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The ATAP division of Google is known for some the most innovative ideas to come out of Silicon Valley. It's the home of the Project Ara modular phone and Project Tango. So it's no surprise to find that Project Jacquard has a large single piece of fabric with conductive yarn woven in that works like a trackpad. The Jacquard team said that more information about its technology would be revealed at tomorrow's ATAP session, but it already looks promising.
The Jacquard loom can weave regular and conductive fabric into a single piece of textile. On the demo table at I/O, the conductive squares on the larger piece of fabric where used to turn lights on, control a media player, and power two touch-tracking setups that visualized the interaction. The conductive surface uses low-power Wi-Fi to communicate with devices. While the demo was on a flat surface, the additional electronics needed to power and connect the fabric to a device are not quite ready to be sewn into your pants. The team is still working on shrinking those components down to integrate with its loom. But once they do, you might be swiping your next jacket to control smartphone.
Filed under: Misc, Peripherals, Wearables, Wireless, Google
Source: Project Jacquard
Out of all the major technology companies, Apple is yet to reveal its plans for augmented or virtual reality. But still, chances are the Cupertino firm's working on a project (or two) behind closed doors, as signaled by multiple patents that have surfaced over the past few years. To make matters more interesting, Apple has bought Metaio, a startup from Germany that's been focusing on AR since it launched in 2003. "Pioneers in Augmented Reality and Computer Vision," reads a message displayed in large font on Metaio's website.
And if you look at its YouTube channel, you'll also find hundreds of videos about AR, such as demos, tutorials, presentations and more -- including one titled "The Industrial Augmented Reality Revolution," which covers how the technology turns real-world info into virtual objects. We reached out to Apple for confirmation and it said this in an email: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." While vague, that is the company's usual response to any inquiry about its rumored acquisitions
It's official now: #Apple has bought #Metaio. http://pic.twitter.com/FGrvm8jbY6
- Magdalena Rogl (@LenaRogl) May 28, 2015
Source: TechCrunch
The most striking part of the just released (on the web, iOS and Android) Google Photos is how familiar it feels if you've already been using Photos in Google+, or before that, Picasa. The biggest change I noticed early on is that by separating Photos from its attempt to launch yet another social network, Google is starting focus on stuff that both benefits its users, and that it does well: cloud storage and using information to narrow down searches. Now, it's a perfect fit for how most people use cameras everyday, from the ones in their phones to point-and-shoots (but maybe not your DSLR). With unlimited storage and machine learning that can link photos by the people in them or where they were taken it's ready to make sense of your massive image library.
The tagline is "organized by what matters" and it refers to Photos ability to pull together geotagging information (if available) or just look at your pictures and figure out where they were taken by the landmarks in them. Most importantly, this information is private -- Photos is a private library where you can curate and edit your pictures, and then share as needed. That said, it is creepily good at identifying people (you can turn that off in the settings), even if it doesn't know who they really are. With my photos, it tracked pictures of my nieces as they grew over several years and still identified them accurately. According to the FAQ, it uses "face models" to group similar photos together. Its ability to ID objects wasn't quite as good -- apparently many of my shoes register as cars or buildings, but it was mostly on point.
One element I liked was its ability to create a sharable link to a picture, which you can then go back and kill later without deleting the photo, or just track which links have been created. Of course, it's also ready to share pictures directly to services like Twitter and Facebook (or Google+) without a problem. A Google Now-like "Assistant" feature tips you off when the app is ready to build out a new collection or collage, and even has the familiar cards setup.
Many of the features that were introduced on Google+ are here too, like Auto Awesome that quickly tweaks images to look their best and highlight faces, create animations from a series of successive shots or automatically create Stories from a place or event. By pulling these features out of Google+, it makes them more logical to use even if the friends you'll be sharing them to are on a different service. The usual light photo editing tools are also included, like cropping or adjusting levels.
Upon loading the new Photos app, users have an option to stick with using their Google Drive storage, or moving over to the new service and its promise of unlimited backups. By choosing the bottomless option, you'll be limited to pictures at a maximum size of 16MP, and videos at 1080p, but that should be fine for most. It also implements some compression on your stored pictures, and while I didn't notice any differences, it's worth considering for those more serious about their pictures. If you want full-res backups that stay as RAW or TIFF files, you can use the Google Drive options for more space, like a 1TB service that costs $10 per month. On the other hand, if you're just running out of space on your phone, the app can identify which photos you have backed up to the cloud and offer to delete them locally.
This is hardly the only way to back up your pictures. Apple has its revamped iCloud Photos setup for iOS and Mac, and Flickr recently added machine recognition to its unlimited storage picture service. Others like VSCO Cam are also options for photo editing and organizing. From what I've seen so far, Google has a better mix of tools that's easy to use even for people who are casual about their pictures and works cross platform -- I tried the app on an iPad and it was almost identical to the version on my Android phone. That's not much help if your platform of choice is something else like Windows Phone, but hopefully Google fixes that -- this gets better if it's available in more places.
Bradley Horowitz, Google's VP of Streams, Photos and Sharing says the point is to make its abilities so transparent they sink into the background, and on that front it has succeeded. The new Google Photos isn't just easy to use, it's unobtrusive and most importantly private by default. In our (overly) public, complicated and multifaceted digital lives, that's refreshing.
Filed under: Internet, Mobile, Google
Source: Google Blog, Google Photos
In no particular order, Google's invading our living rooms, our extremities, our skies, and - curiously - our Android phones. No, really! By announcing Google Now on Tap during today's I/O keynote, the company's going all-in on the idea that a Google smartphone isn't complete without the full power of the Knowledge Graph baked into it. And you know what? I think they're right. Even after just a few moments messing around with it, I don't ever want to use an Android device that can't do what Now on Tap can.
Before we go any further, know this: You're not going to be able to use this feature just yet. Holding down the home button on a device running the Android M preview yields a sad little pop-up proclaiming these go-anywhere Now information cards aren't in this software build. At first I thought it was because there weren't any updated apps that knew to pass along data to Now when I asked for it, but Google product manager Paige Dunn-Rankin kindly set me straight. App developers don't have to do anything at all; Now parses the information on-screen and tries to surface relevant information like locations, reviews and definitions all on its lonesome. And you know what the crazy part is? Even now, in its nascent, not-even-closed to finish state, it's amazing.
Yes, you can the bet the demos on stage -- asking what Skrillex's real name was without actually saying his nom de gibberish -- were rehearsed like crazy. Dunn-Rankin's examples were a little more off the cuff, though. While looking up a Miles Davis record on Ebay, she invoked Now with a long press to reveal biographical information and links to his jaunty tunes on Spotify. Pressing and holding the home button while looking at an Instagram photo brought up its Yelp and Foursquare listings, not to mention a read on how far away we were from it. It works great with voice inputs, too, and the ability to infer the context of a situation is seriously impressive -- you can finally speak naturally to Now, and it'll respond naturally with (almost) exactly what you were looking for. Google's been blurring the line between regular Android phones and ones that sort of double as helpful assistants since the days of the 2014 Moto X, which would rouse itself from slumber when you called for it, so today's news is a step we all probably could've foretold.
Naturally, not everyone's as thrilled as I am. Earlier in the day, my colleague Nicole Lee mentioned that the feature would "creep you out even more than before." I completely disagree. Fine, there might be something initially unnerving about a system that tries to anticipate what you want, but mechanically, it's not even close to weird. Google Now just looks at the context of a given situation faster than you can, and provides some very logical jumping off points. It's not scary, it's just scary efficient... though some would agree only a fine line divides the two.
Filed under: Mobile
