Google’s latest Android 16 Beta adds a lot of new wallpaper and locking screen screen options for Pixel phones, including live weather animations and a functionality that automatically frames photos of photos in a variety of sparkling shapes.
When you select an image to use as a wallpaper in the beta version, you can press the sparkling collection of Starbursts which has become the de facto symbol for AI features to access the new effects. One of them, “shapes”, washes your plain color screen, with a punchout frame in the middle centered on the subject of your photo, whether it is a person, an animal or an object. You can choose from five different shape options: an inclined, rounded oval rectangle, an arched opening, a flowery shape and a hexagon. It is a bit like the iOS functionality “depth effect” which partially obscures the clock on your locking screen with the head of a person.
Currently, your phone chooses the part of the image should be the subject, without the possibility of resize or reposition it. In an image of two cats that my colleague Dominic Preston tried, the phone automatically focused on one of the cats, without any option to use the other.
A new “weather” option interacts with the subject of your photo, as by placing them with rain drops or by wrap them in the fog. The default choice, “local”, modifies the effect according to the nearby weather conditions, but you can choose the fog, the rain, the snow or the sun if you prefer to use a persistent effect. These options join the previous “cinematographic” screen mode which automatically creates a parallax effect, by moving your subject around the background of the image when you tilt your phone. This feature is now activated with a tilt labeled “Add a 3D movement to this photo” and produced slightly different results when I tried it with the same image.
Google also tests the updates of the lock screen, in particular by offering more control over the notifications that appear there. For example, the beta version now has a rocking for “show notifications” which, once deactivated, will hide the notifications that you have already seen.
Finally, 9TO5GOOGLE spotted that a blog From the Google E / S Conference offers an overview of its “live updates” functionality, which, like the live activities of iOS, has live locking screen items that show you when, let’s say, your Uber driver arrives. In the GIF above, you can see which aspects as its progress bar and its temporal estimates will look like.
