The new Drops system lets game makers embed unlocks that are linked to Twitch’s Enhanced Experiences API. This could mean that rewards are activated when a streamer completes a level, or is the last person standing in a round of Fall Guys — developers have freedom to hide activations in any part of their game. Other events can be time-based, requiring viewers to tune into a channel for a set amount of time to access their reward.
Twitch says it has redesigned the Drops platform to let viewers know how close they are to achieving time-based goals, removing some of the randomness from the existing system. Some developers may choose to use Twitch’s new tiered campaigns, which require users to unlock smaller rewards before getting a bigger one.
For developers, the new Drops system incentivizes them to include more Twitch-specific unlocks in their titles. For viewers, it could mean more waiting for a specific prize, but it may also encourage people to push their favorite streamers to complete more complex and daring challenges in the games they play.
● Work together as two geese to make even bigger trouble
● A free update for all owners of Untitled Goose Game
The update will hit Steam, Itch, the Epic Games Store, Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game at the same time. Additionally, iam8bit is producing physical versions of Untitled Goose Game for Switch and PS4, and they’re available for pre-order now. They both come out on September 29th, alongside the game’s vinyl soundtrack; the Switch version costs $40 and the PS4 edition costs $35.
House House developers will participate in an hour-long Q&A session on the Nintendo Indie World Twitter account on August 20th beginning at 4pm ET.
The experiment will only affect publicly-viewable content that’s already meant for mass consumption, like Snapchat’s original programming, publisher content and Snapchat’s “Our Stories.” Snap already allowed this content to be shared within its app, but the experiment will allow users to share the Snapchat content outside of its app as well. Shared links will open in the Snapchat app if it’s installed, or in a mobile web player if it’s not.
It could be a significant update for Snap. The company has typically eschewed the sharing dynamics of most of its competitors, instead preferring to focus on private conversations between friends. At the same time, Snap has been making significant investments in original programming, including its own Snap-branded shows “Snap Originals,” and has seen an uptick in the number of users watching them. Making the shows easier to share could help get even more eyeballs on the content, and potentially bring in more ad dollars for Snap.
Hades has been a staple of Engadget’s living list of the best PC games, and it stands out as the only Early Access title to make the cut. It’s a roguelike romp through the bowels of Greek mythology — you play as Zagreus, son of Hades, in an attempt to escape the Underworld (and dear old dad). Zagreus fights upward through the levels of Hell with assistance from ancient gods and tragic figures including Zeus, Aphrodite, Sisyphus and Eurydice.
Though Hades is a roguelike — meaning players start from the very beginning with each death — ability and weapon upgrades persist across runs, and levels are randomized.
Our god-like rogue-like, HADES, is coming to #NintendoSwitch this fall, when we exit Early Access on PC!
Watch our new animated Launch Trailer, and stay tuned for v1.0, where we’ll be adding the true ending and much more! #HadesGamepic.twitter.com/gmP9RhIjg8
Since the release of Bastion in 2011, Supergiant Games has established itself as a solid indie studio with a flair for rich, hand-drawn science-fiction and fantasy settings. It released Transistor in 2014 and Pyre in 2017. Hades is its fourth title.
The Sounders are one of the league’s best-known teams, and they should attract at least some eyeballs to Prime Video from fans in the Evergreen State. Streaming services are focusing a bit more attention on live sports these days, with the likes of Peacock and CBS All Access playing host to high-profile soccer events and games.
Like most conferences, Adobe Max will be virtual this year. It will also be completely free. The three-day event kicks off on October 20th, and registration is now open.
The full lineup includes content demos, feature previews, musical performances and celebrity appearances. Attendees will hear from Ava DuVerney, Keanu Reeves, Anne Leibovitz and Tyler, the Creator. By signing up early, you’ll get a chance to win a t-shirt, be able to build your schedule early, gain access to instructor files and more.
Google Maps is already one of the most popular services for navigating and remotely exploring the world. Starting this week, though, its default view will be even more colorful and, hopefully, useful for travellers. Google took its satellite imagery and applied some fancy computer vision to accurately identify forests, deserts, rivers and snow-capped mountains. It then created a basic color scheme — dense woods are dark green, while an open playing field is a lighter shade, for instance — and applied it to the stock interface in Google Maps. According to a Google blog post, this new “natural features” view should trigger automatically when you zoom out.
Here’s an example map of Iceland. The old version used a shade of green to highlight national parks. The replacement, meanwhile, retains that information while also explaining where the island’s ice caps are.
“If you’ve been sitting in an MRI, you’ve been hearing that buzzing sound it makes when it gathers data, Dr. Dan Sodickson, a researcher at NYU Langone Health, told Engadget, “it is the raw data from which a magnetic resonance image is derived… and that raw data actually looks like this fascinating starburst” (See above.) That k-space data is stored in temporary storage and once it’s full, the scan is complete and the data undergoes a Fourier transform to actually plot out the spatial frequency and generate an MRI image (below).
Facebook AI
“The MRI is gathering information across the whole image and then basically that frequency information is being turned into spatial information almost like with a prism,” Sodickson continued. “So if you take a prism and you separate out the colors, on the left is going to be all the blue, on the right is going to be all the red. That’s the transform we do… we take all the different frequencies and we sort them out. And when you do that — boom — out comes, your familiar image.”
But rather than wait for k-space to fill up, fastMRI only needs 25 percent of the data that traditional MRI machines would require to generate those same images (below). To be clear, this neural network isn’t analyzing existing MRI images at accelerated rates, it’s actively generating them from the raw data itself and they’re effectively identical to traditional scans.
