From the stage of F8, Joaquin Quinonero, Facebook’s Director of Applied Machine Learning, described a new technique the company is using to improve the watching experience for 360 videos. The format is challenging to deliver because of its size, but Facebook is using machine learning to reduce the number of pixels that have to be rendered at any one time. By predicting where a viewer will look next, rendering priority can be given to that location  — particularly helpful for users with lower quality internet access.

The status quo for 360 videos is reactive rather than proactive rendering. Mike Coward, engineering director for Facebook’s VR video team echoed the frustration of users to me when he described the unpleasantness of turning your head in VR only to see a blurry scene.

One partial fix is to optimize compression. But teams at the company are already using machine learning to select across the thousand-plus compression techniques for individual snippets of video. The other way to reduce the streaming load is to just cut down on what you’re rendering. And rather than reduce quality across the board, Facebook’s approach improves resolution for exactly what you’re most likely to look at next.

Mike Coward, engineering director for Facebook’s VR video teamStep one was to use the resources of the company to monitor where people actually do look when watching 360 videos. Facebook’s VR video team created a heat-map that highlighted the most popular spots that users looked at within videos. From there, Facebook built a generative saliency map using a deep neural network. This model makes it possible to perform predictions on new videos that haven’t previously been watched or studied.

If a human were to be given the task of predicting where someone might look, they might study their natural environment and look for anomalies that could catch one’s interest — think birds or a car driving by.

Abstracting away to the neural net, the physical cars and birds cease to matter. Facebook’s model was trained on a massive corpus of videos to identify interesting subsets of a video frame. Coward told me that the model, when faced with a surfer in the ocean, is capable of picking selecting the surfer as most interesting, despite the fact that both are fast moving entities.

After implementing the prediction model, Facebook was able to increase resolution by 39 percent on VR devices. Aside from improving resolution and making 360 videos accessible to people without great network connections, the technology could some day make it possible to offer preemptive suggestions to creators on how to make videos more engaging.

Sing Street

Perfect for anyone who’s ever been in a band – and pretty much everyone else – this 2016 comedy drama set in 1980s Dublin follows a troubled teen who starts a band to impress the girl he likes. From the shoddy homemade pop videos to the American high school dance dream sequence, it’s got everything you need for a musical ’80s homage.

Battle Royale

A strong inspiration for The Hunger Games, and many other films besides, this disturbingly violent thriller sees a group of Japanese high school students shipped off to an island and forced to fight to the death as part of the annual government-sanctioned Battle Royale game.

Annie Hall

As in many of his films, Woody Allen plays a exaggerated version of himself, in this case neurotic comedian Alvy Singer, who falls in love with flighty Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in this sharp Manhattan-based romantic comedy. If you’re only ever going to watch one Woody Allen film, this is the one to choose.

Red Army

This documentary film tells the gripping story of the Soviet ice hockey team. As well as explaining how the squad became so dominant in the sport during the Cold War, it also tells the tale of those who defected to the US before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Fascinating stuff.

In the Heat of the Night

Screen legend Sidney Poitier stars in this 1967 classic as a Philadelphia detective who travels to a small Mississippi town to investigate a murder. With sad predictability, he’s met with hostility and a racist police chief (Rod Steiger) with whom he must work to solve the crime.

Let the Right One In

Ignore the remake (Let Me In) and stick with the original Swedish horror film about a bullied boy who falls in love with a vampire girl in the Stockholm suburbs in the early 1980s. The macabre romance is bleak and bizarre but also strangely uplifting.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Based on John le Carré’s novel of the same name, this gripping Cold War thriller stars Richard Burton as British agent Alec Leamas who is determined to ‘come in from the cold’ and give up his life of espionage. To do that, he must complete one last mission to East Germany as a faux defector, in order to spread misinformation.

13th

This Oscar-nominated documentary from director Ava DuVernay takes its title from the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution which abolished slavery in 1865. The thought-provoking film takes an uncomfortable look at the country’s subsequent history of racial inequality including the Jim Crow segregation laws and the demonisation and mass incarceration of minority communities.

At the tail end of March Blizzard announced plans for StarCraft: Remastered, which is due later this year with updates including 4K graphics and modern online features. Buried within that release, it also mentioned that gamers could expect to see the original game and its Brood War expansion released for free along with the 1.18 update for the game. That day has come, and nostalgic gamers can dive back in as soon as their copy finishes downloading (PC here, OS X version here) like it’s 1998 again and Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It isn’t just a dated reference.

