TechCrunch
Automattic Adds New Media Explorer Tool For Quick Twitter, YouTube Embeds In WordPress.com
Automattic, the parent company of the popular publishing platform WordPress.com, has released a new Media Explorer tool so users can add tweets and YouTube videos to their posts straight from the WordPress.com post editor. The tool is immediately available for WordPress.com and WordPress.com VIP users, and is coming soon to self-hosted WordPress blogs through Jetpack.
Previously, to embed tweets and videos, users needed to find the specific page, copy the tweet or video’s URL and paste it into the post. Now, users can click ”Add Media” in the post editor page and choose “Insert Tweet” or “Insert Youtube.” From there, they can search tweets by keywords, hashtags, users, reply, mention and location. Once the tweet is found, click “Insert” and the tweet will appear on the page. It’s the same process for embedding a YouTube video. Search by keyword or user, and then insert the video straight from the “Add Media” window.
The Media Explorer plug-in was a joint project between WordPress.com VIP and the WordPress web development agency Code For The People. John Blackbourne from Code For The People explained the idea behind Media Explorer in a blog post:
Embedding a YouTube video or a tweet into a WordPress post is powerfully easy. There’s no HTML, no shortcode, no dialog box or Settings page – just the magic of oEmbed, baked right into WordPress core. But it’s so simple, and so unassuming, that many people just don’t know it’s there; and it’s not something they’d ever go looking for. With Media Explorer, we wanted to expose that magic within the user interface.
Mixamo's Facial Expression Capturing Technology Helps Indie Developers Speed Up Character Animation
Mixamo, a startup that helps game developers animate 3D characters in their games and apps, is launching something pretty neat today. Face Plus is a service that lets developers animate characters simply by recording their facial expressions through a webcam. Basically, you can just sit in front of a webcam and make faces, and your character will make those exact same faces back at you.
The video below explains it best. While they are just targeting this at developers, I could imagine a lot of consumer-facing games or apps that would appeal to kids based on this.
Face Plus cuts out the hassle of having to painstakingly animate each facial expression. And it comes at a time when developers are migrating from simple 2-dimensional games to richer 3-D ones as production costs for hit mobile games continue to rise. To use Face Plus, developers need a webcam, the Unity editor, plus a subscription to Mixamo’s service, which costs $1,500 per year per developer seat.
“We were using a Webcam like the kind you can find for $20 at Best Buy,” said Stefano Corazza, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “It doesn’t require any calibration.”
The service was built with the help of AMD, the semiconductor company that is also a strategic investor in Mixamo. They say AMD helped Mixamo with development of the tool through OpenCL, an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems.
To develop it, they had to train their software with hundreds of images and videos of people from different ethnic backgrounds, ages and genders all with many different facial expressions.
The company has raised about $11 million to date and has clients including Microsoft, EA, Sony, Blizzard and Gameloft.
Unity Game Engine To Get Official 2D Game Support And A Built-In Ad Solution
Unity, the increasingly popular “build once, run anywhere” 3D game engine, is going 2D.
At the company’s UNITE conference in Vancouver this morning, CEO David Helgason announced three things: official support for 2D game development, a built-in advertising service called Unity Cloud, and a new game publishing arm of the company, Unity Games.
If you’re unfamiliar with Unity, here are the basics: You build your game in Unity’s editor, and can then publish it to many, many platforms with minimal modification. It currently supports iPhone, Android, BlackBerry 10, Windows/Windows Phone, OS X, Linux, their browser-based web player, and all of the current/next-gen consoles (though you’d still need to work with each console maker for the rights to publish on those).
In terms of popularity, Unity says they’re seeing 100 Unity-based apps installed on mobile handsets per second. That’s just shy of 10 million installs per day.
Unity3D goes 2D
Now, the news that Unity will officially support 2D game development doesn’t mean that you couldn’t build 2D games with Unity before. You could! Rovio’s Angry Birds sequel Bad Piggies was built on Unity, for example.
It’s just always been a bit of a hacked-together process. You had to lock the camera to one plane, force perspective, and install a bunch of third-party extensions for 2D art management… and even then, it always felt like you were forcing a 2D game into a 3D game engine. You were almost working against Unity as much as you were working with it.
When they realized that as many as half of the Unity Games hitting the App Store were 2D games, though, Unity figured it was time to embrace it.