Facebook AI
Facebook recruited six radiologists to examine two sets of MRI sequences of a patient’s knee, one from a traditional MRI, the other using fastMRI. “The study found there were no significant differences in the radiologists’ evaluations,” per a Facebook post on Tuesday. “Five of the six radiologists were not able to correctly discern which images were generated using AI.” Someone give that sixth radiologist a raise.
“We wanted to start with a large data set so we don’t end up overfitting,” Nafissa Yakubova, a researcher at Facebook AI, told Engadget. ”So we had, I think, thousands of MRI cases from the knee,” as well as a repository of MRI brain scans, each of which contained as many as 800 still images, to use in training the fastMRI model.
Not only will this system help alleviate the stress of people who might be squeamish about spending an hour in a coffin-sized cylinder that turns their hydrogen atoms into tiny radio transmitters, but it will also enable hospitals to serve more patients as well.
“Not every institution, every hospital, every country has an abundance of MRI machines so a lot of the time you have people waiting to get scanned,” Sodickson said. “I would like to reduce that burden.”
What’s more, the system works with existing MRI machines — there’s no need to retrofit anything because this is all just software, it can be installed like a DLC. “Because it’s open-sourced anybody, any manufacturer could have access to it right now and use it for further testing,” Yakubova said. Of course, device manufacturers will still have to receive FDA certification before implementing it.
There’s no shortage of amazing Android phones you can get for less than the price of a Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. The OnePlus 8 Pro clocks in under $1,000. Sony’s oddball Xperia 1 ii, with a 4K screen and the fastest smartphone camera I’ve ever used, goes for about $1,200. I mention this because, ultimately, Samsung is asking you to pay a premium for the S Pen.
The stylus itself hasn’t actually changed since last year. It’s exactly the same size and uses Bluetooth to communicate with the Note 20 Ultra when it’s not close to the screen. What has changed is how quickly the Ultra responds to the S Pen. There’s virtually no lag between the moment you start writing and the strokes appearing on-screen. Samsung pegs the latency at around 9ms, which makes S Pen faster than on other Notes — even the new Galaxy Note 20.
Frankly, I never had much issue with latency in earlier models, but the improvement is unmistakable. Though, you probably won’t notice unless you’re testing them side by side. What’s more important here are the new and refined features Samsung built around the S Pen.
Chris Velazco/Engadget
The biggest change comes in the form of “Anywhere Actions”. Once you whip out the S Pen, you can draw in the air like a magic wand to control the phone. That might sound familiar, and with good reason: Last year, Samsung debuted the extremely similar App Actions.
Those are all here too, but Anywhere Actions take the concept a step further. Rather than limit those Harry Potter gestures to specific apps, you can use them at any point. By default they’re tied to navigation controls like opening the Recent Apps view or returning to the home screen. At first, this all seemed a little pointless since a quick tap or swipe on the screen performed the same tasks with less fuss. But then I realized that you could map different actions and shortcuts to those gestures instead, and everything changed.
It took a little trial and error to figure out what actions and apps I wanted the quickest access to, but assigning them to gestures was dead-simple. What’s not as easy is actually getting the Note to recognize the gestures. They’re all simple symbols, but even after a week, the phone can’t reliably tell the difference between the right-to-left that’s supposed to launch Chrome and the up-then-down that should open Gmail. When these Anywhere Actions work, they’re reasonably valuable. When they didn’t, I wanted to flick the S Pen across the room.
Chris Velazco/Engadget
You can also use the Samsung Notes app to record audio while you jot down notes, and trust me — the feature is a lot more useful than it sounds. While the controls take some getting used to, the ability to tap a word you scrawled and hear what prompted you to write it in the first place is fantastic. It’s a great option for students and note-takers who sit through meandering meetings. Though, I can’t help but feel this feature would feel more useful on something like the Galaxy Tab S7 instead.
The rest of Samsung’s S Pen-centric additions are either much-needed tweaks or features that are so obvious you have to wonder why they’re only showing up now. Among the most helpful? The ability to import PDFs into the Samsung Notes app and mark them up with the S Pen. You can also automatically straighten slanted writing with the tap of a button, and a new Live Sync feature means edits you make with the S Pen on the Note are automatically pushed across other tablets and PCs running the Samsung Notes app.
Not of all these additions may seem thrilling, and those Anywhere Actions definitely need some fine-tuning. But when you consider how good the S Pen and the features that rely on it already were, the bits that do work well here start to seem like icing on the cake. Of course, the flip side of that argument is also true: If you never saw much value in the S Pen, I’m not sure anything Samsung added this time around will change your mind.
Say goodbye to Apple Music’s Beats 1 — at least in name. Today, Apple announced it was rebranding its flagship radio station from Beats 1 to Apple Music 1. It’s a logical move, given that “Beats 1” was the only place Beats branding showed up in the Apple Music service. But on the other hand, the station has been going for over five years now, and Apple calls is “one of the most-listened-to radio stations in the world.” Regardless, it should be simple for regular listeners to make the transition, and the Apple Music brand at this point is strong enough to be the name for the company’s flagship offering.
Apple Music is also launching a few new, very mainstream stations today. Apple Music Hits will focus on, as you might expect, the biggest songs from the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s, something that implies it won’t focus on newer music. The show will be hosted in a similar fashion to Apple Music 1; hosts include Sayde Donovan, Estelle, Lowkey, Jenn Marino, George Stroumboulopoulos, Sabi, Nicole Sky and Natalie Sky. There are also artist-led shows by Backstreet Boys, Ciara, Mark Hoppus, Huey Lewis, Alanis Morissette, Snoop Dogg, Meghan Trainor, Shania Twain and more. That gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of music you can expect to hear here.
