Light Start – Samsung Note 9 reveal, Nissan Star Wars, drones for Time, and Evolve extinct

Samsung said to be revealing the Galaxy Note 9 on 9 August

We’ve been expecting a load of Samsung news to turn up soon but perhaps we weren’t being optimistic enough. Samsung usually turns out the Galaxy Note handsets in time to take attention away from Apple’s major annual launch but the South Korean company might be showing up earlier than expected. A report by Bloomberg claims that, according to “people familiar with the matter”, that Samsung has set a 9 August reveal date for the Galaxy Note 9. That’s a couple of weeks earlier than usual, meaning that we might see the phone hit stores before Apple’s had their announcement time in September. Samsung, at this point, isn’t commenting.

Source: Bloomberg

Nissan takes cues from Star Wars for their latest autonomous driving ad

Okay, okay Nissan. You get points for tying the advert for the Nissan Rogue and its ProPilot Assist Level 2 tech to Solo: A Star Wars Story but you really could have done this a little better. The video above (or at the link below, if you’re reading the newsletter) shows a brief scene from Disney’s latest Star Wars creation before showing us the real-world equivalent, complete with a Chewie stand-in. Our only complaint? If you’re relying on an autonomous system (or semi-autonomous, in this case) in order to move a car between two trucks when there’s a full lane available between then… you probably shouldn’t be allowed to drive at all. This doesn’t really show why we should be impressed with ProPilot Assist. Still, the ad is cute.

Source: Nissan (YouTube)

Time Magazine recreates their iconic cover using drones

Time Magazine has done some odd covers in the past but recreating the iconic logo and red border using a mass of drones flown in sync? That’s a new one. And yet, with the assistance of Intel, that’s exactly what they did — flying 958 drones at once to create their latest cover. That’s a first. Another first is that the cover was also shot by a drone as well — funny, we didn’t think cover photography would be one of the first jobs to fall to the robot drone fleet. If you want to get a full rundown of the technical achievement behind the Time Magazine drone cover, head here for a behind-the-scenes look.

Source: via Engadget

Ill-fated monster chaser Evolve is finally off the endangered list (and on to the extinct one)

Perhaps you remember Evolve, a four-on-one game that Stuff was initially very excited about. It turns out that gearing your whole launch strategy towards selling DLC and season passes (which didn’t include everything) will annoy people, no matter how good the core gameplay is. Which brings us to today, where the dedicated Evolve servers are being turned off. Not right away, that is, but Evolve: Stage 2 (the free-to-download version) will be unavailable from 2 July 2018. The servers for the game as a whole are going to be shutting down on 3 September this year — in-game currency is going to be phased out in the meantime. Players will still be able to create peer-to-peer games and the single-player components will still work but for most purposes, Evolve is basically a fossil.

Source: via Eurogamer