Tag: consumer

Fabled CD-playing, SNES-compatible “Play Station” prototype found in a box

At the 1989 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nintendo of America’s then-chairman Howard Lincoln took the stage to reveal some unexpected news: the company was partnering with European electronics firm Philips to make a CD-ROM-based games console. While the announcement took everyone in the audience by surprise, Sony engineer Ken Kutaragi was the most shocked of all. Just the night before, he and several Sony executives had been demonstrating a product developed in partnership with Nintendo. It was to be the world’s first hybrid console, featuring an SNES cartridge slot and a CD drive, with both formats available to game developers. That product, called “Play Station” (with a space), would never see the light of day. Industry lore suggests that only 200 of the Play Station consoles were ever produced, and hardly anyone has actually seen one of the fabled consoles in the flesh. However, pictures of the legendary original Play Station surfaced on reddit yesterday (retrieved via  Nintendo Life thanks to the current furore over on the site), showing the hybrid console in all its grey and yellowed-plastic glory. The reddit user claims that the console was discovered in a box of items given to him from a friend of his father who used to work at Nintendo. The pictures show that the Play Station featured an SNES cartridge slot on top, complete with a small LCD display and buttons that appear to be used for controlling playback of audio CDs. The rear of the Play Station shows a variety of audio and video outputs, while the familiar SNES controller bears Sony branding. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fabled CD-playing, SNES-compatible “Play Station” prototype found in a box

A Look At The Tech That Could Mean We Never Have To Charge Our Phones Again

 Technology that can wirelessly power our devices on the go could change our world. Imagine never having to plug in your cell phone again, or technology that continuously keeps your electronic car battery running. According to Energous Corporation, that day is just around the corner. Energous’ WattUp is a wireless charger for electronic devices. It can charge your cell phone and… Read More

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A Look At The Tech That Could Mean We Never Have To Charge Our Phones Again

Teardown Reveals Beats Headphones Contain Metal Weights to Give Impression of Quality

Prototype Engineer Avery Louie tore down a pair of Beats headphones to see what makes them tick (or thump) and what he found inside is pretty sad. Amidst “generic drivers” and the cost-reducing tricks of the trade many of you ID’ers are familiar with—designing plastic parts that snap together rather than use screws, etc.—Louie found this gem: A little bit of weight makes the product feel solid, durable, and valuable. One way to do this cheaply is to make some components out of metal in order to add weight. In these headphones, 30% of the weight comes from four tiny metal parts that are there for the sole purpose of adding weight. I’ve got no experience with the industrial design of consumer electronics (my specialty was structural package design, where we’re trying to make everything stronger but lighter). Louie mentions that adding metal weights to a product is “a somewhat common trick, ” although he doesn’t list other examples.  But if any readership would know, it would be you guys and gals. So, ID’ers among you working in the consumer electronics space, have you seen—or god forbid, had to do—the adding-weights thing before? Anything you can tell us without violating an NDA? Via Medium

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Teardown Reveals Beats Headphones Contain Metal Weights to Give Impression of Quality

EA at E3: Star Wars Battlefront, Mirror’s Edge reboot, and new IP Unravel

23 more images in gallery LOS ANGELES—At its pre-E3 presentation, EA revealed an orgy of games, though there only appeared to be one truly original IP: an adorable puzzle-platformer called Unravel . Throughout the 90-minute presentation, a few games stood out. Need For Speed , powered by Frostbite 3, looks truly sensational. In the words of an EA exec, “Frostbite will make you question whether it’s real, or in-game,” and we have to admit, there was one sequence that really did look like live-action actors, despite the fact that it was apparently “pre-alpha footage.” Need For Speed is arriving on November 3. EA also announced a new expansion for the free-to-play MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic , dubbed Knights of the Fallen Empire . It’s due on October 27 and will be free to subscribers. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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EA at E3: Star Wars Battlefront, Mirror’s Edge reboot, and new IP Unravel

Hands-on with YouTube Gaming—Google built itself a Twitch Killer

NEW YORK—YouTube Gaming is coming! YouTube’s Twitch Killer was announced on Friday , so we stopped by the YouTube Space in Manhattan to try out a pre-release version of the service. (And we took a  ton of screenshots, see below.) YouTube says the service will launch “this summer”—it’s kind of “this summer” right now— and sure enough, the version we tried out seemed 99% finished. We spent most of our time with the desktop website, and we weren’t even on a developer sandbox—it was just the live gaming.youtube.com site with a properly-flagged account. Let’s get started! The Interface Ron Amadeo An open live stream, complete with chat. It’s Twitch! Note the “-1:43” tooltip: you can rewind the stream! 3 more images in gallery In its blog post, YouTube neglected to show the most important screenshot: the live streaming video page, so that was the first place we explored. The live video page is an all-dark interface with a large video player and a tabbed interface to the right. The tabs house chat, the typical YouTube related videos list (which should be great for discovery), and a description tab. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hands-on with YouTube Gaming—Google built itself a Twitch Killer

