Amazon's Fling is its version of AirPlay and Google Cast

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/10/amazon-fling-sdk/

If you've been hoping for an AirPlay or Cast-like tool to beam content to your Amazon streaming gadgets, you'll soon be in luck. The company revealed its Fling feature this week, a tool that will allow developers to include a way to control media from a mobile device on your Fire TV. Right now, the software will let you send video, audio and still images from an Android or iOS device to the set-top box (or dongle, we'd surmise) for viewing. Devs can also employ "two-way communication" between the Fire TV and a phone or tablet to "engaging second screen experiences."

The company released an SDK so eager app makers can get started, and Karaoke Party and Rivet Radio are among the first selections to employ the tech. Rather than building the tool into it's OS like Apple and Google, Amazon is allowing app developers to add in Fling as they wish. Amazon's mobile devices run a version Google's operating system after all, and some folks who own its streaming gear probably also own an iOS or Android device. That being said, it'll be interesting to see if the likes of Netflix, Hulu and others will decide to opt in.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Software, HD, Mobile, Amazon

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Via: CNET

Source: Amazon

Framing Pictures With Fingers Would Be the Best Google Glass 2.0 Feature

Source: http://gizmodo.com/framing-pictures-with-fingers-would-be-the-best-google-1716432783

The first Google Glass might’ve died an ignominious death, but don’t give up on face computers just yet. Google will most likely launch some kind of updated Glass in the future, and when it does, features like framing up pictures with your fingers could make it a whole lot better than version 1.0.

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Google's DeepStereo makes Street View 'tourism' more realistic

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/08/googles-deepstereo/

Who here uses Street View to do some virtual traveling? It's not a shabby option if you want to look at places you might never visit within your lifetime, but Google thinks there's still a better way to simulate real-world tours. A team of the company's researchers has developed a technique that uses Google's experimental machine vision algorithm called DeepStereo to transform Street View panoramas into seamless virtual tours. See, Street View photos don't usually capture every detail of a location -- there are always a few frames missing in order to construct convincing digital reproductions of places like museums and houses. DeepStereo can synthesize those missing frames based on the ones that go before and after them, giving Google the ability to create realistic virtual tours.

In order to "train" DeepStero, the team had to feed the algorithm with images captured out of a moving vehicle; after that, it was able to start recreating images. It's still not perfect at this point -- some objects like trees or grass are hard to synthesize and details vanish from the recreated frame if the machine lacks pertinent details. In addition, it takes as long as 12 minutes on a powerful workstation to build a single synthetic frame. DeepStereo's obviously still a young technology, but the team believes it could be used not just to create virtual tours, but to generate environments for movies and virtual reality content in the future.

Filed under: Misc, Google

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Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: Google