The device is definitely not constantly listening and uploading to the cloud (or at least they certainly do not intend it to). This keyword recognition thing everyone is doing is to make interaction more intentional, reduce misrecognition, bandwidth consumption, and processing costs.
Keyword recognition is done locally on the device at minimal processing cost. Compared to actually recognizing your speech, it's trivial to determine whether or not something you said is a given keyword. It's rather like biometric confirmation vs. identification, where confirming whether a given fingerprint is that of a given individual can be done quickly and with a certain probability distribution but determining which of millions of fingerprints corresponds to the one provided is incredibly difficult/unreliable.
The more difficult task of recognizing what you say after the keyword is done in the cloud, but only once you've said the keyword. It would incur considerable cost for you and them to constantly record and upload all audio, especially with their parametric microphone array for sound localization/isolation.
The real concern should be the device's own security, because hacking the device and enabling constant recording would be very harmful.
It's unfortunate it doesn't have a battery. For this price point it would have made a great bluetooth speaker with some extra intelligent assistant functionality.
Looks like the 3D model is just for navigating the street-view-like set of panoramic photospheres. It's so far a necessary compromise, to get much more realistic photos before you can have perfect structure, material and lighting capture/rendering. (the benefit is clear looking at their scan of the old yc building), but if this is to be useful with VR (and it definitely would be) they'll need something in between those panoramic photospheres.
Why are empty circles even necessary for the read status of a message? If the colors and names are known at the top, then you only need to show which ones have read the message as filled circles and those who haven't will be known as the difference.
I don't understand the insistence that robots in the future not be specialized. Quite the contrary, I think they'll be highly specialized, and the ant metaphor agrees.
> Is it me, or is the benefit of that extremely small? I can move my finger and tap the 'Instagram' icon quicker than I can say "Instagram". Never mind that the app itself is highly visual, so there's no point launching it without already looking at the screen and holding the phone to your hand.
and the key insight to a good UX was making it so it always listens, and changes dynamically, but you confirm that the app should open/the recognition was correct by tapping on it like any other icon.
I like that UIs are being given depth, but they should respond as physically expected to, too. Why can't buttons move into the screen when pushed instead of changing color and rippling?
This is pretty cool as far as tech goes, but also seems rather ridiculous practically. Productivity with a HMD will likely amount to a lot more than the same 2D dynamic images we already have(screens) being placed arbitrarily in 3D space. What will it look like instead? one may ask, to which I have no definitive response.
What we have here seems like an extrapolation of what we have now, which may prove fruitful if we have nothing else to go off of (and is the nature of incremental progress). If I had many more monitors I'd place a class (or any other abstraction) on every screen, so maybe every class will have its own 2D plane of text and they'll be organized semantically & dynamically in 3D space. Also resolution here needs to be really really high. Idk, just interesting food for thought.
The obvious answer is specialization. Computer science needs to be split, at the very least, into theoretical CS and Software Engineering. From there, both CS and Software engineering will need to contain specializations as well. Software Engineering will splinter into Networking, Javascript Performance optimization, Compiler optimization, etc.
In the grand scheme of things, our lives are just frames of recognizability to one another, and we live on as the information that transformed via us forever. The cycle of innovation, and thereby of technical debt in software, seems to just be one where we either oscillate between caring about quality vs caring about innovation with a frequency proportional to how quickly we can communicate or a static power distribution of the same dichotomy. Either way, the lines we draw and the lengths of frames for when ideas, people, and companies "die" are all just emergent phenomena of the way we think, and pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, don't ya think?
This makes so much sense. The screen isn't big enough to be interacted with directly, but interacting with the media on the screen using the body of the device is brilliant.
This looks like a funded, experienced, hardware team with an already finished product. Are they only using Kickstarter for exposure? If they're looking for validation/upfront manufacturing costs they should be doing pre-orders instead of "crowdfunding"
I look at what it does, do a quick architecture in my head, then compare it to what I see. This helps me because before I even look at it I have an understanding of how I think it should work rather than an absolutely clean slate.
Similar premise, but the media applications are much more compelling. The SDK provides very precise locations of the devices relative to one another in addition to associating them to one another in a group.
I feel as though some of these acquisitions represent not the purchase of something worth $x to Yahoo but rather the imperialism of traffic that costs $x to them, which are really the same thing but are rather different when viewed through the lens of shutdowns and stagnation. Yahoo is a content company, and content elsewhere means traffic elsewhere which is a loss for them. Facebook's purchase of Instagram, even if Instagram is shut down and loses all of its users is still worth the money if viewed through the lens of owning the traffic regardless.