Lady Gaga was invited by Apple to be the first artist to perform inside the new Apple Park in Cupertino, as part of the grand opening on May 17.
Gaga took to the stage playing a shorter version of her Enigma show for over 15000 Apple employees, exceeding original predictions of a 12000 crowd, on the Rainbow Stage, built as a tribute to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The crowd enjoyed the private concert much more those at the Sapphire Conference last week, where Lady Gaga had to motivate the developers many times during the show. The stage was fairly different to the usual setup, including her name in the Enigma font in large LED lights as part of the design.
Here are our favorite moments:
When Gaga asked the crowd to tell her to go Fuck Herself:
Lady Gaga dedicated Million Reasons to Laurene Powell late's husband.
"If we could all, 15 thousand of us for one minute, that I will time, I would like silence, in honor of your late husband. I think it takes a true genius like Steve Jobs to be able to make so many people talk and communicate, and also, to leave us speechless. Laurene, you do so much for the world, with the Emerson Collective and so much more that you do. You help people, you're kind. This is the most important thing in the universe, kindness. This is what heals the whole world. So I hope you take this as a true sincere kind gesture. I would not only like to dedicate this to your late husband, but to you for carrying on his legacy."
When she talked about being a nerd.
"In moments like these I remember having really frizzy hair and a retainer in my mouth at school, and now i go like what the fuck, I'm the first performer at Apple Park. And it's even more exciting because I'm a nerd, and I fucking love nerds and you're just a bunch of fucking nerds. Because you're so fucking smart and so brilliant. And I used to feel so weird and now I don't. I don't feel so weird cause I'm not alone."
When she asked the Apple Developers to create a "Be Kind" Emoji.
"I'd also like to say thanks to Zane Lowe, because you know, he's always really encouraged me to do whatever the fuck I want. So I'm gonna ask you something, I actually think have to go through a different company and you guys have to approve it. But I would like, if you know anybody, an emoji that says 'Be Kind'. So I'm going to get to work on that."
Google's Jump VR platform will go offline by the end of June, and it has started telling users to download their data before it shuts down completely. The tech giant launched Jump back in 2015 to simplify the creation of 3D 360-degree videos using shots and videos captured by compatible camera rigs, which are typically composed of over a dozen action cameras. Once uploaded, Google uses the power of the cloud to automatically stitch them together.
In an email sent to users and a notice posted at the top of the Jump FAQ page, the tech giant said the platform will stop accepting uploads for processing at 11:59PM Pacific on June 26th. Those who want a copy of the data they uploaded to the cloud will have until June 27th to download them all. On June 28th, Google will start erasing Jump's cloud data and deactivating accounts.
Based on what the company told users, the declining userbase compelled it to shut the service down. "...[We] have seen the emergence of a number of good alternative solutions for creators, including VR180. As these new cameras, formats, and editing tools became available, we saw usage of Jump Assembler decline." Thankfully, camera rigs that support Jump, such as GoPro Odyssey and the Yi Halo, will still work with third-party video editing software -- they cost tens of thousands of dollars, after all.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 took itself off of the Epic Games Store temporarily rather than take part in the recent "Mega Sale"
Epic's first "Mega Sale," launched yesterday, is causing some pricing and availability hiccups for a few publishers. As Kotaku lays out, a couple of games in the store's small catalog seem to have removed themselves from the platform rather than participate in the temporary price reductions.
Paradox Interactive's Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 and Klei Entertainment's Oxygen Not Included are no longer available on the Epic Games Store as of this writing. Bloodlines 2 was actually removed shortly after being listed at a reduced sale price, a state of affairs that Epic's Sergei Galyonkin said happened because Paradox was unaware of the "sale mechanism."
"If a developer or publisher chooses to not participate in our sales, we will honor that decision," an Epic representative told Kotaku. "Paradox Interactive has chosen to not participate in the Epic Mega Sale and the game has been temporarily removed from sale. If you’ve purchased Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 during the period when the discount did apply at the time of check out, Epic will honor that price."
