Month: March 2016

Magnolia Pictures

Here's what the future looks like: collecting data on people while wearing AR glasses.

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In the film Creative Control, set in near-future New York, people can slip on a pair of normal-looking glasses and experience a world that is part reality and part fantasy. This is what companies like Google and Microsoft have been trying to achieve with AR: technology you can wear on your face that doesn’t look completely ridiculous and allows the wearer to access a constant virtual overlay on the real world. There are obvious privacy concerns associated with this kind of device, namely, that you can record people without their knowledge. But there’s also the risk that your real and virtual worlds become so intertwined that you won’t know the difference. That's exactly what happens in Creative Control, with fascinating and genuinely funny results.

David (Benjamin Dickinson, who also directed and co-wrote) is an ad executive who hires musician Reggie Watts (playing himself) to create something using augmented reality glasses for a new client, the appropriately named Augmenta. David is also tasked with trying out a pair of the AR glasses. He talks to friends in the street, goes to parties, and works while the glasses collect data on anything he sees. He then uses this data to create virtual fantasies—which are centered around an avatar of his best friend’s girlfriend. Whenever he is having a bad day at work or gets in a fight with his own girlfriend, he puts on the glasses and escapes into his fantasy world. It’s probably not giving too much away to reveal that David’s virtual world does not make him any happier—the technology makes him anxious, paranoid, and unable to focus on his real life.

Augmented reality eyeglasses aren’t on the market yet, but Creative Control feels like it could happen in the next five minutes. The film captures the addictiveness of consumer technology—and sometimes, the loneliness and anxiety that can follow—with alarming accuracy. We see characters use their smartphones (which, in this vision of the future, look like see-through iPhones) to argue and flirt with each other over text messages. And David often chooses his Augmenta glasses over human interaction. David’s girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), serves as the film’s voice of opposition to technology. She’s a yoga teacher who dreams of living away from the city and its plugged-in culture. Together, they represent two familiar desires of people who use tech from the moment they wake up until they go to sleep: one is to always stay connected, and the other is to throw your phone in the trash and return to nature.

(credit: Ford)

The number of car makers committed to making automatic emergency braking (AEB) a standard feature on all new cars has doubled this week. On Thursday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced that 20 manufacturers are now on board with the plan, which will see AEB systems installed throughout their model ranges by 2022. In September of last year, we reported that 10 OEMs had already made the pledge.

In the past, government mandates were needed to spread advanced driver safety aids like airbags or electronic stability control systems beyond the luxury cars in which they first appeared. In this case, the auto industry has gotten ahead of possible NHTSA regulation and looks set to implement AEB itself.

Speaking at an event last fall, NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said that the agency wanted to see OEMs implement AEB as quickly as possible. "Safety," he said, "should not be a luxury item. Its an obligation for all of us." Whether 2022 qualifies as "quickly" is a matter of opinion, but the time frame may be reasonable given the long product development lifecycles of new vehicles.

All in.

When Sony finally announced a $400 price tag for its PlayStation VR headset earlier this week, that announcement was incomplete at best and downright misleading at worst. The $400 base package doesn't come with the PlayStation Camera that is required for positional tracking or the PlayStation Move controllers that are required for many of the headset's games.

This morning, Sony announced a more complete bundled package that gets at PlayStation VR's true starting price for most users. For $500 (or C$700) North American players get the PlayStation VR headset (and required cables), a PlayStation Camera, two PlayStation Move wands, and the PlayStation VR Worlds collection of themed mini-games. Even without the game, that number represents a significant savings from the suggested retail price for the Camera ($60) and Move controllers ($50 each), though both accessories often actually retail for much less than those suggested prices.

While there are doubtless some players out there who already have the Camera and/or Move controllers they'll need for PlayStation VR, we can't imagine there are a lot. For evidence, look toward Amazon, where sales for the PS4 Camera increased 3,000 percent in the wake of the PlayStation VR announcement (Move controllers and chargers saw a nearly 1,000 percent sales increase themselves). And while you don't technically need Move controllers for every PSVR game, scrimping on them means missing out on some of the system's most compelling virtual reality experiences.

Pizza delivery boys and girls, beware! Pizza giant Domino’s has unveiled an autonomous pizza delivery robot that is being trialled in New Zealand.

On Friday the company unveiled the Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRU), and announced that the bot had already carried out its first successful pizza delivery on March 8. “DRU is an autonomous delivery vehicle and is set to take the world by storm,” the company wrote in a statement on its website.

The vehicle’s development started in 2015 and was pushed towards commercialisation by Domino’s Australia-based skunkworks DLab. According to a promotional video (embedded below), DRU uses software developed by the Australian military contractor Marathon, which manufactures autonomous robots with obstacle-avoidance capabilities.

(credit: Jeremy Reimer)

When personal computers first came into the world in the late 1970s, there wasn’t always an obvious use for them. If the market was going to expand beyond hobbyists and early adopter nerds, there needed to be a “killer app”—some piece of software that could justify the purchase of a particular brand of computer.

The first killer app, VisiCalc, came out in 1979. It turned an ordinary Apple II into a financial planning tool that was more powerful and flexible than anything the world had ever seen. A refined version of this spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, became the killer app that put IBM PCs in offices and homes around the world. The Macintosh, which floundered in 1985 after early adopter sales trailed off, found a profitable niche in the new world of desktop publishing with two killer apps: Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop.

To keep up with the Joneses, the Amiga needed a killer app to survive—it found one with the Video Toaster.