 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Degracia A. Daniels, Irwin Ster, and Ken Hayes. Coming up on DTNS, is the Metaverse open or less open? Plus, video games might help your mental health and all things retro gaming with Demetris Genakis. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 27th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Mitch Schroffalino. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Demetris Genakis is also joining us, game developer and host of the modern vintage gamer on YouTube. Demetris, thank you so much for joining us. You are very welcome, it's great to be here. Well, we're so happy to have you. We're going to talk about gaming in a few minutes, but let's start with a few tech things you should know. Well, the rough quarter for tech earnings continues. Don't worry, Twitter and Snap, it wasn't just you. In Q2, Alphabet earned $1.21 per share on revenue, up 13% in the year, to $69.69 billion, but both missed analyst estimates. Overall, ad revenue grew 12% in the year to $56.3 billion. It's slowest since Q3 2020, while YouTube ad revenue grew just 5% in the year. Google Cloud revenue grew 35.6% to $6.27 billion, although the unit's operating loss increased 45% to $858 million. In more earnings news, in its Q4 earnings, Microsoft earned $2.23 per share on its slowest revenue growth since 2020. That's up 12% on the year to $51.87 billion, both missing analyst estimates. Its intelligent cloud unit, which includes Azure and Windows Server, grew revenue 20% on the year to $20.91 billion, with Azure revenue of 40%. That sounds good. More personal computing revenue increased 2% on the year to $14.36 billion. Within this though, gaming revenue fell 7% on the year. In other earnings, in its Q2, Spotify grew monthly active users 19% to 433 million, with paid users up 14% to 188 million, AKA premium and paying users are up 14%. The company also announced it discontinued its car thing product, setting demand and supply chain issues, and it just not being for sale for most of its existence. And just people being like, why did you do this? You named it car thing, we don't get it. No one got it, and now they're discontinued. All right, so moving off of earnings for a minute, Google added almost 100 photorealistic aerial views to landmarks in maps, Google Maps. These new aerial views are a first step to launch the immersive view that the company showed off at Google IO earlier this year. The company also relaunched Street View on Maps with 10 cities in India. You might recall it suspended the service in the country in 2016 due to lack of security clearances from the government. Google partnered with local firms, Genesis International and Tech Mahindra for the relaunch and plans to expand to 50 cities by the end of the year. And Sony confirmed its upcoming PSVR2 headset will include a see-through view mode to view your surroundings, a broadcast mode to record yourself while playing and a cinematic mode to display non-VR games and content on a virtual screen. The broadcast mode does require a PS5 HD camera attached to your console. Still though, no word on price or launch date, probably what everyone is kind of waiting for at this point. I'm actually kind of interested in the whole, non-VR, watch a movie on a plane type thing that I think they're going for here. All right, so let's talk about the metaverse. I know we've talked about it ad nauseam, but it keeps on ticking. The Federal Trade Commission filed for an injunction to block meta from buy meta, you know, formally Facebook, from buying the virtual company, virtual reality company within, which is the maker of VR game, Supernatural, which I'm a big fan of and I've talked about quite a bit on the show in the past, possibly limiting meta's push into the metaverse. It's an anti-trust lawsuit and the first to be filed under Lena Kahn, the current commission's chair. Now the Verge reports that meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in an all-hands meeting earlier this month that meta is competing with Apple to determine what direction the internet should go in. Zuckerberg hopes meta will be seen as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple. Apple hasn't announced its VR or AR plans in any official capacity, but boy, there are a lot of rumors and it is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year. And meta is participating in the metaverse open standards group along with other tech giants like Microsoft, Epic Games and others to create open protocols that will let people easily move through future immersive 3D worlds with their virtual goods working on standards like the equivalent of a JPEG in VR, for example. Zuckerberg points out that Apple's approach to building hardware and software, it tightly controls works well for the iPhone, but that it's not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better when it comes to the metaverse. So you might be saying, well, okay, so meta says it's pitted against Apple because Apple's closed and meta is open. How is meta going to make money? Like what is the, you know, what's the long view here? As for how meta's metaverse future looks from a revenue standpoint, Zuckerberg also said in the same meeting, our North Star is that can we get a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade? If we do that, we'll build a business that is as big as our current ad business within the decades. So, all right, what do we think? Is meta like the Android to iOS when it comes to an open metaverse? Is that too much? Is meta stretching here? You know, can meta convince users of that? It's a little weird in terms of direction, isn't it? I like that comparison, except it's kind of backwards. Like normally what you do is Apple will do a thing and then somebody else like Android will come around and say here is a viable, strong alternative. That's not what's happening here. And I think it's a little weird that meta doesn't want to try to lead. I mean, they stay, they do, but this feels like they're reacting to something we don't even know what it is yet. We don't know what they're doing. Plus they have the price of the two-year-old piece of hardware they currently sell. Or they won't. Buy a hundred dollars. Buy a hundred dollars. It's not $15. Like I was sort of shocked yesterday when we talked about that. Yeah, and it may just be that they're, I know you guys talked about this yesterday, but you know. It kind of made me think like, does meta have a little insider info on what Apple is gonna price their offering at and know that they're still gonna be undercutting Apple significantly to the point that they can raise a price a hundred dollars? Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. The bigger issue is until Apple announces something, we don't even know what their play is. I mean, their play will probably be focused more on, I don't know, about more on AR. We just don't know. So they're kind of like, we're gonna be ready no matter what. And I don't know that they're, I don't know. They're not instilling confidence in means, but. On that note, here's what we do know. Like here's what Apple has officially said, right? They haven't, like, we've only heard reports from the information of Mark Gurman. And I mean, a lot of other sources, reputable sources that obviously they're working on this airheads have been working on it for a long time. We've seen comical renders of it. But what we do know is that in January, Tim Cook responded specifically to questions about the metaverse on an earnings call saying that is very interesting to us, but they really are keen on pivoting toward AR. Like they cook immediately pivoted to saying, we've been investing in AR for years and that's gonna be a continued area of investment for us. You know, we've all seen a lot of the AR apps and demos, I mean, going back, I think to like the iPhone 4 or something like that. The other thing that we've seen is Mark Gurman, again in January in his newsletter, basically saying Apple is not this first generation headset. They are really not looking at this in terms of like a metaverse long time wearing. Like they're not really seeing it as like watching a movie in your headset. It's gonna be more for short form stuff. And that basically like a metaverse kind of plate is off limits was the words that Gurman used on that. Maitreza, what are your thoughts on this? Do you have thoughts on VR, AR or what's ahead? Yeah, I mean, I've dabbled with VR before and I wouldn't say that I'm really kind of entrenched in that space, but I think it's interesting that meta is saying they're an open platform when it's all tied to Facebook accounts, right? So is it really an open kind of standard? You know, you still have to have that connectivity or that tie to your Facebook login. And I believe maybe they've relaxed that somewhat in recent times with thing you headsets, but I'd be very surprised if it's really an open platform versus Apple. I mean, I get what they're trying to say, I get what Zuckerberg is trying to say with Apple because it is truly a closed ecosystem. But I don't know, I wouldn't say that meta is an open platform by any stretch. I didn't, yeah, the whole idea of meta saying, no, we want to work with other game developers to make sure that the metaverse is this open platform. It's like, we don't know what the metaverse is. We talk about it a lot, but like, where is it? Where are we going? What are we doing? In terms of openness, I mean, I do think being part of that standards body, I do think it is important to have Facebook as the predominant seller of VR headsets are clearly kind of the consumer level. Like that is significant that they're on board for open metaverse standards. Now, whether that's to benefit themselves long-term, I'm sure that's the case. Why else would you do it? But the idea that they're gonna be in a mixed hardware, software standards world. And I think the counterpoint to that is we've seen this repeated is like one of the benefits of Apple maybe playing within their own sandbox is they can have a fixed hardware platform that they're always betting against. That's what we've seen being successful with iOS in a lot of ways. We've seen that they can iterate a lot faster on some of these newer technologies. Like the thing about standards is generally those iterate slow on purpose, right? Cause you don't want to break standards. Apple, if they choose not to join that body, again, they're kind of playing by a totally different roadmap at this point. And if they're not even prepared to call it metaverse, I think this is meta forcing that comparison saying we're the metaverse company and Apple is like, we don't even want to use that word right now. Well, there are definitely some questions yet to be answered. Hopefully by this fall, we'll have a lot more of those answers. But moving on for the purposes of the show, Scott, tell us about video games and mental health. Well, I have said for a long time that I felt like video games were good for me. I may have been wrong, but they're not bad for me either. Anyway, this is what's going on. In the past when people asked how video games impacted your mental health, your answer was probably very much dependent on whether you like video games or not. Hence my story. Video games are a gigantic industry, but the academic research into mental health is still a work in progress. Previous studies have been limited by having gamers self-report playing time, which isn't really all that accurate. It can cause other issues. Yeah, in fact, last year, a team of social science researchers from the University of Oxford published a study in the journal Royal Society Open Science, which worked with the EA, also Nintendo, to obtain records of player behavior for players opting into the study. So they said, yeah, we want to be part of this. The study only looked at two titles, Plants