Nearly a decade after Google Glass made a debut at I/O 2013, Google is working on a new set of augmented reality glasses. The company teased the device at I/O 2022, sharing a short clip that showed off some of its capabilities. We saw an "early prototype" of the wearable transcribe a conversation in real-time, effectively providing captions for the wearer. Google also showed off the prototype translating a conversation from English into Spanish, allowing a non-English speaker to carry out a conversation with the Google employee speaking to them. 

Google didn't say when it plans to release the wearable it showed off today. We'll also note the teaser video the company played during its presentation included text at the bottom of the frame that said what it was showing off was a "simulated point of view," suggesting the final interface may look dramatically different from the one Google showed off today.  

Developing...

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Google is rolling out auto-translated video captions for YouTube on mobile devices, with support for 16 languages. The feature is live now. Additionally, YouTube video transcripts are now available to all Android and iOS users.

This is all part of Google's work to make YouTube videos easier to navigate and search, building on existing features like auto-generated chapters. Google has a plan to increase the number of YouTube videos with auto-generated chapters from 8 million to 80 million by the end of the year. 

Next month, Google plans to add auto-translated captions to Ukrainian YouTube content.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

YouTube is giving Shorts creators yet another way to incorporate content from other users within their videos. Starting today, the company has begun rolling out Green Screen, a feature that allows you to use up to 60 seconds of an eligible YouTube VOD or Short as the background for your own original Short. Green Screen allows you to use both the video and audio from a sampled clip.

If you don’t want other people incorporating your long-form footage in their Shorts, you can opt out from Green Screen sharing through YouTube Studio. Otherwise, each time a user samples someone’s content, you’ll see a link to the original video in the Shorts player.

YouTube has begun rolling out Green Screen to iOS, with Android to follow at a later date. You can access the feature through the three-dots menu found in the Shorts app. The rollout of Green Screen follows the announcement of the Cut functionality YouTube introduced last month. That feature allows creators to add up to five seconds of footage from an eligible Short or YouTube video to their clip. Remixing has played an important part in TikTok’s success, so it’s not a surprise to see YouTube working to offer Shorts users similar tools.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Google I/O is one of the company's most important events of the year, and it all kicks off with today's keynote. It's a safe bet that Google will reveal fresh details about Android 13, but the company will most likely have much more to discuss.

It's not exactly a secret that Google has been beavering away on its own smartwatch — especially after a prototype was left at a restaurant recently. It wouldn't be a surprise if the company officially showed off the Pixel Watch for the first time today. There are also rumblings of news on the smartphone front, particularly in the form of the rumored Pixel 6a. 

Google will also surely have announcements on other fronts. Key products like Search, Google Assistant and other hardware may be on the docket as well (I have my fingers crossed for some Stadia news, but I'm not holding my breath).

Before the keynote gets underway at 1PM ET, join us for our pre-show, which starts at 12:40PM. Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low and Senior Reporter Sam Rutherford will break down what we expect Google to announce and provide their expert analysis. Engadget will also have full coverage of all the biggest news from I/O.

Follow all of the news from Google I/O 2022 right here!

Apple's compact desktop is back down to the best sale price we've seen since its debut. Amazon has the 2020 Mac Mini M1 for $570 right now, thanks to a discounted price that's brought down even further by an automatically applied coupon. That's $130 off the desktop's regular rate, and the model on sale includes 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

The Mac Mini is still the most cost effective way to get an M1 machine in your home — even the MacBook Air M1, which debuted at the same time, costs more starting at $1,000. The Mini comes with an eight-core CPU, eight-core GPU (one more than you'll find in the base Air M1) and 16-core Neural Engine, so you can expect speedy performance, high energy efficiency and nearly instant wake times. It should provide enough power for most users, even content creators, and it can even handle some gaming as well.

The exterior design of the Mac Mini has been left mostly unchanged, but that's not a bad thing. The small silver box will fit into nearly any desk setup without taking up too much space, and it has a number of ports including two Thunderbolt connectors, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, an Ethernet connector and a headphone jack. Our biggest gripe with the machine is its lack of upgradeability: you can't change the RAM and SSD, as they are soldered in place. But if you can live with that, the Mac Mini M1 remains a good option for anyone in need of an updated, powerful desktop.