Everybody copies everyone: iOS 9 features inspired by Android

Apple announced iOS 9 on Monday, and while watching the keynote, I had just a little bit of déjà vu. Most of iOS 9’s new features seem to be squarely aimed at Apple’s biggest rival in mobile: Android. Specifically, they were about  catching up  to Android. Search improvements, proactive assistance, split screen, and transit directions? It’s been done, but the differences are the fun part, so we chased down the new iOS 9 screenshots and compared them to their Android counterparts. It’s not just about who copied whom; it’s also a chance to look at the different designs of the two operating systems. And hey, Apple isn’t the only one taking ideas from a competitor. Android M’s selectable app permissions are an exact copy of the iOS model. Siri and Search are chasing Google Now but hitting Google where it hurts The iOS 9 Search and Google Now screens. 8 more images in gallery iOS 9 adds a lot of “proactive assistant” and search features that were first seen on Android. The main search screen now looks a lot like Google Now, with cards showing various bits of information. Search differs from Google Now in that it shows suggested people and apps at the top, but the News and Nearby places are all Google Now. iOS search shows categories for Nearby places, while Google Now shows individual places with ratings and pictures. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Everybody copies everyone: iOS 9 features inspired by Android

Newly unveiled iOS 9 focuses on more proactive Siri, better multitasking

SAN FRANCISCO—As expected, Apple used its WWDC keynote today to take the wraps off iOS 9, the newest version of its operating system for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. While iOS 7 and iOS 8 ushered in big changes, iOS 9 will instead focus on speed and stability. In other words, iOS 9 will be to iOS 8 as OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was to OS X 10.5 . That said, Apple isn’t promoting iOS 9 using Snow Leopard’s “no new features” label. The new operating system harvests some of iOS 8’s lowest-hanging fruit and continues the work of opening the platform up to developers. It also tweaks the aesthetic introduced back in iOS 7. You fancy, WatchOS-like UI. 3 more images in gallery Among the highlighted updates for iOS 9, Apple VP Craig Federighi started by detailing an improved Siri. The assistant now has an updated UI to match WatchOS, but more importantly Siri has evolved into a more proactive assistant. For examples of this functionality, Federighi mentioned Siri can automatically play music you like from the lockscreen while on a run. iOS 9 Siri can add things to the calendar alongside a “time to leave” reminder that keeps traffic data in mind. And when unknown phone numbers reach out, the newly proactive Siri will scan your e-mail to try to identify who is getting in touch. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newly unveiled iOS 9 focuses on more proactive Siri, better multitasking

A Tiny Video Game-Playing Business Card You Can Smuggle In Your Wallet

A year ago Kevin Bates singlehandedly justified the antiquated tradition of swapping business cards with a thin and tiny handheld console that could even play video games. He originally created the Arduboy as the ultimate business card to show off his electronics skills to potential employers, but now anyone can finally buy one through Kevin’s recently-launched Kickstarter campaign. Read more…

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A Tiny Video Game-Playing Business Card You Can Smuggle In Your Wallet

Tesla’s new “Powerwall” home battery will cost $3,500 for 10kWh units [Updated]

HAWTHORNE, Calif.—In the sleek warehouse of Tesla’s Design Studio, CEO and co-founder Elon Musk announced the company’s latest products—a line of stationary batteries for households and utilities meant to store energy so that it can be used when energy is scarce and/or expensive. The home stationary battery will be called the Powerwall and it will cost $3,500 for a 10kWh unit. That unit is optimized to deal with serving a house if the traditional power grid goes down. A cheaper, $3,000 version will have a 7kWh capacity, and it will be able to help a house with solar panels deal with the fluctuations in energy supply. The prices don’t include installation, and Tesla said it would be working with certified installers including SolarCity and others. In a Q&A before the event, Musk said that the batteries will have thermal management systems to allow them to power houses in hot and cold climates too—the batteries have an operating temperature range of -20C (-4F) to 43C (110F). Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Tesla’s new “Powerwall” home battery will cost $3,500 for 10kWh units [Updated]

New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley

Final Fantasy maker and tech-demo master Square Enix unveiled a doozie of a demo at Microsoft’s 2015 Build conference. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry] , the demo showcased a range of DirectX 12 technical and processing wizardries to create a real-time animation on par with pre-rendered cut scenes and movies. During the demo (which you can view below), Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer explained each scene contained around 63 million polygons, which is supposedly up to 12-times more than Square Enix managed to render in its Agni’s Philosophy DirectX 11 demo back in 2012. Running 63 million polygons with high-resolution textures—8K by 8K in this case—is no small feat. By comparison, Star Citizen’s biggest carrier ships run up to around seven million polygons , while Ryse’s protagonist Marius was made up of 85K polygons on the Xbox One. One of the most impressive moments in the demo is when Guggenheimer zooms into the character model, revealing an immense amount of detail right up to the individual pores on her skin. The character’s hair was also revealed to be made up of individual polygons rendered with over 50 shaders, and not the less expensive surface mapping technique that’s commonly used to create features such as hair. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley