to enter such a saturated market without a unique selling point to pitch, which in Sky Mobile’s case, is rollover data and fully flexible contracts.
Just as BT favoured simplicity when it reentered mobile last year, Sky is starting out with just three SIM-only plans.
| Price per month | £10 | £15 | £20 |
| 4G data allowance | 1GB | 3GB | 5GB |
You’ll notice we’ve only highlighted data allowances in the table above, because that’s all you get. Calls and texts are either billed on a pay-as-you-use basis — each minute or message costing 10 pence — or you can throw down an additional £10 per month for the unlimited package.
A Sky Mobile contract comes with a 12-month term, but you’re not agreeing to any fixed pricing structure. Each month, you can change your data plan, and add or remove the unlimited calls and texts package. You can do this mid-month, too. Say you’re on the £10, 1GB tariff, and are running out of data. You can upgrade to the £15, 3GB tariff, pay the fiver difference, and immediately get those two extra gigs. The next month, you can drop back down to the 1GB plan again and just pay £10.
This flexibility and competitive pricing, at least where data is concerned, isn’t even Sky Mobile’s killer feature — data rollover is. Any unused data, from any month, goes into your “piggybank,” which you can draw from to top up your allowance at any time. Now, any rolled-over data does expire after three years, but the piggybank works on a “first-in, first-out” basis, so you withdraw the data that will expire soonest, first. A family can link up to five SIMs with a single piggybank, too, so what the parents don’t use, the kids can eat through later. All plans and piggybanks are said to be easily managed via a mobile app or online.
The whole point of being a quad-play provider, which Sky will soon be, is so you can cross-pollinate your other services with alluring customer incentives. Thankfully, how this works in Sky Mobile’s case is relatively simple to explain. Existing Sky+ TV customers that pick up a mobile contract get the £10 unlimited calls and texts package for free, and they also get Sky Go Extra for free.
To jog your memory, Sky Go Extra is a mobile app that lets you download content for offline viewing and stream live TV on the move. Sky Mobile subscribers will get one new feature, though, called “Sync.” Sync effectively lets you see what’s sitting on your Sky+ box at home, helping you decide what you might want to catch up on when you’re not sat in front of the living room TV. Sky is selling this as the best features of Sky Go Extra, with the added discovery features of your Sky+ box.
And that’s it for now. There are currently no incentives for Sky broadband customers, and no word on how that might play out if/when Sky get around to it. Either way, we’re told the plan is to keep everything as simple as possible, especially when Sky Mobile expands into handsets from the likes of Apple and Samsung sometime next year.
The launch schedule is probably the most complicated thing about the whole proposition. Contracts will initially be available to anyone who registered their interest ahead of time — more than 46,000 people, apparently — and existing Sky TV customers. Only Sky+ customers for now, though, since they’re the only ones that can take advantage of this new Sync feature.
Sky Q customers, and anyone else, will have to wait until the “full market launch,” which will start early next year.
Source: Sky
Facebook runs afoul of German hate speech laws
Facebook has been getting into trouble for its discriminatory content a lot lately, and it recently yielded to pressure about some of its practices in the US. But the social networking giant could face tougher restrictions in Germany around the content posted by its members. According to The New York Times, Facebook came under fire there for its failure to, in a timely manner, remove a post that targeted Jewish people and businesses.
The post in question was a map of Berlin that listed the names and addresses of local Jewish institutions and Israeli-owned businesses, and was published on a far-right group on Facebook. The map was reportedly displayed under a banner with the words “Jews Among Us,” and resulted in at least one Israeli business owner in the city receiving phone calls saying, “I hate Jews,” according to the Times.
Some of the people identified in the map complained to Facebook, which reportedly did not remove the post at first. The company said the map complied with its community standards. That drew the ire of others in social media, local press as well as German lawmakers. According to the Times, Facebook deleted the group’s entire page, including the offending post, within 48 hours of the public outcry.