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Although it's supposed to be restricted by surveillance rules at local, state and federal levels, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has built up a mass surveillance system that includes details on almost all US residents, according to a report from a major think tank. Researchers from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology said ICE "now operates as a domestic surveillance agency" and that it was able to bypass regulations in part by purchasing databases from private companies. 

"Since its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives," the report's authors state. "By reaching into the digital records of state and local governments and buying databases with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time."

The researchers spent two years looking into ICE to put together the extensive report, which is called "American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century." They obtained information by filing hundreds of freedom of information requests and scouring more than 100,000 contracts and procurement records.

The agency is said to be using data from the Department of Motor Vehicles and utility companies, along with the likes of call records, child welfare records, phone location data, healthcare records and social media posts. ICE is now said to hold driver’s license data for 74 percent of adults and can track the movement of cars in cities that are home to 70 percent of the adult population in the US.

The study shows that ICE, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, has already used facial recognition technology to search through driver’s license photos of a third of adults in the US. In 2020, the agency signed a deal with Clearview AI to use that company's controversial technology. In addition, the report states that when 74 percent of adults hook up gas, electricity, phone or internet utilities in a new residence, ICE was able to automatically find out their updated address.

The authors wrote that ICE is able to carry out these actions in secret and without warrants. Along with the data it acquired from other government departments, utilities, private companies and third-party data brokers, "the power of algorithmic tools for sorting, matching, searching and analysis has dramatically expanded the scope and regularity of ICE surveillance," the report states.

Spending transactions reviewed by the researchers showed that, between 2008 and last year, ICE spent around $2.8 billion on "new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing initiatives." It spent approximately $569 million on data analysis, including $186.6 million in contracts with Palantir Technologies to help it make sense of its vast troves of data. Records showed that ICE also spent more than $1.3 billion on geolocation tech during that timeframe and $389 million on telecom interception, which includes tech that helps the agency track someone's phone calls, emails, social media activity and real-time internet use.

In addition, the findings suggest the agency started engaging in certain surveillance activities much earlier than previously believed. The researchers found a contract from 2008 that granted ICE access to the Rhode Island motor vehicle department’s facial recognition database. Prior to that, it was understood that ICE started conducting facial recognition searches on state and local data sets in 2013.

The authors claim that ICE has been able to sidestep congressional oversight and bypass attempts at state level to curtain its surveillance capabilities. They included a list of recommendations that may help rein in the agency's surveillance dragnet, such as Congress reforming immigration laws to "undercut ICE surveillance authority" and blocking ICE's use of DMV data. The recommended measures also include protecting people who trust federal, state and local authorities with their data and blocking the use of utility records for immigration enforcement.

Engadget has contacted ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.

Now that the latest components from AMD, Intel and Nvidia are available, Lenovo is updating its 16-inch flagship gaming laptop with more lights, better performance and bigger batteries. And after getting a chance to go hands-on with the new Legion 7, I really appreciate that Lenovo made two slightly different versions to suit people's needs.

First up is the standard Legion 7, which is more of a desktop replacement-style gaming notebook designed to house the most powerful CPUs and GPUs you can put in a laptop right now. It's available in either Intel/NVIDIA (starting at $2,449) or all-AMD configurations (starting at $2,059), with Lenovo supporting up to a 12th-gen Intel i9 chip and RTX 3080 Ti or Ryzen 9 6900HX and Radeon RX 6850M XT.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Now those are some beefy specs, but the most important upgrade might be the addition of a new 99.9 WHr battery. That's the biggest power pack you can put in a laptop while still being able to carry it on a plane. On top of that, while Lenovo's included power adapter is a bulky 300-watt affair, the Legion 7 also supports USB-C power delivery. That means if you want to travel light, you can pack a smaller USB-PD adapter (up to 135 watts). However, it's important to remember that if you do so, the laptop won't charge as fast or get full performance when plugged into the wall.

That said, the most eye-catching part of the system is without a doubt all the RGB lighting scattered across its chassis. You get a light-up logo on its lid, a backlit keyboard with optional per-key adjustability, a big light bar in front and a ton of LEDs in its vents. Now I don't know if anyone keeps track of stats like this, but the Legion 7 may have the most RGB lighting of any gaming notebook.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

While it wasn't ready in time for my hands-on session, Lenovo says it's also planning to release its new Spectrum app that's designed to give users more control over lighting effects, including the ability to sync things with whatever music or videos they’re playing.