vs. Zombies, Battle for Neighborville, and Animal Crossing New Horizons, looking at about 3,200 players across two weeks. The researchers found a small positive relation between gameplay and effective well-being. Well, interesting. I kind of wish they had done more games, but in a new study in the same journal, they expanded things. They expanded their scope and duration of the study. They recruited nearly 39,000 players. That is a lot. That's a big study sample. Over six weeks, games surveyed, spanned a much wider range of genres. So this still included Animal Crossing again, but also Apex Legends, get a shooter in there. Eve Online, Big MMO, Forza Horizon 4, a big driving game with a lot of stuff to do. Gran Turismo Sports, similar game, and The Crew 2, another driving game. They went really hard on the driving game. The researchers, again, used players' actual gaming day there, rather than self-reporting. Yeah, so players in the study were asked to scale their gaming experiences on a positive versus negative scale, ranking how often they felt things like happy or afraid, as well as something called the Cantral Self-Anchoring Scale, which asks people to say whether they're on a ladder with the top being their best possible life. Oh, boy, I'm somewhere in the middle of that these days. Player also took a player experience... Players also took a player experience of need satisfaction survey, which tracked experiences in specific titles, including motivations to play. So whether it's a shooter or an Animal Crossing game, you know, I feel like the sample size has gotten bigger. How's that? For sure. In the end, this is where things get interesting, study found that, quote, the impact of time spent playing video games on well-being is probably too small to be subjectively noticeable and not credibly different from zero, unquote. So again, negligible there at that end. How people felt in general also didn't impact their time spent gaming. I can attune to that pretty well. The study did find some evidence that motivation to play did have a slightly larger impact on well-being, but it's not clear if it would have had a noticeable impact on individuals. I still also think that they, as much as they expanded the study in the second phase, I really think they limited themselves by not really going for a more genre-complete study. And it's a little tricky to do because it turns out there are a lot of video games. While we've been sitting here talking, 20 have been released on Steam probably. That's just the way we work today with video games. But I wouldn't mind like a Resident Evil in there or something that's a little scarier that'll get people's emotions going in a different direction and stick with the light stuff, the medium stuff, and then the harder stuff for lack of a better term. I think you may have had maybe more interesting results. Oh, that's an interesting point. Jonas, do you have thoughts on whether or not a better variety of games would have tipped the scales a little bit here? Sorry, was that for me? I'm sorry. Yes. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting study, right? Because you're right, there's probably a lot of other games that could have been added. I think of a game like Animal Crossing, which brought so much joy and happiness to people two years ago in the middle of a pandemic, I think it was one of the reasons that game, in my opinion, became so successful. So yeah, I think it would have definitely helped if additional genres was added into the mix and maybe just widen the spread of games a little bit. I think it would have definitely helped. Yeah, because at this stage, it feels like it was helped, it was funded by the automotive industry. Well, there's so many car games in there. I don't know what they expected to get differently out of those different experiences. But I do think it's interesting that they had a, you know, the initial study, you could say, Animal Crossing is very much a, not even cooperative. It's a simulator you play and you invite others into it where, and Plants for Zombies Tower Defense, you're playing it by yourself. You're kind of playing against the game. Whereas, you know, racing games, yes, we're very much, it's very much a lot of, and Apex Legends is very much player versus player. Eve Online is all of that and more, like it's this whole culture and economy and everything like that. So I do feel like they did expand some to, like more directly competitive in games where we might think there could be like hurt feelings in, you know, if someone blows up your Eve Online chip, you spent three years provisioning out and stuff like that, that is a lot different than necessarily maybe losing a game like Plants versus Zombies or something like that. So I do think that there are, like they definitely did broaden the scope and, you know, to kind of, to kind of counteract that. I mean, the important thing here is that we are getting more research, right? So that we can, we can look at these and say, okay, how can we build even more studies? So you're right. Let's maybe do a first person shooter study. Let's, let's get this into, you know, World of Warcraft. Let's get them into more like, either like wide scale MMOs or older games that have more established communities, although I think Eve Online falls into that as well. So, you know, that, that is kind of the, what I think is, it stands out to this is we have the, we're getting an increasing body of evidence now that other researchers can modify studies and look at, we can get more granular as you guys are kind of saying so that we can make informed policy as opposed to saying video games seem scary to me because I didn't play them growing up so kids shouldn't play them as much or something like that. And to stave off emails, the specific game they played here, Plants vs Zombies Battle for Neighborville is actually their third person competitive shooter. So I think in those initial, that