Author: peterjang73

A nerdy father of two, a husband of a beautiful and understanding wife, an engineer who loves anime and tinkering with PCs and games, but most of all, loves God.
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Google turns Toontastic into a 3D storytelling app

Google Education has launched a 3D version of Toontastic, almost two years after Mountain View bought the company that created it. The new Toontastic stays true to the original version: it’s still a storybook app, except now kids can work with 3D characters and environments. They can animate short three-dimensional movies by customizing characters and placing them in interactive scenarios, or they can use the tool to make projects for school. Google describes the updated Toontastic as some sort of a digital puppet theater. The app is now out on the App Store and on Google Play for phones, tablets and select Chromebooks.

Mountain View’s Education division regularly works on projects kids can learn from and enjoy, such as initiatives that teach them how to code. Last year, it developed a way to make exploring the Himalayas online more fun with the help of a friendly jetpack-riding yeti named Verne. It also once offered a $30,000 scholarship prize for a Google Doodle contest featuring K-12 students in the US.

Source: Google Education

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Windows 10 is about to get a high-performance Game Mode

Microsoft made a big fuss out of the Windows 10 Creators Update’s gaming features, and it’s nearly ready to start delivering on them… including some that have remained mysterious. The company has revealed that it’ll start trotting out a largely unknown Windows 10 Game Mode as part of Insider previews "this week." The improvement won’t be fully functional until later releases, but Microsoft has at last shed some light on what it is: it’ll fine-tune your PC to speed up gaming performance. This mode should help both legacy Windows games (Win32) and modern titles (UWP), so you won’t have to be picky about what you’re playing to notice a difference. You should "soon" hear a lot more about how it works, Microsoft says.

The news comes as Microsoft has detailed some of the already known upgrades hitting both the Xbox One and Windows 10 in the months ahead. Baked-in Beam livestreaming will be the centerpiece on both platforms, giving you a simple way to share whatever you’re playing. On the Xbox One, you’ll also see an enhanced, always-available Guide with faster access to game recording and music controls, an Achievement tracking overlay, a new look for Cortana and a Gamerscore leaderboard.

Both platforms will receive Xbox Live upgrades that help you connect to friends on social networks, a more social-friendly Activity Feed, better tools for Clubs and looking-for-group posts, and the option to start your own Arena tournaments in games like Killer Instinct and World of Tanks. So long as you’re willing to be patient (you won’t get much of this until at least the Creators Update), you’ll have a lot to look forward to.

Via: Mike Ybarra (Twitter)

Source: Xbox Wire

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Six futuristic off-road vehicles

By Cat DiStasio

"Where we’re going, we don’t need roads." When Doc Brown said it, he was driving a flying time machine, of course. But not all vehicles need to become airborne to travel off the grid. This capability is especially important in rural areas where roads have never existed, or in disaster recovery situations where pathways are no longer passable due to earthquakes or flooding. No matter the reason, a slew of innovations are tackling off-road transportation like never before. Some futuristic all-terrain vehicles are built to drive over just about anything, while others have been engineered to carry their own road surface and pick it back up as they truck along. Whether the situation calls for traveling over impassable obstacles or creating a road for other vehicles, there’s a tough machine out there to tackle the job.

Road-carrying truck

B-Y-O-Road? Welsh company Faun Trackway dreamed up (and built) a truck that can travel where there are no roads — because it carries its own. Mounted on the back of an otherwise pretty standard-looking truck, a roll of thin aluminum extrusions can be unfurled to create a 50-meter roadway. The resulting temporary surface is capable of supporting vehicles weighing up to 70 metric tons, so the road-laying truck is a great companion for delivery and rescue vehicles carrying heavy supplies into otherwise hard-to-reach areas. Once the convoy has traversed the aluminum roadway, Faun Trackway’s creation rolls the road back up and hustles along to its next challenging destination.

Electric "spider" car

The Swincar is a bizarre but useful car that can drive just about anywhere. Each of the vehicle’s independently driven wheels is attached to a spider-like leg for extra ground clearance, and powered by its own electric motor. This setup translates to a lot of power and control, so uneven terrain barely even slows the Swincar down, let alone stops it in its tracks. Because it’s an all-electric vehicle with no emissions, the Swincar one-ups traditional ATVs in the sustainability department as well.

Tunnel zipper truck

This truck can not only drive where there is no road, but it can build a 14-mile tunnel out of Lego-like bricks in just 24 hours. The zipper truck is equipped with rollers held in place by a tapered metal core, and the wider front of the truck allows the tailored lock-blocks to be placed just so, creating a perfect archway. Much like the historic arch’s Roman predecessors, the arched tunnels zipped together by this truck need no mortar or adhesive to stay together. Even better, the blocks can be removed once the tunnel is no longer needed and then be reused many times over.

Slope-worthy VW party bus

While some off-road vehicles are designed with serious functions in mind, others are just looking for a good party. This modified 1966 VW Bus Bulli T1 was created with slope-side jams in mind, and its wheels were replaced with rubber snowmobile tracks. The hip party van can travel across the snow at a good clip — around 30 miles per hour — and comes equipped with a 1,000-watt subwoofer and two 300-watt speakers (as well as two turntables and a microphone). Just add snow and your own DJ.

Automatic brick road machine

Designed to make charming brick roads even easier to lay down, this Dutch machine does the work of a crew of human laborers in a fraction of the time. Dubbed Tiger-Stone, the automatic paver-laying machine can lay up to 400 square meters of gorgeous brick road in a day. Adjustable to widths up to six meters, the machine is fed by human workers who stack bricks into an angled hopper in the desired pattern. The machine then leverages gravity to lower the bricks onto the pre-leveled ground where a sand layer has been prepared. Tiger-Stone eliminates the back-breaking aspects of bricklayers’ jobs, while cutting both time and cost and — best of all — leaves behind a beautiful brick road where there was none before.

All-terrain adaptive tricycle

This hybrid tricycle helps adventurers with disabilities go places they’ve never been able to go before. Created by designer Jesse Lee, the Horizon can traverse a wide variety of surfaces that wheelchairs and other adaptive vehicles struggle with, such as gravel, hills, grass and dirt. It’s powered by electricity and pedal power (controlled either by hand or foot), which can be combined in one of three different "driving modes," depending on how much power is needed. The Horizon can go up to 25 miles per hour, and its 48-volt lithium-ion battery offers a 30-mile range on a full charge.

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