I'm not sure I love the system's brushed metal edges, but I have to give some props to Lenovo for including three USB-C ports on the laptop's left and right sides. This makes it easy to plug in things like thumb drives, while in back, there's additional connectivity for stuff you don't need to fiddle with as often such as power, Ethernet, HDMI and more. And alongside a new 1080p webcam (up from 720p), you also get a dedicated electronic shutter slider on the right for increased privacy.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

In general, the Legion 7’s build quality felt good too. There wasn’t very little flex on its lid or deck, and while touchpads are often an afterthought on gaming laptops, this one is both large and responsive. Unfortunately, there weren’t any games installed, so I wasn’t able to get a sense of its thermals or fan noise. But I do like the laptop's updated power button, which now has a built-in fingerprint reader.

That said, while I respect a big, high-spec gaming laptop (and anyone who wants to carry one around), weighing in at 5.5 pounds, the Legion 7 isn't a great pick for frequent travelers. But that's where the Legion 7 Slim comes in. That's because while you still get a 16-inch display, support for a 99.9 Whr battery and a very similar design, Lenovo increased the Slim's portability by reducing its max specs a touch, deleting a lot of RGB lighting and trimming down the size of its chassis. The result is a thinner and lighter 4.5-pound laptop with a smaller hinge that's easier to toss in a bag.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Aside from its size, the biggest difference between the standard Legion 7 and the Legion 7 Slim is that the latter tops out with either an NVIDIA RTX 3070 or an AMD RX 6800S GPU. And unlike its bigger sibling, the Slim's refresh rate peaks at 165Hz instead of 240Hz. The upside is that with the Intel/NVIDIA version of the Slim starting at $1,589 for a Core i5 chip with an RTX 3050 Ti or just $1,519 for the AMD Advantage model featuring a Ryzen 5 6600H and RX6600S GPU, Lenovo's slightly smaller system is a lot more affordable.

So regardless of what type of gamer you are, Lenovo is looking to give you a few more choices among 16-inch gaming notebooks. And while I'm curious to see how those huge batteries fare in real life (especially when paired with a power-hungry 12th-gen Intel CPU), I really like what I've seen so far.

The Intel/NVIDIA versions of the Legion 7 and Legion 7 Slim will go on sale first sometime later this month, with the AMD Advantage models arriving slightly later in June.

Last week, a group of Apple employees wrote an open letter criticizing the company's hybrid work-from-home policy, which requires employees to be at the office three days a week starting May 23rd. Now, Apple has lost director of machine learning Ian Goodfellow over the policy, according to a tweet from The Verge's Zoë Schiffer. Goodfellow may have been the company's most cited machine learning expert, according to Schiffer. "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," he wrote in a note to staff. 

A group of Apple staffers called "Apple Together" opposed to the RTO (return-to-office) strategy cited multiple arguments against it. They noted that in-person collaboration isn't needed that often, thanks to apps like Slack. They also countered Apple's argument that in-person work allows for "serendipity" when people bump into each other, saying that Apple's siloed office structure makes that difficult. 

It also noted that a daily commute "is a huge waste of time as well as both mental and physical resources," and that the policy will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce.

Mainly though, the group cited Apple's hypocrisy in the way it markets its products. "We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?" the letter states. 

Apple, which brought in a Q3 record $97.3 billion last quarter, has been facing employee discontent of late. On top of issues around RTO, it's facing an NLRB complaint over hostile working conditions, and Apple Store employees are quietly attempting to unionize.

Forty years after it first began to dabble in quantum computing, IBM is ready to expand the technology out of the lab and into more practical applications — like supercomputing! The company has already hit a number of development milestones since it released its previous quantum roadmap in 2020, including the 127-qubit Eagle processor that uses quantum circuits and the Qiskit Runtime API. IBM announced on Wednesday that it plans to further scale its quantum ambitions and has revised the 2020 roadmap with an even loftier goal of operating a 4,000-qubit system by 2025.

Before it sets about building the biggest quantum computer to date, IBM plans release its 433-qubit Osprey chip later this year and migrate the Qiskit Runtime to the cloud in 2023, “bringing a serverless approach into the core quantum software stack,” per Wednesday’s release. Those products will be followed later that year by Condor, a quantum chip IBM is billing as “the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits.”

