Snap Inc. made waves a few weeks ago when it announced Spectacles, a pair of $130 sunglasses with a camera on it that connect to your smartphone to take and send Snaps. Now the company has revealed how you’ll actually be able to buy a pair: from bright yellow vending machines — called “Snapbots” — that will travel around the country selling the device.
Each Snapbot will be in place for about a day, starting with one located right by Snap Inc.’s headquarters near Venice Beach in California. Prospective buyers be able to track where the Snapbots are located using a map on the Spectacles website.
Snap Inc. has said that the Snapbots will be the only place you’ll be able to buy a pair of Spectacles, at least for the first few months. Ellen DeGeneres showed off the Spectacles buying experience with some snaps sent earlier today. It appears that the Snapbot uses a built-in camera to allow potential buyers to virtually try on the Spectacles (in a manner similar to Snapchat’s augmented reality photo filter) before buying.
Additionally, if you can’t make it to a Snapbot but want to try out how a pair of Spectacles would look on you, Snap Inc. has a QR code on the Spectacles website that you can scan to add a limited-time filter to Snapchat for virtually trying them on.
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 when Instagram 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.
Android is the crown jewel in Google’s vast empire of software and web services, and its unprecedented success has inevitably attracted the scrutiny of European Union regulators. Today, Google steps up its public efforts to diminish European concerns over its mobile market dominance, and it’s doing it with the power of GIFs.
Google
You don’t think we offer choice, says Google, but have you seen how little choice iPhone buyers are getting? All the preloaded apps on an iPhone come from Apple. 39 out of 47 preloaded apps on Windows 10 phones come from Microsoft. But less than a third of preloaded apps on Samsung’s Galaxy S7 come from Google. So what’s the big deal?
Extending the point beyond apps, Google argues that it’s impossible for Android to have a market monopoly when the iPhone exists. "To ignore competition with Apple," says Google, "is to miss the defining feature of today’s competitive smartphone landscape."
The problem at the heart of the European investigation is actually Google’s control of its Play Store, which is the central portal for app distribution on Android and pretty much essential to any new Android smartphone. And since Apple doesn’t license or open-source iOS, and Microsoft’s Windows 10 has no mobile ecosystem to speak of, any new smartphone in Europe that isn’t an iPhone is compelled to carry Google’s apps.
Because Android manufacturers have to have the Play Store on their phones, Google can practically dictate whatever terms it wants to the companies signing up for the privilege. And that’s how it is that the basic suite of Google Play services and apps are installed on every new Android smartphone by default, including such apps as Google Maps, Google Play Music, Chrome, and YouTube. Granted, most of these are the best apps in their class, but the European Commission’s antitrust body is more worried about unfair market power.
But Google’s GIF counterarguments are strong. The Mountain View company also points out that apps like Snapchat, Spotify, and Dropbox have enjoyed hundreds of millions of downloads on Android, which runs counter to the notion that Google is suppressing competition. Google has its own messaging, music, and cloud storage services, and yet its mobile platform is open enough to sustain more popular alternatives without a problem.
What Google is saying, in a nutshell, is that Android is too flexible and manipulable by the user to ever really be locked down and anti-competitive. Okay, so Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, and anyone else wanting to sell an Android phone is practically forced to ship it with Google apps on board. Is that really such a big deal if people can get their favored apps for free anyway? And moreover, Google makes the economic argument that "distributing products like Google Search together with Google Play permits us to offer our entire suite for free," so if you really like Google’s mobile apps and don’t want to pay extra for them, you should be happy with the status quo.
That’s Google’s argument, and the question now is how compelling the Euro regulators will find it when they reconvene to consider imposing substantial fines on Google’s practices.
The day after the election, Walt and Nilay sat down to discuss what the tech industry might have in store for the next four years under the new president.
We love your feedback on the topics of the show and suggestions on how to make our show better and more fun — you can tweet at Walt at @waltmossberg and Nilay at @reckless. And of course, we'd love it if you subscribed in iTunes (here's the direct RSS feed, if you like), along with The Verge's other great podcasts like What's Tech, and The Vergecast. You might also want to check out Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, and Too Embarrassed to Askfeaturing The Verge's Lauren Goode.
