Hasta La Gadget!

Walk the floors at Google I/O and if you’re lucky you’ll run into Sergey Brin, who spent some time telling us about the development process behind Google Glass as well as a teaser for the update roadmap. Surrounded by fans and sporting his own Glass, Brin explained some of the decisions around the use of a monocular eyepiece, and of its placement out of the line-of-sight rather than directly in front of the wearer, as you might expect from a true augmented-reality device. However, he also revealed that a future software upgrade will address one of our own issues with Glass: keeping video steady when you’re filming it from a wearable.

We’ve already been impressed by how Glass holds up as a wearable camera, particularly during situations – like when you’re playing with your kids or demonstrating a new gadget – when you need your hands to be free. However, we also found it more than a little getting used to, keeping your head still when you’re recording a conversation. All too easily you end up with nodding video, as you unconsciously move and react to the person you’re talking to.

We mentioned that to Brin, and he confirmed that it’s something Google is actually working on addressing. “Stay tuned, we’re gonna have some software that helps you out” he told us; it’s unclear how, exactly, that will be implemented, but digital image stabilization is already available on smartphones, and Google might be using a similar system. Glass also comes equipped with various sensors and gyroscopes – some of which are only partially utilized in this early iteration – and so Google could tap into those to do image-shifting and compensate for head-shake.

As you might expect for a device named the “Explorer Edition” and aimed squarely at developers, Glass is still a work-in-progress. Google aims to translate what it learns from this relatively small-scale deployment to the eventual consumer version – tipped to arrive in 2014 – including both design and functionality refinements.

We asked Brin about the style decisions Google made along the way, and at which point the aesthetics of Glass came into the process. “We did make some functional mockups,” he told us, “but mostly we made functional but uglier, heavier models – style came after that.”

Style is, when you’re dealing with device you wear, distinct in a very particular way from design. Even if the work on physical appearance followed on after function, how Glass sits on the face did not.

Glass-chat with Sergey Brin at Google I/O 2013:

“Very early on we realized that comfort was so important, and that [led to] the decision to make them monocular,” Brin explained. “We also made the decision not to have it occlude your vision, because we tried different configurations, because something you’re going to be comfortable – hopefully you’re comfortable wearing it all day? – is going to be hard to make. You have to make a lot of other trade-offs.”

We’ll have more coverage from Google I/O all week, so catch up with all the news from the epic 3.5hr keynote yesterday!

Glass Video: Controlling AR.Drone with NVIDIA Shield

Sergey Brin talks Glass: Camera stabilizer incoming is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We heard rumors during the calm of the storm last night before Google I/O, and now it’s official. Google today announced what they’re calling Google Play Music All Access, which is the company’s own take on music streaming, and they look to take on Spotify and Rdio, which are the two main heavyweights in this category.

The mobile app looks to have all of the same features that we’ve seen in music streaming subscription services in the past, including personalized recommendations, featured music, and the ability to create radio stations out of the music that you enjoy the most. This gets based on a certain artist or song, similar to how Pandora creates different stations.

While a song is playing, you also have the choices of giving it the thumbs up or thumbs down, as well as the ability to rearrange future songs in the automated playlist, as well as swiping away the songs you don’t want to listen to. Google says that All Access is a music player “without rules,” meaning that you can have be as interactive as you want, or just let it do it’s thing.

Basically, it’s nothing that we already haven’t seen before in Spotify, Pandora, or Rdio, but there are a few minor features that music enthusiasts may enjoy greatly. Plus, if you’re already deep into the Google ecosystem, this could be a great addition to your app collection. And like Spotify, you can upload your own music to the app and have it appear right along side all the other content. All Access will also be available as a web app for cross-platform enjoyment. As for price, you’re looking at $9.99/month for unlimited access.