This rapid four-fold jump in quantum volume (the number of qubits packed into a processor) will enable users to run increasingly longer quantum circuits, while increasing the processing speed — measured in CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) — from a maximum of 2,900 OPS to over 10,000. Then it’s just a simple matter of quadrupaling that capacity in the span of less than 24 months.

To do so, IBM plans to first get sets of multiple processors to communicate with one another both in parallel and in series. This should help develop better error mitigation schemes and improve coordination between processors, both necessary components of tomorrow’s practical quantum computers. After that, IBM will design and deploy chip-level couplers, which “will closely connect multiple chips together to effectively form a single and larger processor,” according to the company, then build quantum communication links to connect those larger multi-processors together into even bigger clusters — essentially daisy-chaining increasingly larger clumps of processors together until they form a functional, modular 4,000-qubit computing platform.

“As quantum computing matures, we’re starting to see ourselves as more than quantum hardware,” IBM researcher Jay Gambetta wrote on Wednesday. “We’re building the next generation of computing. In order to benefit from our world-leading hardware, we need to develop the software and infrastructure capable of taking advantage of it.”

As such, IBM released a set of ready-made primitive programs earlier this year, “pre-built programs that allows developers easy access to the outputs of quantum computations without requiring intricate understanding of the hardware,” per the company. IBM intends to expand that program set in 2023, enabling developers to run them on parallelized quantum processors. “We also plan to enhance primitive performance with low-level compilation and post-processing methods, like introducing error suppression and mitigation tools,” Gambetta said. “These advanced primitives will allow algorithm developers to use Qiskit Runtime services as an API for incorporating quantum circuits and classical routines to build quantum workflows.”

These workflows will take a given problem, break it down into smaller quantum and classical programs, chew through those processes in either parallel or series depending on which is more efficient, and then use an orchestration layer to “circuit stitch” all those various data streams back into a coherent result that classical computers can understand. IBM calls its proprietary stitching infrastructure Quantum Serverless and, per the new roadmap, will deploy the feature to its core quantum software stack in 2023.

“We think by next year, we’ll begin prototyping quantum software applications for users hoping to use Qiskit Runtime and Quantum Serverless to address specific use cases,” Gambetta said. We’ll begin to define these services with our first test case — machine learning — working with partners to accelerate the path toward useful quantum software applications. By 2025, we think model developers will be able to explore quantum applications in machine learning, optimization, finance, natural sciences, and beyond.”

“For many years, CPU-centric supercomputers were society’s processing workhorse, with IBM serving as a key developer of these systems,” he continued. “In the last few years, we’ve seen the emergence of AI-centric supercomputers, where CPUs and GPUs work together in giant systems to tackle AI-heavy workloads. Now, IBM is ushering in the age of the quantum-centric supercomputer, where quantum resources — QPUs — will be woven together with CPUs and GPUs into a compute fabric. We think that the quantum-centric supercomputer will serve as an essential technology for those solving the toughest problems, those doing the most ground-breaking research, and those developing the most cutting-edge technology.”

Together, these hardware and software systems will become IBM Quantum System Two with the first prototype scheduled to be operational at some point next year.

The management at Raven Software, the Activision Blizzard subsidiary that develops Call of Duty games, has reportedly been trying to convince its employees to vote against unionization. According to The Washington Post, the Raven management has been sending out messages and holding town hall meetings ahead of the election deadline on May 20th. 

During a meeting held on April 26th, company leadership suggested that unionization might not only impede game development, but also affect promotions and benefits. After that meeting, The Post says management sent employees an email with a message that's more direct to the point: "Please vote no." The Raven employees the publication talked to said the company's efforts were ineffective, though, and that they still voted yes for unionization. 

This saga began late last year when Raven suddenly laid off around a third of the group's QA testers after months of promising better compensation. Activision Blizzard workers staged a weeks-long strike in support of the QA employees, and unionization efforts started at the same time. Since then, Activision has been trying to dissuade workers from forming a union. 

Activision VP of QA Chris Arends reportedly told team members in a Slack meeting that a "union doesn't do anything to help us produce world-class games, and the bargaining process is not typically quick, often reduces flexibility, and can be adversarial and lead to negative publicity." The National Labor Relations Board granted the quality assurance testers' permission to hold a union vote in April, though, and workers have been sending in their ballots by mail over the past month. We'll soon find out if Activision's alleged union-busting efforts are effective soon enough: The NLRB will be counting the ballots via video conference on May 23rd.