WhatsApp users are beginning to see an option for two-factor authentication their account settings folder. According to Android Police, the feature is live in the most recent betas of the app (2.16.341 and above), and has also been spotted in the Windows Phone beta. Once activated, the app will prompt a user for a static six-digit passcode every time a new phone is registered to the account.
The new code might seem inconvenient, but it provides a crucial line of defense against criminals who might try to clone your phone, convincing a carrier to assign your phone number to their new mobile device. Without two-factor protections, all that’s required to register a WhatsApp account on a new device is a confirmation SMS message — but since that message is sent to all devices registered under your phone number, it’s trivial to break if the attacker has cloned your device.
The feature has been rumored for some time, but this the first time a functional version has been available to users. And while it’s still only in beta versions of the app, it’s only a matter of time before it makes the leap to the official release.
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, has called climate change a “Chinese hoax,” so it’s no wonder climate scientists are freaking out about what will happen to the environment in the years to come.
Trump has already threatened to pull America out of the landmark Paris climate change accord, eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, repeal environmental regulations, and cut climate funding. He proposed an incoherent energy plan aimed at reviving the coal industry. It’s difficult to know which of these promises Trump will follow through on, but climate scientists warn that his plan is a disaster that would create lasting harm to everything from global biodiversity to food availability.
Possibly the most disastrous move would be preventing the United States from following the Paris agreement, the landmark climate change deal that commits almost every country to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t have the luxury of remaining silent because decisions about whether the US is in or outside of Paris climate agreement may affect all of us — they literally affect the kind of world that we’re going to leave behind for future generations,” says climate researcher Benjamin Santer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Even if every country keeps its Paris accord promises, we’re still on track for dangerous levels of global warming. And if America does flout its obligations, it’ll seriously hurt international momentum around the issue, especially if other countries follow suit.
It would actually take Trump four years to officially withdraw from the accord, but in the meantime he can simply not enforce its guidelines while repealing climate change regulation put in place under the Obama administration, like the Clean Power Plan. With a Republican legislature and a Supreme Court opening waiting to be filled, Trump’s plans will face little resistance.
Trump has also talked about abolishing the EPA, and he’s already picked a climate change skeptic to lead the EPA transition. The abolition or gutting of the EPA could especially hurt people who live in places with high pollution, says Mark Cane, a professor of earth science at Columbia University. For an example of what a country without an EPA looks like, says Santer, look at China: “Look at what a country looks like without rigorous environmental protection, where the population has to endure significant local air pollution that’s responsible for literally tens of thousands of additional deaths.”
Trump’s energy plans are also cause for alarm. He wants to bring back coal mining, he says to restore coal jobs. This is simply not going to happen, says Steven Cohen, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. The coal industry is not coming back, for reasons that have nothing to do with climate: natural gas is now far cheaper.
And a push toward coal would “be an enormous step backward with huge health implications,” since coal is responsible for thousands of premature deaths per year, says Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Coal is a dangerous form of energy from start to finish: one way to mine it is by removing the tops of mountains, which destroys ecosystems and groundwater. Coal is also the dirtiest fossil fuel, emitting air pollution and high levels of carbon dioxide. “We can’t be dinosaurs and trying to revive coal is making us dinosaurs,” says Santer. “We can’t imagine that by going back to some time in the past, we solve the problems we’re facing today, that’s not a solution. What happens to dinosaurs? They die out.”
The president-elect’s goal of being completely “energy independent” is also ludicrous, adds Cohen. It’s not realistic to be completely self-sustaining in today’s global economy. In fact, being “energy independent” can be risky because if something happens to our refineries, we have no other sources. Not to mention claims that we’re dependent on the Middle East for oil mostly aren’t true. If anyone is dependent, it’s Europe being dependent on Russia, Cohen adds.
If Trump makes good on all his promises, climate change will continue unchecked. There will be staggering losses of biodiversity, more extreme weather events like drought and hurricanes, hotter temperatures, and melting Arctic sea ice. Rising sea levels are one of the most pressing dangers, according to Santer. Sea levels are projected to rise by several feet by the end of the century; that would be devastating for the US East Coast and other places around the world. “Several feet of global sea level rise? That’s a different planet,” says Santer.
