Two Big Ears, a company recently acquired by Facebook, is offering its pipeline for cinematic virtual reality and 360 video (including its authoring tools, encoder and rendering engine) for free.
Called the Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation, this suite is designed to allow creators to implement VR audio across all devices and platforms. Authoring tools require OS X 10.7 or higher, and an up-to-date Mac is recommended for using the Spatial Workstation. Support for Windows will be added in the near future. Audio mix can be exported in a range of formats, including ambisonics.
With this announcement, Two Big Ears’ 3Dception for Games tool will no longer be a separate product. The company will be working with the Oculus team to combine its expertise and VR audio. It wrote that existing Pro customers will continue to receive support in accordance with its current agreement for the next 12 months.
Jibo SDK helps build robot skills
The beta version of the Jibo Software Developer Kit has been released, allowing developers to build robot applications known as Jibo skills.
Jibo is billed as a social robot for the home, and with this beta, developers can build Jibo skills that will expand its capabilities. The company said Jibo is a developer platform designed to connect people through its presence, convey emotions, interact with people, and have its own personality.
The Jibo SDK can be downloaded directly from the Atom Package Manager. Developers will receive access to Jibo’s audio processing, speech technology, visual processing, interaction, personality and movement capabilities. Developers can build Jibo skills using JavaScript.
The Jibo SDK consists of an animation editor, behavior editor, speech editor and simulator, and it is built on top of Atom, an IDE that is based on Electron and produced by GitHub.
Twilio reimagines developer console
Developers will have a new end-to-end console for prototyping, building and debugging Twilio apps, along with documentation and a debugger.
The new console focuses on how developers use Twilio for the first time, helping them to get their app into production while making sure there are no bugs. In the run-up to the SIGNAL communications development conference, Twilio debuted Console as a sneak peek, with the whole suite of Twilio products ready for access with the new slim dock, according to the company.
One of the new features in the console is the introduction of TwiML Bins, where developers can create static TwiML responses for Web hooks inside the console without the need to use a publicly available Web host, according to the company.
The debugger has been revamped in this release. Developers can now group errors by the Webhook URI that is associated with them, according to the company. This gives the developer insights into problematic endpoints in a Twilio application.
