ICYMI: Goat-inspired robot design and apple picking
Today on In Case You Missed It: A researcher at Carnegie Mellon created the GOAT leg for robots that moves much like a pogo-stick and posted a video of its tests to YouTube. Meanwhile a robot to harvest apples might still be in prototype, but it’s miles more advanced than the thing that just shakes trees violently until all the apples fall off.
The mechanized sushi chef video can be found here, the boy who swallowed a dog toy here, and Joe Biden not being able to let go is here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Facebook is launching its own PC gaming platform
Facebook’s gaming aspirations didn’t stop with Farmville and its $2 billion Oculus VR acquisition. Nope, the social network is also launching a dedicated PC gaming platform today. Said platform will lean heavily on developers using the ubiquitous Unity game engine, according to a release from the company. The partnership’s first project is admittedly developer-centric, but it has a direct impact on the folks playing games on Facebook. Zuckerberg and Co. describe it as a new export feature baked into Unity that allows a studio to publish directly to Facebook and the aforementioned Facebook PC gaming platform “with very little effort and few code changes.”
“Integrating tools that provide effortless access to Facebook’s network is a key part of helping developers find the success they deserve,” Unity’s VP of business development, Elliot Solomon, said in a canned statement from a press release.
This is big for a few reasons. For starters, Unity is a wildly popular, free-to-use tool employed across the industry by countless indie developers. You’ve probably played a few titles built with it and not even realized. Firewatch, Kerbal Space Program, Ori and the Blind Forest, Superhot, Monument Valley and Alto’s Adventure, just to name a few, were all developed using the Unity toolset. In theory, those could be ported to Facebook’s platform with very little extra work from their respective developers. And that’s to say nothing of the myriad VR apps Unity powers.
Which is where this makes the most sense: Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point, Facebook is going to need a way to sell Oculus VR games and its new platform will help that happen. Facebook says it paid out over $2.5 billion to web-game devs last year alone, and that there are over 650 million players on its gaming network. For context, in the past 48 hours, Steam reported 11 million concurrent users. What’s a curiosity now will very likely be a dominating force in the not too distant future.
Facebook is running a closed alpha test of the new work environment right now, and applications to join are open until August 31st. The social network promises “immediate access” to testing the engine’s latest build and the export function.
Source: Facebook
Spotify’s first documentary recalls the early days of Metallica (updated)
We first heard about Spotify’s Landmark series back in May and today the first installment is debuting for Android and iOS users. Landmark — Metallica: The Early Years is a documentary-style look at the iconic heavy metal band’s origins and the move from performing in dive bars to taking the stage in stadiums. During the course of four chapters, the series recounts the formation of the band through the release of 1984’s Ride the Lightning.
One of a dozen shows the streaming service has planned, Landmark will examine key events and figures in music history with interviews, rare footage and, as you probably guessed, playlists that serve as an audio companion to the visuals. Starting today, all four parts of the Metallica documentary will be available for streaming. There’s a catch though: Landmark can only be streamed with Spotify’s Android and iOS apps. The company didn’t offer any indication as to when or if it would be available on desktop or the web at some point in the future. Yes, you’ll have to watch it on a mobile device. What’s more, the videos are only available in the US, UK, Sweden and Germany. The good news? Users of both the free and paid tiers will be able to stream all four chapters of the documentary.
Spotify announced plans for a lot original video content this year and it recently debuted an animated series that offers a bit of music education. Details on the other projects remain scarce except for a tease of Rush Hour: a show where two DJs have a remix battle in the back of a van. The video push mirrors similar efforts from Tidal and Apple Music in regards to original video, with news of Apple’s documentary project with Cash Money Records surfacing yesterday. As music streaming services try to attract new users, and woo others from their current subscription, it looks like original video will be one tool they employ to try and achieve that goal.
As far as Spotify’s Landmark is concerned, you can watch the trailer for the first installment down below.
