 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, and Brad, plus our brand new patrons, Luke, Khloé, Lynn, Mark, and Pepe. Thank you, Luke. Thank you, Khloé. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you, Mark. And thank you, Pepe. On this episode of DTNS, Epic Games gets further into consumer content creation. Streamlabs wants to make it less hard out there for our streamer. And what is up with LG's touchscreen briefcase anyway? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 15, 2023. From Studio Shirt Brother, I'm Sarah Lane. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have a lot of stuff to talk about. Gosh, I wish Scott Johnson was on the show today because there are lots of gaming news items, but Justin and I and Roger are going to unpack them. But first, let's start with some quick heads. Microsoft has started selling replacement parts for Surface devices in its Microsoft Store. This includes things like SSDs, batteries, and also displays. Microsoft partnered with iFixit to sell repair tools separately. The components are available for now in Canada, France, and the United States. Uber will add video ads to its Uber, Uber Eats, and Drizly apps. The ads will run while you wait for arrival and during trips. Drizly will also run them on search results pages. The company has sold static ads since 2019. And their CEO told analysts earlier this year that ads are a key part of Uber strategy. The ads will show up this week in the United States and expand to Australia, France, and the United Kingdom. It's just a matter of time. Ireland's data protection authority put the rollout of Google's chatbot barred on Holt in the EU. The authority said it needed to see more details on how Google is protecting user data. Bing and chat GPT remain available in the EU at this time. Google announced that Google Lens now is the ability to search for skin conditions based on a photo. That means things like rashes, hair loss, marks on nails and bumps on lips, amongst other conditions. The company is careful to say that search results yield information, not a diagnosis. Google Maps is also getting glanceable directions, which give you live trip updates on your lock screen and update estimated time and routes without having to start navigation. Immersive view now lets you virtually fly over more than 500 landmarks worldwide and a search generative experience or SGE will use its large language model to create a snapshot for destinations. Amazon announced the launch of the Disney magical companion on Echo devices. So for $6 per year or as part of Amazon Kids Plus, users can say, hey, Disney and the voice assistant will respond in the voice of more than 20 characters, such as Mickey Mouse, R2-D2, Fuzzy the Bear, Moana and more. The subscription also adds games and other activities. All right, Justin, let's talk about Epic being busy, doing things that aren't necessarily traditional gaming things, branching out, so to speak. The company released a new tool called Metahuman Animator that can capture an actor's facial performance. When I say actor, it's really anybody, because capturing only requires something simple like an iPhone. Then you create your Metahuman in the Unreal Engine. You need local GPU hardware within a short amount of time. What we first heard about this from Epic at the GDC Game Developers to Conference back in March, but developers now do have access to play around. So performance capture using iPhones has been around in the Unreal Engine since 2020 when Epic launched its Live Link Face iOS app. That's something that you could download right now if you have an iOS device, an iPhone 12 or higher. Metahuman Animator is now part of that same app, at least in my experience, playing around with it this morning. You do also need a PC that's running Windows 10 or 11 and the Metahuman plugin for Unreal Engine. So if you have an iPhone, that's just sort of one part of this. But if you have a few of these components, you can get some stuff going pretty easily. Epic says the tool can also be used with existing vertical stereo head-mounted camera systems to achieve even greater fidelity. So if you were a filmmaker, you might actually want to step it up a little bit. Now, if you're scratching your head wondering what this is for, what does it look like? Epic put out a short film called Blue Dot that shows what the animation tool can do. And boy, it is impressive. I mean, it does not look exactly like live action, but it is close. It is real close. Justin, did you get a chance to look at this? I certainly did. And it is absolutely remarkable because like you said, it's not that it has to look photorealistic because obviously you have video for that, but it does look enough like you that you can have a world of possibilities. Not only can these kind of characters be entered into games in the future, but also you can fully move into the world of CGI. I mean, if you look at the tools that are at your hands right now, the concept of creating a CGI studio like a Pixar level movie from 10 years ago is now something that you could probably do with a mid-range PC and an iPhone. And that's insane. Totally. Yeah. And I had to laugh a little bit at the term metahuman because to me, metahuman is like what I look like in Meta's horizon world, which is a very different thing. And I don't think the two are, you know, they're different, right? You know, the idea of like, I have an avatar that sort of may be representing me, but I can have fun with it. That's not what this is. This is to represent the closest version of you that can be achieved with, you know, some consumer devices that might be hanging around your brush. I will add, I mean, beyond like this is kind of the next step in MoCap or motion capture that's often used for video games and CGI. What's so amazing about it is that you cut out a lot of the steps that are in between and you drop the price, like not by a little, but by a lot. Like instead of talking about thousands, like tens of thousands of dollars, you're speaking of just like a few thousand dollars. And I'm not, it's remarkable because now you're straddling the line between traditional animation, traditional CGI and real life, live action cinematography. And if you watch any of these programs, whether it's like Netflix's Anthology, Love Death, Love Robots or Love Death and Robots, where a lot of the shorts are done with MoCap animation, you can see where this is headed, where there is a huge disruption into a lot of the traditional CGI workflow, the stuff that's been designed since Toy Story, actually even before then when they had Terminator 2 and movies like The Abyss, where it was CGI was just in its infancy, this will allow creators to not have to spend a lot of money to be creative and still have work that's really polished. And that's the thing, Roger, is that when you talk about these prices coming down, you're not talking about the heights they can hit. You're talking about the ability to make mistakes and to go in directions and scrap it and restart. When we went from film to digital, that's when we got a lot of these comedies that were largely improvised because you wouldn't do that on film. That cost a lot of money. But when you could shoot the movies digitally, it didn't matter if you had a lot of funny people do a million takes at the same scene until you got the absolute best one, because that's what the technology afforded. And this gives you the opportunity to do that, but with animation. I really think stuff like this is a low key game changer. Meanwhile, Epic is partnering with French luxury good group LVMH to help customers with fitting rooms and fashion shows in the virtual world. LVMH will use Epic's 3D creation tools like Unreal Engine to create digital twins. So you can hypothetically see how a physical product might look and behave. Epic's Fortnite is still a popular multiplayer video game. But now it's also an online space to socialize and rub shoulders with celebrities to celebrities such as big name musicians hosting virtual concerts in the same vein. Roblox now features high end fashion brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Gucci and fashion events happen inside the blocks. Man, it is okay. So I okay. All right. Epic's Fortnite hosting virtual events. I dabble a little bit. I mostly sort of heard about it after the fact. Hugely popular. Roblox as well. Hugely popular. The idea of having virtual goods that you pay for and you care about a big deal. Epic partnering with LVMH to help know how that Louis Vuitton jacket is going to look on the real Sarah, you know, that's representative of me. We just talked about, I mean, now we're really getting into some weird territory. And when I say weird, I mean, cool. It's not like, it's not really what we, you know, what we think of as like, okay, I want to buy this thing. What's it going to look like? This is, you know, a representation of me that is more accurate than ever. And me saying, do I want to buy that Gucci jacket? Is it going to look weird on the very realistic representation of me as it might if I tried it on at the store in general, where I'm like, yeah, it hangs weird. This is, you know, the, the, you know, the metaverse for lack of a better term is more interesting than ever. Well, let's, let's be realistic here. This is a gateway to the same runway that luxury goods use all the time, which is the fantasy of owning it. Yeah, that you want to imagine what it is like for you to own it. That's why they have beautiful stores. That's why they have amazing displays. That's why they pay Nicole Kidman to walk around with it in their ads, right? Because you want to put yourself in that fantasy world. And this is just adjusting to the times. I don't quite think that this is necessarily the game changer that the first story was, but I do think that it is the past that there is a possibility that when we go and try on these luxury goods and these sunglasses, that maybe even if we can't afford the actual luxury products, are you willing to pay a fraction of that price to walk around in Roblox or in Fortnite with it? Because maybe Louis Vuitton is willing to take that money from you. Listen, if you're hanging out in, you know, one of these many virtual worlds more than a couple hours a day, then yeah, I think it does matter because that's where you are. That is where your person is. No, there is no boundaries to stunting, Sarah. No boundaries. Indeed. Back in the real world, if there even is one at this point, along with some of the more health-related features that Justin told you about earlier, Google announced a virtual try-on tool. That's more of a predicting how a clothing will fit you on your person in the real world. You select a model that's close to your physical shape and clothes and Google shopping will be shown on that model. Google's using a diffusion model that it developed for this exact purpose, kind of the model that's used by image generators like Dolly 2. The feature is launched for women's tops in the U.S. with some brands you might know like Anthropology and Ann Taylor Loft. All right. So it was a mirror 24 hours ago on yesterday's DTNS that we discussed the trend of social networks increasingly being a source of news over traditional newspaper and TV options, especially with the younger set, although Facebook in particular was on the decline as a specific news source. Some of that is Facebook's on doing. Some of it is just trends. So it's worth noting that on Thursday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is resurfacing the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which is a proposed bill designed to help print and broadcast news outlets in their negotiations with tech giants like Google and Facebook and others. The bill would create a safe harbor from antitrust laws for eight years for newspapers, broadcast stations, and digital outlets. Now, if you've been following along back in December, Facebook threatened to consider removing news from their platform altogether rather than submit to government mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value that Facebook provides to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions. So things more or less stalled at that point, but we are seeing a resurgence of people who care about these things. Now, Justin, this is your lane. We've seen kerfuffles over traditional versus social ways to consume news over the last couple of years. Australia, for example, something we've talked about on the show in the past. Is this the same thing? Is the U.S. approaching this any differently? We are approaching it a lot differently. I do think that there's a couple angles here. And before we get to any of them, let me say yet again, thank God we're finally talking about journalism. First things first, a progress at the speed of government. If the United States government wanted to intervene and help save some of these journalistic institutions from the parasitic elements of Facebook, then they would have come in and tried to regulate against the idea of Facebook controlling these groups that they had a lot of these journalistic platforms migrate on and then made incredibly restrictive unless you entered into a pay-to-play model with Facebook. That didn't happen. I think it has helped choke off a lot of the traffic that these outlets believe they were going to get from social media, especially one as click-rich as Facebook, which does actually feed a lot of people news sources when they want to and right now when they want to equals when you pay them. That being said, the most fascinating part of this trend is that we've kind of given up on the idea of newspapers and television, the king media for the vast majority of the people that are listening to this program right now through some point of our lives. They've given up on them competing and what we're looking at now is those mediums being entered into a government protectionist philosophy mostly because we still believe that regulated over-the-air or daily interactive news like newspapers are with a community is important. Now, I don't know how much it is, but I do know that whatever it is, we're not going to worry about there being monopoly protections. We had a viral video that was going around for the last few years about, I believe it was all the Sinclair stations reading the same script. We're giving up on that if we're looking at it as, hey, let's protect these stations from big mean social media. The government is essentially saying they can't compete, so we got to step in and keep them alive. Yeah. So, well, yeah. So then I guess the question becomes how much do you care that these, particularly sort of more local stations, the Sinclair conglomerate is obviously a big one, but how much do we care that news as we know it is sort of being dismantled and restructured? Well, I mean, part of it is something that happens naturally. We all find different ways that we can listen to stuff and watch stuff and read stuff, and that has always been the case. We're going to have a story about podcasting a little bit later in this show, and that has largely cannibalized what used to be a huge radio audience. It doesn't mean that podcasting or radio is good or bad. It means that certain people have evolved to find their information elsewhere. What I'm mostly fascinated by is what happens to these newsrooms and to these television stations as we go forward. Because you could sell me on a wide variety of possible outcomes that will happen in 10 years. Either that television stations will be radically different, or they will be pretty much what they are now. The one thing that I would bank on is free and over the air is something that will remain a very potent and powerful technology, even in an era of ubiquitous internet. But you could say that, you know, if I were to, let's use Facebook as an example just because we were talking about it before, that is sort of the same as free and over the air, right? I'm on the network. I might get some news. I digest it. Who's hurt by that? You are right in the concept that that's how most people have migrated. They're like, okay, well, I used to watch the six o'clock news, but that only happens at six o'clock, and I have to wait until the end of the day. Now I can search Facebook when I'm at work and I can not only not work, but I can also find the news, at least find the news that Linda is talking about. The reality of what is happening with Facebook is fascinating, mostly because of their own parasitic relationships with a lot of these outlets. They sold the outlets on many different versions of a bright, beautiful utopic future, not only through groups, but also through pivots to video. They guided this path by way of a lot of money, and now that none of them have panned out and Facebook itself finds a dearth of advertising to sell against this content, now everybody's looking at each other and saying, wait a minute, what happened? Well, Justin, nobody is better than you are to unpack some of the stuff. Obviously, it's an unfolding news item. We will talk about it on future DTNSs as the journalism competition and as the journalism crumbles. Either stays proposed forever in productivity or becomes a real thing. Well, in our surveys, we do annual surveys every year, and thanks to everybody who participates. In our surveys of which guests you'd like to hear more from, we get a lot of good answers, but guess who is the single most frequently mentioned person? That would be Molly Wood. So we are listening, and we want to give you more Molly Wood. We've got Molly to agree to come on DTNS for Molly Fridays once a month. She's going to bring her tech perspective, her smarts. She's also going to participate in our Friday quizzes, which are a lot of fun. But to make this happen, we need your help. We need a few more patrons. And when I say a few, we need quite a few. If we hit 4,000 paid patrons, we have about 415 to go by June 29th. We will start the following day. The next day, June 30th, would be our first Molly Friday. If you want this, if you thought about being a DTNS patron and maybe just been on the back burner and you go, oh, yeah, I really do want to do that. Do sign up now and let's make Molly Fridays happen. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Logitech owned Streamlabs, which makes software for people who stream videos on YouTube, Twitch and elsewhere released a new podcast editing tool called Podcast Editor. It includes machine assistants like Tech Space Editing and Transcription Generation. The tool can identify clips good for short video and automatically remove verbal pauses like ums and ahs. It can also do translation in 30 languages. It's going to be part of Streamlabs. Streamlabs is $19 a month ultra subscription. Is that something that you play around with, Justin? I have. I work with another editor for my Friday editions of Politics, Politics, and he fairly religiously edits on through Descript, which is another one of these machine learning programs that pops everything to a transcript and you can edit via the words and not just listening to the audio. I don't use it personally, mostly because I tend to be a little superstitious when it comes to just feeling the audio. I'm a little Jedi like that. I need to know what it is so I can edit it in a very oral, A-U-R-A-L kind of way. But that being said, what I really find fascinating with this is the shifting definition of the word podcast because even for us, we are streaming live and we do have a compelling video version of this, but by and large, DTNS is a derivative of a form of podcasting that is from radio. We are making radio level content that is on demand and that was the initial idea of what a podcast is. But we've also seen through the rise of live streaming and YouTube podcast to mean something that is just a longer form conversation with a bunch of people on a streaming video platform. Oftentimes, these things have no audio only component. They are only available when it comes to Twitch or YouTube. So what I would say this is for the Streamlabs tool, which is ubiquitous amongst YouTube and Twitch streamers, is it's for the second version of this definition, not necessarily for the first, although surely for anybody who does both that will have value. Yeah. Streamlabs actually said recently that in the Twitch category, just chatting, which used to be like, am I gaming? No. Am I doing one of these other Twitch specific things? No. I'm just chatting. That has now become its most popular category because that's the podcast category of we're going to be talking about stuff. Maybe you could tag it as tech or that sort of thing. But it's a big deal now and Twitch obviously is well aware of that as well. What I think is interesting about the podcast editor, and I haven't played around with the tool myself because I just don't pay for Streamlabs in general other than playing around with it a bit, is the resizing tools, resizing meaning, helping to clip out a cool, funny quip that just paid for 10 seconds within the latest Politics Podcast that then he can send out to TikTok and Instagram. I know especially, and I know this is a little bit inside baseball, but we talk about this all the time on DTNS is like, okay, well, where are fun pieces of content within the larger piece of content that we can help engage people with wherever they may be. And that is extremely time consuming. Social media teams that are built around this sort of thing. And I don't know how well this particular tool will replace that. And it's certainly not the only one. But yeah, I think, especially for anybody who's looking to find that audience and throw a little spaghetti at the wall, this makes it that much easier. And this is also something that fits into our modern meta of social media right now. The the most emerging and exciting levels of that are TikTok and YouTube shorts and anything in between. And that is fascinating for people like us who have done podcasts for a while and have a gigantic reservoir of this content. Because unlike YouTube when it was starting that really, really, really