Google Maps - Pokémon Challenge

Call it an April Fools joke, but this is actually a pretty damn awesome collaboration between Google and Nintendo. Google's map software is actually now overrun with Pokémon in an amazing augmented reality stunt that will last till the 2nd of April. Following their Lego intiative, it seems like the Google map team has been having quite a bit of fun with their service.

Using a mixture of GPS and augmented reality goodness, users will be able to track down all 150 Pokémon in their own neighborhoods, with the promise that the best trainers will be invited to Google to take on the best trainers and be hired as a Pokémon Master. While the latter part of that claim is dubious at best, people have actually been out and about capturing them. Kind of like partaking in Geocaching (Except with infinitely more broad appeal), you can update you Google maps app on your Android or iOS phone to partake. I'm honestly hoping that Google actually rewards the people that will probably spend a day or two outdoors capturing every single last one of them.

Say Hello To Google's Project Tango! Augmented Reality On The Go

General interest in augmented reality seems to be going through a reinvigorated phase, and It's exciting to say the least. Google's 'Tango' initiative is an experiment in space, depth and motion, and it seems like the company is intending to crowd source the research and see what people come up with. Crowdsourcing has become a very common trend in various industries, including Valve handing out Steamboxes to developers just recently, DARPA outsourcing vehicle design to concept artists and many other initiatives. The end goal of Tango will probably end up as some sort of mobile wearable interface (A guess), which would be a step beyond what the Oculus Rift could do for gaming.

Project Tango is an exploration into giving mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion. What if you never found yourself lost in a new building again? What if directions to a new location didn't stop at the street address? Imagine playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character. Imagine competing against a friend for control over physical space with your own miniature army.

Build - A Chrome Experiment with LEGO®

In between doing their best to turn themselves into Cyberdyne and recreate the events of the Terminator movies over the past year as well as the various Youtube and Google+ fiascos, I've been starting to think that Google has lost their playful side. However, every once in a while they seem to offer us a collaboration or experiment that beckons back to their golden age of experimenting and offering users ways to make their lives easier.

Get building.

This Lego collaboration is a pretty fun one: Claim stake to a location on Google maps and build whatever you want on it, then publish it to a 1:1 world map which will be populated by any other like-minded brick lover out there. So you could technically immortalize where you live with a living monument to your greatness or whatever else comes to mind with the limited brick set offered. It's free and situated inside your browser, and will probably result in some amazing free worlwide data collection for Lego and Google: Ingenious or diabolical?

Using The New Youtube Commenting System - A Not Sarcastic Tutorial

The recent features that Google has been rolling out to create an unholy union between Google+, Youtube, Gmail and other services - And it's only made me aware that the company might have more of an engineer driven approach to problems instead of a designer based one. It's been quite fun being forced to use a now broken Gmail account, an incredibly un-intuitive commenting system that makes little to no sense and losing a year or two of subscriptions on Youtube thanks to their forced account swap roll out.

Lowtax, ringleader of the Somethingawful forums put together a concise guide to the new Youtube/Google+ rollout that perfectly captures the sheer confusion that they've unleashed with their bizarre new commenting system. Seriously, these recent update fiascos really have me wondering what's going on over in Silicon Valley. You can't win people over on your social network by ramming it down their throat with every service you provide.

"Phonebloks" Modular Phone System Partners With Google To Become A Reality

Following the meteoric success of Dave Hakken's Phoneblok pitch video, which offered a revolutionary phone that could be customizable to the users needs via a modular 'feature block' system. Originally launched on Youtube on September 10, the video went viral and got the attention of the right people as Hakken intended.

Yesterday evening Google subsidiary Motorola announced that they'd be partnering with the Dutch designer to bring the concept to life, and potentially shake up the mobile industry with a concept intended to reduce the waste that traditional mobile phones generate. The company had originally been working on a similar idea over the past year, but found that Hakken's vision could further cement Motorola's initiative. The plan is to roll out an open source module development environment with dev kits in the next few months prior to the launch of the final product, dubbed 'Project Ara.' Stay tuned for more updates.