Paradox also noted in a statement that the game will "return to the store soon," presumably after the sale is complete.
Epic's Mega Sale, which offers a reduced price for every game currently available on the platform, also includes an additional $10 discount for games prices $14.99 and over, covered by Epic itself. But those steep discounts can cause an awkward price discrepancy for publishers that also offer their games on Steam, where Valve's larger revenue cut can create a different value proposition. Some publishers also might be wary of effectively devaluing a new release by offering such a large price reduction so soon after launch.
Meanwhile, the Epic Mega Sale also caused some brief pricing confusion for Supergiant's hack-and-slash title Hades. After the game was briefly listed at $6.99, its sale price was reset to $14.99. The game's base price, however, was listed at $24.99, up from its original listing of $19.99. Supergiant later reset both the base and sale prices to $19.99 and apologized for raising the base price without advance warning.
Yesterday, Epic launched a "mega sale," offering games at up to 75 percent off and additional $10 credits for purchases over $14.99. It looked like Epic was preparing to go head-to-head with the Steam Sale, which is scheduled to arrive at the end of June. But by the end of the day, fans noticed two titles mysteriously vanished from the Epic Store, and the price of another seemed to increase.
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 disappeared first. The game was available for pre-order, and according to Epic, it will return to the store soon, presumably after the sale ends. Klei Entertainment's Oxygen Not Included, which was also available for pre-order, vanished as well. It makes sense that publishers wouldn't want their pre-orders in a sale. While there are several other pre-order titles available at a discount, those are Epic Store exclusives.
In a statement shared with Engadget, Epic said, "If a developer or publisher chooses to not participate in our sales, we will honor that decision. Paradox Interactive and Klei Entertainment have chosen to not participate in the Epic Mega Sale and their titles (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 and Oxygen Not Included, respectively) have been temporarily removed from sale. If players have purchased either during the period when the discount did apply at the time of check out, Epic will honor that price."
Meanwhile, the cost of Hades - Battle Out of Hell seemed to increase, but Supergiant Games reportedly said that was an error. The game is now listed at its original launch price, $19.99, and is on sale for $9.99 during the sale. After that, Supergiant Games will supposedly increase the price to $24.99.
As we noted yesterday, Epic's store has been drawing attention -- some good, some bad -- by aggressively going after Steam's stranglehold on PC games market. While it appears that only two games were pulled, this isn't a great look for Epic.
Alex Kipman, Microsoft’s HoloLens and Kinect creator, is always enthusiastic about the future of computing. As he stands in front of me inside a Minecraft-themed conference room on Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington, I’m immediately drawn to the stacks of Lego blocks on the table beside him. Lego is the perfect analogy for Minecraft. For a decade, it’s been a game that millions use to build their own creations out of virtual blocks of materials. Minecraft employees use Lego blocks to build miniature buildings during meetings, but over the past 12 months, they’ve been adventuring outside to secretly test a new way to play Minecraft.
In the same building where Microsoft is creating the next Halo game, a team of engineers and game designers have been dreaming up the future of Minecraft on mobile phones with the help of the HoloLens team. Minecraft Earth is a new free-to-play game for iOS and Android that’s surprisingly ambitious for Microsoft. We’ve already seen holograms through Microsoft’s HoloLens headset, but the company now wants to bring this technology to a much broader scale with the help of Minecraft Earth.
”Minecraft Earth proposes to completely break the dogma that has lived with us in computing since the beginning: this idea of a single person that holds a single device to create a single experience,” says Kipman. “With Minecraft Earth, that’s no longer the case. The content is in the real world.”
Imagine sitting at home and building something in Minecraft on your phone and then dropping it into your local park for all of your friends to see it together at the same exact location. Minecraft Earth aims to transform AR gaming from single-person experiences into a living, breathing virtual world that’s shared by everyone. If Microsoft succeeds, you’ll be able to walk into a mall and point your phone’s camera at a McDonald’s Minecraft adventure while you’re eating a Big Mac or see your own giant structures next to actual buildings.