Update: Despite the announcement stating that Landmark would only be available inside the mobile app, the first chapter has been poster to YouTube. We’ve reached out to Spotify to confirm if the others will be added later. You can watch Chapter 1 right here:
T-Mobile One is the carrier’s new unlimited data plan
T-Mobile has offered an unlimited data option for a while now, using it as a big differentiator between it and AT&T and Verizon. But now, it sounds like the carrier is going to do away with data buckets entirely and offer one plan that includes unlimited talk, text and data. It’s called T-Mobile One, and it’ll be available to current and new customers as of September 6th.
CEO John Legere announced the new plan this morning in a video blog, saying that he wanted to get rid of the confusion and huge number of choices that the other carriers currently offer. But, as is often the case with wireless plans, there’s a lot of fine print here in the new plan to be aware of.
The big catches for T-Mobile’s new plan come down to two things: tethering and video streaming. The T-Mobile One plan includes “unlimited” tethering, but only at 2G speeds. That’ll make it essentially useless. If you want to use LTE speed when tethering, you’ll have to pay $15 per month for 5GB of data.
Video is even more complicated. While T-Mobile is offering “unlimited” data, they’re throttling all video down to 480p standard definition resolution. If you want to use your data to watch high-definition video, it’ll cost a whopping $25 per line, per month. If you’re signed up to one of T-Mobile’s current unlimited plans, you can watch video in HD — though the company had been defaulting everyone to lower definition video. You have to actively switch on HD video if you want to get things in a better resolution. But with this new T-Mobile One plan, you’ll have to pay through the nose if you want to watch HD video.
T-Mobile’s new plan isn’t even really any cheaper than its existing offering. If you get four lines, it’ll be only $40 per line, but sign up for less and you’ll be paying quite a bit. A single line is $70 a month, less than the $95 it currently costs. Two lines is $120, $20 cheaper than the existing option. Additional lines after that are $20 each.
These changes come at the end of a month that saw AT&T and Verizon both revamp their data offerings. Both carriers added more data to their various plans, but those plans also cost a bit more now. Verizon also added some limited carryover data as well as the option to throttle your data speeds if you go over your limit rather than pay an overage charge. Not to be outdone, Sprint is also in the process of announcing some new plan details on Twitter right now.
One big question is whether or not T-Mobile’s old plans will be available or whether T-Mobile One will be the only option going forward for new customers. T-Mobile says it won’t be eliminating its existing Simple Choice plans right now, but it expects T-Mobile One to be its main offering going forward. So that likely means the existing Simple Choice unlimited plan that includes more tethering data and HD video playback will be going away soon.
Update: This post has been updated to reflect more details on T-Mobile’s new pricing structure.
Source: T-Mobile
Smart glasses make hands-free ‘Pokémon Go’ a reality
Pokémon Go has taken the world by storm. It’s not uncommon to see dozens of people walking around parks and city streets with their heads buried in their phones, trying to catch cute cartoon monsters. Unfortunately, doing so means you’re not keeping your eyes on the road, which has already led to a few accidents. But what if you could somehow play Pokémon Go while also paying attention to the world around you? That’s exactly what Recon has attempted to do by porting the popular game over to the Jet, a pair of Android-based smart glasses the company released last year. The setup isn’t perfect and it doesn’t work completely just yet, but even what I’ve seen so far provides an exciting glimpse at the next wave of augmented reality.
At Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco this week, I had a chance to try on a Jet to see the app in action. Since the Jet already has GPS, WiFi and a fully baked operating system, a Recon software developer by the name of Patrick Cho was able to move Pokémon Go over to it as a standalone app. The caveat here is that the Jet doesn’t have LTE, so you’ll have to figure out how to get WiFi if you’re out and about — an important consideration when playing Pokémon Go. Mine used a hotspot connection to a phone for its internet connection, so we were good there. Cho also had to reorient the Pokémon Go screen from portrait to landscape mode to accommodate the Jet’s 428 x 240 resolution display.
Pokémon Go, as seen on the Recon Jet
It took a while to get the app going. Since this is an unofficial port, it isn’t optimized for the Jet and feels quite sluggish in action. The app was also prone to stalling, and even crashed on me a few times. But it did work eventually. After a long loading time, I saw the familiar Pokémon Go interface appear in the Jet’s bottom-right screen. I immediately saw a map representation of the area surrounding San Francisco’s Moscone Center dotted with a slew of Pokéstops imbued with sparkling pink lures. It was a sight that would make any Pokétrainer happy.
