Got a few thousand bucks and a good deal of engineering expertise? You’re in luck: Stanford students have created a quadrupedal robot platform called Doggo that you can build with off-the-shelf parts and a considerable amount of elbow grease. That’s better than the alternatives, which generally require a hundred grand and a government-sponsored lab.
Facebook -owned Oculus is shipping its latest VR headgear from today. Pre-orders for the PC-free Oculus Quest and the higher end Oculus Rift S opened up three weeks ago.
In a launch blog, Oculus touts the new hardware’s “all-in-one, fully immersive 6DOF VR” — writing: “We’re bringing the magic of presence to more people than ever before — and we’re doing it with the freedom of fully untethered movement.”
For a less varnished view on what it’s like to stick a face-computer on your head, you can check out our reviews by clicking on the links below…
TC: “The headset may not be the most powerful, but it is doubtlessly the new flagship VR product from Facebook”
TC: “It still doesn’t feel like a proper upgrade to a flagship headset that’s already three years old, but it is a more fine-tuned system that feels more evolved and dependable”
The Oculus blog contains no detail on pre-order sales for the headsets — beyond a few fine-sounding words.
Meanwhile, Facebook has, for months, been running native ads for Oculus via its eponymous and omnipresent social network — although there’s no explicit mention of the Oculus brand unless you click through to “learn more.”
Instead, it’s pushing the generic notion of “all-in-one VR,” shrinking the Oculus brand stamp on the headset to an indecipherable micro-scribble.
Here’s one of Facebook’s ads that targeted me in Europe, back in March, for e.g.:
For those wanting to partake of Facebook-flavored face gaming (and/or immersive movie watching), the Oculus Quest and Rift S are available to buy via oculus.com and retail partners including Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, Walmart and GameStop in the U.S.; Currys PC World, FNAC, MediaMarkt and more in the EU and U.K.; and Amazon in Japan.
Just remember to keep your mouth shut.
Google said today that existing users of Huawei Android devices can continue to use Google Play app store, offering some relief to tens of millions of users worldwide even as it remains unclear if the Chinese tech giant will be able to use the fully-functioning version of Android in its future phones.
Huawei has finally gone on the record about a ban on its use of Android, but the company’s long-term strategy on mobile still remains unclear.
Sometimes you need scrambled eggs. And with that thought, today at the Overland Expo in Flagstaff, AZ, Rivian announced a major accessory for its electric pickup: A camp kitchen. The unit slides out from the Rivian R1T’s so-called gear tunnel that lives between the bed and cab. The kitchen includes storage and a stove that’s powered by the R1T’s 180kWh battery pack.
This kitchen unit is the first significant concept Rivian has unveiled for the pickup’s unusual gear tunnel. This space provides another locked storage compartment for the pickup — but why have it all, many asked when it was revealed? And now, with this kitchen unit, Rivian is responding to the questions. It seems Rivian wants to make its vehicles the center of an ecosystem of add-ons. The company already revealed racks, vehicle-mounted tents and even a flashlight that hides in the side of the driver’s door. Expect more camping and outdoor gear as Rivian cements its brand image around adventurers.
Rivian is positioning its products for a particular lifestyle. Think Patagonia-wearing, Range Rover-driving, outdoorsy types or at least those who aspire to have that image. It’s a smart play, and so far, Rivian has stayed true to this image. All of its advertisements, social media posts, and appearances make it clear that Rivian is carefully aligning its brand image.
Trucks and SUVs are generally marketed to workman and families. TV commercials feature dusty men hauling bails of hay and women unloading groceries and closing the rear tailgate with her foot. But not Rivian.
So far Rivian has shown its products in the backwoods, running trails and sitting next to campfires. The people in the commercials are on an adventure, wearing coats by The North Face and sleeping in REI tents. With the kitchen from today’s announcements, they can pull a kitchen out of their pickup and make some coffee.
Rivian tells TechCrunch this is just a concept, but the company intends to bring this unit to production. There are likely to be other units for the gear tunnel. I, for one, would love to have a slide-out dog washing and drying station because there’s nothing worse than putting a muddy dog in a truck.
Children with vision impairments struggle to get a solid K-12 education for a lot of reasons — so the more tools their teachers have to impart basic skills and concepts, the better. ObjectiveEd is a startup that aims to empower teachers and kids with a suite of learning games accessible to all vision levels, along with tools to track and promote progress.
When your game tops 100 million players, your thoughts naturally turn to doubling that number. That’s the case with the creators, or rather stewards, of Minecraft at Microsoft, where the game has become a product category unto itself. And now it is making its biggest leap yet — to a real-world augmented reality game in the vein of Pokémon GO, called Minecraft Earth.