initial tests, they were like, here's a shooter where you're competitive and it's a little intense and here's your little management game. And they're, you know, we'll get a good range between those two. I'm glad they expanded it, but yes, granularity, I think is important in these kinds of studies. This is a great step forward. Getting 39,000 participants is huge. So I'm always happy to see, yeah, more of this stuff is good stuff. I'm happy to, happy to see it. There are bounce rates in that survey though, for like, we reached out to 600,000 people and 2,000 EVE Online players responded to us. Well, it might be very likely that you're listening to the conversation and saying, I have thoughts. If you are feeling social, get in touch with the DTNS audience on the social networks, DTNS Show on Twitter and DTNS PIX on Instagram or a few couple of ways you can get a hold with us and let us know how you feel. All right, well, if you're into classic gaming or retro gaming, however you want to refer to it, you are definitely familiar with emulators. They've been around for forever. We've all run DOS emulators, haven't we, the greatest of all time. Software that lets you emulate old game consoles, home computers, arcade machines, to play games. But more recently, with the popularity of open source Mr. Project playing retro games, it's taken on new dimensions, kind of rethinking what we think a lot of, when we think of emulation. So Demetrius, can you kind of explain what the Mr. FPGA is, what this whole project is about? Yeah, so you talked about emulation and in the past, emulation when we think about it is, it's a software thing. So you are on your computer with a programming language, you can build an emulator and it's all running by software. And emulation is pretty good these days, but there's always going to be that, there's always going to be that edge case where something's not quite right or there's some input delay that was not found in the original hardware. So FPGA is essentially taking the hardware schematics of a particular piece of hardware, a target piece of hardware. And for this example, we'll just say an arcade game. And taking that schematic and just transforming it with a language known as HDL hardware definition language into a chip on the Mr. itself, which is called the DE10 Nano. So basically it's essentially simulating, replicating, emulating whatever you want to call it at a hardware level rather than a software level. So you're replicating the entire schematics of a piece of hardware onto this Mr. So the end result of that is, it's a lot more accurate than traditional software based emulation. There is things like input delay and things like I said with regular emulation is not existent in something like the Mr. And it's really being embraced by kind of the retro community right now because it's kind of that missing link between software emulation. A lot of people, a lot of people like software emulation. A lot of people would rather have real hardware but real hardware is getting so expensive these days when we talk about retro gaming. If you wanna go back and buy something that was out in the 80s or the 90s it's gonna cost you a bit of money to get a good setup, right? So the Mr. essentially just gives you in the palm of your hand literally a really great hardware solution for old retro hardware and a lot of people are really kind of embracing it as I mentioned. So can you, I guess for retro gaming so what are exactly for people that haven't checked this out? Like what systems does this apply for and kind of how do you get set up for this? Are you plugging carts into this or what's happening with that? So there are many, many different systems that run on the Mr. I didn't, I haven't taken account but there is at least a few hundred I would say. All the, well not all but the majority of home computers that you probably have heard of like the Commodore 64, Apple II, the Macintosh, the Amiga, the Atari ST, DOS as well, IBM PCs are all handled by the Mr. Eight 16-bit and some 32-bit consoles like the Super NES Genesis, even the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn's getting some support now are all supported things like Game Boy, Game Boy Advance and arcade. So there's a lot of different arcade games that run on the Mr. So the support for it is growing and there is a active community that's continuing to add pretty much every single day adding new cores to the Mr. project and everything is free and open source. It's all based on the community. So there's a lot of involvement, a lot of kind of iterating that's going on and there's a lot of day to day kind of updates that happen and it's actually, it's quite good. And so as far as your second question, do you plug cartridges into it? No, you don't. Basically it's, you kind of treat it the same way you would treat a traditional emulator. You kind of load it all, load up everything on an SD card put all your ROMs on there and kind of the start and finish result doesn't seem any different than traditional emulation but you're running it on this small, you know Mr. DE10 nano board and it's essentially just manages a whole thing for you. And the great thing about this device is you can connect it up to an old school CRT or a flat panel HDTV or you can even connect it up to an arcade machine so you can basically have the Mr. replacing kind of traditional arcade boards at great levels of accuracy. So it's a, it's kind of a solution for many, many different people to do many different things with. I have my own in my house and I just have my connected up to my big television in the living room. When I want to get my retro fix on, that's kind of what I use. So it's very versatile and it's a very awesome piece of hardware. It's interesting because a lot of folks who maybe do retro via other methods whether they buy a new mini console from Nintendo which by the way is just software emulation. It's not an actual