Google Play Music All Access takes on Spotify with music streaming is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week the 6th annual Google I/O 2013 developers conference began with a series of Android announcements, picking up on Google Play game services as a central element in the future of the system – both cross-device and cross-platform. The keynote began with Google’s Vic Gundotra speaking about how important it is that they reach out to this community year after year. He handed the mic over to Sundar Pichai almost immediately, who made the case for the ever-changing world with a photo of Google I/O compared to last year’s event: a “sea of smartphones” compared to a single flip phone (guess which is which.)

Pichai spoke about The Journey of Personal Computing, noting that Android and Chrome remain two separate systems. Android began, he said, as an open system that is now the most popular operating system in the world. Chrome as a web browser, he reminded the audience, is now the world’s most popular web browser. It’s through this web browser and with this system that Google Play game systems will come to life.

Pichai showed the current level of Android activations in the world – 900 million strong. Comparing this number to 2012′s activations at 400 million, it was plain how the operating system was making waves. 48 billion app installs were announced for Google Play by Google’s Hugo Barra. Google’s Vice President of Android Product Management announced further that the company had already paid out more this year to developers through Google Play than they had the entirety of 2012.

Barra continued with updates for the developer community on Google Services updates with APIs for Google Maps. Activity Recognition, power saving, and ease in integration bring this system into the future. Also on tap was Google+ sign-in. This system allows users to log in with Google+ on-the-fly through a series of websites – and all, in the near future, if Google has their way.

Google+ Cross-device Single Sign-on was made clear – Google+ will now be as easy to sign in with as Facebook is in both apps and on your desktop. Signing in on your desktop computer will also have you signed in on your tablet or smartphone if the app is compatible with this system.

But it was Google Play game services that knocked out the most important update to Android without a doubt. Here you’ll find users able to save their game on one device and pick it up from another place without a problem.

This system is both cross-device and cross-platform. It works for both Android and iOS – Apple devices as well as those made by LG, HTC, and all the rest. Connecting through Google+ and the users’ Google account, multi-player games will also be made a snap over the web – more-so than before, that is.

Google Play game services will be rolling out starting this week and we’ll be having more of a close-up look at it each day. Stick around our Google I/O tag portal to see it all, start to finish.

Google Play game services launched cross-device and cross-platform is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Jaws dropped during Sony’s demonstration of Killzone Shadow Fall for the PlayStation 4 back in February, and now new information from developers Guerrilla Games gives some technical insight on how the next-gen console runs, what coding for it is like, and just what sort of step up from the PS3 is on offer. The tech demo – which you can see after the cut – shows how the new Killzone title was running on Sony’s demo hardware, while a “postmortem” of the event by Guerrilla Games runs down the improvements of the incoming hardware.

Much of the summary is dedicated to how much more straightforward it is to develop titles for the PS4. The console uses the same concurrency model as the PS3, for instance, with a main “orchestrator” thread and then the rest of the code running in jobs across all the cores; on the PS4, though, Guerrilla found that 80-percent of all code could now be run in jobs, versus 20-percent on the current-gen console.

To show how well the game ran, the developers had to cook up their own CPU and GPU profilers, since the official tools still aren’t quite ready. On-screen, there’s a physically-correct lighting model and volumetrics supported on every light, along with real-time reflections. Some of the most obvious improvements are in characters, with far greater detail allowed.

Killzone Shadow Fall PS4 tech demo:

“Our aim for [the] announcement event was to run on PS4 hardware” Guerrilla writes, meaning “1080p, solid 30FPS, [and] no cheats.” The latter is presumably a reference to the Killzone 2 for PS3 demo gaffe, where what was later revealed to be rendered game footage was initially portrayed as running on the console itself.

Killzone Shadow Fall PS4 gameplay demo:

“PS4 is really easy to program for!” lead tech Michal Valient concludes, and the “GPU is really fast” while “GDDR5 bandwith is awesome” assuming you handle the memory mapping properly. “We’ve only scratched the surface” he says.

Sony didn’t show off the final hardware at its PS4 launch event, only the peripherals and some game demos. It did, however, confirm the core specifications: 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, an x86 CPU, an enhanced PC GPU, and a hard-drive; there’s also WiFi b/g/n and Bluetooth, USB 3.0, gigabit ethernet, and a Blu-ray drive.