This hugely ambitious project starts with some basics in the form of Minecraft Earth. The game will be available in beta on iOS and Android this summer, and I got to try various forms of it at Microsoft’s campus a couple of weeks ago. It’s fair to say the game I played was basic, occasionally buggy, but very impressive. While the regular version of Minecraft lets players play in modes like creative (with unlimited blocks and items) or survival (if you die you lose your items), Microsoft is blending these traditional modes into a new way to play Minecraft.
“This is an adaptation, this is not a direct translation of Minecraft,” explains Torfi Olafsson, game director of Minecraft Earth. While it’s an adaptation, it’s built on the existing Bedrock engine so it will be very familiar to existing Minecraft players. “If you like building Redstone machines, or you’re used to how the water flows, or how sand falls down, it all works,” says Olafsson. All of the mobs of animals and creatures in Minecraft are available, too, including a new pig that really loves mud. “We have tried to stay very true to the kind of core design pillars of Minecraft, and we’ve worked with the design team in Stockholm to make sure that the spirit of the game is carried through,” says Olafsson.
“We have covered the entire planet in Minecraft,” explains Olafsson. “Every lake is a place you can fish, every park is a place you can chop down trees. We’ve actually taken maps of the entire world and converted them to Minecraft.”
The fascinating part of adventures is that you can be side-by-side with friends, all experiencing the same game on the exact same spot of a sidewalk or in a park at the same time. Microsoft is doing some impressive behind-the-scenes computational magic (more on that later) so that when you play an adventure, it’s in a precise location, beyond regular GPS coordinates, so that everyone is experiencing the same thing. You can fight monsters, break down structures for resources together, and even stand in front of a friend to block them from physically killing a virtual sheep.
All of the blocks that are collected during an adventure are shared with fellow players, so there are no player-versus-player battles here to kill each other and steal materials. You’ll even see the tools that fellow players have in their hands on your phone’s screen, alongside their username. The idea is that you essentially become your phone in Minecraft Earth, and your camera is a lens into this virtual world.
Once you’ve gathered lots of resources, you can then start building. Every player will have a library of build plates, with some that are as big as 200 x 200 feet. You can use build plates to sit a Minecraft build down on a table and build something with friends. Every piece of material that a friend uses on your own plate will then be part of your build, so it’s a collaborative effort to create giant structures; playing solo will mean a lot of searching around for materials.
I sat for around 10 minutes creating a Minecraft build where I could see blocks flying onto the structure from someone next to me. They could also see everything I was doing in real time, and we could build together block by block. I could, if I wanted to, also steal my friend’s blocks here to create my own mega building. That introduces an interesting social dynamic because, unlike most games, you’ll be physically next to the person you’re stealing from in the virtual world. “In order to steal, you would have to look up and go, ‘Hmm, I’m going to take your blocks,’” says Saxs Persson, creative director of Minecraft. “Shenanigans will come from when people have different opinions about what needs to happen, or they band together and do something meaningful.”
Once you’ve completed a build, you can then share a link to it for friends or followers to then play with your creation on a table or in giant scale in an open space. You’ll only be able to share a temporary copy of your build to friends, though. They can burn it down and massacre your animals, but it won’t get saved. Because every block, every animal, and every item came from somewhere, it’s a chance for Minecraft Earth players to show off how many hours they’ve put into the game. “This allows people to build something pretty and share it with their friends,” explains Olafsson. “It allows you to be inspired by other people’s craftsmanship.”