Announced today but not playable until summer (on iOS and Android) or later, MCE (as I’ll call it) is full-on Minecraft, reimagined to be mobile and AR-first. So what is it? As executive producer Jesse Merriam put it succinctly: “Everywhere you go, you see Minecraft. And everywhere you go, you can play Minecraft.”
Yes, yes — but what is it? Less succinctly put, MCE is like other real-world-based AR games in that it lets you travel around a virtual version of your area, collecting items and participating in mini-games. Where it’s unlike other such games is that it’s built on top of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, meaning it’s not some offshoot or mobile cash-in; this is straight-up Minecraft, with all the blocks, monsters and redstone switches you desire, but in AR format. You collect stuff so you can build with it and share your tiny, blocky worlds with friends.
That introduces some fun opportunities and a few non-trivial limitations. Let’s run down what MCE looks like — verbally, at least, as Microsoft is being exceedingly stingy with real in-game assets.
Because it’s Minecraft Earth, you’ll inhabit a special Minecraftified version of the real world, just as Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite put a layer atop existing streets and landmarks.
The look is blocky to be sure, but not so far off the normal look that you won’t recognize it. It uses OpenStreetMaps data, including annotated and inferred information about districts, private property, safe and unsafe places and so on — which will be important later.
The fantasy map is filled with things to tap on, unsurprisingly called tappables. These can be a number of things: resources in the form of treasure chests, mobs and adventures.
Chests are filled with blocks, naturally, adding to your reserves of cobblestone, brick and so on, all the different varieties appearing with appropriate rarity.
Mobs are animals like those you might normally run across in the Minecraft wilderness: pigs, chickens, squid and so on. You snag them like items, and they too have rarities, and not just cosmetic ones. The team highlighted a favorite of theirs, the muddy pig, which when placed down will stop at nothing to get to mud and never wants to leave, or a cave chicken that lays mushrooms instead of eggs. Yes, you can breed them.
Last are adventures, which are tiny AR instances that let you collect a resource, fight some monsters and so on. For example you might find a crack in the ground that, when mined, vomits forth a volume of lava you’ll have to get away from, and then inside the resulting cave are some skeletons guarding a treasure chest. The team said they’re designing a huge number of these encounters.
Importantly, all these things — chests, mobs and encounters — are shared between friends. If I see a chest, you see a chest — and the chest will have the same items. And in an AR encounter, all nearby players are brought in, and can contribute and collect the reward in shared fashion.
And it’s in these AR experiences and the “build plates” you’re doing it all for that the game really shines.
“If you want to play Minecraft Earth without AR, you have to turn it off,” said Torfi Olafsson, the game’s director. This is not AR-optional, as with Niantic’s games. This is AR-native, and for good and ill the only way you can really play is by using your phone as a window into another world. Fortunately it works really well.
First, though, let me explain the whole build plate thing. You may have been wondering how these collectibles and mini-games amount to Minecraft. They don’t — they’re just the raw materials for it.
Whenever you feel like it, you can bring out what the team calls a build plate, which is a special item, a flat square that you virtually put down somewhere in the real world — on a surface like the table or floor, for instance — and it transforms into a small, but totally functional, Minecraft world.
In this little world you can build whatever you want, or dig into the ground, build an inverted palace for your cave chickens or create a paradise for your mud-loving pigs — whatever you want. Like Minecraft itself, each build plate is completely open-ended. Well, perhaps that’s the wrong phrase — they’re actually quite closely bounded, as the world only exists out to the edge of the plate. But they’re certainly yours to play with however you want.
Notably all the usual Minecraft rules are present — this isn’t Minecraft Lite, just a small game world. Water and lava flow how they should, blocks have all the qualities they should and mobs all act as they normally would.
The magic part comes when you find that you can instantly convert your build plate from miniature to life-size. Now the castle you’ve been building on the table is three stories tall in the park. Your pigs regard you silently as you walk through the halls and admire the care and attention to detail with which you no doubt assembled them. It really is a trip.
In the demo, I played with a few other members of the press; we got to experience a couple of build plates and adventures at life-size (technically actually 3/4 life size — the 1 block to 1 meter scale turned out to be a little daunting in testing). It was absolute chaos, really, everyone placing blocks and destroying them and flooding the area and putting down chickens. But it totally worked.
The system uses Microsoft’s new Azure Spatial Anchor system, which quickly and continuously fixed our locations in virtual space. It updated remarkably quickly, with no lag, showing the location and orientation of the other players in real time. Meanwhile the game world itself was rock-solid in space, smooth to enter and explore, and rarely bugging out (and that only in understandable circumstances). That’s great news considering how heavily the game leans on the multiplayer experience.
