Ideaforge

Working from home isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and a slew of companies just announced longer-term initiatives to make their remote work practices either extend or permanent. That means for some it’s the perfect time to take their at-home videoconferencing setup even further, so we’re going to take a closer look at various core elements to build on our initial exploration of what can help you improve your video call or live broadcasting game. Today, it’s all about audio.

Microphone basics

In our initial feature, I highlighted some great entry-level options for add-on pics that you can use to produce better sound than what your Mac or PC can produce alone. Those included the Samson Meteor Mic, a longstanding favorite that connects directly via USB and that produces great, full-bodied sound without any customization required.

There’s also the Rode Wireless GO, a simple and affordable wireless mic pack kit that you can use on its own, or pair with a lavalier like the Rode Lavalier GO for a bit better sound. Rode also makes a great USB mic, that, like the Meteor Mic, just works and comes in at around $100 – the Rode NT-USB Mini. It features some design decisions like a magnetic desk stand that could make it more flexible for use for certain setups vs. the Meteor Mic, and the sound it produces is also fantastic.

To improve your Rode Wireless GO setup a bit further, or to use a wired lavalier-style wearable mic plugged directly into your computer or audio interface, there are a couple of great options available from Sennheiser that provide subtle but noticeable sound quality improvements no matter how you’re using them.

The Sennheiser MKE Essential Omni is a great lavalier mic that’s often used in stage productions and other professional settings, with a tiny profile that you can pretty easily hide in clothing using the included clip, or even in hair, or in tandem with an earset holder for putting it right on your cheek next to your mouth. You’ll get slightly different sound profiles depending on how you wear it, but it generally produces great, warm sound and doesn’t cost too much at just under $200 (on the relative scale of sound equipment prices).

Sennheiser’s ME 2-II is another, lower-cost option at $129.95 that also produces great results, and works with with wireless transmitters like the Rode Wireless GO, but it’s a bit less warm and present than the MKE Essential.

Getting serious about sound

High-end lavalier mics are already starting to get into high expense territory, but as with most audio equipment, the sky’s the limit here. That’s also true for shotgun microphones, which is another option for rigging your setup for the best possible audio without compromising on things like unsightly microphones in frame, or some of the trade-offs that come with using very physically small microphones like lavalier and lapel mics.

In our original post, I talked about using a Rode VideoMic NTG as one option, and that is indeed a great, mid-level shotgun mic to experiment with, with the added benefit of being terrific for use on-camera in the field thanks to its built in battery, compact dimensions and intelligent compatibility with a range of modern cameras.

But for home studio use, there are shotgun mics that are much more appropriate to the task. The Rode NTG3 is a personal favorite, and a popular standard in the broadcast and film industries – for good reason. The NTG3 is a tubular mic with a standard XLR output, that required 48v phantom power and that is perfect for videos shooting scenarios where you’re staying relatively still in a fixed location with cameras also mounted in fixed positions – ie., exactly how most people have their home working spaces set up.

The Rode NTG3 is a bit of a budget-buster, however – it’s $699, which is more than even some very high-quality standard podcasting mics out there. But for the price, you get an extremely high-quality piece of hardware, that has built-in moisture resistance for shooting outdoors if that’s ever something you want to do, and that sounds great even when mounted out of sight beyond the frame of your camera’s lens.

It’s also supercardioid in its pickup pattern, which means it does an excellent job of picking up sound directly in front of it, but not sound to either side. That’s a great advantage to have in most shared home office spaces, just like it is with on-location film shoots.

Another top option that’s a popular favorite, and that comes in at a lower price point, is the Sennheiser MKE 600. At around $330, it’s roughly have the price of the NTG3, and it has a built-in battery in case you want to take it with you and plug it into your camera. It also uses XLR, which means you’ll need a preamp like the Focusrite 2i2 or the recently released Audient EVO 4 to make it work with your computer (or the iRig Pre if you’re running it to a deck like the Blackmagic ATEM Mini, as I was).

The sound from the MKE 600 is still top notch, but it doesn’t do quite as good a job as the NTG3 of eliminating any self-noise, and of capturing a deep, rich tone that’s suitable to deeper voices. You can check out a comparison of both boom mics, along with the Sennheiser MKE Essential, in the video below.

Another option is to use a pole or boom-mounted mic like you generally see podcasters or radio personalities use. These include popular options like the Shure SM7B, which you’ll probably recognize immediately from its distinct profile. I’m partial to the Shure Beta 87A supercardioid mic for home recording of audio podcasts, but as you can see from the video below, there are some reasons that you might not want to use it for live video conferences, meetings or events – even if it sounds great even untreated.