With the release of Unity 4.3 this fall, Unity will be picking up a whole new 2D workflow and set of tools, effectively letting it double as a proper 2D game engine. To get all technical for the 2D game geeks out there: it’s getting a proper, drag-and-drop sprite importer, and built-in texture atlasing (so you can cram a bunch of sprites — like, say, the individual frames of an animation — into one mapped image for the sake of performance). It’s getting a built-in sprite animation editor, and a dedicated 2D renderer with things like layers/depth and parallax scrolling.
(Interesting side note: Helgason tells me that the biggest challenge in finally supporting 2D was figuring out a good workflow — an interface for 2D that worked well and still felt like Unity. They fell in love with the work of a third-party developer, Juha Kiili, who’d built a bunch of 2D add-on tools for the community. So they hired him to lead the charge into 2D.)
Unity has also integrated the open-source and super popular Box2D physics engine, which powers the physics in so many 2D mobile games that it’s crazy. If you’ve played Angry Birds, or Limbo, or Rolando, or Tiny Wings, you’ve seen Box2D in action.
Unity Cloud
Helgason also announced a new tool that they’re calling Unity Cloud. Before you start dreaming of a drop-in solution for game saves in the cloud (à la Steam Cloud), Unity Cloud is a built-in advertising/cross-promotion solution for Unity developers to tie into their mobile/tablet games.
Once integrated, Unity developers set the points in their game where they want full-screen, interstitial ads to be allowed to pop up. They can then control the ads via a web interface. Just launched your game and want it to be an ad-less experience until it proves popular? Just keep all the ads disabled, then check the box in the web interface when you’re ready. Made a sequel and want to promote it? Use the web interface to change all the ads to one supporting your new game.
So far, Unity says they’ve partnered with around a dozen game publishers (Glu, Supercell, and Kabam, among others) to fill their ad inventory.
Helgason tells me that the ads will likely be somewhat simple at first, but will eventually evolve to support much of what the Unity Engine as a whole supports. Imagine being able to advertise your game with a level from your game, loaded on-the-fly.
Unity Games
Back in last year, Unity launched a publishing arm called Union. Union existed to find the best examples of Unity games, and help them get onto platforms they probably otherwise wouldn’t, or that Unity didn’t officially support for most developers — things like the Roku box, or Samsung’s Tizen platform.
Today, Union becomes Unity Games. Besides the name change, the primary difference is the stage at which the team might take interest in a developer; rather than waiting for a Unity-based game to prove popular, Unity Games will be open to helping early stage/conceptual games find their footing. Once a game is under their label, Unity will help the developer both in building the game and distributing it, and with things like testing, analytics, and user acquisition.
It’ll be interesting to see how Unity Games does. They didn’t have any breakout/smash successes as Union — at least, not any that I’m aware of; will opening the doors to earlier stage developers help them find and nurture a hit?
Google+ Hangouts Go HD, Starting With Hangouts On Air
Google today announced that it is bringing HD-quality video to Hangouts, its video chat service. The rollout will start with Hangouts on Air, the live-streamed version of Hangouts that makes group chats available for viewing by anybody on Google+, YouTube and as embeds on a user’s website. Everybody else will be able to get access to this feature “over the next few weeks.”
As Google notes, the higher video quality obviously requires an HD-capable webcam, as well as more bandwidth and processing power than a regular video chat.
As our friends over at Gigaom noted earlier today, the company also switched from using the H.264 video codec to its own open VP8 codec in preparation for this move. This switch, Google VP of Engineering Chee Chew told Gigaom, should be virtually invisible for users, but its adoption has now enabled Google to turn on this HD feature.
Google doesn’t just offer an HD version of Hangouts. Last December, it launched a low-bandwidth version of Hangouts with a bandwidth requirement of just 150 kbps.
In the long run, Chew told Gigaom, the team also plans to embrace WebRTC for plugin-free video conferencing, but to do so, the standard still has to mature. It’s also currently not possible for Google to apply many of the effects it offers in Google+ Hangouts through WebRTC. The WebRTC standard also currently doesn’t give developers control over how much bandwidth these chats use without using a proxy server in the middle. Given these restrictions, it will likely take quite a while before the Hangouts team can enable WebRTC for all of its users.
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