🍴 The Web: Google Designs Game Characters For You
By: Alex Larcheveque
Tags: Google, Game Design, Amazon, Web Development, Gaming

Wooooo! If you’re a basketball fan, today is the NBA Draft. My favorite pick?Lamelo Ball. I think he’s going to be a top-3 pick and a future superstar. I’m calling it now.👀

In this newsletter: Amazon disrupts again, Google helps gamers, and much more! We hope you enjoy.

Amazon — The Company That Will Never Die

It seems like Amazon is the company that never ceases to die. Always disrupting industries and being such a force that nobody can compete against, they have done it again — introducing Amazon Pharmacy.

What is it? Amazon Pharmacy is Amazon’s own online pharmacy that will eliminate the need to go to another CVS, ever again. Prime members will receive unlimited, two-day delivery for their prescriptions at no additional cost to their membership.

Why? Amazon Pharmacy’s vice president, TJ Parker, stated that they wanted to curate a seamless experience to get prescriptions and understand options, prices, and get their medications fast. “The [pharmaceutical] industry is inconvenient and confusing.”

How Amazon is Doing It Better:Clear Pricing: No more going through different prescription providers to get confusing and misleading prices, it’s an all-in-one platform now.

Pharmacist Support: Medicine isn’t working or giving you side effects? Amazon has 24/7 pharmacist support if you have a question or need advice.

No More Long Lines: Two day shipping, discrete packaging, and no more “judgy” looks when picking up birth control. Count me in.

The Future: Clearly Amazon knows what they’re doing, having the confidence to tackle the $312 billion drug-store industry. We think that drug store companies will either have to climb a infrastructure hurdle or slash their markups to compete against Amazon. Companies need to figure out a solution, now.

Want to Build Hearthstone? Just Hire Google

Oh, you think game design is easy? Hearthstone, a popular online-card game, has a total of 2,766 cards available to play. According to a Hearthstone designer, it takes 4–5 days to create the board itself, then another week or so to create all the clickables, effects, and animation. My point? Character design is a long, tedious process.

Google uses AI and ML to help characters get off the ground. This month, Google released something exciting that game developers can use. By utilizing a version of Google’s MS Paint, the company combined AI and Machine Learning to generate video game creatures, fast.

The tech behind it: Building An Inventory of Animal Parts: To build fantasy creatures, Google engineers needed to have an inventory of different animal body parts. After segmenting these body parts from different animals and datasets, they had claws, eyes, horns, etc. from different animals.

Building A Base Body: After having an inventory of parts, Google created another, separate dataset of structured bodies from different animals, which acted as the “base layer” to the new fantasy character.

Combining The Two: After having the base body and the part datasets trained, Google engineers created a system that allowed users to create a Frankenstein — mixing and matching a base body with any number of various animal parts.Adding Fantasy “Drama”: After the character’s “wireframe” was more or less completed, now the dramatics had to be imported. Google used more AI to realistically render fur, skin, and other textures. Then, they used Unreal Engine to pose the character with dramatic perspective, composition, and lighting. Magic!Use Cases? This will mostly be used for the ideation phase of character design. Why spend hundreds of man-hours conceptualizing and sketching out prospective characters that might eventually get scrapped?

Instead of spending that precious time, companies can use Google’s tool for the ideation process, and then spend the saved time in developing of the character properly.

Want to try Google’s tool for yourself? Try it out here.

“Lite” News For You

Twitter Copies Others. Twitter launched “fleets,” which are stories for Twitter. They disappear after a day, and are set to boost engagement on the platform.

Twitter launched “fleets,” which are stories for Twitter. They disappear after a day, and are set to boost engagement on the platform. Machine Learning for Machines. Purdue University mechanical engineers are training computers to recognize mechanical parts — from bearings, washers, to brakes. They aim to use this library to identify parts on real-life machines.

Purdue University mechanical engineers are training computers to recognize mechanical parts — from bearings, washers, to brakes. They aim to use this library to identify parts on real-life machines. YouTube Launches Audio Ads. Listening to a music video on Youtube? Watching a rave? With videos where users only glance at the screen occasionally, YouTube will launch ads that are mostly audio.

Listening to a music video on Youtube? Watching a rave? With videos where users only glance at the screen occasionally, YouTube will launch ads that are mostly audio. Airbnb IPO. Set to go life in December, Airbnb can be the third-largest IPO of the year. It even turned a profit last quarter, netting $219M.

Guess The Price — Airbnb Stays You Can’t Believe Are Real

This is a treehouse inspired by a pinecone. Guess how much the price is per night?

Meme of the Week — Why I Use Bootstrap

GUESS THE PRICE — ANSWER

$450/Night. Yes, this is an actual Airbnb you can rent.

The treehouse sits 35' above ground on the uphill side and almost 60' from the ground on the downhill side. With two triangle shaped see through floor panels this treehouse makes one feel as though they are flying through the upper Redwood canopy.