From Digital Age to Nano Age. WorldWide.

Tag: Magic

Atoms Lanka Solutions > Magic
Robotic Automations

Apple unveils a new Magic Keyboard at iPad event | TechCrunch

May 8, 2024 12:53 AM0


At its iPad-focused event on Monday, Apple announced a new and improved Magic Keyboard, its keyboard accessory for iPad.

The Magic Keyboard has been “completely redesigned” to be much thinner and lighter, Apple says, and now includes a function row for quick access to controls like screen brightness, volume adjustment and play/pause. Beyond that, the new Magic Keyboard features aluminum palm rests and a larger trackpad. Plus it’s more responsive, Apple says, with haptic feedback and a USB-C port for charging.

It’s the first major revision of the Magic Keyboard since its launch in 2020. And — with the addition of the function row — it’s now on par, feature-wise, with its counterpart the Magic Keyboard Folio.

The new Magic Keyboard comes in two sizes — one for the 11-inch iPad Pro and one for the 13-inch model — and in two colors, black and white. It can be pre-ordered today for the same price as the previous-gen Magic Keyboard, $299 for the 11-inch and $349 for the 13-inch, and will be available in stores next week.

In other keyboard accessory news, there’s a new Smart Folio for iPad Air. It attaches magnetically and supports multiple viewing angles for “greater flexibility” than the old model.

The Smart Folio is available in charcoal gray, light violet, denim and sage and priced at $79 for the 11-inch iPad Air version and $99 for the 13-inch version.

Other announcements at Tuesday’s event included a new iPad Air with an M2 chip and first-ever 13-inch size; a new iPad Pro with completely new M4 chip and stacked OLED screens for higher-fidelity display; a Pro version of the Apple Pencil featuring new sensors; and a new version of the Magic Keyboard. You can catch the full video here:


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Former Magic Leapers launch a platform for AR experiences | TechCrunch

May 2, 2024 8:54 PM0


When Trace’s future co-founders Greg Tran, Martin Smith and Sean Couture joined Magic Leap in spring/summer of 2015, it was about as hot as startups come. After years of secrecy, the augmented reality company captured Silicon Valley’s imagination with in-device footage, before capping the year with an $827 million raise.

The story of the intervening years is one of a massively funded and extremely promising startup struggling to find market fit. Tran exited his creative director role in January 2020, while Couture and Smith left in July 2020 and February 2021, respectively.

Trace was founded in 2021, with Tran, Smith and Couture stepping into the respective roles of CEO, CTO and head of 3D art. The startup, which builds location-based branded augmented reality experiences, is a product of some of Magic Leap’s early content struggles.

“It’s really hard to make AR content,” Tran tells TechCrunch. “It’s really early in the ecosystem. There were a lot of partners with Magic Leap. Whenever they wanted to make content, it would take three to six months to do, take experts in development and 3D art and whole teams of people. We saw an opportunity to make that process a lot easier.”

Trace is a far more modest firm than Magic Leap. In addition to its three founders, the company employs a handful of contractors. Magic Leap’s funding now tops $4 billion. Trace, on the other hand, is announcing a $2 million pre-seed this week, co-led by Rev1 Ventures and Impellent Ventures. Still, the company has already teamed with some high-profile names, including Qualcomm, Telefónica, T-Mobile and Lenovo.

Image Credits: Trace

If you attended Mobile World Congress this year, you may have encountered the AR experience it built for Deutsche Telekom. Or perhaps you saw the mixed-reality offering it built for the Hip Hop 50 Summit last year in New York.

Trace’s offering centers around a creator app designed to easily add AR content to a real-world space. Tran likens it to a Squarespace for AR experiences. Once in place, a user can access the digital content through Trace’s app or a web browser.

The creator experience has thus far been limited to a private beta, but Trace expects to open it to the public over the next few months. When that happens, companies will be able to produce experiences as part of a subscription-based offering.

One way the company is very much in line with Magic Leap, however, is its focus on enterprise clients.

“The partners that we’ve had so far have been some of these big brand companies,” says Tran. “We’re focused on some of those enterprise-level partners first. … This is a consumer-facing product, in a way, but we see there being more opportunity in the enterprise space right now.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Google brings AI-powered editing tools, like Magic Editor, to all Google Photos users for free | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 5:41 AM0


Google Photos is getting an AI upgrade. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free. This expansion also includes Google’s Magic Eraser, which removes unwanted items from photos; Photo Unblur, which uses machine learning to sharpen blurry photos; Portrait Light, which lets you change the light source on photos after the fact, and others.

The editing tools have historically been a selling point for Google’s high-end devices, the Pixel phones, as well as a draw for Google’s cloud storage subscription product, Google One. But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.

Image Credits: Google

There are some caveats to this expansion, however.

For starters, the tools will only start rolling out on May 15 and it will take weeks for them to make it to all Google Photos users.

In addition, there are some hardware device requirements to be able to use them. On ChromeOS, for instance, the device must be a Chromebook Plus with ChromeOS version 118+ or have at least 3GB RAM. On mobile, the device must run Android 8.0 or higher or iOS 15 or higher.

The company notes that Pixel tablets will now be supported, as well.

Magic Editor is the most notable feature of the group. Introduced last year with the launch of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, this editing tool uses generative AI to do more complicated photo edits — like filling in gaps in a photo, repositioning the subject and other edits to the foreground or background of a photo. With Magic Editor, you can change a gray sky to blue, remove people from the background of a photo, recenter the photo subject while filling in gaps, remove other clutter and more.

Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect. And those edits would be more manual, not automated via AI.

Image Credits: Google

With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month. To go beyond that, they’ll still need to buy a Premium Google One plan — meaning 2TB of storage and above.

The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required. The full set of features that will become available includes Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Sky suggestions, Color pop, HDR effect for photos and videos, Portrait Blur, Portrait Light (plus the add light/balance light features in the tool), Cinematic Photos, Styles in the Collage Editor and Video Effects.

Other features like the AI-powered Best Take — which merges similar photos to create a single best shot where everyone is smiling — will continue to be available only to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

OnePlus went ahead and built its own version of Google Magic Eraser | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 7:31 AM0


OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer — for better and worse. Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, the AI Eraser. Before you ask, no, this is not simply a rebadged version of Google’s longstanding and very good Magic Eraser.

Nope, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in a bid to show the world that it has AI ambitions of its own. It’s likely the Oppo-owned company has been working on AI Eraser for some time now — though the world has known about Google’s version since the Pixel 6 event back in March 2021 (Magic Editor, meanwhile, debuted a year back at I/O 2023).

From the sound of its press material, the company went and built this thing ground-up, starting with its own first-party large language models.

“AI Eraser is the result of a substantial R&D investment from OnePlus,” the company notes in its press material. “The proprietary LLM behind the new feature has been trained on a vast dataset that allows it to comprehend complex scenes. Through this advanced visual understanding, AI Eraser is able to intelligently substitute unwanted objects with contextually appropriate elements that naturally elevate the photo’s appeal, empowering users with the ability to make high-quality photo edits anywhere and at any time.”

An AI-powered eraser is an undeniably handy feature, but it’s also one that Google knocked out of the park immediately. It’s probably not the best use of one’s R&D resources to go head to head on that feature — especially a feature that is currently available across iOS and Android devices via Google Photos.

More than anything, this appears to be OnePlus’s attempt to plant its flag into what has very much shaped up to be the year of the smartphone. Hopefully next time, it will use those resources to build something that truly differentiates itself from existing properties.

AI is rolling out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open and OnePlus Nord CE 4. It will not, however, be coming to the R12-D12.




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Back
WhatsApp
Messenger
Viber