There are a range of other options, of course – including differently priced options from both Rode and Sennheiser, most of which offer great quality for what you pay. The nature of audio is that it’s also a highly personal preference, with different people preferring sound that’s either favors the higher end, the low end, or that’s more or less balanced, so it’s going to take a lot of comparison shopping and listening to samples to figure out what works for you.

Bottom line

In the end, sticking to quality brands with established reputations in the film and video industries is a great way to get make the most of your setup. Mics like those I use above benefit even more from physical sound isolation, including measures that are fairly easy to accomplish, like laying down carpets and towels, as well as more advanced practices, like picking up dedicated sound isolating materials including foam pads and mounting them on your walls.

Sound is probably the trickiest part of any videoconferencing or virtual event setup to get right – it’s as much art as it is science, and there are a lot of variables that are hard to control, even with the best equipment, especially in live settings. But going the extra mile can mean the difference between coming across polished and professional, and appearing unprepared, which is bound to make a difference in our increasingly virtual face-to-face world.

Source: Tech Crunch

High quality data is the fuel that powers AI algorithms. Without a continual flow of labeled data, bottlenecks can occur and the algorithm will slowly get worse and add risk to the system.

It’s why labeled data is so critical for companies like Zoox, Cruise and Waymo, which use it to train machine learning models to develop and deploy autonomous vehicles. That need is what led to the creation of Scale AI, a startup that uses software and people to process and label image, lidar and map data for companies building machine learning algorithms. Companies working on autonomous vehicle technology make up a large swath of Scale’s customer base, although its platform is also used by Airbnb, Pinterest and OpenAI, among others.

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed, or even halted, that flow of data as AV companies suspended testing on public roads — the means of collecting billions of images. Scale is hoping to turn the tap back on, and for free.

The company, in collaboration with lidar manufacturer Hesai, launched this week an open source dataset called PandaSet that can be used for training machine learning models for autonomous driving. The dataset, which is free and licensed for academic and commercial use, includes data collected using Hesai’s forward-facing PandarGT lidar with image-like resolution as well as its mechanical spinning lidar known as Pandar64. The data was collected while driving urban areas in San Francisco and Silicon Valley before officials issued stay-at-home orders in the area, according to the company.

“AI and machine learning are incredible technologies with an incredible potential for impact, but also a huge pain in the ass,” Scale CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Machine learning is definitely a garbage in, garbage out kind of framework — you really need high quality data to be able to power these algorithms. It’s why we built Scale and it’s also why we’re using this dataset today to help drive forward the industry with an open source perspective.”

The goal with this lidar dataset was to give free access to a dense and content-rich dataset, which Wang said was achieved by using two kinds of lidars in complex urban environments filled with cars, bikes, traffic lights and pedestrians.

“The Zoox and the Cruises of the world will often talk about how battle-tested their systems are in these dense urban environments,” Wang said. “We wanted to really expose that to the whole community.”

The dataset includes more than 48,000 camera images and 16,000 LiDAR sweeps — more than 100 scenes of 8s each, according to the company. It also includes 28 annotation classes for each scene and 37 semantic segmentation labels for most scenes. Traditional cuboid labeling, those little boxes placed around a bike or car, for instance, can’t adequately identify all of the lidar data. So, Scale uses a point cloud segmentation tool to precisely annotate complex objects like rain.

Open sourcing AV data isn’t entirely new. Last year,  Aptiv and Scale released nuScenes, a large-scale data set from an autonomous vehicle sensor suite. Argo AI, Cruise and Waymo were among a number of AV companies that have also released data to researchers. Argo AI released curated data along with high-definition maps, while Cruise shared a data visualization tool it created called Webviz that takes raw data collected from all the sensors on a robot and turns that binary code into visuals.

Scale’s efforts are a bit different; For instance, Wang said the license to use this dataset doesn’t have any restrictions.

“There’s a big need right now and a continual need for high quality labeled data,” Wang said. “That’s one of the biggest hurdles overcome when building self driving systems. We want to democratize access to this data, especially at a time when a lot of the self driving companies can’t collect it.”

That doesn’t mean Scale is going to suddenly give away all of its data. It is, after all a for-profit enterprise. But it’s already considering collecting and open sourcing fresher data later this year.

Source: Tech Crunch

Minecraft is one of the most popular games on the planet, so it’s natural that Microsoft, after buying creator Mojang some years back, would attempt to apply the genre’s playful, blocky aesthetic to other genres. After modest success with the Story Mode adventure game and Pokémon GO-like Minecraft Earth, they’ve tried their hand at a light action-RPG à la Diablo — and unfortunately come up rather short. For now, that is.

