Tested

Google Play App Roundup: Hangouts, Kingdom Rush, and Sonic the Hedgehog

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 20 May 2013 06:45:00 +0000

That Google I/O hangover can be a real killer, but there are still untold multitudes of apps being added to Google Play all the time. This is no time to take a break! It's time for the Google Play App Roundup where we bring you the best new and newly updated apps on Android. Just click the app name to head right to the Play Store.

This week we look at Google's new chat service, check out a great tower defense game, and experience a classic.

Hangouts

Google Talk has been a part of Android since its inception, but it’s was largely ignored as redesigns have progressed. And all this despite being a really useful service. As Google I/O approached, we all expected the messaging unification known internally as Babel to be announced, but it turns out to unify very little. Hangouts is Google’s new messaging brand, and it replaces Talk. Let’s take a look at how it works.

Hangouts is basically a replacement for Google Talk and G+ Messenger. To be fair, Google never really said Hangouts was supposed to be unifying messaging on Android -- everyone just really hoped it would. There is no SMS functionality like Apple has in its messaging app, and Google Voice SMS is also excluded. This isn’t a dealbreaker, but I sincerely hope this functionality can be added soon.

As it stands, Hangouts pulls in your Google contacts from Talk, as well as all your Google+ circles and friends. By far my biggest issue with Hangouts right now is that the contact list ends up a bit of a jumbled mess. People with multiple addresses tend to show up more than once (despite trying to merge contacts) and the large contact shortcuts at the top of the app are not configurable. This decision baffles me.

Hangouts uses a sliding UI, which Google seems quite fond of lately. It has a very Holo feel, but I was initially confused about how to get back to the contact list from conversations. Sometimes you can slide back over to it, but other times you need to tap the ‘+’ button in the action bar to get there.

Hangouts includes regular 1-to-1 conversations, group messaging, and video hangouts. It’s good that we finally have all these functions in one place. Android has had video calls built in for some time, for instance, but no one used it because the functionality was buried in the Talk app. Now it’s all Hangouts video chat, which is much easier and more consistent with Google’s services.

One thing that Hangouts gets very right is the read-receipt and typing status in text conversations. Small avatars of your friends float down the side of the conversation view to show you how far they’ve read. This is extremely well-done, as is the bouncing dot animation to let you know when someone is typing.

Also along for the ride in Hangouts is emoji and image support. Yes, you can finally send pictures through chat instead of trusting MMS. This might actually be my favorite feature, because I suspect I’ll use it a lot. The emoji not so much, but I’m sure some folks will be very into it.

The Hangouts app will replace Talk, and that comes with a few sacrifices. Status messages are gone, as is the Away/Screen-off state. You’re either online, or not online. Any apps you had that plugged into Talk will more than likely stop working, as well. Overall, Hangouts is a good upgrade once you cozy up to it... I’m slowly coming around. There has been some trouble getting certain devices updated through Google Play, but all should be well now.

Kingdom Rush

Tower defense games are easy to do on mobile devices -- it may actually be harder to screw one up than make it work. Still, that doesn’t mean they’re all worth your time. I like to see something different in tower defense titles, and Kingdom Rush offers that. Not only do you have towers to worry about, there are troops to be deployed and managed. Also of note, this game supports achievements through the newly announced Google Play Games service.

The basic elements of this game will be familiar. You have to stop the creeps from reaching the goal at the end of the maze. If too many of them make it through, you lose and have to start over. To prevent them from sacking your kingdom, this title provides you with four different towers. There are barracks, marksmen towers, artillery towers, and mage towers. Four towers might sound like too few, but after a few upgrades, you have the option of transforming into one of eight special towers types (two choices for each tower). On top of that, there are various additional powers you can level up for each maxed-out tower.

I like the way the barracks figure into the overall gameplay here. Your foot soldiers can only be stationed within the range of the barracks, much like other towers have attack ranges. They will attack and slow down approaching foes, which allows the other towers to back them up with ranged attacks. Additionally, you can deploy conscripted farmers as help your ground forces.

Heros are unlocked after a few stages, and can roam wherever you want on the map. These units pack a punch, and level up over time. Heros and other ground troops mostly operate on their own -- you simply have to move them to where you want them. Because creeps often come from multiple directions, you may find yourself re-deploying troops often. This is one of the things that makes Kingdom Rush so compelling.

Speaking of the creeps, there are a lot of them. Each of the 50+ different baddies have unique looks, stats, and vulnerabilities. You have to mix up your defenses to stop them all, which is nice to see. Too many tower defense games can be beaten by spamming one powerful type of tower.

