Day: June 3, 2021

Over the past year, I’ve heavily relied on Google’s Nest Hub Max in the kitchen. This 10-inch smart display has helped me remember important ingredients while I cooked, and it’s entertained me with music as I waited for the water to boil. I’ve enjoyed my time with it so much that when Google unveiled a new version of its 7-inch Nest Hub, I was excited to see if bringing it into my bedroom could upgrade my sleep too.

Sleep Sensing is the hot new feature in Google’s smaller smart display. As the name suggests, it can monitor your sleep—without the need for a camera—and offers suggestions to improve sleep quality. I love pulling my weighted blanket over me and relaxing for the night, but sleep doesn’t always come easy. I toss and turn, my allergies block my nose from breathing normally, and my mind recalls an awkward memory from years past. 

After more than a month with the second-generation Nest Hub on my nightstand, I can’t say I’ve slept any better, but it has enlightened me to a few sleep habits I wasn’t aware of.

Sleep Tight

The new Nest Hub can do everything its predecessor could do. That includes playing movies and music, walking you through recipes, cycling through your photos, controlling smart home devices, and answering all your Google Search queries. There’s not much new in this department, except for the various Assistant-related updates Google typically rolls out in a year.

Visually, you’ll hardly notice a difference. It comes in a few new colors, like “mist,” a pale blue, and Google says it’s made of 54 percent recycled plastic. If you’ve tried other Google smart displays, you know exactly what you’re getting here. 

The first Nest Hub, originally called the Google Home Hub, didn’t have a camera, and neither does the new one; I like that. I never use the video chat function on my Nest Hub Max, though it can be useful if you already use Duo, Google’s default video chat app on Android phones. But considering this Nest Hub is meant for the bedroom, one of the most private places of the home, I’m glad the camera didn’t make an appearance.  

There are now three far-field microphones instead of two, and I haven’t had any issues with it picking up my commands. The speaker has been slightly improved as well, and for something that sits on the nightstand, it’s pretty good! But it’s not going to be my first choice for DJing a party.

The 7-inch screen itself isn’t any different, and unfortunately, performance hasn’t improved all that much either over the first-gen model. It always takes a second or two to trigger actions after I’ve tapped the screen. This is a problem with the larger Nest Hub Max as well. They’re all just a bit laggy. It’s still just as compact as before though. It should easily fit on most bedside tables with room for other items like your phone and a glass of water.  

Sixth Sense

Twice a year, the #PitchYaGame Awards puts a call out for independent game developers around the world to share their latest creations, with cash prizes awarded to the best entries. The latest call for entries was yesterday, and it included a wonderfully original game called Viewfinder that’s part Portal, part Inception, with a dash of Pokémon Snap, and I’ll raise hell if it doesn’t win.

Describing how Viewfinder is played isn’t easy, it’s best explained by simply watching a video of it in action, so please feel free to skip down to the clip embedded below. In its current form, players are dropped into abstract 3D worlds and are challenged with navigating their way across a level from a first-person perspective, but countless obstacles lie in their way, including seemingly impassible gaps and unclimbable structures.

The players aren’t equipped with traditional weapons or building tools to assist them, but they do have access to a Polaroid-like instant camera that can be used to snap 2D photos of the game world itself. That’s great for souvenir collectors, but the instant photos they take can also be held up and overlaid on what the player is seeing in the game, at which point the 2D image will become physical structures incorporated into the game as part of the explorable 3D world.

Viewfinder is also reminiscent of another puzzle game called Scribblenauts which similarly relied on a player’s ingenuity by having them conjure up nearly any object or tool to solve a challenge by simply writing its name in a notebook. In Viewfinder, the instant camera takes the place of that notebook but offers almost an infinite number of ways to solve a challenge, although at the same time it can potentially introduce new ones depending on what you end up adding to that 3D world.

Watching videos of Viewfinder in action, even though the game isn’t finished yet, brings back fond memories of our first exciting glimpses of Valve’s Portal years ago, which brought some much-needed innovation to the first-person shooter genre that didn’t simply involve bigger guns and bigger, badder enemies to blast. Completing Viewfinder won’t require a fast trigger finger, but ingenuity, imagination, and passable photography skills.

Its creator, Robot Turtle, is a game studio founded by Matt Stark’s company, Fern Turtle Games, in collaboration with Robot Teddy. For the time being Viewfinder is the game’s working title, which may or may not change once the game is officially released for PCs and consoles. Unfortunately, there’s no definitive launch date yet, but given the game appears to be breaking new ground, at least in terms of gameplay, we’re happy to let its creators take as much time as they need to deliver what will hopefully be an amazing experience.