Minecraft Dungeons is a sort of my-first-dungeon-crawler type game, a friendly, streamlined version of the genre Diablo created where players enter a procedurally-created dungeon or region, kill some monsters, get some loot, make it out alive, and do it all over again.

That’s the idea in this game as well, but of course the whole thing uses the block-based look and feel of Minecraft. As you travel through different biomes to free villagers, destroy ancient forges and so on, everything from the levels and monsters to equipment and potions looks like it came straight out of the original game. They nailed the look perfectly.

It’s refreshing, because games like this tend to court a rather grim aesthetic, and when it comes to gameplay they pile on features and mechanics until it feels more like you’re playing a spreadsheet than a game. It’s clear from the start Minecraft Dungeons was intended to provide the fun of fighting, upgrading, and exploring without the overly complex and dark trappings of the genre.

For instance, instead of having a handful of character classes each with their own skill tree, everything your character can do depends on their equipment. Weapons, armor, and accessories all have unique bonuses and abilities. So if you want to be a bow and arrow type fighter, wear the Ranger armor that gives you extra ranged damage and ammo, and use accessories that empower your arrows. Want to be a melee guy? There’s armor and swords for that too.

Customization of your play style, an important part of these games, is achieved by judicious choice of a set of random upgrades on each item. When you gain a level, you get a point can be used to activate, say, a passive ability that deflects enemy projectiles 20 percent of the time. Then it costs two points to upgrade it again, so it deflects 30 percent of the time.

You get those points back when you trash the item and can reapply them to a new one, providing low-risk, low-commitment progress — in time you’ll have lots of points banked to upgrade and experiment with whatever new item you find.

This approach is really a breath of fresh air after the convoluted overlapping systems of the likes of Diablo, Grim Dawn, and Path of Exile. There was just the right amount of “this new sword is tempting but do really I want to recycle my old one?” tension, and although you will collect trash loot, it’s easy to check and dispose of.

I didn’t get a chance to test multiplayer, but the game is definitely designed with co-adventuring in mind. Couch co-op lets you drop in a second player with a controller or connect online with others on the same platform (cross-play is coming soon). A cross-platform casual dungeon crawler is something I’ve been wanting for a long time.

It’s too bad, then, that this is where the game runs out of really positive qualities. I’m keeping in mind that this is a $20 game designed with players new to the genre in mind — not to say kids exactly — so there’s no sense comparing it directly to a major mainstream gaming franchise. But even so, Minecraft Dungeons has some serious issues.

For one thing, it really needs more variety. Part of the fun of these games is traveling from region to region and fighting new types of monsters with different tactics and abilities. That really just isn’t there in this game. The 10 different areas are visually distinct, yes, but they’re linear, similar from one run to another, and don’t differ all that much gameplay-wise. One aspect of Minecraft I’ve always loved, exploration, is nearly absent. Getting up on a hill or down in some little valley or cavern you can see usually isn’t possible — they’re just walls or bottomless pits. Side paths often run quite a distance but I eventually learned to stopped taking them because they were frequently empty and it always took forever to backtrack afterwards.

You’ll run into the same zombies, spiders, and soldiers over and over, and get the same weapons and accessories dropped over and over, often with very similar stats. Although there seems to be a good variety at first, the abilities and weapons don’t seem particularly well balanced, with some obviously and objectively better than others. Some are basically useless: One ability gives you a speedup for a few seconds after you dodge — but the game also slows you down for a few seconds after you roll, so they kind of just cancel each other out. Another returns a third of one percent of your health for every 100 blocks you uncover in the game. What?

This wouldn’t be an issue if the game had better difficulty tuning. I found in my playthrough that there was no challenge whatsoever 99 percent of the time, and then suddenly a situation would arise where I would be nearly instantly killed. These weren’t lesson-teaching deaths like other games — just sudden confluences of bad luck and, it must be said, some poor design.

Ranged attacks from enemies will often come from off-screen, for instance. And not just a stray arrow, but many simultaneously. Enemy projectiles also go through all other enemies, unlike your own, and are very difficult to dodge, especially when there are a dozen coming from different angles. So sometimes after spending the whole level barely taking a hit, you’re reduced to an emergency situation in a fraction of a second, with very little warning, by enemies you haven’t had a chance to react to or perhaps even see. The close-zoom camera shows details well but limits your understanding of what’s happening around you.

These brutal difficulty spikes aren’t always accidental. One enemy kept popping up that repeatedly spawned huge numbers of bear traps under my character’s feet that closed before any but a really expert player could be expected to dodge. Bosses are cheap, swarming players with minions, storms of enormous projectiles, and instant, undodgeable melee attacks.