prioritized stuff that was happening right now, it didn't like repurpose content unless it was extraordinarily nostalgic. Shorts and TikTok comes from a world where a lot of these people watching it are fine watching really old stuff, as long as it's interesting for 30 seconds to a minute and a half. And so if you have the ability to cut stuff out, not only in your live content, but also maybe going back into the archives a little bit and finding different things for which would be exciting to a new audience. I do think that they're there for it. This is not making content for an audience that doesn't exist. You know, perhaps related to this before before we move on is Twitch announcing its new partner plus program. That means streamers get an increased 70% of the share of their subscription revenues that's up up to the first 100,000 that they bring in each year with Twitch taking the other 30%. Now, I thought this was new, Justin, but we were talking earlier that this is actually sort of a rollback to how it used to be. They are rolling back based on a ruling that was not particularly popular. And I am now obligated to say that my wife works at Twitch. Well, there you go. All right, so this is a fun one. And when I say fun, I mean it's somewhat baffling to me. LG has a product that you might really like. You might also find baffling. You might think both. The standby me go that standby without a D, but that standby me go briefcase and monitor hybrid. It's a 27 inch touchscreen model that's housed inside a brief case of sorts. I don't know what else you would call it, sort of resembling an old portable turntable or lunchbox of sorts. Now, if you're saying, well, this looks really cool, bwing, bwing points out the specs aren't great. It's running WebOS TV software. It's got four speakers. It's got wireless connectivity, but the battery taps out around three hours. The screen is only 1080p. So there's a retro thing going on here. And retro is kind of a, you know, it's a big deal these days, even just for a novelty or maybe a gift type of thing. I looked at LG's product page. It shows, you know, some various scenarios where the standby me go would be fun. Maybe you're using it to play music while picnicking with a group of friends or, you know, you carry around the outer shell and everyone knows, oh, that's that, it's that standby me go. So Justin, I don't know. What am I missing? I really wish that Tom were on this show, not because of just his professionalism and witticisms, but also because I am very much looking forward to finding out which K-pop artist is doing a sponsored content for this because I am almost assured that somebody will, at some point, it is such a destination product. It looks a little Wes Andersony, a little Spike Jonesy, maybe like in the her model of Future Tech. It's pricey at 900, which is a little rich for something that feels gimmicky. But I don't know. I don't agree with Boing Boing on saying that the specs are bad. Like, yes, the specs aren't fan. They're at top of the line, but the point of it is that it's in a briefcase, right? Like it's not supposed to be huge. The biggest thing that I could look at it for was, A, if you look at it from a production side, and it is something that is an appellate case or something. So you could do very lightweight shooting on it. That's pretty interesting. Other than that, I don't know. It's a gimmick, but you know, they put a TV in a suitcase. What do they think of next? Yeah. I mean, some years ago, somebody gave me a turntable that looks like, well, not exactly like this. I mean, it was much more retro than this looking, but it's basically a turntable that's in a little, it looks like an old briefcase. You open it up. You have to plug it in. It wasn't wireless, and it kind of works. Speakers sucked, but I was like, this is such a fun gift. Maybe that's what we're going for here. But again, you've got the touchscreen. Imagine you were out by Lake Merritt, and you wanted to watch an A's game while they're still in town. You could just pop that open and boom, you're right there. You're having a good time. And there you go. And people around you will say, wow, what is that word? You get it. And you say, oh, wow. It's the LG Standby Me Go briefcase monitor. You close it up. You walk to Portal. You have a few cocktails. You're having a great day. Well, Justin, when you're not having a few cocktails at Portal, I guess you haven't done that for a while. Yeah, a little bit. But, you know, whatever the Austin equivalent is, where can people keep up with your work? I would like to direct everybody to know a little more. Know a little more is a fantastic podcast that is hosted by Tom Merritt wherein you get context and fantastic storytelling about the technologies that guide our very life. The first season that was produced by my production company, Dog & Pony Show Audio is out now in its entirety. So I would encourage you guys to go listen to it and get ready for our next season, which is already in the works. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. You might have heard that Valve has officially released new changes to its Steam client, adding a revamped UI, new features, including a notepad and a Game View panel. And Roger is going to share his thoughts on it. But just a reminder, you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back. Join it all again tomorrow with Rob Dunn with Joining Us and Len Peralta. You're on the top tech stories. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.