Facebook Hires Ex-Google Executive to Lead New Research Lab

In a fresh bid to connect the world better, Facebook has announced a new research lab to build hardware products based on its software and has hired a former top Google executive to achieve its goal.

The team at the new group called "Building 8" will be led by Regina Dugan who worked at the "Advanced Technology and Projects" group at Google and was director of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

"I am excited to have Regina apply DARPA-style breakthrough development at the intersection of science and products to our mission," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Thursday.

"This method is characterized by aggressive, fixed timelines, extensive use of partnerships with universities, small and large businesses, and clear objectives for shipping products at scale," he added.

"Building 8" will help Facebook realise its dream to focus on connectivity, artificial intelligence and augmented reality over the next 10 years as Zuckerberg outlined to people at its annual F8 conference in San Francisco this week.

"We will be investing hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars into this effort over the next few years. I'm excited to see breakthroughs on our 10 year roadmap in augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, connectivity and other important areas," he posted.

"'Building 8' is an opportunity to do what I love most. Tech infused with a sense of our humanity," Dr Dugan said in a statement.

Bringing chatbots to life, Facebook has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) bots right into its popular messaging app Messenger to allow users to interact with businesses and get updates from them.

With chatbots, an interactive software powered by AI and with human help, Messenger users can send messages to businesses just like they do to their friends and get things done.

The company also unveiled its own 360-degree stereoscopic 3D video camera.

The new 3D video camera called "Facebook Surround360" produces sharp, truly spherical footage in 3D.

The system includes stitching technology that seamlessly marries the video from 17 cameras, vastly reducing post-production effort and time.

The design specs and stitching code will be available on GitHub this summer.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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