Daily Archives: September 4, 2015

Google Street View becomes standalone app, aimed at exploration

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Google Street View has long been a staple of Google Maps, allowing you to explore an area as if you were there. It’s incredibly useful for looking for business, orienting yourself, getting a sense of parking in an area, or even just looking around for the heck of it. And now, Street View gets its own app for both Android and iOS.

This new app is aimed to help people explore and share their surroundings. There’s a gallery full of photo spheres that people have contributed, and it allows you to contribute your own. This app replaces the Photo Sphere app on iOS, and comes built in with the photo sphere camera on both platforms. You can take beautiful 360 degree photos and share them for all to see.

Not only can you use your own camera, but the app has support for 360 degree cameras like the Ricoh Theta S and the NCTech iris360. All photo spheres taken will also appear on Google Maps for regular folks to see. If you want to download the app to your Android device, head over here to the Play Store!

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Apple TV: What Features Should It Have?

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Over the past 25 years, I have personally used no less than 25 DMAs (digital media adapters) of some sort of electronics connected to or inside my TVs. I have used 10 of the 25 in the last five years as the experience, content and technology is slowly but surely improving. The first 15 years were a painful journey, to say the least. The recent ones I’ve used in my home were the Apple TV (all gens), Microsoft Xbox One, NVIDIA Shield, HTPCs (home theater PC), Roku, Boxee, WD TV, Google TV, and Logitech Revue to name just a few.  Therefore, in addition to being professionally inquisitive on what the next Apple TV could or should look like, but personally, as well.
First off, the latest and greatest streamer to beat on the NVIDIA Shield console. Its 4K, can play nearly every major provider’s content, plays games well, has a fast and fluid UI, offers upgradable storage, and has a killer , voice-enabled remote and game controller with private listening capability.  I wrote about the NVIDIA  Shield here and here.

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3-D Printing Glass From The Mediated Matter Research Group At MIT Media Lab

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To make a great pizza, you need an oven temperature around 700 degrees Fahrenheit. To melt thermoplastics, like most of today’s fused filament 3-D printers, you want just over 220 degrees Fahrenheit. To melt glass, you need about three times that, over 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit (1165 degrees Celsius), roughly. The MIT Media Lab, with its Mediated Matter Research Group, has been doing more than a little tinkering to create the world’s first Glass 3-D printer.

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