Tag: events

Facebook explains the tech behind its 360-degree videos

Facebook made 360-degrees videos viewable on the News Feed back in September, but it was apparently no easy feat making it possible. The latest post on its Engineering blog explains the problems they had to deal with, including the difficulty of stitching footage together without producing distorted images. To prevent making videos look like they came out of a warped nightmare, the engineers created a video filter that uses a common CG method called ” cube mapping .” It works by dividing a frame into six squares to form a cube: the top and bottom 25 percent of the frame are compressed into two images, while the middle part that makes up 50 percent of the frame is divided into four. Now, that six-image frame is still flat. So, what the filter does is wrap it around a virtual sphere inside a cube, with each square expanding to fill the cube in every direction you can view: up, down, left, right, front and back. That allows Facebook to render each frame with 25 percent fewer pixels than the original video, making the finished product easier to view from our end. Fewer pixels also mean faster processing times and smaller file sizes, which are essential for the social network to be able to produce 360-degree videos quickly. In fact, its engineers decided to split the job across several powerful machines, which the company can definitely afford , for faster encoding. While these 360-degree videos are perfectly viewable without VR glasses, they indicate the arrival of more content on the website optimized for virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg revealed earlier this year that the company’s focusing on VR tech, as he believes it’s the “next major computing and communication platform.” Not to mention, FB dropped $2 billion last year to acquire Oculus VR. No doubt he’d want the News Feed to be more immersive, especially since the consumer version of Oculus Rift will be available for purchase in Q1 2016. As for what’s next for the team, Facebook engineers Evgeny Kuzyakov and David Pio had this to say: Of course, hurdles remain. We haven’t cracked automatic detection of 360 video upload yet — right now the false-positive rate inhibits our ability to fully implement this. Facebook’s scale is so large that even a 0.1 percent false-positive rate would mean we would incorrectly declare thousands of regular videos as 360 video. That’s a specific example, but there are a lot more broad, exciting challenges to tackle as well. Higher resolutions, 3D video, and 360 video optimized for virtual reality are all part of the near future of this space. It’s an exciting time to be working on video. We hope you enjoy the experience we built today and look forward to launching more in the future. Star Wars: The Force Awakens Immersive 360 Experience Speed across the Jakku desert from Star Wars: The Force Awakens with this immersive 360 experience created exclusively for Facebook. Posted by Star Wars on Wednesday, September 23, 2015 Source: Facebook Engineering

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Facebook explains the tech behind its 360-degree videos

Ultimate Hacking Keyboard splits in half, is fully programmable

If you want to go a step beyond mechanical keyboards, you’ll inevitably end up looking at the wild variety of ergonomic options. Now we have a new challenger: The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard by the Hungarian startup Ultimate Gadget Laboratories. It’s a mechanical keyboard that can be split apart for better ergonomic placement on your desk, and, true to its name, it also lets you completely remap the keys as you see fit. The company even included mouse support within the keyboard (which also lets you mimic touch gestures on smartphones and tablets). The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard is launching today on Crowd Supply with a funding goal of $200, 000, and it’ll start at around $200. It’s slated to begin shipping in the second half of 2016. Slideshow-330012 Laszlo Monda, the founder and lead developer of the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard project, says he focused on making the device portable when it’s in one piece. In a brief hands on time with a prototype unit, it didn’t feel as heavy as most mechanical keyboards, and it’s also compact enough to fit into most bags. The actual keys felt pretty great too, with just the amount of feedback you’d expect from a solid mechanical keyboard. Monda notes that the keys will be durable enough to last 50 million presses. You’ll also be able to choose from a variety of different mechanical switch options once the keyboard starts shipping. The Ultimate Hacking Keyboard feels just as sturdy split apart, as it does when it’s joined together. Its metallic connectors give it a particularly satisfying click when it comes together. Both halves are connected by a standard telephone cord along the top of the keyboard — you can also switch that out with a longer cable if you need any more room. While I didn’t get to spend any time with the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard’s configuration application, Monda describes it as something that will let you create application-specific key layouts, complete with fully customizable layouts. For the most part, the keyboard is targeted at people who just want to be more productive. It’s not exactly something meant for gamers, since it doesn’t have a dedicated row of function keys (they’re alternate options for the top number keys). That could make it tough to play games that rely heavily on function keys (though it’ll be just fine for most shooters). Source: Ultimate Hacking Keyboard

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Ultimate Hacking Keyboard splits in half, is fully programmable