Unfortunately, I was unable to catch any Pokémon due to the uncooperative app. But the proof of concept is there. Even though there’s no touchscreen, I could theoretically throw a Pokéball by swiping the temple on the right. A side button could be remapped to trigger a Pokéstop. And if you were armed with the upcoming Pokémon Go wearable that lets you snag monsters by simply tapping a button, it’d make capturing that elusive Dragonite that much easier. At the very least, I could see myself using the Jet to hatch a Pokémon egg just by walking around.
The Pokémon Go app launcher, as seen on the Recon Jet
I particularly appreciated that the game only took up a small corner of my peripheral vision. I could still see and interact with the world as I played the game. This way, I was able to track monsters and still be aware of my surroundings. Of course, the potential downside here is that the Recon Jet’s battery life likely isn’t long enough to withstand hours of play. But being able to play Pokémon Go without having to stare at your phone still sounds like a pretty great proposition to me.
The Jet has so far been used mostly for fitness applications like running and cycling, but Recon recently announced an enterprise partner program that will open it up to other uses too. The idea here is that the AR glasses could be used for work like field service or manufacturing. For example, workers could talk to a remote engineer as they’re fixing a problem or look up a user manual on how to fix electrical wiring right as they’re doing it. But the real purpose of opening the Jet up is to show how flexible it is as a hardware and development platform. And as I’ve seen with Pokémon Go, it’s a pretty great way to play augmented reality games too.
It’s difficult to see here, but this is a shot of the Pokémon Go screen on the Recon Jet’s tiny display
A Recon spokesperson said that if more time was spent on it and if Niantic joined in to help optimize the app, there’s potential for the experience to be much better. Recon isn’t the only company to think of this collaboration either. Osterhaut Design Group (ODG) ported an unofficial version of the app over to its R7 headset a month ago, while CapitolaVR created a demo of how Pokémon Go would look through Microsoft’s HoloLens headset. Still, the R7 and the HoloLens both sell for upwards of $2,000, while the Jet is available today for $500. Plus, Recon’s hardware has already been repurposed to play paintball in the form of the Empire EVS mask, so it doesn’t take much imagination to see how it could be adapted to work with mobile AR games too.
In an email statement, a Recon spokesperson said: “With further optimization, Pokémon Go on Recon Jet could very well be brought to market in the future.” Let’s hope it is.
T-Mobile Introduces $70 Unlimited Data Plan, But HD Video is $25 Extra
T-Mobile has introduced a new plan called T-Mobile ONE [PDF] that offers unlimited talk, text, and 4G LTE data for $70 per month. A second line can be added for $50 per month, while up to six more lines can be added for an additional $20 per month each. The total cost for a family of four, for example, would be $160 per month.
T-Mobile ONE has some caveats to consider. First, unlimited video is limited to 480p standard definition for all services, with unlimited HD video available for $25 per month extra per line. Additionally, tethering is limited to 2G speeds, with 5GB of high-speed tethering available as a $15 add-on.
T-Mobile’s existing Simple Choice plan with unlimited talk, text, and 4G LTE data costs $95 per month and includes unlimited HD video and 14GB of LTE tethering. The carrier also offers 2GB, 6GB, and 10GB of 4G LTE for $50, $65, and $80 respectively. It is unclear if these plans will be retired September 6 for new customers.
T-Mobile also clarified that, as with its Simple Choice plans, customers using the most data — specifically the highest 3 percent — may see their data traffic prioritized behind other users once they cross a threshold of around 26GB of data during their billing month. The carrier noted that throttling will only occur at specific times and places where there is network congestion.
The new plan includes usual T-Mobile perks such as Simple Global, Mobile Without Borders, Wi-Fi Unleashed, Stock Up, and T-Mobile Tuesdays. T-Mobile will also pay up to $650 in early termination fees to customers who switch over from AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint through its Carrier Freedom program.
T-Mobile ONE will be available for new postpaid customers on September 6, while new prepaid customers will be able to get the plan “in the future.” Existing customers have the option to keep the Simple Choice plans they have or switch to T-Mobile ONE. The plan costs $5/month extra per line without AutoPay enabled.