The team said they’d tested up to 10 players at once in an AR instance, and while there’s technically no limit, there’s sort of a physical limit in how many people can fit in the small space allocated to an adventure or around a tabletop. Don’t expect any giant 64-player raids, but do expect to take down hordes of spiders with three or four friends.
In choosing to make the game the way they’ve made it, the team naturally created certain limitations and risks. You Wouldn’t want, for example, an adventure icon to pop up in the middle of the highway.
For exactly that reason the team spent a lot of work making the map metadata extremely robust. Adventures won’t spawn in areas like private residences or yards, though of course simple collectibles might. But because you’re able to reach things up to 70 meters away, it’s unlikely you’ll have to knock on someone’s door and say there’s a cave chicken in their pool and you’d like to touch it, please.
Furthermore adventures will not spawn in areas like streets or difficult to reach areas. The team said they worked very hard making it possible for the engine to recognize places that are not only publicly accessible, but safe and easy to access. Think sidewalks and parks.
Another limitation is that, as an AR game, you move around the real world. But in Minecraft, verticality is an important part of the gameplay. Unfortunately, the simple truth is that in the real world you can’t climb virtual stairs or descend into a virtual cave. You as a player exist on a 2D plane, and can interact with but not visit places above and below that plane. (An exception of course is on a build plate, where in miniature you can fly around it freely by moving your phone.)
That’s a shame for people who can’t move around easily, though you can pick up and rotate the build plate to access different sides. Weapons and tools also have infinite range, eliminating a potential barrier to fun and accessibility.
In Pokémon GO, there’s the drive to catch ’em all. In Wizards Unite, you’ll want to advance the story and your skills. What’s the draw with Minecraft Earth? Well, what’s the draw in Minecraft? You can build stuff. And now you can build stuff in AR on your phone.
The game isn’t narrative-driven, and although there is some (unspecified) character progression, for the most part the focus is on just having fun doing and making stuff in Minecraft. Like a set of LEGO blocks, a build plate and your persistent inventory simply make for a lively sandbox.
Admittedly that doesn’t sound like it carries the same addictive draw of Pokémon, but the truth is Minecraft kind of breaks the rules like that. Millions of people play this game all the time just to make stuff and show that stuff to other people. Although you’ll be limited in how you can share to start, there will surely be ways to explore popular builds in the future.
And how will it make money? The team basically punted on that question — they’re fortunately in a position where they don’t have to worry about that yet. Minecraft is one of the biggest games of all time and a big money-maker — it’s probably worth the cost just to keep people engaged with the world and community.
MCE seems to me like a delightful thing, but one that must be appreciated on its own merits. A lack of screenshots and gameplay video isn’t doing a lot to help you here, I admit. Trust me when I say it looks great, plays well and seems fundamentally like a good time for all ages.
A few other stray facts I picked up:
Sound fun? Sign up for the beta here.
I got my hands on DJI’s Osmo Action cam and took it out for a spin. Check out the video for my initial impressions.
As wild as it sounds, the race is on to build a functioning space internet — and SpaceX is taking its biggest step yet with the launch of 60 (!) satellites tomorrow that will form the first wave of its Starlink constellation. It’s a hugely important and incredibly complex launch for the company — and should be well worth launching.
For a brief time, DJI and GoPro were partners — or at least uncomfortable allies. Way back in 2014, the companies were joined together with the intention of building a drone designed to capture athletes in motion. It must have seemed like a perfect piece of synergy from two players at the top of their respective games.
Of course, things didn’t shake out that way. The best laid plans and all that. GoPro went all in on its own drone, but Karma’s launch was wobbly, to say the least. Sixteen days after release, GoPro recalled the drone after battery issues caused it to start falling from the sky. The drone was re-released, but the division was seemingly doomed from the beginning. Early last year, the company announced plans to axe around a fifth of its staff, effectively ending its drone division in the process.
DJI’s own business, on the other hand, has been booming. The Mavic Pro, announced shortly after the Karma, has redefined the consumer drone space, spawning a sequel and several other folding quadcopters from the company, including the Mavic Air, Zoom and Spark. All the while, the Shenzhen-based company has been making strides in imaging, with products like the impressiveOsmo Pocket gimbal.
But until now, DJI had never taken a direct swing at GoPro’s true bread and butter: the action camera.
The Osmo Action is a shot across the bow. DJI is gunning directly for GoPro with its own action camera that brings a compelling feature set to the conversation. The camera arrives at a time of relative calm for GoPro. The company’s first quarter financials were looking up, with a 20% year-over-year revenue increase.
Just yesterday, the company’s stock price got a healthy bump on the news that it was shifting manufacturing to Mexico in an attempt to address rising U.S. tariffs resulting from the company’s Chinese manufacturing. Thinknum published its own take on GoPro’s future, as the California-based company appears to be undergoing a hiring spike on the software side. We’ve reached out to GoPro, asking whether this points to a shift away from hardware moving forward, but have yet to hear back.
