Google has spent years developing 3D models that you can view and manipulate in the real world using smartphone-based AR. Tigers, velociraptors, Iron Man and even Childish Gambino — I’ve enjoyed summoning them all from the comfort of my living room. A Cambropachycope, though? Thanks but no thanks. Google’s latest AR offering is an ancient crustacean with a large black eye covered in tiny lenses. It’s a fascinating piece of history that just so happens to be absolutely terrifying, too — especially when it’s sat on your desk or coffee table, staring at you like an abandoned design from Aliens or Prometheus.

If you’re a scaredy-cat like me, you might appreciate some of the other animals that Google has prepared in partnership with Moscow’s State Darwin Museum and London’s Natural History Museum. These include the Aegirocassis, a sea creature that lived 480 million years ago, a reef-dwelling spotted trunkfish, and a digital recreation of the whale skeleton that is currently suspended from the ceiling of the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall. All of these are available to view through the Google Arts & Culture app, an encyclopaedic piece of software that also offers art galleries, cave paintings and the Apollo 11 Command Module in AR.

Snap has updated its Lens Studio platform so artists and developers can create custom Lenses — the company’s term for AR experiences — that leverage full body tracking. Snapchat’s maker has created two templates, Full Body Triggers and Full Body Attachments, that can conjure up various effects based on what the user is doing inside the frame. As a tutorial video explains, these include toggling virtual objects, playing short pieces of animation and particle bursts. Before, developers could use a Skeletal template to track eight points on the upper body. The new templates, meanwhile, can monitor 18 points including the user’s knees and ankles.

There’s an obvious application for these new developer tools: dance videos. The genre has always been popular across various social platforms including YouTube and Instagram. TikTok’s monumental rise, however, and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — which has forced many to stay indoors and find new ways to entertain themselves — has encouraged people to create even more body-grooving clips. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Snapchat wants to support the trend with new artist and developer tools. If you don’t want to download and learn Lens Studio, fear not: Snapchat has already released four creator-made Lenses — Star Burst, Be You, Alone and Be Happy — that you can try right now in the app.

If you’re a budding musician, though, you may be most interested in the digital instruments. You can “test drive” the TR-808 virtual instrument for free through Roland Cloud now through August 31st if you have an account. Roland’s Zenbeats is also adding two 808-themed audio loop packs, one of which (Mixtape Vol. 4 “808”) is free. You can try the app for free as well.

This is clearly Roland’s big opportunity to plug its current wares and its role in music history. At the same time, there’s little doubt that the TR-808 had a major impact on the industry. Its distinctive drum and cymbal sounds have defined genres like rap, hip-hop and techno, and are still used to this day. It was important enough that groups like 808 State even based their names and sounds around it. While this certainly isn’t the only electronic instrument to have reshaped music in its image, it may be the one you’re most likely to recognize.

Just in time for its 25th anniversary, Ghost in the Shell is getting a 4K Ultra HD rerelease. On September 8th, you’ll be able to buy Mamoru Oshii’s landmark film in a beautiful collection that will let you watch the 1995 feature across multiple formats.

Lionsgate has remastered both the original Japanese and English audio tracks for Dolby Atmos. There’s also support for Dolby Vision HDR. Included in the release is a digital copy of the movie. For good measure, you also get the film on Blu-ray. Special features include new audio commentaries from English scriptwriter Mary Claypool and Richard Epcar, who voices Batou in the dub. Best Buy will sell an exclusive steelbook version of the release that features the art of artist Orlando Arocena.

MIT

A particularly difficult aspect of developing MosAIc was creating an algorithm that could find not only similarities in color or style, but also in meaning and theme, Hamilton said. Researchers examined a deep network of “activations,” or features, for each image in the open access collections of both museums. The distance between the “activations” of the deep network was how researchers judged similarity.

Researchers also used a new image search data structure called a “KNN Tree,” which groups images together in a tree-like structure. To find one image’s closest match, the algorithm starts at the “trunk” of the grouping, then follows the most promising “branch” until it’s found the closest image. The data structure improves on itself by allowing the tree to “prune” itself based on characteristics of the image.

Hamilton said he hopes the work started on MosAIc can be expanded upon to other fields, like humanities, social sciences and medicine. “These fields are rich with information that has never been processed with these techniques and can be a source for great inspiration for both computer scientists and domain experts,” he said.

Since we first played with the SonarPen as a standalone product over two years ago, it has apparently boosted compatibility with “98 percent” of Android phones, as long as it’s the version shipped with a gold-colored tip. I got to try the latest SonarPen on a prototype version of Colors Live, and just like my experience with the prototype back in 2018, the stylus felt natural — my strokes of varying pressure showed up instantaneously and accurately. This is partly also thanks to the 120Hz touch sampling rate on the Switch’s screen, and together with pressure sensitivity, the SonarPen easily stands out against the cheaper, “dumber” styluses already out there. 

