ambience
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Free Sleep Sounds - get some shut-eye or relax with this free app
Free Sleep Sounds (free!) joins a pretty crowded field of apps designed to help you sleep, relax or meditate. The app contains 25 well-recorded environments in stereo in categories like Ocean, Rivers and Streams, Wind, Fire, Birds and more. A unique feature is the ability to created blended mixes of any of up to six tracks, so you could hear wind along with the crickets. The app can run in the background. Free Sleep Sounds also shows you some nice images taken around the world to accompany the sounds. There is a sleep timer, and the tracks nicely fade out so they are not jarring. I tried Free Sleep Sounds with headphones as well as on a Bluetooth Stereo speaker, and found the audio quality quite good. Using this ad-supported app is easy enough, but it has the most intrusive and obnoxious ad placement I have seen in years. The screen bounces with notifications, and many of the ads are animated and distracting. It is the LAST thing I would want to see in an app designed to help me relax. If you look at the screen at all, anxiety replaces any soothing effects the soundscapes are designed to create. At times I wanted to throw my iPhone out the nearest window. The same developer offers a paid app that is actually a pretty good deal. While it is on sale for US$0.99, Sleep Sounds HQ offers more than 600 relaxing sounds. Some of the categories are a bit weird, like Industrial and Trains; not the kinds of soundscapes I would think of first if I needed to get some rest. Still, there is so much to choose from and the lack of ads makes Sleep Sounds HQ seem the better deal. I would suggest trying the free app and see if you like the sounds and features; if you do, migrate to the paid version. I am sure that was the developer's intention in the first place... My favorite sleep/relaxation app is still Naturespace. It's a free app with a lot of in-app purchases, but the audio is first rate, and the free version has some great soundscapes. Naturespace is designed for headphone listening and has special settings for earbud listeners, but it sounds fine over external speakers. Sleep Sounds and Naturespace both provide natural sounds, which I prefer to synthesized soundscapes. Free Sleep Sounds requires iOS 6 or later. It's not universal, and it is optimized for the iPhone 5.
Choose My Adventure: Neverwinter wonderland
When I think about what separates a good Neverwinter Foundry mission from a great Foundry mission, I have to say that it's the ambiance. Ambiance ranges from sounds to lighting to special effects. I could create the best mission ever, write the best story, but if I don't create the best ambiance for the quest, my design could fall flat. What are some of the best ways to create ambiance? Which ones should I put into this Choose My Adventure? In my limited time in the Neverwinter Foundry, I have barely been able to scratch the surface of everything that the design tool has to offer. Of course, decorations such as a dining table in a dining room add to the atmosphere of the setting, but so does the sun shining through the window or the NPCs clapping in the next room. Today, I need your assistance in choosing the different types of ambiance for different parts of our adventure.
Yantouch Black Diamond 3D ambience iPhone dock hands-on
While we weren't busy kicking up dust on the CES floors, we sat down with Taiwan-based Yantouch to have a fiddle with its latest product, the Black Diamond. When not in use, it really is just a gorgeous spherical black diamond, or at least its faceted front half is; but slip in an iPhone 4 with the Black Diamond app enabled, and you get a funky sound sensitive mood lamp. On top of that, the dock also charges up your iPhone while it shows off its colors, and somewhere at the bottom there's some black magic that channels out amplified audio from the phone, although actual speakers would be even nicer. Ultimately, Yantouch sees the Black Diamond as a developing platform for potential applications like an outdoor temperature indicator, or some sort of caller ID color tagging tool for seeing from afar who's calling. If all goes well, Yantouch will even consider making an Android version, but we're not sure if the $79 price tag will immediately catch on. Anyhow, check out our hands-on video after the break. %Gallery-113922%
GDC09: Raph Koster kicks off Worlds in Motion Summit
Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2009 has begun and Massively is in the trenches to report on all the big announcements for the massively multiplayer online gaming industry, plus we have some great interviews lined up all week as well. Our GDC 2009 coverage begins with today's Worlds in Motion Summit, kicked off by Raph Koster, MMO and virtual worlds luminary. Koster's speech is short, essentially a quick review of the virtual worlds trends he's observed over the past year. It's important to see things in perspective, Koster points out, mentioning that virtual worlds have recently turned 30, and are now a far cry from their MUD origins. Hardcore, geeky stuff Koster says, and we've come a long way since then. "We've kind of arrived, haven't we?" Koster asks. "One half of American adults are gamers today, which is an incredible step."