It’s going to be a busy week.
What to expect from Facebook’s annual developer conference

2017 marks the 10th anniversary of F8, and you know that CEO Mark Zuckerberg will want to show off just how far Facebook has come in the past ten years. Covering more Messenger, those Live woes and maybe even a bunch of hardware, here’s a look at what we’ll hopefully see in the days ahead.

Origin’s first budget gaming laptop costs less than a grandThere’s such a thing as a budget gaming laptop?

Origin’s EON15-S laptop has always straddled the line between gaming performance and portability, and this year’s model does that again, but for a bit less cash. For 2017, the PC maker has added NVIDIA’s newish 4GB 1050 Ti graphics card, a model that gives it a (very) mild speed bump over last year’s 980M-based EON15-S. That’s squeezed into a 1-inch, 5-pound case, and costs $999 for the cheapest configuration. However, there’s no high-res screen option this time around — you’re stuck with a 15.6-inch 1,920 x 1,080 IPS panel.

That’s a big number.Netflix explains why it keeps paying Adam Sandler for movies

Yesterday Netflix revealed its quarterly earnings, and said it is close to having 100 million streaming customers. But the most surprising statistic had to be news that subscribers have streamed half a billion hours of Adam Sandler movies since the debut of The Original 6.

It’s only twice the price of a Model 3
Tesla cuts the price on its entry-level Model S by $5,000

Recently, Tesla dropped the cheapest version of its Model S and now it’s followed up by lowering the price of the current entry-level edition. The 75 and 75D are still $1,500 more than the 60/60D was, even after a $5k price cut, but they offer more range and now come standard with features like a glass roof and automatic rear power liftgate.

It’s time to get dirty
Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt take the fight to Airbnb via lobbyists

Inevitably, hotels were going to fight back against “home sharing” apps, and a New York Times report says that time is now. Via lobbyist organizations, the hotel industry is apparently fighting on the “local, state and federal level” to rein in Airbnb and the rest with additional regulation and scrutiny (Of course, some would argue that scrutiny might be necessary).

Distill water, hop oil, or whiskey… if your local laws allow it.
Picobrew’s next goal: A safe and affordable DIY distillery

Picobrew has a new, cheaper countertop beer brewing system. That you already knew. But the company is now dipping its toes into distilling. The Picostill is an add on for the Pico Model C that turns that weird custom designed keg into a countertop distillery. Specifically it’s a reflux still that uses vacuum distillation, which doesn’t look as cool as a pot or column still, but makes far more efficient use of the space.

Finally, a way to revisit Microsoft BASIC 2.0.
Go back to 1984 with Internet Archive’s Macintosh collection

Not content to sit on the sidelines, the Internet Archive recently resurrected something, too. This time, it’s a swath of apps, games and software from the original Macintosh circa 1984. That means stuff like Lode Runner, MacOS System 7.0.1, Microsoft BASIC 2.0 and Space Invaders are on offer in their pixelated, black-and-white glory. Just like the old days.

The Wear24 will set you back $300 with a 2-year activation.
Verizon’s Android Wear 2.0 watch goes on sale May 11th

Verizon’s Android Wear 2.0 smartwatch broke from cover back in February with an scheduled launch for March. Well, that didn’t happen. Today, the wireless carrier announced that its Wear24 device would go on sale both in stores and online May 11th. If you’ll recall, the wearable is priced at $300 with a 2-year activation plus $5 month to tack one on to your data plan.

But wait, there’s more…

As TechCrunch notes, CBS quietly rolled out the new section last week and only offers a small selection of 18 films licensed from Paramount Studios at the moment. Although the company plans to grow the lineup in the near future, current choices include Election, Rosemary’s Baby and Up in the Air. Anyone who needs a classic Star Trek fix will probably be delighted to learn a number of those films are included, even as they’ve suddenly disappeared from Netflix in the US.

For now, CBS is hoping the latest entry to the Star Trek franchise, as well as its Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight, will be enough to start luring more users to the service. The president of CBS Interactive Marc DeBevoise recently told New York Magazine that the company plans to branch out into even more original content this year, but they’re still trying to find the sweet spot that will drive users to pay for “a premium version of CBS.” As for the release date for Discovery, DeBevoise says production is “going great,” but wouldn’t commit to a fall premiere.