Bloom
Latest
Philips Hue leaks show new versatility for Lightstrip Plus and Bloom
The Lightstrip Plus will now offer more versatility.
The Obamas' production company unveils its first Netflix projects
The production company from President and Mrs. Obama, Higher Ground, has unveiled its first lineup of Netflix shows roughly a year after forging a deal with the streaming giant. The initial seven-show catalog will take "several years" to arrive, but is unsurprisingly an optimistic mix of shows that exemplify "resilience, determination, and hope" and focus on "transcending divides to bring us together." Not that they're all squeaky-clean -- some of them explore difficult subjects.
Brian Eno's music creation app is coming to Android, 10 years late
If you remember the early days of Apple's App Store, you might remember Bloom, Brian Eno's "generative music" app. It showed the potential of the smartphone as an artistic tool at a time when mobile apps were still novelties. Well, it's coming back with a vengeance on its tenth anniversary... and it's not just for iOS users this time. Eno and Peter Chilvers are releasing Bloom: 10 Worlds, a "significant" expansion and refinement that will be available for Android in addition to the iPad and iPhone. The core formula, where you touch the screen to introduce new sounds and influence the visuals, remains intact -- there's just a lot more to do.
How to make your dumb home smarter without spending a fortune
If you go all out connecting your house, you can end up spending as much upgrading a smart home as it costs to build a dumb one. But you don't need a ton of proprietary gear to pimp your crib with 21st-century tech. Your smartphone and tablet already serve to consolidate your digital life, and they can do the same with your lights, power outlets, air conditioning and nanny cam -- even your door locks and Crock-Pot can be app-controlled, if you so please. Join us below to explore affordable options for your entire home, all of which can be installed yourself.
Radiohead launches experimental interactive app PolyFauna
English music group Radiohead launched its own interactive app on iOS and Android today called PolyFauna. The app is an "experimental collaboration" with design studio Universal Everything, and is free to download. While it's not a game in the traditional sense of the word, PolyFauna presents users with an abstract, evolving world viewed from a first-person perspective. Viewers float through the world, turning their devices to view the artistic environment around them and follow a floating red dot to seemingly "warp" to a new area. The app uses imagery and sounds from Radiohead's song "Bloom." The band described its inspiration for PolyFauna as coming from "an interest in early computer life-experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious." [Image: Radiohead]
Philips expands iOS-controlled Hue line
Still love it when the lights in your house flash a rainbow of colors every time you're mentioned in a tweet? According to The Verge, Philips has announced two new additions to the Hue line of internet-controlled lighting; the US$89.95 LightStrips and the $79.95 Bloom. LightStrips are flexible, sticky-backed two-meter lengths of small LEDs made for accent lighting and things like frames. The Bloom (seen below, from the German Philips website) is a portable lamp that can be used to highlight an entire wall with its 120-lumen LED bulb. Both lights require the Philips Hue wireless bridge, which is part of the $199.95 starter kit available at Apple Stores and other retail locations. That kit includes the bridge and three controllable LED bulbs. All of the Hue lighting products are energy-efficient and can be controlled through the Hue app or IFTTT recipes to display any of more than 16 million colors in a number of intensity levels. A source for The Verge explained that the new lights are supposed to appear in Apple Stores and on Apple's online store soon, although the publication was not able to get a response from either Apple or Philips.