Google Streetview Hyperlapse

This amazing project was created by Teehan+Lax Labs, a creative think tank created to explore the potential of existing technology and how to push it farther. Using specifically designed code, the developers figured out how to create a truly fluid tool for extracting beautiful timelapses out of the image rich Google map data. Their official release below:

Hyper-lapse photography – a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest – has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.

The site settings are purposely low (like having a maximum of 60 frames per animation) for greater accessibility. However, all the source code is available on Github (including examples and documentation) so developers can play with higher frame rates, better image quality, and more complicated camera movements

The First Google Glass Short Film

Interesting timing. On the same day that the Apple unveiled the next generation of their product, Google dropped this video of a film captured using the companies newest augmented reality eyewear product, known as Google Eye and Project Glass. The glasses supposedly weigh less than a pair of sunglasses, and are integrated with memory, a processor, a camera, speaker, microphone, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi antennas, an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and battery to boot.

I can't help but be excited by the possibilities of this product, especially due to the fact that it falls into an all new mass market tech product category and the quality looks amazing (If it's not mocked up). And with a launch date of 2014, they should definitely have some time to streamline and improve the design of the glasses. I'll definitely be getting one of these day one, I've been stuck on augmented reality ever since discovering Ghost In The Shell.

Project Glass : A Glimpse Of The Future

After much speculation, Google finally unveiled their 'Project X,' a futuristic proof of concept augmented reality display that will integrate smart phone capabilities into a slick pair of wrap around glasses. The initial response has been mixed, with naysayers mainly stating that they're going to run into everything (And everyone) and have to deal with intrusive apps, but I guess those people failed to look at the actual design of the glasses, which obviously don't obscure the viewers vision. The glasses are currently being location tested by Google employees, with plans to someday develop these into a mass market product.

Being a bit of a futurist, I definitely embrace Google's forward thinking and their drive to make concepts once considered a thing of science fiction into a reality. Remember Google's self driving car we reported about just a week ago? I'm definitely appreciating the direction they're headed in. As an added bonus for them, it would actually be a great incentive to finally use Google+. Check out the parody video for the Project Glass initiative which appeared just hours after the official video below. Would you wear a pair?

Google Maps Drops An 8-Bit Bomb

We're on the eve of April fools at this point, but I think Google has already won the war for best prank product I actually would love to have. According to Google, the NES will finally be getting Google Maps, themed to the likes of Dragon Quest and complete with crunchy 8bit music. Remember, blow on the cartridge to get rid of bugs! Absolutely amazing.

Microsoft Assaults The Googlighting Stranger

I watched this video in awe: I just couldn't believe that this was an official Microsoft video. Yet lo and behold, it was and today Microsoft has fired its initial salvo against Google and its cloud-based Google Apps products. The video, “Beware the Googlighting Stranger,” is a (Edit: f***ing terrible) response to Google’s cloud-based productivity suite.

The description asks: "What happens when the world’s largest advertising business tries to sell productivity software on the side?” and it's true. I remain neutral as I haven't tried out the system or used Google outside of searching or as a web-browser but the video does raise a good point as to why the cloud-based applications aren't hitting off; Google Office doesn't work offline. Microsoft office however, does.

Though I find the biggest piece in the irony cake is Microsoft slamming Google on Youtube, which is owned by Google. Ballsy in concept, but marred by the absolutely terrible execution.

Google Celebrates Halloween The One Way They Know How

How does Google celebrate Halloween? By putting up a really cool video on their front page! Did you expect any less? This stop motion video features the Google gang shaping 6 giant pumpkins into the 6 letters before the twilight hours, with the Google crew messing about and getting changed into costumes in the meantime. Some day the Awesome-Robo crew will make a halloween video on a more epic scale with 11 pumpkins spelling out the site, and a giant robot cat holding it up. But hey, until we can make that magic work we'll let Google use our idea.

Google Celebrates Charlie Chaplin's Birthday The Only Way They Know How

Logging onto Google today gave me a great treat. The Google Doodle team stars in an homage to the silent film era's greatest star's 122nd birthday. I was watching Modern Times yesterday, and I forgot how great his comedy was.

Happy Birthday sir!