Terahertz Radiation To Enable Portable Particle Accelerators

Zothecula writes with this Gizmag story about an interdisciplinary team of researchers who have built the first prototype of a miniature particle accelerator that uses terahertz radiation. “Researchers at MIT in the US and DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) in Germany have developed a technology that could shrink particle accelerators by a factor of 100 or more. The basic building block of the accelerator uses high-frequency electromagnetic waves and is just 1.5 cm (0.6 in) long and 1 mm (0.04 in) thick, with this drastic size reduction potentially benefitting the fields of medicine, materials science and particle physics, among others.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Terahertz Radiation To Enable Portable Particle Accelerators

6 flying cars that let you soar over traffic

By Cat DiStasio The dream of flight has entranced humans for centuries, and modern innovators won’t quit until the flying cars of sci-fi movies are realized. Although today’s traffic jams still happen on the ground level, plenty of engineers have their eyes and minds on the sky. It’s fascinating, if not intoxicating, to dream of the day when we might one day be able to take to the skies in a vehicle of our own, but until then, we can revel in prototypes built by dreamers with the capital to turn their high-flying ideas into a reality. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.Slideshow-329306

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6 flying cars that let you soar over traffic

AT&T NumberSync lets one phone number rule all your connected gadgets

We’re encumbered with more connected silicon than ever before, and having to juggling multiple phone numbers for a phone, a smartwatch and a tablet, well, really sucks. To that end, AT&T just announced NumberSync, a free service that links all your other connected AT&T gizmos (think 3G smartwatch or tablets) to your main phone number. Better yet, incoming calls and text messages will get routed to all those devices at once — none of this hokey call-forwarding nonsense. When you add a NumberSync-enabled device to one of AT&T’s Mobile Share plan buckets, you’ll get the option to turn on NumberSync totally free of charge . AT&T SVP Jeff Bradley says the feature will launch later this month with one supported device from a hush-hush phone maker (our money’s on Samsung), with a few more to follow by the time the holidays roll around. Ultimately, the carrier would like to see its full line of connected devices play nice with NumberSync’s sharing tendencies, but that’s a little easier said than done. And for folks like me, who have no less than five phone numbers running at the same time because of review phones, NumberSync doesn’t really help. It’s all about those other, non-phone connected gadgets AT&T wants to sell you. What AT&T’s basically doing here is taking advantage of the network upgrades it developed while rolling out Voice over LTE to kill a growing consumer headache and give their hardware partners a better shot at selling stuff at the same time. Clever clever. But why the slow rollout, especially if most of the heavy lifting is handled on AT&T’s end? Can’t they just flip the switch for everyone at one? I asked Bradley what the deal was, and it’s because NumberSync isn’t a completely one-sided affair — phone makers have to modify software like the dialer and messaging apps to play nice with AT&T’s network modifications. Thankfully, most of this technical legwork *should* be invisible to you and me — enabling NumberSync on a secondary device like a tablet would require one final new step at the end of the normal setup process. “The good part, ” Bradley pointed out, “is they get better [at integration] once they get the first one under their belt.” One of the few good things about the way our domestic wireless carriers work is that they’re totally fine stealing good ideas — it might give the originator ammunition to fire back, but whatever. In the end, it means benefits eventually flow to all consumers instead of just one subset of customers, and AT&T isn’t the only carrier that’s working on a network infrastructure that makes NumberSync possible. AT&T might have the head start on this, but seriously, the rest of you carriers had better get cracking too.

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AT&T NumberSync lets one phone number rule all your connected gadgets