There’s also progression in Minecraft Earth with levels and experience points that are similar to a traditional role-playing game, rather than the classic Minecraft experience. Your character never gets reset, and you always have your same materials in a world that everyone participates in. “We think it’s important to kind of reward and recognize your progression,” says Olafsson. “We have levels that unlock content, and as you go up in levels, you’ll get access to more and more content and more build plates.” You’ll also start to earn rupees, the in-game currency for Minecraft Earth that will let you buy things like build plates, potions, and more content.
One of the key parts of Minecraft Earth is having multiple people interact with adventures in a specific location in real time. This is actually a very difficult problem to solve with augmented reality, and it’s thanks to recent progressions in mobile technology that have allowed Microsoft to even try to tackle this. Eventually, Microsoft wants these to persist as “holograms” in the environment around us with exact precision. The problem is our phone cameras aren’t very intelligent. You can use GPS, Wi-Fi fingerprinting, and AR to determine a location, but you need computer vision algorithms to really work out where to place a virtual object that everyone is going to interact with.
Microsoft is using its new Azure Spatial Anchors technology in Minecraft Earth. It uses machine vision algorithms so that real-world objects can be used as anchors for digital content. These holograms, as Microsoft calls them, always stay in the same spot. Apple and Google are also working on ways to let multiple devices see and interact with the same virtual object in AR, but Microsoft is trying to create the infrastructure and tools to let developers use this across iOS and Android. This is the secret sauce of Minecraft Earth, if you will.
“We rely on people going out and, essentially, not scanning the world, but seeing the world for us and then making that common play space,” explains Persson. This means that Minecraft Earth players are going to help inform where adventures should be placed. They’ll also contribute to making Microsoft’s Azure Spatial Anchors technology more powerful, simply by pointing their cameras at the environment around them. There are obviously privacy implications here, and Microsoft says all data and images will be anonymized so that the algorithms are only detecting feature points around you. Without this machine vision, Microsoft wouldn’t be able to be so ambitious with Minecraft Earth.
“To do this, we had to take some of the HoloLens algorithms for capturing images on device and turn them into a point cloud that we can share,” says Jason Cahill, an engineering architect for Minecraft. This allows Microsoft to locate every player in the game and precisely know where they are standing and where to place an adventure for everyone to interact with. Adventures will start off conservatively, and players will walk up to the rough area that Microsoft has designated a place to play. These will mainly be placed nearby where people are often collecting the tapables, and it will be up to the first few players in that area to decide exactly where an adventure gets placed. Once it’s been placed enough times in a safe area, it will persist for new players to simply walk up and start interacting with the adventure.
Persistent holograms are obviously the end goal for Minecraft Earth, and it’s easy to imagine a future where players can drop these wherever they want once they’ve been approved. This user-generated content always comes with a mountain of risks, though. Whether that’s people building virtual penises or houses with swastikas, there’s always going to be people who would love to ruin the fun.
“There are lots of very real challenges around user-generated content,” says Persson. “It’s a complicated problem at the scale we’re talking about, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tackle it.” Microsoft is starting carefully at first without user-generated content being freely placed into the world, and then it plans to figure out how to get this content into Minecraft Earth in the future. “Our vision is that, over time, the collection, the building, the playing, the adventuring will lead to things that people demand they have a place to display,” says Persson. “I think we’ve definitely taken the right steps to get started on that journey. And then we’ll see how quickly we can find the right way for more people to see what you’re doing.”
There are clearly a lot of challenges to overcome for Minecraft Earth to work flawlessly, and Microsoft is certainly being ambitious here. From the demos I played, there’s a lot of potential for this to be a true killer AR app. It’s unlike anything I’ve experienced in AR before, but at times, the demos did feel a little chaotic with multiple people involved in adventures and building structures. I think the core game loops will work well with a few people side by side, but scaling that to have 20, 50, or even hundreds of people interacting with a holographic Minecraft adventure will be very challenging.