For his part, the thing that keeps Emanuel awake at night is the relationship between armed conflict and food and water shortages. “When climate change brings about food and water shortages — which, arguably it’s already doing — that promotes migration pressures that increases the probability of armed conflict,” he says, “which in a nuclear world is a very, very dangerous thing.”
Rampant climate change will affect everything from international trade to food politics. Intense rainfall can lead to flooding and damage to infrastructure and severe droughts, according to Jason Smerdon, a Columbia University climate scientist. Animals aren’t safe, either; climate change has already destroyed so many habitats that researchers speculate that we’re already living through the sixth extinction.
Looking to the future, there are a few ways that the damage could be limited. First, the government is still a system of checks and balances, and even though Republicans will soon control all three branches, there’s a chance someone could object to Trump’s most extreme proposals. Democrats will still have the option of a filibuster. “Donald Trump is not the CEO of the United States and he doesn’t have the power that he’s used to having in his own company,” says Cohen. “So you’re going to see very quickly that if he wants to get anything to happen, there are a whole bunch of stakeholders and a lot of the things that he said he’s going to do he won’t be able to do.”
Though Trump has attacked wind and solar energy, Emanuel, the MIT climate scientist, hopes that Trump may change his tune if he sees the US falling behind economically. “I tend to try to pull the rabbit of optimism out of the black well of despair, and I think that when the president and Congress realize that we are going to be left behind in the transformation of a 6-trillion-per-year global energy market, things will change rapidly,” he says. “The rest of the world understands that we have to innovate clean energy and whoever innovates fastest and best is going to get a strong edge in this colossal energy market.”
And even if Trump has his way, that global growth in clean energy will continue. Emanuel hopes the election will shake up the international community and make them see that they can no longer look to the United States for leadership in this area. “Renewables are here to stay and they are already employing millions of Americans and that’s going to continue irrespective of decisions made by the Trump administration,” says Santer, the National Academy of Sciences climate researcher. “Now they can either make it easier for the rise of renewables and for a transition to a low-carbon energy future, or this administration can make that much more difficult.”
There is a thick fog drifting through the woods, obscuring everything more than few feet in front of my face. I can see a crooked sapling, and then behind me I hear the crunching of dry leaves. Turning, I spot several figures lurching slowly forward. As they come closer, details emerge: a stain of dark blood on one’s clothing, a piece of missing flesh on the arm of another. I can hear the ravenous murmuring grow louder, as the zombies close in from all sides.
This wild experience was delivered to me as a 360-degree film, posted on YouTube recently by AMC as part of its promotion for The Walking Dead. It felt especially terrifying to me because I was streaming on YouTube’s new VR app, which launches to the public today. I watched it on a Daydream View virtual reality headset powered by a Pixel smartphone. From the hardware to software, everything about this experience was crafted by Google, and it was terrific. I felt "present" in a horror film, a character sharing the same world with flesh-eating ghouls, not just watching it unfold as a spectator with a screen.
I got to spend a week reviewing YouTube’s VR and I found a lot to love. It’s a big step up from the VR experience Google has been able to deliver so far with its Cardboard headsets. The hardware means immersive films look better and head tracking is more accurate. More importantly, the software interface for casual browsing is terrific. Hopping from one video to another no longer feels like a chore, and you can keep an eye on what’s playing in the background while cueing up your next bite of entertainment.
While a lot of the immersive videos being created for YouTube VR are still in the experimental phase, the app itself feels polished and intuitive. It starts with a sense of place. A lot of the time, when you use a VR app, the home screen is a fully fleshed-out location meant to add atmosphere. The Wall Street Journal app in Daydream, for example, puts you into a luxury apartment, complete with fine art, gleaming modern furniture, and sumptuous views of midtown Manhattan. The Google Play app does a similar thing, putting you in a living room stocked with posters, statues, and memorabilia that serve as playful reminders of iconic characters from film and television.
YOUTUBE GIVES DAYDREAM A BEDROCK TO BUILD ON
YouTube’s app does away with all that. "The key was to make it feel like a real physical environment without drawing your attention away from the content," said John Harding, who leads engineering for emerging experiences on YouTube. "It’s a very muted environment, it’s very subtle." You are standing inside an empty geodesic dome. Ahead of you a screen floats above an empty gray floor. YouTube’s familiar interface hangs suspended in the air around the screen. You can dismiss it once you start to watch, or bring it up again with a click, leaving your video to play behind semi-transparent icons and menus.
