As previously rumored, Nintendo will be ending production of the beleaguered Wii U “soon.” The news comes from a note on the company’s Japanese site, as spotted by Kotaku, which states that “production is scheduled to end soon.” Previous reports pegged the productionhalt as of this year, while others reported it would go on well into 2018.
The news should come as no surprise. With less than 14 million units sold worldwide, the Wii U was a commercial failure, despite a series of strong and original games from Nintendo. It’s the company’s worst-selling console, sitting behind the 21 million-selling GameCube.
Of course, the future isn’t exactly dire for Nintendo. The company recently unveiled its much-rumored Switch device, a portable tablet that can also work with a television like a console. Nintendo will be revealing the Switch’s release date and price in January.
As for this year, this week sees the launch of a surprise piece of hardware from the company, in the form of the miniature NES Classic Edition on November 11th.
Three months after they were introduced, Instagram stories are beginning to separate themselves from the Snapchat stories they are derived from. Today Instagram is introducing mentions, links, and an inline version of its Boomerang tool into stories. The result is a product that feels livelier than before, and truly distinct from Snapchat for the first time.
The new features represent the biggest update to stories since their launch. But only two of them will be available to everyone to start with. Links, which allow users to attach hyperlinks to individual Instagram stories, will be available only to verified users. You’ll know a link has been added to a story when you see the words “see more” on the bottom of a story. Tap it (or swipe up) and the link will load using Instagram’s in-app browser.
This marks the first time links have been allowed anywhere in Instagram beyond user profiles. (Hence the phrase “link in bio” littered throughout your feed.) Nathan Sharp, an Instagram product manager, told The Verge that the company added links to stories in response to the large number of brands using the feature to promote content there. Adding links to stories means users don’t have to leave the app, he said. “It was a question of trying to keep this seamless, linear narrative experience,” Sharp said. But he wouldn’t commit to saying that all users would be able to posts links eventually.
On the other hand, all users will be able to use mentions. Using the type tool on a snap and typing “@” will bring up a tray of your frequent contacts. You can tag them in a story whether they’re in it or not, and they’ll be notified inside with an Instagram direct message. Mentions show up in stories with an underline to signal that they’re tappable — tap once to bring up a preview of the profile, and tap again to go to the profile. But profile links only work if the name is moderately sized — make the mention too big or small and it will lose its magic underline.
It’s a nice touch that extends an advantage Instagram stories have over Snapchat — they’re designed to help you discover other accounts on the service. We saw this first whenInstagram brought stories to its popular Explore tab, highlighting popular users for those who haven’t yet followed them. Now every story offers a chance to highlight a person, place, or brand. If you’re a creator, that could be one reason to focus your efforts on Instagram instead of Snapchat, which offers fewer tools for finding new accounts.
The final new tool takes advantage of Boomerang, Instagram’s year-old standalone app for making looping videos. Now it appears as a creative tool within stories that is available even if you don’t have the app installed on your phone. Tap it to create a looping burst of up to five photos, which will then endlessly play and rewind. Story Boomerangs can be shorter than the roughly 1.5-second clips you get from the standalone app (just remove your finger while recording), and you can reverse the camera mid-shot if you like. You can also zoom in on your subject with one finger while recording in a new media format destined to be called the zoomerang.
The introduction of stories to Instagram portended a world where every social app has merged into one. With today’s news, the company has suggested that the stories format is more flexible than it looks. Instagram hasn’t quite made the feature its own. But it’s getting there.
A teaser trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has arrived, and it looks as though it’ll be 2017’s most amazing-looking thrill ride through space.
Based on a series of French graphic novels Valérian and Laureline, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is the latest film from Luc Besson, who’s best known for The Fifth Elementand Lucy. The film will follow Valerian and Laureline, a pair of government operatives who are sent to the city of Alpha on a mission that will help save the human race.
Set to the Beatles’ "Because," we’re treated to a montage of busy and fantastic scenes. There’s spaceships approaching bustling cities, flying robots etching walls with lasers, amazing-looking aliens, and some great looking moments as the two characters escape from danger all around. It’s an eye-bursting trailer, and it looks absolutely incredible. Let's hope the film is just as good.
It certainly looks as though this is a movie that Fifth Element fans will really love, and the visuals recall other spectacular-looking films like James Cameron’s Avatar and The Wachowskis siblings’ Jupiter Ascending.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets will hit theaters on July 21st, 2017.
Instagram has confirmed that it’s working on adding a live video feature to its app. CEO Kevin Systrom discussed the company’s live video ambitions in an interview with the Financial Times today. This comes just a few weeks after we got our first glimpse of the feature being tested thanks to Russian news site T Journal.
“Live is really exciting for us. I think it can enhance what we’re doing,” Systrom is quoted as saying. “If I’m trying to strengthen relationships with someone I love, them streaming video to me live would be an amazing way to be closer to them.”