The issue here isn’t just that it’s hard, but that the game doesn’t give you the tools you need to deal with it. Dodging feels clumsy and enemies block your movement; there is little in the way of active defense like a shield or accessory you activate to repel arrows for 5 seconds; you only have one slowly recharging healing potion and health doesn’t trickle back, so little mistakes add up over time. Not that it matters, since punishment is usually swift and extreme.

What all this amounts to is a game that alternates between monotonous and frustratingly hard, even for a fan of the genre like myself. And considering you’ll run through all the areas in the game in a handful of hours — there are ten areas, each of which takes perhaps 20 minutes to clear — it’s expected that you’ll repeat them over and over to reach the gear level required to beat the final boss. I got all the way to that point and was insta-killed twice in a row.

I repeated a few areas but found them nearly indistinguishable from their earlier iterations. Ultimately I just wasn’t motivated to grind away just so I could unlock another, likely even more unfair, difficulty level.

I wouldn’t complain so much if this wasn’t, ostensibly, a game for beginners. Minecraft Dungeons innovates and simplifies in some really laudable ways, but the moment-to-moment game design is too uneven and the variety on offer isn’t enough even for a $20 game.

But it must be said that Minecraft itself also started out rather barebones and was built up over time into something remarkable and almost infinite. There are two DLC packs in the works for Dungeons, one rather crassly visible from the very start — nothing like being asked to pay more for a game you just bought. The good news is these packs will grow the game to a size that feels more like an adventure and less like a demo. I also expect that patches over the coming weeks and months will considerably tweak the equipment and difficulty — it can be, and needs to be fixed.

A year from now Minecraft Dungeons could very well be a no-brainer purchase, a cross-platform casual hack-and-slash that you can play with your kids or your friends and have a great time without thinking too hard about it (or opening Excel). But right now it’s mostly potential. I’d hold off on picking this one up until it’s been made into the game it’s meant to be.

Source: Tech Crunch

In a live-streamed town hall, Mark Zuckerberg gave an overview for what he expects in the near future as Facebook pursues accommodations to keep workers productive and safe during the COVID-19 crisis. The move comes as large tech companies reassess the viability of their iconic Silicon Valley campuses, now empty as the pandemic keeps most employees at home.

Part of Zuckerberg’s vision, announced Thursday, includes the surprise announcement that Facebook will be setting up new company hubs in Denver, Dallas and Atlanta. Zuckerberg also noted that Facebook will focus on finding new hires in areas near its existing offices, looking to cities like San Diego, Portland, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The Facebook CEO estimated that over the course of the next decade, half of the company could be working fully remotely.

Zuckerberg also elaborated on what kinds of roles would and would not be eligible for all-remote work, noting that positions in divisions like hardware development, data centers, recruiting, policy and partnerships would not be able to shift away from a physical office due to their need for proximity.

“When you limit hiring to people who live in a small number of big cities, or are willing to move there, that cuts out a lot of people who live in different communities, have different backgrounds, have different perspectives,” Zuckerberg said.

For Menlo Park employees looking for greener pastures, there’s one sizable catch. Starting on January 1 of next year, the company will localize all salaries, scaling compensation to the cost of living in the enclaves Facebook employees may soon find themselves scattered to.

Source: Tech Crunch

Like most of us, you’ve probably been stuck inside for months now. Sitting around, pacing your home, watching a lot of bad television. Would anything possibly be better than finally getting some time outdoors to commune with nature and catch a little ultra high-def television?

Up to now, outdoor sets have largely been the realm of specialty companies with names like SunBriteTV. Now Samsung’s getting in on the decidedly niche category, with the Terrace line. The sets also sport a fairly niche price tag, starting at $3,499 for the 55-inch model and going up to $6,499 for the 75-inch.

The lofty price tag gets you IP55 weather proofing, against the inevitable water and dust. The 2160p screen is an extremely bright 2000 nits — designed to be bright enough to watch in the sunlight. It’s got all of the necessary ports, but Samsung’s largely focused on wireless connectivity, so users (well, installers) only have to plug it into a power source. There’s also a separate Terrace sound bar that also carries the IP55 rating. That’s going to run you an additional $1,200 to complete the set up.

Maybe it’s just me, being grumpy and slightly unhinged from being stuck inside a New York apartment for months on end, but the last thing I want to do upon leaving the apartment is watch TV. Granted, this pandemic is starting to get to me. If you’ve got the inclination, outdoor space and several grand to spend, Samsung’s got you.

Source: Tech Crunch