Lightscaping at home with Philips' Hue LightStrips and Bloom (hands-on video)
Earlier today, Philips announced two new add-ons for its app-controlled Hue system: LivingColors Bloom, a standalone portable fixture, and LightStrips, a 6.6-foot LED tape that you can affix to any surface using the included adhesive back. Both products are fully compatible with the existing Hue system, including the base station and three-bulb kit that launched at Apple Stores last year. Knowing that part of the solution's appeal is its quick and easy setup, we decided to build out a five-light rig at home using three standard bulbs, one Bloom and one LightStrips set. It took less than an hour to get up and running, including swapping out bulbs, running power to LightStrips and setting up the base station and app. In order to take full advantage of available "scenes" (lighting color macros based on uploaded images), you'll want to install all of your bulbs in one room or open space. You can very easily control the color and brightness of each unit using the Android or iOS app, however, so if you prefer to go that route, there's no reason you can't install Hue all over your house, as long as you don't go beyond the 50 maximum units each base station can support. For now, most of the available scenes support one through three fixtures, not the five you'll end up with if you have one complete kit, a Bloom and LightStrips in your home, so we avoided using scenes for the time being. If you're using app version 1.1 on iOS, you can take advantage of IFTTT integration, too, letting you set up a virtually endless number of macros. Even with five Hue fixtures in a small space, the room was a bit too dark -- this solution works best for accent lighting, so unless you're prepared to use 20 bulbs in a room, you'll probably want to mix in traditional fixtures, too. Still, Hue serves its purpose well, and we definitely see the appeal despite the $200 you'll spend on the base kit, $80 for the bloom and $90 for the LightStrips. See our installation in action in the hands-on video after the break.%Gallery-195485%
Philips grows Hue smartphone-controlled lighting lineup with $80 LivingColors Bloom, $90 LightStrips
There's no shortage of home automation solutions on the market, but none can touch the cool factor of Philips' Hue. The Android and iOS-controlled lighting solution consists of a base station that controls up to 50 different lights, including the company's existing LED Connected Bulb, and two new additions, designed to let you add light without a standard lamp socket. The first product, LivingColors Bloom, is a compact fixture that you can position on the floor, on a shelf or anywhere in a room. It sits on the ground and bounces your pick of 16 million colors off any surface. LightStrips, on the other hand, is a better fit for more permanent (and subtle) installations. The 6.6-foot LED strip can be cut to size, and includes an adhesive backing, so it can be easily mounted under a counter, bed or inside cabinets. Both offerings support the full Hue color spectrum, and are compatible with existing apps and macros, including the IFTTT integration that debuted in May. Hue Bloom is set to retail for $80, while LightStrips will run you 90 bucks. Expect both products in Apple Stores this Thursday.
Apple says it now gets 75 percent of its total energy from renewable sources
Based on the latest reports, the company once chided for making too large an impact on Mother Earth is now claiming that a full 75 percent of its energy is being sourced from renewables. Apple's chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, informed Reuters this week that all of its data centers -- including the gargantuan facility in Maiden, North Carolina -- are now fully powered by renewable energy from onsite and local sources, while three-fourths of the energy used by the whole company is pulled from green sources. For those wondering, that includes solar, wind, hydro and geothermal, and the 75 percent mark is a stark 40 percent uptick from just two years ago. As for what the future holds? According to Apple: "We won't stop working until we achieve 100 percent throughout Apple." Alrighty then.
Scape, Brian Eno's new ambient music creation app is now available on the iPad (video)
Music making apps for the iPad are ten-a-penny, but when it's the brainchild of a super-producer like Brian Eno, you have to take notice. Scape is the third of his collaborations with Peter Chilvers after Bloom and Trope, an app that lets you generate ambient music with Eno's own sounds on a colorful, conceptual interface. Unlike standard beats'n'loops setups, each sound is tied to a series of rules -- including the time of day -- that ensures the tunes you create never play the same way twice. It's available from iTunes for $5.99 / £3.99, and who knows, maybe in a few years time, Coldplay'll come calling for your professional expertise.
App review: Planetary for iPad
The iPad's music player hasn't changed much since its debut, and unlike its desktop counterpart, it also lacks a built-in music visualizer for your mesmerization. Luckily, for the folks who are seeking ways to spice up their iPad music experience, you now have a new option: Planetary, by Bloom Studio. As you can tell by the name and the screenshot above, what we have here is a visually compelling app for exploring your tablet's music library. It's very straightforward: each artist or band is shown as a star, surrounded by albums in the form of orbiting planets, and then you have individual tracks displayed as moons orbiting each album. During playback, each track leaves behind a trail on its orbit to indicate its play time, though you can hide the orbit lines (and labels) if you them too distracting. To choose other albums or artists, the good old pinch-to-zoom or the simple tapping on other 3D objects will move you between the moons and constellations, or you can just tap on the bottom-center button to jump straight to the letter selector for artists. Obviously, the former's more fun within the first few hours, but after awhile we found ourselves preferring the quicker option to skip the mellow animation. Head past the break for our full impression and demo video. %Gallery-122989%
Bloom Electrons' pay-what-you-consume service thinks outside the Box
Bloom Energy's aptly-titled Bloom Box made a splash last year with much hooplah, bringing the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Colin Powell to its unveiling. But while the promise of efficient fuel cell technology is great for the eco-minded and even the long-term penny-pincher, the mid-to-high six-figure upfront cost limits the potential customer base to only the upper echelon of the environmentally conscious. Cue Bloom Electrons -- instead of paying for the Bloom Boxes and owning them outright, you can lease a 2MW installation for no money down and pay only for the electrons you use. A 10-year contract is required, which yes does put your smartphone commitment to shame, but Bloom hopes this Credit Suisse / Silicon Valley Bank-backed plan opens the door for educational institutions and non-profits to join in on the fun. Press release after the break.