August unveils a Homekit-enabled lock, keypad and doorbell camera

August Home Inc, makers of the August Smart Lock , announced the forthcoming release of three new products as well as a new service at a press event in San Francisco today. The new product lineup includes a second-generation Smart Lock, a Smart Keypad and a Smart Doorbell Camera. The lock itself offers a number of design improvements over its predecessor including a magnetic faceplate that won’t pop off every time you manually engage the lock as well as a stainless steel indicator on the lock sleeve. Plus, being Homekit-enabled, the new Smart Lock will allow users to issue voice commands through Siri rather than opening the app itself. It’s available for order today and will retail for $230. The older generation locks will be discounted to an even $200. The weather-proofed keypad will make granting temporary access to service providers (say, the delivery guy or your dog walker) much easier. Instead of forcing folks to download the August app just to use a one-time Bluetooth code, users will be able to program a 4 – 6 digit PIN into the keypad themselves and then share the code via text message or what-have-you. And, like the older shared BT codes, these PINs can be set to last for as many hours, days or uses as you’d like. The keypad will retail for $80 when it becomes available in the next few weeks. The Doorbell Cam is also weather-proofed, Wi-Fi enabled and pretty darn clever. It’s equipped with a standard motion detector but will also turn on the camera when it detects movement near the door. So instead of issuing a push notification every time a car drives past your house, the motion detector will also turn on the Wi-Fi camera (which is equipped with human-detection software) to ensure that the movement is actually a person standing on your stoop, not just parking at the curb. The camera will retail for $200. What’s more, the camera integrates with the rest of the August devices allowing you to remotely unlock your door for the delivery guy and record both him entering and exiting the residence. This ensures that he doesn’t swiped stuff from your house while dropping a package in the foyer. Plus, this way, you’ll never miss a delivery. The only drawback is that the camera is powered by your existing doorbell wiring so if you don’t have a doorbell already installed on your door (like me) you are SOL. Finally, August is expanding the scope of its temporary access system to allow services, not just individuals access to your door. “We’re announcing a new service that we call Access, ” August co-founder Jason Johnson told Engadget . “Probably the best way to describe it is, much like, new transportation apps like Uber helps consumers find service providers [in this case, drivers for hire – ed.] are in third party transportation logistics, we’re in third party service logistics. We help consumers find services that have integrated with our platform and we help them connect in a trusted and secure way.” The company announced 12 initial launch partners today including Sears, Postmates, Pro.com, Handy, Fetch, Shyp, BloomNation, Envoy, Rinse, HelloAlfred, Wag!, Pillow, and Doorman. Instead of having to give partial access to a delivery person every single time you order from Postmates, users will be able to grant access to Postmates the company. This may seem like a security issue however it’s not that far off from what many August users already do with trusted service partners like these. Plus, the lock maintains copious logs about who opened which August-locked door with which access code so tracking down the responsible party should your valuable go missing during a delivery will be a piece of cake.

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August unveils a Homekit-enabled lock, keypad and doorbell camera

Clinton Home Servers Had Ports Open

Jim Efaw writes: Hillary Clinton’s home servers had more than just the e-mail ports open directly to the Internet. The Associated Press discovered, by using scanning results from 2012 “widely available online”, that the clintonemail.com server also had the RDP port open; another machine on her network had the VNC port open, and another one had a web server open even though it didn’t appear to be configured for a real site. Clinton previously said that her server featured “numerous safeguards, ” but hasn’t explained what that means. Apparently, requiring a VPN wasn’t one of them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Clinton Home Servers Had Ports Open

Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ feature has controls to filter out sad times

Facebook’s On This Day tool is a nice feature when it recalls good times that may have slipped your mind. It has a tendency to bring up events and people that you might prefer to forget, though, and the social network added preferences to curtail the sadness. On This Day now has controls that’ll let you filter out specific people and dates so the feature doesn’t remind you of those bits of nostalgia you’d rather not revisit. Facebook has come under fire for toying with our emotions and digging up the past before, and there’s already been some criticism of On This Day since it launched in March. By adding preferences, Zuckerberg & Co. are offering a way to keep those bad memories at bay. It’s a nice touch, since you never know exactly when the memory machine will pop up in your News Feed. If you’ve noticed On This Day posts there, the new controls should be available for you to tweak. Via: The Verge

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Facebook’s ‘On This Day’ feature has controls to filter out sad times

Open-Source Doom 3 Advances With EAX Audio, 64-bit ARM/x86 Support

An anonymous reader writes: Dhewm3, one of the leading implementations of the Doom 3 engine built off the open-source id Tech 4 engine, has released a new version of the GPL-licensed engine that takes Doom 3 far beyond where it was left off by id Software. The newest code has full SDL support, OpenAL + OpenAL EFX for audio, 64-bit x86/ARM support, better support for widescreen resolutions, and CMake build system support on Linux/Windows/OSX/FreeBSD. This new open-source code can be downloaded from Dhewm3 on GitHub but continues to depend upon the retail Doom 3 game assets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Open-Source Doom 3 Advances With EAX Audio, 64-bit ARM/x86 Support

See the Sketches J.R.R. Tolkien Used To Build Middle-Earth

Esther Schindler writes: In addition to writing the story of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien drew it. The maps and sketches he made while drafting it “informed his storytelling, allowing him to test narrative ideas and illustrate scenes he needed to capture in words, ” reports Ethan Gilsdorf at Wired. “For Tolkien, the art of writing and the art of drawing were inextricably intertwined.” It’s all coming out in a new book, but here we get a sneak preview, along with several cool observations, such as: “If Tolkien’s nerdy use of graph paper feels like a secret message to future Dungeons & Dragons players, then so does his ‘Plan of Shelob’s lair.’ Tolkien’s map of tunnels stocked with nasties—here, a spider named Shelob—would be right at home in any Dungeon Master’s campaign notes. He even marks the place for a classic dungeon crawl feature: ‘trap.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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See the Sketches J.R.R. Tolkien Used To Build Middle-Earth