T-Mobile follows in the footsteps of new data plans from AT&T and Verizon.
Tag: T-Mobile
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The creator of Google’s self-driving car now works for Uber
Bloomberg has taken a look at Uber’s future in the autonomous vehicle world and uncovered a small, but important detail. The website is reporting that Uber has purchased Otto, the driverless freight truck startup that was launched a few months back. That news wouldn’t be interesting but for the fact that Otto was founded and staffed by former members of Google’s self-driving car team.
Anthony Levandowski was a prodigious Berkeley graduate who built a self-stabilizing autonomous motorcycle for the DARPA grand challenge. Shortly afterward he founded 510 Systems, a startup that Google bought to form the basis of its self-driving car project. Otto co-founder Lior Ron, meanwhile, was the head of Google Maps for three years before leading Motorola’s revolution after Google bought it.
According to Bloomberg, the deal was made in July, and could potentially be worth as much as $680 million. That’s a high price for a startup that’s less than a year old and has fewer than 100 employees, but there’s plenty at stake here. After all, a Google-owned and operated autonomous taxi service would, eventually, put Uber out of business. The website quotes CEO Travis Kalanick saying that producing a rival technology was “basically existential” for his company.
Rather than attempting to build a self-driving truck, Otto’s mission was to create a retrofit kit that could be bolted on to existing vehicles. This technology would only be used on highways, the simplest part of driving but the core component to hauling freight. Human operators would then take over for the complicated part, but could otherwise get a nap in the back of the cab.
Now, Otto’s platform will be used as a beachhead to get Uber into the trucking business as well as adapting Levandowski’s tech into its own self-driving cars.
Source: Bloomberg
Uber will offer free rides in its self-driving cars this month
After months of testing, Uber’s self-driving cars are ready to pick up their first passengers. Bloomberg reports that the ride-hailing company will allow customers in Pittsburgh to request one of its autonomous Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles via their smartphone in the coming weeks, pushing it into territory that other major developers of self-driving cars have yet to fully explore.
According to the report, Uber won’t be sending its cars out alone. A human supervisor will sit in the driving seat, as required by law, “with their fingertips on the wheel.” A second person will be sat in the front passenger seat, taking notes on a laptop while cameras inside and outside the vehicle record everything that happens during the ride. Customers won’t be expected to pay for their journey in Uber’s XC90s, at least to begin with, which may help put nervous riders at ease.
Pittsburgh serves as the ideal environment for Uber’s autonomous trials. The city is home to its Advanced Technologies Center (ATC) and local authorities have already approved the testing of its self-driving fleet. When the do hit the road, only a handful of cars will be available right away, but Uber has struck a deal with Volvo to take delivery of 100 vehicles by the end of the year.
With Ford announcing yesterday that it intends to have fully autonomous cars on the road within five years, Uber is moving swiftly. It wants to be out ahead of its rivals with its own tried-and-tested solution, not a ready-made one from a car manufacturer that could one day eat its lunch.
Source: Bloomberg
Whyd is a colorful take on voice-controlled wireless speakers
Just two years ago, Whyd was trying to mix up the music streaming world, with a service that let you collect tracks from around the internet, and put them in one place. Today, it’s moving into hardware with a multi-room wireless speaker. Don’t worry, if you were into its aggregation service, (as you likely know) it wasn’t killed, but made open source earlier this month. Starting today, though, the Whyd brand will live on as a multi-room speaker system.
Before we get to the features, let’s talk about that design. The egg-like form, and bold colors are striking for sure — if Ikea did wireless audio, it might look like this. The speaker uses four 40mm drivers to pump out sounds in 360-degrees, and there’s a shiny glass touch-sensitive button on top so you can control your music with gestures.
Physical controls are old news though, right? Whyd thinks so, and has given the speaker Amazon Echo-like voice control. Using what looks like fairly natural voice commands — “Play my morning playlist” the demo video shows us — you won’t even need to lay a single greasy digit on that polished peak. Five beam forming microphones also promise that you’ll be heard wherever you are in the room.