A spokesperson for the company told Engadget that the page is no longer available, and that it is “very sorry for any distress caused.” The company’s director of policy in Europe, Richard Allen, also conceded in an interview with the Times that the post qualified as hate speech, and should have been taken down.
On its Community Standards page, Facebook says it “may remove certain kinds of sensitive content or limit the audience that sees it.” It also says that it believes encountering different opinions can lead to “important conversations about difficult topics.”
Allowing (and even fostering) free and open discussion while preventing the spread of inflammatory, discriminatory and all-out fake content is a delicate balancing act that the social network is still struggling to master. It’s been criticized for its recent failure to prevent the proliferation of false news during the recent American election, and has run afoul of German authorities multiple times for similar issues. But the company has, slowly but surely, been implementing changes to combat these high-profile issues.
Source: The New York Times
Electrolux is testing Uber-like laundry machine sharing
You can already get rides from strangers and rent their rooms, but what if you could use their washers and dryers? Electrolux thinks it’s worth a shot. CEO Jonas Samuelson tells the Financial Times that the appliance giant is testing a “laundry Uber” where you could pay to clean your clothes at someone else’s home. This would require an abundance of connected machines to be viable, but it would help you recoup some of the cost of expensive equipment that stays idle most of the week.
The company isn’t blind to the potential legal and technical hurdles with a service like this. Who covers the costs if the machines shrink your new sweater? What about security or long-term technical compatibility? We’d add other concerns as well. Does the homeowner have to accommodate you while you’re waiting for your clothes, for example? And how do you make sure that people don’t buy properties just to turn them into makeshift laundromats, much as some have converted apartments and houses into illegal Airbnb hotels?
Samuelson doesn’t say how well the tests are going, or provide a timetable for when you could see Electrolux offer a public-facing service. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if the company goes forward once it addresses key issues. Electrolux and other appliance makers aren’t exactly seeing a surge of demand, and a sharing option might spark interest. After all, you might be more likely to buy a pricey washer/dryer combo if you know that it won’t cost you that much in the long run.
Source: Financial Times (login required)
Canary Brings Live-Streaming and Archived Footage to Apple TV With New App
Connected security camera company Canary is today launching a new update to its app that introduces support for the fourth-generation Apple TV, letting users view their camera’s live stream on their television, or watch older recordings saved within the app. Prior to the Apple TV app, Canary users only had the company’s mobile app to view content captured via a Canary or Canary Flex system (via TechCrunch).
When the Apple TV app is opened, Canary users will be presented with a dashboard and choose between live and recorded feeds. For those who have multiple Canary cameras, the app will initially open upon a “Location view,” so they can choose which system to access video.
Canary cameras record movement as “events,” so users can scrub through each on the Apple TV app, bookmark important ones, delete those deemed unnecessary to save, and jump to the next one with a Related Videos section under each of these events. The version 2.0.2 update to the Canary app also brings support for iPads and Android tablets.
In addition to HD video capture, the Canary cameras monitor air quality and include a built-in 90 decibel siren that users can activate through the mobile app to scare off intruders the camera notices within the home. The Canary Flex has many of the same camera-capturing features as the basic model, with the added bonus of a completely weatherproof outer shell.
Canary can be downloaded from the iOS App Store for free [Direct Link]. The 2.0.2 update has yet to hit the App Store, but should begin rolling out today.
Tag: Canary
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Kwikset’s Entry-Level Smart Lock ‘Kevo Convert’ Available to Pre-Order for $150
Smart lock manufacturer Kwikset recently announced that the company’s simplistic deadbolt solution, the Kevo Convert, is now available for users to pre-order for $149. Unlike Kwikset’s other systems, including the Kwikset Kevo, the Kevo Convert is an easy-to-install conversion kit that keeps the outward-facing hardware of a standard door lock, while replacing the interior deadbolt.
Due to its simpler solution, the Kevo Convert system is cheaper at $149 than Kwikset’s other products, which run for upwards of $230. The conversion kit comes with all of the company’s smartphone-connected abilities, including ways for users to distribute access keys to people trying to get into their home when they aren’t around, and push notifications each time the deadbolt is locked or unlocked.