AT&T cries foul over T-Mobile's 'HSPA+ is 4G' talk
No matter how much T-Mobile wants to pretend, HSPA+ is not on the same upload / download pay grade as LTE and WiMAX. Still, that isn't stopping the company from calling its new technology rollout "4G speeds," much to the dismay of another major HSPA+ supporter, AT&T. Cue Ma Bell spokesman Seth Bloom, who recently told Fierce Wireless, "I think that companies need to be careful that they're not misleading customers by labeling HSPA+ as a 4G technology." Of course, AT&T itself is rolling out that technology as an intermediate step between current 3G and LTE, and we know they want to reserve the 4G nomenclature for the latter's unveiling. Hey guys, can we just label it 3.95G and call it day?
Bloom 'Box' Energy Server hands-on (literally) with video!
So here it is, the now-famous (that was fast) Bloom "Box" Energy Servers -- all five of 'em -- working their magic at eBay's north campus. Not much to look at, but we're happy to say it retains a low temperature -- the only heat we really found was due to direct exposure to the light -- and remains quiet while running. There are vents just underneath the sides where cool air was being pumped out. Of course, its raison d'etre is its ability to more efficiently deliver power, which is not something we can really test ourselves. Bloom Energy showcased a number of customers today -- FedEx, Walmart, Staples, Google, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Cox, and of course, eBay -- and if the numbers meet their mark, you can color us mighty impressed. You know the drill: gallery below, quick video after the break! %Gallery-86437% %Gallery-86409%
The Bloom Box: a power plant for the home (video)
Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home -- one block can power the average European home. At least that's the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that's been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell. Bloom's design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green "ink" on one side and a black "ink" on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities -- a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks. Now get this, skeptics: there are already several corporate customers using refrigerator-sized Bloom Boxes. The corporate-sized cells cost $700,000 to $800,000 and are installed at 20 customers you've already heard of including FedEx and Wal-mart -- Google was first to this green energy party, using its Bloom Boxes to power a data center for the last 18 months. Ebay has installed its boxes on the front lawn of its San Jose location. It estimates to receive almost 15% of its energy needs from Bloom, saving about $100,000 since installing its five boxes 9 months ago -- an estimate we assume doesn't factor in the millions Ebay paid for the boxes themselves. Bloom makes about one box a day at the moment and believes that within 5 to 10 years it can drive down the cost to about $3,000 to make it suitable for home use. Sounds awfully aggressive to us. Nevertheless, Bloom Energy will go public with details on Wednesday -- until then, check the 60 Minutes sneak peek after the break. [Thanks, Abe P.]
10 cool videos of the iPhone as a music instrument
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/10_cool_videos_of_the_iPhone_as_a_music_instrument'; The hyperbole around the iPhone platform has become hyperbolic itself, so I'll spare you the deconstruction of what is now an obvious conclusion: the iPhone has musical chops. The dizzying array of apps on the store has led to quite a few musical apps as well. It makes sense, as the multi-touch screen is a divine interface for manipulating sound. Along with the dump truck of musical apps has come an even larger group of iPhone performers. I have yet to see impromptu drum circles made of iPhones, but you never know what the future will bring. We begin our afternoon concert with Jordan Rudess demoing one of my favorite musical apps, Bebot. Take it away, Jordan!