ANOTHER PLAYER IN THE LIVE VIDEO ARMS RACE
Systrom didn’t offer any details on when the live video feature might be available, or exactly how it will work. Based on the screenshots in the T Journal report, though, it appears that live streams from people you follow on Instagram will appear highlighted in red at the top of the app in the “stories” carousel.
Instagram added those 24-hour Snapchat-style stories back in August, and at the time it was a big moment in the ongoing arms race of features that’s happening between visual media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube. But live video figures to play an increasingly important role in that arms race going forward. Facebook is extremely bullish on the concept, and the company boasts that its users watch live videos more often and for longer periods of time than non-live videos. So it’s no surprise that Instagram — which was bought by Facebook in 2012 — will soon offer live video as well.
Augmented reality startup Occipital first burst on the scene in 2013 with a successful Kickstarter campaign for the Structure Sensor — a strip of cameras and sensors you strap to your iPad that can be used to scan, measure, and project things into the world around you. Today the company is pushing that tech forward by releasing its first iOS app called Canvas. It’s an app that is capable of capturing and processing 3D scans of entire rooms, and it will even let you take accurate measurements inside that scan. Think of it like digital measuring tape, only more powerful.
“One of the examples that we showed in our Kickstarter video back in the day was a person scanning and measuring our entire house,” Occipital cofounder Jeff Powers tells The Verge. While the original Structure Sensor was technically capable of this, Powers says that the dozens of apps developers have made for Structure Sensor using the software development kit have dealt more with small-scale interactions. “Making the jump from object-level things to entire spaces like rooms or homes has proven to be a pretty big leap, especially for a third-party developer to pull off.”
CANVAS MAKES THOUSANDS OF MEASUREMENTS PER SECOND WITH SUB-MILLIMETER ACCURACY
So Occipital went ahead and made the room-scale app themselves. Canvas, Powers says, is “all about letting a consumer or professional digitize a space.” You can use it to create a three-dimensional scan of an entire room, or even your whole home if you want. Canvas will also let you make measurements within that scan, so you could theoretically measure for an entire room’s worth of furniture or construction without ever picking up a measuring tape or a pencil.
The app does this by performing tens of thousands of measurements on your iPad, and it leans on the Structure Sensor’s sub-millimeter accuracy to create this scale 3D model. The scans can even be converted into CAD formats, allowing professionals to separate out layers like walls, windows, and ceilings for more complex redesign projects. (That process involves a mix of algorithms and Occipital employees working with the data, and happens over the course of 48 hours, but the company says the goal is to eventually automate everything.)
Powers says the company has sold about 50,000 Structure Sensors since its debut, and he expects Canvas to be used less by general consumers and more by professionals like contractors or interior designers. But Occipital hopes that Structure Sensor owners will find more casual uses for canvas, like measuring a piece of furniture at a store.
Canvas is available on iOS today for free, and Occipital is also selling a new wide angle lens attachment for the $379 Structure Sensor that will improve the motion tracking for room-scale scans. The lens costs $39 on its own, but Occipital will also sell it in a bundle with the Structure Sensor for $399.
Periscope may have helped jumpstart the live video trend, but until now it’s been difficult to specify which audience direct your content toward without blindly going live for everyone to see, or manually inviting users to a particular stream. Today’s update will give you a more informed look at who to share your broadcast with and creating Groups to accommodate that.
If you’re looking to target your biggest followers, Periscope now shows you a list of “Superfans,” or 10 of your most engaged viewers based on whether they follow your account, and how often they watch and comment on your videos You can even see a ranking of your Superfans from numbers one to 10.
In addition to seeing who their Superfans are, you can also see which account has you as their Superfan... so don’t get creepy, because Periscope knows.
Building from this, Periscope now lets you create your own Groups so you can reach communities with specific interests, such as your online fans, Superfans, or in-real-life friends. The idea is you can broadcast directly to a group of your most loyal followers to build relationships with them or share something exclusively to a specific subset. For reporters and bloggers, that’ll be helpful to cut down feed clutter between work-related broadcasts and personal ones.
Periscope is also adding a small update to its web viewer with the ability to browse suggested through videos and comment or send hearts. Previously, you were only able to watch the streams.
The Superfan and Group update is live now on both Android and iOS.
My vigil has been long and lonely, but finally there's a VR backback that can be acquired for cold hard cash. MSI's VR One PC-as-a-backpack, announced back in May and refined in September, just went up for sale on Newegg. The PC, which includes an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 card, a 2.7GHz Core i7 processor, 256GB SSD, and 16GB of RAM, has a November 30th ship date and costs $1,999.Dual, hot-swappable batteries (and, of course, the backpack straps) make the machine portable, though obviously you'll need something like the HTC Vive to live the truly untethered room-scale VR life you were always promised. If you have an extra $300 to spend, a GTX 1070 version with a 512GB SSD for $2,299 is also available, with the same ship date.
Of course, MSI isn't the only manufacturer building a VR backpack. Zotac and HP are also supposed to (hopefully) ship something soon.