For now, of course, GoPro’s still very much invested in the action camera category. The GoPro Hero7 arrived late last year to positive reviews. Our own Lucas Matney gave it good marks for its stabilization and live streaming capabilities, while noting that the company hadn’t made many strides on the hardware front since the last gen.
Quoting Lucas here:
[GoPro’s 2018 story] seems to be a more conservative one with the company’s new flagship device the Hero7 Black moving mostly laterally on hardware specs while throwing its focus to software tech like digital video stabilization. The moves seem designed to reduce R&D costs while widening the gap between the low and high-end on the company’s far cleaner new product line.
While the action camera market has been crowded for several years now, GoPro’s name continues to be synonymous with the category for many consumers. DJI is far from the first company to go head to head with GoPro in the space, but in 2019, it may well be the best positioned. It has proven itself a master of imaging with drones and gimbals, making the move into action cameras an easy enough lift.
Still, DJI knows enough to not enter a new category without actually bringing something new to the table. The Osmo Action certainly looks like a GoPro at first glance. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all of that, but after a decade and a half of GoPro Heroes, the entire industry appears to have settled on the boxy design as the ideal form factor, with regards to portability, durability and all of that other fun stuff.
The most immediate difference is at the dual-screen design. There’s a standard 2.25-inch rear touchscreen, coupled with a 1.4-inch display on the front. The new feature certainly makes sense for quick setup options and selfies. While it’s true that plenty of action cameras offer streaming to mobile devices, the front screen works really well for last-minute adjustments — and to give you a little added confidence that the camera is capturing what you want.
TechCrunch video producer Gregory Manalo has been playing around with the Osmo Action for a couple of weeks now and so far has a lot of nice things to say about the execution. Like me, he wasn’t entirely sold on the front-facing screen initially, but has since come to appreciate the value it adds.
“I found it great for composing the shot on my motorcycle,” Gregory reports back. “You can switch back to the other screen while still recording. Switching screens was snappy. The lack of touch on the front screen is a bummer but not a deal breaker.”
The camera utilizes DJI’s proprietary Action OS. I played around with it a bit myself in a briefing about a month or so ago at a parkour gym in Brooklyn. There was a bit of a learning curve for my first few minutes, but once you’ve got the initial lay of the land, it’s quite easy to use on the fly. Gregory concurs, calling it “clean and easy to navigate.”
Ditto for SnapShot. The feature is designed to capture quick shots on the go. As anyone who’s ever used an action (or frankly any) camera can tell you, things don’t always go the way you’ve mapped them out in your head. Press the shutter button once and the camera will power up and start recording in less than two seconds.
Of course, you do lose the time it takes to fire up. Gregory again: “What would be even cooler is a pre-record option so that it covers that two seconds of lag. But I’m guessing that would either zap the batteries sooner or add more bulk to the camera somehow.” I suspect that’s a pretty fair assessment of the camera’s limitations on that front.
Once fired up, the camera is capable of shooting 4K videos at up to 60FPS, along with 12-megapixel photos. The Osmo Action features an option effect to de-warp videos, removing the fisheye effect in the process. And in keeping with the rest of DJI’s offerings, there are a number of different in-camera effects for creating compelling videos on the fly, including time-lapse, 8x slow motion and a variety of custom exposure effects that will give you cool shots of things like the stars.
From a shooting standpoint, however, the biggest standouts are HDR and, naturally, Electronic Image Stabilization — something DJI’s perfected over several generations of drones. Strangely, in the current configuration, however, the two features don’t appear to work in tandem.
“The HDR video feature claims three stops of additional dynamic range in the scene with natural transitions between light and dark areas,” Gregory says. “Based on the footage you can definitely tell a difference. I’d shoot with HDR more often than not, just so I can have the information in the footage when I go to post. But here’s the trade-off: EIS cannot be enabled in HDR video.”
It could be arriving in a firmware update, or maybe it’s just more than the hardware is currently capable of handling. Either way, it seems like a prime candidate for some future upgrade. For now, however, most of the nits that can be picked here are on the small side. That’s fairly remarkable for what’s essentially a first-generation product — albeit one from a well-established company.
The Osmo Action is available today, priced at $349. That puts the camera at $50 below the Hero7 Black’s $399 retail price. Though GoPro’s premium action camera has been on sale for some time now. It’s currently priced at $299 on the company’s official site, perhaps in anticipation of the Osmo’s release.
Whatever the case, DJI’s made it very clear that it’s not messing around here. GoPro’s status as the end all, be all of action cameras probably isn’t going away any time soon, but DJI just made an extremely compelling argument for its own spot in the conversation.