Other features include an “auto lock” security system that automatically locks the door thirty seconds after it’s been unlocked, “eliminating the need to double-check the front door before bed.” The Kevo Convert system works with any smartphone within Bluetooth range, but users who want the ability to unlock their home and gain remote access to their smart lock when out of that range will have to purchase the $99.99 Kevo Plus kit.
Like other Kwikset products, the Kevo Convert will also be able to integrate with the Nest Learning Thermostat, Ring Video Doorbell, and other smart home connected devices.
Anyone interested can pre-order the Kevo Convert for $149 in Satin Nickel or Venetian Bronze at The Home Depot.
Tags: Kwikset, Kevo Kwikset
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Apple Offering Refunds to Customers Who Paid for iMac Hinge Repairs
Apple has internally announced it will issue a refund to customers who previously paid for an iMac display hinge replacement or repair, according to a recently updated service document obtained by MacRumors. These repairs could often cost upwards of $100, according to reports from affected users.
Apple’s service document acknowledges some 27-inch iMacs shipped between December 2012 and July 2014 may be affected by an issue with the display hinge, resulting in the screen no longer adjusting and continuously tilting forward. The issue appears to be limited to late 2012 and late 2013 models in particular.
The issue has been frequently reported by dozens of users on the Apple Support Communities, MacRumors discussion forums, and elsewhere on the web, with a number of iMac owners describing a similar experience in which the hinge makes an audible popping or cracking sound and then stops working.
Apple Support Communities user Mr Mo-Fo:
I was just sitting watching TV when there was a loud crack and my iMac screen suddenly tilted down – now the screen will not stay where it is tilted/positioned. I was not using the iMac at the time and it was not doing anything it just broke on its own. The Mac was only bought in February and has not been moved or tilted once it was in place.
MacRumors user Plazm:
My one month old 27″ iMac (about a month old) at work seems to have developed a loose hinge so that the screen always tilts at its most downward. It still tilts up and down, but will always return to that position by itself.
Apple has since extended its related iMac hinge repair program to cover late 2012 and late 2013 iMacs for up to five years from the date of their original purchase, compared to an original three-year period. Apple will replace the hinge mechanism on affected iMacs at no charge, regardless of warranty coverage.
Unlike some of Apple’s other Exchange and Repair Extension Programs listed on its website, the details of this program have not been made publicly available. Apple has instead sent internal communication to Apple Authorized Service Providers with information about repairs and refunds.
Apple recommends affected customers contact the company by phone or web to initiate the refund process. Customers who still have a broken hinge can book an appointment with the Genius Bar at an Apple Store or visit an Apple Authorized Service Provider to determine if their iMac is eligible for the repair program.
Related Roundup: iMac
Tag: repair program
Buyer’s Guide: iMac (Don’t Buy)
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Apple Expands Carrier Billing to Belgium and Norway
Apple has enabled carrier billing in Belgium and Norway, expanding upon the feature’s existing availability in Germany, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The feature is limited to select carriers in each country — share if yours is supported in the comments.
The payment method enables customers to pay for iTunes content, App Store apps, iBooks, and Apple Music subscriptions without needing a credit or debit card, or even a bank account. Instead, purchases are added to a customer’s mobile phone bill and paid off at the end of the month.
Apple has a support document explaining how to set up carrier billing on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and Mac or PC.
Tags: Belgium, Norway, carrier billing
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iTunes Connect’s 2016 Holiday Shutdown is December 23-27
Apple has advised developers to make sure their apps are up to date by Thursday, December 22, as new apps and app updates will not be accepted between Friday, December 23 and Tuesday, December 27 (Pacific Time).
Apple says any planned app releases during this holiday period should be submitted, approved, and scheduled in advance. Other iTunes Connect and developer account features will remain available through the five-day period.
Tags: App Store, iTunes Connect
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