On top of this minimalist world, YouTube basically overlays its familiar interface. It’s like a floating wall of semi-translucent controls, and it works really well. The Daydream controller makes clicking and scrolling a snap. It's a struggle to type when you want to search, but luckily voice search is available. I spent time inside all the Google apps that come preinstalled inside Daydream, and it’s clear YouTube’s VR product has gotten a lot more attention than Google Street View or Google Play — both of which feel far less polished, and don’t take advantage of the new Daydream controller nearly as well. My colleague Adi Robertson feels Daydream is still waiting for its killer app. For me, YouTube VR is the most satisfying part of a major web property to virtual reality that I’ve ever used, an app I felt like coming back to every day, and one that definitely gives Daydream a bedrock to build on.
Along with crafting a location and adding environmental effects, YouTube had to decide on the dimensions of the experience. "Getting the depth cues right was also critical," said Harding. "How big does the screen feel? Am I sitting three feet away from a five-foot TV or am I in the middle of a movie theater with a huge screen? The actual field of view occupied is the same, but you get a very different sense of presence and level of comfort."
Right now the app presents you with a screen much bigger than a household TV floating about 10 feet in front of you. The effect, when you dismiss the floating controls, is powerful. I watched a UFC fight, and while it wasn’t an immersive 360 experience, I definitely felt myself sink more deeply into the action, with my headset blocking out the world around me, and nothing but the moving image to occupy my attention. YouTube has added some subtle touches to reinforce the feeling of presence in a physical space. While the screen is magically floating above the ground, it casts a flickering light onto the floor, shifting in color and strength to match the picture.
YOUTUBE IS NOW A PHYSICAL PLACE WITH ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS
The default view isn’t perfect. With my Pixel XL I found that about two-thirds of the screen was in focus and the rest was a bit blurred. Luckily YouTube has a nice fix for this: using the controller you can zoom the screen in and out. Make it smaller and you can keep the entire image in sharp focus at once. Zoom way in and you can have it fill your screen. This is a nice way to add an immersive quality to films that aren’t shot in 360. Videos shot from the perspective of a drone moving at high speed, for example, feel amazing when stretched to cover every corner of your view.
Another clever touch YouTube has included is the ability to grab your screen and reposition it. Just click and drag to your desired location. Like a lot of VR headsets, the Daydream View can get heavy on your head after a while, and I found mine tended to slip down if I didn’t hold it with one hand or reposition every few minutes. I could minimize the issue by reclining or by lying flat on my back, and to center the image I would just grab the screen and move it into the perfect position.There was one major issue I had with the app. Since this was YouTube, the video was streaming. When my connection was strong enough, everything looked great. But when my connection occasionally faltered, especially when streaming a 360-degree video, YouTube downgraded the quality of the image, and the immersive world around me suddenly became a blurry, pixelated mess. To avoid this, I tweaked my settings, insisting the video stream in high quality instead of adapting on the fly. Unfortunately this meant the video would often pause, a white pinwheel circling in space as my video struggled to load.
ADS ARE A MILLION TIMES WORSE IN VR
The big drawbacks to YouTube in VR are predicated on the very things that made YouTube a massive success: streaming and advertising. These are the twin pillars that helped the service grow into the global giant it is today. They are also absolutely miserable in virtual reality. When your eyes are inches from the screen, and you can’t look away, ads, adaptive bitrates, and buffering feel way more intrusive and grating.
Keeping streaming and advertising in the mix creates problems, but there is actually a simple solution to these issues, one that fits nicely into the company’s business model. If you’re a YouTube Red subscriber, you don’t have to sit through ads and you can download videos to watch offline, allowing you to sidestep the two biggest issues I had with the VR experience. So far YouTube hasn’t found a huge audience for its subscription offering, but Google is giving away three months of Red free with the purchase of a Pixel, so perhaps the added value it brings to the VR experience will convince a new cohort to join.