Richard Lai/Engadget

The “smarter” pressure-sensitive styluses from the likes of Apple, Wacom and Logitech won’t work on the Switch due to the lack of hardware support — you’d need a different touch subsystem on the screen, for starters. Compared to my experience with the Apple Pencil on an iPad, the SonarPen’s tethered cable and transparent disc around the tip could sometimes get in the way, but the painting flow and end result felt almost just as slick. As a bonus, the SonarPen has a shortcut button above its tip for quickly changing brushes and colors, whereas the Apple Pencil only offers a similar functionality on its second-gen release by way of a double-tap gesture.

As for the game itself, Colors Live includes many elements that fans of the series will find familiar, including the color palette, brushes, stroke options and more around the canvas. Most importantly, there’s direct access to Colors! Gallery, where you can browse over four million digital paintings from the community. These vector-based files can be downloaded for a replay of how they were made, and you can even paint on top of them.

Richard Lai/Engadget

One handy new feature in Colors Live is the ability to toggle between right-hand mode and left-hand mode with one click in the game. With the default right-hand mode, you’re holding the stylus with your right hand, so all the shortcut keys — both physical (zooming, panning, color picker, palette and undo) and virtual (drawing tools) — are pushed to the left for easy thumb and index finger access. This is all vice versa for left-hand mode. 

Another new feature in this game is “Color Quest,” in which you have to complete timed painting challenges to progress through an adventure map. According to Andersson, this single-player mode was actually crowdsourced in order to cater to artists of different levels, so think of it as a self-training exercise. But for those who are up for a global challenge, the Colors team continues to host themed weekly challenges (sometimes with physical prizes), and winners will be featured in the official gallery.

Richard Lai/Engadget

Andersson originally pitched his idea of getting Nintendo to sell the SonarPen as an in-app purchase on its eShop, but while the gaming giant was apparently impressed by his demo, he struggled to convince the team to sell the peripheral. Andersson eventually took the Kickstarter route as a means to deliver the bundle to his early adopters. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the developer has now set up his own online store, where you can pre-order the game-and-stylus bundle for $40. Colors Live is expecting its digital release in America, Europe and Australia this summer, followed by Japan later this year/

You won’t have to visit Japan to see a life-size Gundam statue in the months ahead, although you may still have to book a lengthy trip. Our Engadget Chinese colleagues report that Bandai Namco will debut an 18-meter (about 59ft) Freedom Gundam statue at the LaLaport Mall in Jinqiao, Shanghai, China sometime in 2021. It’s the first large Gundam robot statue to be built outside of Japan, Bandai Namco said.

It’s unclear if this robot will have any movement like the recent Yokohama statue, but it won’t be surprising if that’s the case. These statues have been cultural draws for years in Japan, and movement (however limited) might draw more people. The pandemic complicates matters — it’s unclear how many people will want to venture outside to see a robot statue in 2021. Still, this shows that the desire to see large robots extends beyond Japan’s shores.

You can’t go back in time to see how Monet or Van Gogh made their masterpieces, but AI might give you the next best thing. MIT CSAIL researchers have created a machine learning system, Timecraft, that can deduce how a painting was produced and recreate the likely brushstrokes, even for famous artists. The design was first trained on 200 timelapse videos of digital and watercolor paintings, after which the scientists produced a convolutional neural network to ‘deconstruct’ artwork based on what it had learned.

The results aren’t perfect, but they’re more effective than you might think. Timecraft was better than existing benchmark tests over 90 percent of the time. And when used to recreate paintings that already have timelapse videos, it fooled almost half of the people participating in an online survey.

When Photoshop first landed on the iPad, users were pretty taken aback to learn there was no pressure sensitivity mechanism for the Apple Pencil, but that’s been fixed in the latest update, too. You’ll now be able to adjust the pressure sensitivity of your Apple Pencil for more precise brushing, cloning, and other effects when using brush-based tools. This means you can brush as softly or as firmly as you want and you’ll produce an effect that’s optimized for the tablet environment.

Adobe

Over on Fresco, meanwhile, the app has been rounded out with a bunch of new features that Adobe hopes will make it “the best drawing and painting app around.” The eyedrop function has been expanded to support multicolor eyedropping, Capture Shapes (familiar to those that have used Adobe Draw in the past) has arrived in vector and raster, and a new Vector Trim heralds the first of what Adobe says will be a whole set of trim tools in Fresco, making clean-up a lot easier. There’s also a new Mixer brush set, new ruler functions, new keyboard shortcuts and a bunch of bug fixes. Fans of Fresco didn’t have much to complain about to begin with, so these updates only serve to make an already solid app even better.

 

Lenovo

From a feature standpoint, the Smart Frame seems to have a lot going for it as well. It includes both light and color tone sensors, allowing it to adjust the brightness and temperature of its display to the ambient lighting of the room it’s in. It also includes a motion sensor at its front, which lets you wave at the Smart Frame to change photos. Additionally, Lenovo decided to try and future-proof the device by adding 2-watt speakers and a microphone to open the door to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant integration down the line. 

Of course, like with most new devices, you’ll probably want to wait for an in-depth review before committing even $200. However, if you like what you see, this is a good opportunity to save some money on a new product.