As is par for the course these days, two speakers can be linked to make a stereo pair. You’ll of course be able to pipe music to the Whyd speaker from a number of sources, including WiFi, Bluetooth, GoogleCast and AirPlay as well as streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Sound Cloud, Tidal and Google Play. There’s also an Android and iOS app that will put all these options together in one place.
Perhaps Whyd’s most ambitious feature is its price. At $500, that puts it squarely agains the very capable Sonos Play:5, the streaming stalwart’s flagship speaker. If you’re more about the voice control, Amazon’s multifunctional Echo costs just $180. If you’re an early bird, you can shave a solid $200 off the Whyd, bagging one for $300 — either way, you’ve still got a little while to think about it, as the speaker won’t ship until this fall.
Source: Whyd
AMD crashes Intel’s party: Powerful Zen CPUs are coming next year
A block away from Intel’s Developer Forum in San Francisco, AMD brought together a select group of media and analysts to make one thing clear: Its long-awaited Zen processor actually exists, and it’s on track to ship early next year for desktops. Surprisingly, the company is aiming directly at the high-end PC gaming market, whereas its last few chips appealed more to budget builders.
“Our focus is on high-performance CPUs and GPUs,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said, as she listed off the company’s most recent accomplishments. Those include building the chips powering both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (as well as the One S and the upcoming Project Scorpio), and delivering a surprisingly powerful $200 video card in the Radeon RX480.
Beaming like a proud papa, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster listed off what makes the Zen processor so special: It’s built from the ground up with a focus on “performance, throughput and efficiency.” Using a 14nm FinFET (3D transistor) architecture, AMD’s engineers have increased the chip’s performance by 40 percent, compared to their last-gen hardware, all the while making it more power efficient. AMD has also finally implemented Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), which lets Zen’s cores run multiple threads at the same time (basically, its own version of Intel’s HyperThreading).
“We have to be faster, we have to be more agile, we have to be more creative, because we’re the smallest player,” Papermaster said. Digging a bit deeper into the technical details, AMD says it increased Zen’s instruction scheduler by 1.75x and execution resources by 1.5x, added an 8MB L3 cache, and also implemented a larger shared L2 cache. Altogether, Zen should push around five times the amount of bandwidth to its core than AMD’s previous Excavator design.
So what does all that mean to you? Basically, you can expect the company’s Zen chip to be better at massive processing tasks (think 4K video and gaming, as well as VR), and easier on laptop battery life. It sounds like the sort of leap in performance AMD needs to better compete with Intel in high-end computing, but there’s still much we don’t know. Zen’s thermal profile, which would tell us just how efficient it actually is, remains a mystery. And naturally, AMD isn’t ready to talk about final clock speeds or pricing just yet. Papermaster says more technical details will be divulged at the Hot Chips conference next week.
AMD’s first product based on Zen will be an 8-core, 16-thread desktop chip called Summit Ridge, which will run on the new AM4 platform and will support DDR4 memory and “next-gen I/O.” But the company also hopes Zen will help it get back into the lucrative server market with “Naples,” a 32-core, 64-thread behemoth. AMD also expects to see the new chip design reach embedded computers in the future (mostly due to its increased power efficiency). Surprisingly, the company’s engineers are already hard at work on its followup platform, Zen+, Papermaster revealed.
To give us a sense of Summit Ridge’s performance, AMD pitted it against a Core i7-6900K, Intel’s top-of-the-line 8-core chip (which currently sells for around $1,100), using the Blender rendering benchmark. With both chips clocked at 3Ghz, the Summit Ridge machine managed to finish rendering a scene around half-a-second faster than Intel’s processor. AMD had to downclock its competitor from 3.2GHz to make the fight fair, but the benchmark as still a notable win. We also saw Summit Ridge, together with AMD’s R9 Fury X, playing Deux Ex: Mankind Divided in 4K with smooth frame rates (of course, we weren’t told the exact FPS figure).
You can expect Summit Ridge to hit the market in the first quarter of 2017, while Naples will launch in the second quarter. And if you’re aching to get Zen in a laptop, keep an eye out during the second half of next year (the company announced its latest batch of laptop chips back in May). Despite its progress with Zen, AMD will surely have competition from Intel, which is expected to debut its seventh-generation Core CPUs this fall.