The graphics in Kingdom Rush are bright and colorful with a strong cartoon feel. It actually reminds me quite a lot of Battleheart, which was abandoned by the developers a while back. Performance is great, and everything looks very polished.

Kingdom Rush will cost you $1.99 in Google Play, which is totally reasonable. However, there are some in-app purchases. Before you get up in arms, let me assure you they are not obtrusive, nor necessary to play the game. If you have even a passing interest in tower defense games or having fun, buy Kingdom Rush.

Sonic the Hedgehog

There have been a few Sonic games on Android thus far, but they’ve all been remakes in the spirit of the original. This is the first time that spiky blue speed-demon has graced Android in his original form, sans emulation. Sonic the Hedgehog is compatible with virtually all Android devices, but there are a few new additions to this classic game.

If you were cognizant in the early to mid-90s and lived in the developed world, you have almost certainly played this game. I won’t bore you with an in-depth explanation of how to play it, or whether or not the gameplay is compelling, You know it is. What we need to sort out is how well this title plays on Android with a touchscreen.

Sonic is a great game to port to a mobile device because the controls are simple. There’s just the one button and a directional stick. The stick is off the the left, and the single jump button is on the right. It all works about the way you’d expect it to, although I’d say the thumbstick is a bit less exact for small movements than a controller is. The upside, Sonic supports almost all wireless and wired controllers.

In addition to playing as Sonic, you can now also play as Tails and Knuckles, who were not originally in this title. I’m not sure how to feel about that. The levels in this game were designed for Sonic, and it might not play as intended with these other characters.

The feeling of speed is what makes the Sonic games cool, and that is preserved in the Android port. There are no slow downs and the game’s physics feel about the same as they ever did. What new, though, is the save mode. You can have several games going at once. If you run out of lives, you can simply dive back in with 3 more chances at the last level you reached. So you can see the whole game even if you don’t have the same platforming chops you once did, but there’s a no-save mode for the more hardcore traditionalists too.

Most of the other Sonic games in Google Play are HD updates of the original content, but this one is a straight port. As such, it has that distinctly 16-bit look. You know, from the days when the competition was the NES with only 8-bit graphics and we thought the Genesis looked amazing. Ah, those were the days. Sonic’s graphics have aged gracefully in my opinion, but it now correctly renders in widescreen. This isn’t an attempt to cash in on retro graphics -- it’s a classic.

Is it worth $2.99? Probably. This is still one of the best games of its time, and it works just fine on a phone or tablet.

That's all for this week's Roundup, but check back next time for more cool stuff. Also feel free to suggest apps you want to see reviewed.

Show & Tell: Favorite Electric Pour Over Kettle

Matt Fernandez — Mon, 20 May 2013 06:00:00 +0000

MakerBot Mystery Build: Booster Packs

Matt Fernandez — Fri, 17 May 2013 23:00:00 +0000

1970s Digital: How Westworld Invented Digital Effects

Wesley Fenlon — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:00:00 +0000

FIlm buffs thinking back on the history of digital effects will probably bring up 80s classics like Tron or Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which featured cinema's first entirely computer-generated sequence, courtesy of ILM. But if you want to get picky, the use of digital effects in film goes back further than that. All the way to 1973, in fact. Today's CG space battles and green screens galore owe it all to Westworld, written and directed by Jurassic Park writer Michael Crichton.

The New Yorker has a fun profile on Westworld's effects, which were, of course, archaic by today's standards. The film was shot on a skimpy $1.25 million budget--small money, even at the time--and only a couple minutes of the film required digital effects. Westworld is set in a sci-fi resort, where visitors can spend $1000 a day to hang out in Medieval World, Roman World, and Westworld, which recreate classic time periods with robots serving as stand-ins for real people. Before the Star Trek holodeck came around, this was sci-fi's best take on recreating a paradise version of the past.

Things go wrong, of course--the robots go haywire, and cowboy Yul Brenner hunts star James Brolin across the resort. He is, in every respect, the proto-Terminator--including his "computer" vision, which is muddy and pixelated. Enter the first digital effect.

Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic wasn't around to whip up snazzy digital effects yet, so "Crichton got a quote for generating the computer imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena," writes The New Yorker. "He was told that the two minutes of footage would cost two hundred thousand dollars and require nine months—both prohibitive. He turned to a maker of abstract films, John Whitney, Sr., famed in art and film circles for his work creating animation with military-surplus analog electronics and motor assemblies. Whitney referred Crichton to his son, John Whitney, Jr., who was eager to follow in his father’s footsteps as an experimental filmmaker, but using computers. He agreed to do the effects in four months for twenty thousand dollars."