Nintendo, super Nintendo in there. Right. That's true kind of across the board of all those devices but they're pretty good. And you plug them in and you play them and you go, this is great. I enjoy this. Or you buy compilation on Steam of a bunch of old Neo Geo games and they look great on your computer and you're playing great. And they're even maybe widescreen. They've added some bells and whistles that recent Pac-Man collection, 40 year Pac-Man collection is a bit like that. But what the special sauce here explained very well by Demetrius is that this thing will, it's virtual still, but it's like an exact circuit replication of say a Genesis or Mega Drive if you were in Europe or Japan. And when you play your games, those ROMs in that environment gone are any differences. The differences are virtually not there. The only real difference is it doesn't look like a Genesis and there's no cartridges stick in the top and you didn't plug in, perhaps to the same TV you had 1994. But for all effects and purposes, it is the real deal. Again, most people, they may run some emulation on their PC or Mac and go, this is fine, what's the problem? And for most people, that's still gonna be true. But this just represents an amazing step forward but not just in games emulation. I think that FPGA has huge potential as a scalable technology to create virtual environments that are so exacting that everything from replicating what a supercomputer did precisely back in 1974 is possible here. It's just gonna be a matter of somebody doing the work to get it done. And I think it's amazing. It's really nice stuff. And just to add to that real quick, we talk about retro gaming but what Mr. really brings to the table as well is kind of hardware preservation. We talk about software preservation, preserving games and making sure that these games are available. So future generations can play games. Well, this is essentially doing the same thing but on a hardware level. The people that are actually taking hardware schematics and then putting them into the mister, those things are preserved forever. So you can always go back and recreate that hardware, which is I think a really cool thing. And we've got some links to this in the show notes, Demetrius, but where should people go if they wanna like kinda check this out and see how to get started with all this? I would suggest, so I did a good video on the mister. So check out my channel, Modern Vintage Gamer, if you want kind of a quick introduction on the mister and how I kind of fared with it. But I would say if you're looking for a, more detailed setup guides and information, I would check out a good friend of mine, Bob. His name is RetroRGB. So I would go to his website. I think it's RetroRGB.com. He has got a ton of mister information on there. He basically covers it every single week on his webpage. So I would suggest check that out. He's got setup guides and all sorts of things on there. So check out his channel. Excellent. Well, if you're a person who wants to do some travel and you need a guide of your own, here there's some vacation time that you might have set up, but you might not know where to go and what makes the most sense. Chris Christensen, our amateur traveler, has some thoughts. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another tech in travel minute. One of the first tools that I ever reviewed as I started the Amateur Traveler blog and podcast about 17 years ago was Kayak Explorer. Kayak.com slash explore. It had a different name at the time, but it lets you say I can go anywhere in the world. Where can I go and how much will it cost in September? How much will it cost in October? Well, they've made a new change to that tool, which I have still used for these last 17 years that lets you say I can leave on this date and come back on this date. Now, where can I go and give me a better idea what the cost will be for airfare. And it's quite useful for me right now because I'm thinking about going and working remotely for a week and I know what dates I want to do it. And this is the kind of tool that helps with that. That's Kayak.com slash explore. And I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Thank you, Chris. As always, always good stuff. Also thanks to Demetris Janakis. And I'm sorry, I called you Gianni earlier. It's just my favorite Milwaukee Bucks basketball player. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do. Yeah, you can find me on YouTube. Just Google Modern Vintage Gamer and I'll be there. And if you want to kind of be more interactive with me, I'm on Twitter as well at Modern Vintage G. So check out my Twitter. Throw me a follow. My DMs are open. So, you know, feel free to ask me any questions there too. You heard the man. Get in those DMs. Scott Johnson, always nice to have you as well. Let folks know what you are up to lately. Sure. Well, as always, over on the Frogpants Network, there's tons of podcasts to listen to. And in particular, I would like to point people toward CORE. I also do a retro show, but before I get back into that, there's Thursday coming and Thursday means CORE. CORE is a show all about modern gaming. It's all about what's happening in the industry in games in general, the games we're playing and how they might impact you. I'm told it's really good. So check it out and see what you think on Thursday nights. That's over at frogpants.com slash CORE or just search for CORE wherever you get your podcasts. Excellent. We also have a brand new boss to thank. The brand new boss, his name is Martin. Martin just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Martin. Thank you, Martin. Yay, yay, yay. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet available at patreon.com slash DTNS. If you know, you know, but if you don't, what a fun. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow. Doing it all again with the Marvel sun joining us. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.