Thanks Zak!

Killzone Shadow Fall PS4 tech demo shows potency of next-gen console is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Nokia Lumia 920 users tempted by the improved lens of the Lumia 925 and the new Windows Phone’s broader ISO support should probably hold off before they trade in, with Nokia’s photograpy chief Juha Alakarhu promising an incoming update will significantly narrow the gap between the phones. While all eyes are on the new Lumia 925 today, Nokia has a pleasant surprise for existing 920 owners, with confirmation that the Amber update due this summer will bring many of the improvements to the older device. Meanwhile, Alakarhu also explained why Nokia’s burst-photo system is better than, say, HTC’s Zoe approach, and why the Finnish firm would be happy to work on making it better.

Amber has already been confirmed to include the Smart Camera app, which brings effects like Motion Focus, Action Shots, and other burst-image-related trickery to the Lumia 925. However, Alakarhu also told us that Amber will expand the supported ISO range of the Lumia 920, just as the 925 comes with support for out of the box.

Nokia Smart Camera hands-on:

Currently, the Lumia 920 tops out at ISO 800; with Amber installed, that will be quadrupled to ISO 3200. The result will be better low-light shots as well as improvements in sports photography and when snapping images of moving subjects.

It’s not only the old flagship which will get a photography polish after Amber. All of Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 line-up will get the newest version of the photo engineers’ algorithms, which will help increase sharpness – particularly in cropped shots, Alakarhu explained – and lower noise, in addition to improvements in exposure. There’ll also be support across the range for remapping the camera shortcut key to the Smart Camera app, instead of the Windows Phone default.

Not all of the Lumia models will see the same degree of improvement, of course. Nokia will adjust the level of tweaking depending on the core sensor; the Lumia 520, for instance, won’t attempt ISO 3200 shots, since the hardware really isn’t up to it. A final decision on what changes will be delivered to each device is yet to be reached, with Alakarhu’s team still working on that ahead of Amber’s expected release in July.

The speed at which Smart Camera clusters of shots open up – something we found to take around 15 seconds with Nokia’s current pre-production software on the 925 – will also be improved, though the photo team couldn’t tell us exactly how fast the process will become. Although it’s slower than how quickly, say, HTC’s One can open up a Zoe set, there’s a good reason for that.

One of our ongoing criticisms of the One is how much space Zoe photography takes up, both on the smartphone itself and in the cloud. Nokia has addressed that by packaging the ten stills together, rather than storing each as an individual frame; the end result doesn’t follow the “ten shots so 10x the size” explanation you might expect, Alakarhu explained. Opening and editing those takes some processing time – in fact, it’s currently the most processor-intensive thing the Lumia 925 is asked to do – but while there are other ways Nokia could deal with the files, the company is wary of diverging too greatly from imaging standards.

“I think what we want to do next is make the sharing super-easy, so that your friends can also enjoy making those changes on Facebook or their own phone” Alakarhu told us. “And so we need to find the right format, the right way to do it. There is currently no industry standard for doing that, and I don’t want to take the proprietary route for doing that, because this needs to be accessed by everyone.”

Exactly how that common format might look is unclear. HTC has opted for Zoe Share, a free – albeit temporary – web-gallery service that One owners can use to show off select stills, video clips, and highlight reels created on the smartphone. Nokia currently has no specific sharing system that preserves the Smart Camera post-processing potential, though you can of course push out the final results as regular photos through the usual Facebook, Twitter, email, and other routes.

“In the 920, we actually did a lot of the foundations” Alakarhu concluded, hinting that there was plenty more photo-centric news to be shared later in the year. “The algorithms we had have, for example. But now we have been able to do that optimization, and the pace of the development has been incredible now that we have that great foundation of algorithms.”

Got a Nokia Lumia 920? Give Amber a try before you upgrade to 925 is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.