Revolutionary: Special Effects
This week, graphics professionals and enthusiasts flocked to SIGGRAPH to share and discuss the latest technologies and techniques for making gorgeous computer graphics. The focus of the convention is mainly offline rendering (the stuff that we see in print, movies, and television that's too complex to be rendered in real time), but as computers and game consoles become more powerful, many of these methods and effects make their way into the realm of realtime rendering. Ten years ago, the opening cutscene for Super Mario Galaxy would have needed to be rendered by a cluster of computers and converted into full motion video. Even though the Wii is not pushing graphical fidelity the way this generation's HD consoles are, we've still come a long way and there's much to be appreciated. There are all sorts of graphical effects that, over the years, have been added to the game artist's palette, and in this edition of Revolutionary, I'd like to draw your attention to a few of them. When games like Super Mario Galaxy come along, we find ourselves questioning how it's possible for them to look so good, while most other Wii wares have the appearance of games designed for a much weaker platform. It's easy to forget that the Wii's hardware comes from the strong pedigree of Gamecube when much of what we're looking at reeks of Playstation number two. With multi-platform shovelware, and even a few high profile titles that didn't get any special consideration on the Wii (Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band, I'm lookin' at you!), developers often drop assets and effects to a lowest common denominator. In the class which Wii is placed, the Playstation 2 has the lowest and most common specs, so our Wii graphics are brought down to its level. The PS2 has had its share of beautiful games, but the methods for making them so beautiful are uncommon enough that they're largely ignored when making games that will have to be replicated on another console in the same class. It's often the first and second party games or that rare, exclusive third-party effort that is given the budget and time to explore the depths of the Wii's fixed-function graphics hardware and pull off something it wasn't expressly designed for. And considering that the core technologies in the Wii were designed nearly a decade ago, there's a lot of "new tricks" that artists and programmers have had to teach the "old dog."
No threat for Lifebloom
Lume the Mad has done the math (very thoroughly), and he's got the answer for Druids: the end healing burst of Lifebloom doesn't cause any threat at all, either for the caster or the recipient. He first pared the entire situation of casting Lifebloom down to its basic elements -- you've got a player who body pulls a mob, and a Druid healing them. He took out all possible reactive abilities that might cause threat, and then set up a situation where the Druid obtained threat, and cast LIfebloom on another player, with an opposing faction Shaman purging the spell early (so it could jump straight to the end heal), and the mob stayed on the Druid -- the big heal didn't cause threat for the recipient at all. Finally, Lum tested if the Druid was recieving aggro, and as you can see above, neither the Druid caster or the Warlock is affected by the end heal of Lifebloom -- just one point of damage can still pull the mob around.There's been a lot of discussion about this already -- the HoT aspect of Lifebloom still does cause threat (for the Druid), and so you combine that with the fact that lots of people were testing under "unsecure" situations, and the whole thing got very confusing. But Lum's tests seem very clear: Druids can cast away knowing that they won't pull aggro with that burst of healing at the end of the spell.[Thanks, Matticus!]
Gundam 0079 screens rise from the ashes
Finally, some Mobile Suit Gundam MS Front 0079 screens that are as big and beautiful as the stars themselves. It's been a while since we saw anything on the title -- and even then, we were limited to tiny screens and grainy scans -- but it looks like the wait was worth it, even if the bloom is a little crazy at times.The game released this week in Japan, so what you see here is how it'll look if (when?) the title makes it to our shores.%Gallery-5185%
Death Jr. 2 to feature HDR lighting?!
Death Jr. was the first PSP game to be publically shown, and it wowed a whole lot of people with its technical prowess. If a new interview at QJ.net is to be believed, it appears that we'll be wowed again. Chris Carla commented:Well, we used Renderware on our first game on PSP, and it wasn't exactly perfectly tuned for PSP. After we removed it for [Death Jr. 2], we found our framerates hit 90fps... before we knew it, thanks to our fantastic tech staff, we had light blooms, High Dynamic Range lighting, and lots of other lighting and frame buffer effects running in the game. The net result is that we've probably got some of the most technically advanced features of any title on PSP at this point, which is pretty cool. We've done a lot more than that as well; I think people will be pleased by the tech in the game, and our loading times are still extremely short.Can this really be possible on a handheld? Death Jr. 2 seems to address the problems of the original and throws in a multiplayer co-op mode to boot. The sequel comes out this Halloween, but until then, don't forget you can check out the original for only $10.