Whitney's idea was to divide the film into squares and calculate the average color in each one, blurring them together into what we would now immediately call a pixelated look. But there was another problem: scanning the film back then was no easy task. Whitney found a company that could help him, and spent two months testing out how to play with color and contrast to make the effect work projected on a screen.

The New Yorker writes: "Because Whitney didn’t have a color scanner, the workload was tripled: M.G.M.’s optical department made color separations of the film—one set of black-and-white footage for each of the three primary colors—that he needed to process separately, image by image. The computer processing itself took about eight hours per ten-second sequence."

Today, Pixar's render farm could do that work in a fraction of a second, but it was perhaps a bit miraculous that Westworld made its planned release date. The rest of the New Yorker's article discusses how Whitney's effect changed how a few scenes in the film were shot, and goes on to touch on some other computer-generated effects of the 1970s. It's stuff we take for granted, now, but it took a whole lot of work not so long ago.

MapBox Rethinks the Satellite-Based Map, with Beautiful Results

Wesley Fenlon — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:30:00 +0000

The Google Maps update announced at this week's Google I/O Conference integrates the satellite view of Google Earth. It's 3D! It looks great! Of course, if you look closely, Google Maps' images will still have plenty of imperfections. At the street view level, photos are often blurry or awkwardly stitched together. That's the price we pay for total coverage, and the good news is that quality is constantly improving.

Making smarter maps, with more usable data, is Google's primary goal. The mission of another mapping service, named MapBox, is something very different. MapBox wants to make their maps gorgeous. The best looking on the web. And they're doing a pretty damn good job.

Image credit: Mapbox

Wired recently wrote a behind-the-scenes look at MapBox, a small team of about 30 using open mapping data to build a prettier, if not better, map. Their service is currently used on Foursquare and Evernote, and they've had other partners in the past. While MapBox isn't as big as Google Maps or Nokia Maps, they're gaining a foothold, and their use of totally open data allows for a lot of flexibility. The best part of the story is how they're getting that data, and what they're doing with it, which is where MapBox really differs from Google Maps.

MapBox's satellite imagery comes from NASA's LANCE-MODIS system, which is public domain. Here's challenge one, as Wired explains:

“ 'For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012,' says [MapBox's Charlie] Loyd, 'this amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.'

"The first problem is even getting the data. It’s all available in the public domain, but just transferring it over to MapBox’s servers was a major task because of the volume. To do this render, they needed to download two thirds of a terabyte of compressed data. 'We’ve got 30 to 40 servers pulling down data from NASA,' says [data analyst] Herwig. 'We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?' "

Dealing with a mere five billion pixels sounds like a huge challenge, but of course that's nothing new to companies that have mapped the entire Earth. Typically, the satellite imagery would be scanned, and the brightest, least-cloudy images would be chosen because they give the clearest view of a region. There's an obvious issue with this technique: images won't match up. Two locations side-by-side could be represented by photographs taken months or seasons apart.

MapBox wants a seamless, beautiful map. That takes a different approach.

MapBox "takes all the images it has of an area and stacks them on top of each other," writes Wired. "Then, it reorders each column of pixels in the stack based on how cloudy it thinks it is. 'We do that for every pixel in the world,' says Loyd.

"Once MapBox has reordered the pixels, it takes the average of the least cloudy ones, and that average becomes the canonical pixel for that particular spot on the map. The scale is dizzying. Loyd says that when he and his team were about 40 percent of the way through the job, he calculated that if they printed out their work to that point, it’d cover 2 acres of land at 300dpi.

"MapBox has to pull some other tricks too. The color of the landscape changes throughout the year as summer green leaves turn to oranges in the fall, then snow falls in the winter, then new growth returns in the spring. Average all that together and you’d get a muddy brown. So the team uses some techniques to ensure that they’re capturing peak growth, which is May/June in the northern hemisphere and December/January in the southern."

Photo credit: Mapbox

The final product: a seamless, eternal summer on Earth, without a cloud in the sky. It's not necessarily the most realistic representation of summer, but compare Google Maps and MapBox and it's hard to miss how vivid the latter's satellite view is. Google's moving forward with some seriously smart data usage, but MapBox is focusing on something digital maps have sometimes had trouble with--simply making them nice to look at.

The Low Tech Origins of Found Footage Films

David Konow — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Found footage movies are in the zeitgeist again, even though many thought it was a one trick idea with The Blair Witch Project. But the enormous cost to profit margins of the Paranormal Activity movies launched the trend again, and it crossed over to other genres as well, like the comedy Project X, and the superhero movie Chronicle.

Whether it’s a horror story or a comedy, the idea is simple. An event happens, it’s been documented on video, and once the footage is found and watched, it tells the story of the event. The idea of a found footage movies seems so simple, you’d think anyone could do it. In fact, that’s been the appeal for many filmmakers: it’s a simpler, and much cheaper, way to make a movie.

