Spring break is right around the corner, with Summer following close behind. Time to start thinking about vacation! And, wouldn’t you know it, Google has a new tool to help you plan one. It’s called Destinations on Google, and it’s as easy to use as you’d hope it would be.
Basically, all you have to do is run a search on a city, state, or country followed by the word destinations. Google will then come back with hotel and flight information to give you an idea of what kind of costs you might be looking at. The feature lets you specify dates, or you can leave the dates open to see when it might be less expensive to go.
There’s also specific activities you can have Google tailor its responses around, and it supports curated itineraries in some cases. Destinations is definitely work in progress – right now Google only supports 201 cities around the world – so don’t be disappointed if your locale of choice isn’t supported yet. But, knowing Google, it’s only a matter of time until it’s got the whole world covered with vacation suggestions and helpful pricing info.
Is the future of televised sports on VR?
The Occulus Rift, HTC’s Vive, and Samsung’s Gear VR will put VR hardware in the hands of untold numbers consumers this year. And the content is definitely coming along as well. Fox Sports just announced it is streaming March Madness in VR this year, and now we’re learning that Intel just bought Israeli startup, Replay Technologies, which develops VR tech for sporting events.
Intel and Replay worked together to deliver the NBA slam dunk contest in VR back in 2013, which was a little ahead of its time. But this purchase comes at a time when people will be hungry for VR content, and it looks like Intel will be in on delivering it. Now more than ever, it seems clear that 2016 will go down as the year Virtual Reality truly arrived for consumers.
Watch Google’s AV hit acity bus
Finally, just for fun: Remember that story we did last week about one of Google’s self-driving cars finally causing a traffic accident? Well, there’s video of it. Released by the Associated Press, the video has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it capture of the autonomous vehicle as it pulls into traffic, right into the side of a bus.
The rest of the video is taken from inside of the bus, with a classic “wait, did we just get hit? Gosh darn it all to heck!” reaction from this surprisingly un-phased bus driver. The rest of the video shows the damage to the Google car, which definitely took the brunt of the damage. No surprise there. Glad nobody was hurt, and not bad for computerized car’s first accident right? Could have been way worse. And that’s it for DT DAILY