That challenge will feed into Microsoft’s broader ambitions with HoloLens and augmented reality, in general. Microsoft sees devices like the HoloLens as the “third wave of computing,” but the company needs the scale of mobile to really understand the world and improve HoloLens and its own cloud offerings. I think Minecraft Earth is fundamental to helping improve Azure Spatial Anchors, HoloLens, and most of Microsoft’s cloud offerings. The learnings from this game could ultimately help improve the services, software, and even hardware that Microsoft offers to commercial customers.
“I think the partnership will improve our overall product,” admits Neena Kamath, product lead for Azure Mixed Reality at Microsoft. “We discover so much… understanding how users interact with their world, and what the design points are. It’s a great partnership.” Microsoft has used the research and technology it built for HoloLens, and it’s now bringing it to iOS and Android devices with the help of ARKit from Apple and ARCore from Google. Now, the real-world data from these devices that everyone has in their pockets will feed back. “It’s a wonderful loop,” as Kamath puts it. Minecraft Earth won’t be launching on HoloLens anytime soon, though, despite Microsoft teasing it at E3 a few years ago.
Microsoft now plans to let Minecraft players access Minecraft Earth for a closed beta this summer. It’s not clear how many will be able to access the beta, or whether it will be restricted to the US initially. It’s early days for Minecraft Earth, and Microsoft doesn’t have all of the answers to many questions figured out just yet. Even monetization isn’t finalized. “We have a fortunate position that Minecraft in and of itself is doing fine from a financial point of view, which allows us to not have to focus too much on what happens with Minecraft Earth,” says Matt Booty, Xbox Game Studios head. “I have total confidence that the team will figure out what the right monetization is for the game.”
I did spot a marketplace section in Minecraft Earth, but it wasn’t ready or populated, so monetization is very much a work in progress. Microsoft did hint that build plates could be sold, though, and it’s easy to imagine that you’ll be able to buy a bunch of rupees to get more gear. Microsoft says it, understandably, won’t be using loot boxes, though.
It’s also reasonable to assume that we might even see Microsoft appear onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next month. While Microsoft is promising Android and iOS support, I only got to experience the game on Apple’s latest iPhone XS handsets during my brief hands-on time. Minecraft Earth is the best demonstration of augmented reality on an iPhone that I’ve ever seen, and Apple showcased Lego structures during last year’s demonstration of multiplayer mode for AR games.
For now, though, all we have is demos, and Microsoft wouldn’t let me take photos or video or any of the gameplay. The company is being unusually hesitant, most likely because early versions of the game are a little buggy. Aside from the summer beta, the company isn’t committing to a full launch date or plan for Minecraft Earth. I think that’s largely because the Minecraft team is still figuring out a lot of the tech and design decisions.
Microsoft’s gaming chief Phil Spencer was the first person to experience the initial prototype last April, and Persson revealed the pair were thrilled to be firing off fireworks in Minecraft Earth during a lunch hour outside in the rain while colleagues walked by oblivious to the future that Microsoft is building. Microsoft now has months of work ahead to get Minecraft Earth ready. Like the millions of people playing Minecraft right now, Microsoft still has a lot of crafting to do to bring holograms into the real world.
Cleaning robot from LG on display at Incheon International Airport in Seoul / South Korea.
Jonas Gratzer via Getty Images
For the last few years LG has been pushing integration of AI features in all kinds of products with its ThinQ brand, and now it's designed custom hardware to enable on-device AI processing in "future robot vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerator and even air conditioners."
Similarly, the LG Neural Engine is intended to process image and voice data even when it's not connected to the cloud. That means a device with the chip could recognize its environment and adjust settings accordingly, navigate through a place it hasn't been before and understand a user's commands in natural language -- all offline. LG also claims powerful security is built in -- with all the data it takes in, resisting hackers who could remotely control a unit or use your washing machine's sensors to violate your privacy would an unwanted outcome.
The Korean company has been investing heavily in AI, most recently opening a new research lab in Toronto to follow its other North American location in Silicon Valley, so while this may be a first, it's definitely not the last thing we'll hear about LG and AI.
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