The software is one side of the YouTube VR experience, content is the other.There is a lot of 360 video on YouTube, and plenty of high-definition stuff that's worth watching in two dimensions. But I would be lying if I said most YouTube videos make sense in this new medium. I’ve got a mix of comedy, music, gaming, and martial arts videos churning through my daily feed, and the vast majority of those are not worth isolating myself in a headset. Most clips were still best while I’m washing the dishes, walking the dog, or riding on the subway, not blocking out the rest of the world so I can focus entirely on them.
YOUTUBE IS THROWING BIG MONEY BEHIND 360 CREATION
YouTube isn’t oblivious to the fact that a lot of its popular content — makeup tutorials, unboxing gadgets, silly pranks, and webcam confessionals — aren’t particularly powerful when ported to virtual reality. At the same time, the company believes it has to leverage its current roster of creators if it hopes to make YouTube VR an app that users will return to on a daily basis. So it’s giving any creator with over 10,000 subscribers access to cameras and software for making 360 videos through its Creator Spaces. And it's paying for professional production studios to join some of its top talent to craft new videos that pay homage to the subject matter certain channels are known for while tweaking the formula so it’s worth watching in VR.
The success or failure of these efforts will have a big impact on Google’s push into virtual reality. YouTube VR is one of just a handful of apps you can use on the Daydream platform right now. There is a lot more to choose from inside an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, and even on Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, a comparable piece of casual VR hardware powered by software from Facebook’s Oculus. For Daydream to succeed, and by extension Google’s efforts in VR, the ecosystem has to be something users will want to come back to on a regular basis. Until third-party developers start building lots of experiences, YouTube’s creators are going to have to pick up the slack.
Take Merideth Foster, a YouTuber best known for videos on fashion and beauty. A 360-degree shot of her applying foundation and blush is probably a waste of everyone’s time. So YouTube partnered her with Surreal to craft a virtual tour of her apartment instead. Fousey Tube, a channel built around pranks and challenges, used skydiving to justify a 360-degree video.
Some creators kept their tried-and-true formula while adding a few bells and whistles for VR. Tastemade, a cooking channel, simply stuck a 360 camera into the kitchen, so viewers can feel like they are standing right alongside the hosts. They also experimented with animated overlays that pop up during the action. Instead of a two-dimensional video that cuts from a shot of the cook to a close-up of the food prep, the VR version drops a visual of eggs being whisked right in front of the chef. It’s funny and wonderful and weird and doesn’t always work well. It’s mixed-reality editing, a new approach for a new medium.
"As I’ve watched VR for the last year and a half, I’ve started to see a lot of similarities to the early days of web video," says Jamie Byrne, a 10-year veteran of YouTube who started working at the company before it was acquired by Google. "If you had told anyone back then that videos of people putting on, making, or taking gadgets out of box would be worth billions, they would have said you were crazy. But of course that’s the reality today."
"WE’RE STILL KIND OF IN YEAR ZERO WITH VR."
Byrne is now the creative director for YouTube VR, tasked with helping creators get the tools, technology, and support they need to make videos for this new medium. "We’re still kind of in year zero with VR or maybe you could call it year one," he told me. "When we start to think about content experiences, I don’t think anyone knows what’s gonna work and what’s not gonna work. I think what’s gonna drive incredible amounts of watch time, what’s gonna create daily viewership in VR, I don’t think people know the answers to those questions."
I came away from these videos thinking they might appeal to fans of certain YouTuber’s as an occasional treat. I wasn’t sold on the idea that 360 video was strong enough to be worth the regular investment of time and money for channels that are more about casual intimacy than immersive spectacle. But I expect things to change rapidly as YouTube and its creators get a sense of what clicks with the slowly growing audience of VR headset owners.
Right now YouTube VR is simply leveraging its existing library of content and helping its popular creators figure out how to adapt the genres that already work for them to the medium of immersive videos. But it’s clear that the team hopes YouTube will eventually be more than just linear film users can watch. "We’ve gone from rectangular video to 360 to 360 stereoscopic with positional audio. We’re looking at how do we continue to push the format forward," says Harding. "We want to push the boundaries of what it means to have immersive content. Whether that means six degrees of freedom, being able to move around, or being able to interact with things, it’s definitely a direction that we’re exploring."
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