Some feel that Blair Witch had a punk, DIY sensibility that proved to young directors they didn’t need a lot of fancy, schmantzy equipment to make a movie. As Josh Leonard, who starred in the film, told the L.A. Times, “It was like when you and your buddies were 14 and you heard a Germs album and you’re like, ‘I could do that.’”

Paramount has a number of found footage projects in development, and as the President of the studio, Adam Goodman, told Deadline, “I believe it’s something that’s here to say. It’s a terrific medium for filmmakers. They don’t see the medium as a barrier to entry. They don’t care about shaky cameras. For whatever reason, it just makes for a much more visceral experience for the audience.”

At least one horror director complained to me that doing a found footage movie makes directors lazy, but in several found footage horror films it took a lot of work to make it look like no work went into it at all. Since the late sixties, documentary techniques and cinema verite became a big part of making horror films effective.

Night of the Living Dead may have been the first in this regard with its frantic camerawork, and fake newsreel footage that helped make the event seem more plausible. And as Dan O’Bannon, the late screenwriter of Alien, said of horror films that were shot on a budget, the lack of professional polish makes them feel far more removed from Hollywood. Like demented home movies, you have the feeling the people behind the camera aren’t bound by any restraints and could show you anything.

Blair Witch was shot on Hi-8, which is essentially a step above VHS, and it definitely gave it that demented home movie feel, but it was actually a European horror flick shot on 16mm that first started the found footage concept, namely 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust.

In Holocaust, a group of documentarians film a group of cannibals on an island, and they are all eventually slaughtered. The documentary footage is later found, and it tells the story of their demise. The gore and violence in the was so convincing, some thought it was a snuff film, and the director Ruggero Deodato, was thrown in jail for murder. Much like Blair Witch, the actors agreed not to do any press for the film to fool people into thinking they really disappeared. At the trial, the stars actually had to show up to prove they were still alive so Deodato could get out of jail.

And while 28 Days Later wasn’t a found footage horror story, it has some elements of one, especially using the relatively cheap Canon XL1 cameras, which made the production much easier to shoot faster and more mobile. Certain shots, like the opening in an empty London, could were filmed under tight time constraints, so the crew used many cheap cameras to shoot from multiple angles all at once instead using many takes. Director Danny Boyle had said that with shooting on digital “the general idea was to try and shoot as though we were survivors too.” Funny enough, 28 Days was one of the movies that made the world safe for digital, and it looked very impressive even though it wasn’t shot with top of the line hi-def technology.

Hollywood will always look for cheaper ways to make movies, and with a found footage story you can definitely work with far less money than working on Hi-Def, or 35mm while we still have it. But Eduardo Sanchez, who created Blair Witch with Daniel Myrick, has always felt that found footage could be applied to many other genres like horror, much like we’re seeing today.

“This Is Spinal Tap was kind of found footage,” he says. And indeed, Christopher Guest makes his comedies in a similar fashion, where he’ll film himself improvising into the camera, and the rest of the film is invented as they go. “It was acceptable in comedy before it was accepted in horror with Blair Witch and Cloverfield,” Sanchez continues. “But I think it can be done in every genre really, and I’m glad to see that it’s expanding and being done in other kinds of films.”

Blacksmithing a Klingon Bat'leth

Norman Chan — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:30:00 +0000

Executable Biology

Norman Chan — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:00:00 +0000

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal wrote a fascinating story about the efforts of the OpenWorm initiative--an open-source project that has been working on creating a perfect virtual organism. These aren't Sims we're talking about; the OpenWorm is a cell-for-cell recreation of the real-life roundworm, or C. elegans. These creatures, which have had their entire genome sequenced, are composed of only a thousand cells, and have a neural circuit composed of just 302 neurons. That makes the biologist and computer scientists behind OpenWorm believe that they can create an accurate computer model of its anatomy, down to the cellular level (free of much abstraction). And if a simulation is achieved, could this example of example of executable biology be considered "alive"?

Tested Makes Gourmet Space Food for Astronaut Chris Hadfield

Joey Fameli — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:58:00 +0000

Episode 170 - Audio-Only Edition - 5/16/2013

Will Smith — Fri, 17 May 2013 01:28:00 +0000

This week, Will, Norm, and Wes discuss Google I/O, Hangouts, Maps, Music, paid YouTube channels, the problem with Kepler, the Microsoft/Google brouhaha, and a whole lot more. We didn't do fake outtakes, but Norm did discuss the fall TV upfronts at length, so it's pretty much the same thing. Enjoy!