Launched earlier today, the Kobo Aura One is the most advanced eReader with a larger 7.8" E Ink screen, waterproofing, a new ComfortLight PRO feature that reduces blue-light exposure for nightime reading and improved functionality for borrowing eBooks from a public library.
eReaders haven't been terribly exciting for some time now. The rise of tablets and phablets has fragmented the market and most users are happy reading on the devices that they already carry with them all the time.
Kobo, clearly pushing for differentiation, has released the Aura One eReader with a larger 7.8" E Ink screen, waterproofing, a new ComfortLight PRO feature that reduces blue-light exposure for nightime reading and improved functionality for borrowing eBooks from a public library.
Coming to Canada on August 30 for 249.99, the Kobo Aura One was designed in collaboration with Kobo's customers and aims to be the one eReader that best fits all and it can be submerged under water for one hour.
Much like what has happened with Google+, Google is taking some of the best features of its Hangouts on Air live-streaming service and moving them to YouTube Live. Starting September 12th, if you want to livestream through a Google service, using YouTube Live is the way to go. Google released a walkthrough on how users can make a transition to YouTube Live, including things like starting, scheduling, and controlling livestreams from there.
The native Q&A feature won’t be included in the transition. This time, Google wants broadcasters to use social media or Google Slides’ Q&A feature to communicate to viewers while streaming. Showcase and Applause are also getting cut.
Mixed reality is almost upon us. Microsoft Windows head Terry Myerson announced at Intel’s annual developers’ conference that the company is partnering with intel to allow Windows 10 PCs coming out next year to have support for mixed-reality applications. What mixed reality is, as defined by Recode:“The key term for mixed reality, or MR, is flexibility. It tries to combine the best aspects of both VR [virtual reality] and AR [augmented reality], wrapped up in a marketable term that sounds marginally less geeky than its cousins. In theory, mixed reality lets the user see the real world (like AR) while also seeing believable, virtual objects (like VR). And then it anchors those virtual objects to a point in real space, making it possible to treat them as "real," at least from the perspective of the person who can see the MR experience.”
The upcoming PCs will have the holographic shell built in—this is the same operating system running on the Microsoft HoloLens headset. PCs will work with a head-mounted display and run all Windows Holographic apps and this will be enabled by “6 degrees of freedom devices,” which are input devices to add positional tracking alongside other traditional input forms like clicking and pointing. And it’ll be widely available, too. So you don’t require a high-powered machine needed by some of today’s VR headsets. The Microsoft demo video at the conference showed Windows 10 Holographic running at 90FPS on a tiny Intel NUC desktop PC.