At the I/O developer conference on Thursday, Google unveiled a bold plan to bring desktop-grade graphics capabilities to your smartphone — using a few behind-the-scenes tricks.
The technology, called Seurat, takes high-fidelity virtual reality scenes and works some magic to effectively downscale the underlying geometry to the point where a smartphone could render the whole scene in real time.
Google was light on the exact details but through a partnership with Industrial Light and Magic’s internal “Experience Lab” or ILMxLab, we got a chance to see the technology in action and it’s pretty impressive. Taking users into an interactive VR version of a scene from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, ILMxLab created a lavishly detailed world using high-powered desktop hardware.
Using Google’s Seurat technology, ILMxLab was able to break down the overall polygon count and downscale textures without sacrificing too much in the way of graphical fidelity. While the downscaled version did not look quite as sharp, it only took about 13 milliseconds for a smartphone to render — down from an hour on high-end desktop hardware.
The behind-the-scenes trickery Seurat employs managed to pare down and compress the original scene from one featuring over 50 million polygons to one with just 72,000 — there was a bit of quality lost in the process, which is to be expected. The real goal of this technology is to enable better VR experiences on mobile devices, which possess only a fraction of the power a VR-ready desktop has at its disposal.
As illustrated in the demo, one key component of the technology essentially eliminates background details that are not visible to users, which enables the mobile versions of VR scenes to appear lifelike and high-quality without overtaxing smartphone hardware.
This forward leap in graphical quality is a big deal for Google’s Daydream ecosystem, which it hopes will become the standard for mobile VR and AR experiences.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.