Month: April 2016

"Sam, how many times do we have to tell you: Stop putting expensive VR equipment down your pants!" (credit: Sam Machkovech)

As much as we love the latest virtual reality rigs for Windows PCs, playing a game doesn't always feel realistic. The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive track head motion incredibly well, and the Vive adds solid hand tracking, but the rigs are bad at other things you'll want to do once you feel transported—particularly any movement beyond the size of your office or living room.

So far, the solutions to long-distance VR movement have left us a bit wanting. Pressing a control stick to virtually move while sitting still in real life usually results in instant nausea, so that's out. "Teleportation" systems let users point at a spot in the distance and automatically appear there, which works fine but feels a little limited, while giant walk-simulation treadmills are too expensive, hot, and bulky for realistic home use. The latest solution, introduced by a game maker out of Boston, is the most realistic-feeling yet—so long as you're fine with sticking a plastic controller down your pants.

Video edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

A British Airways A320 like this one reportedly struck a possible drone today at Heathrow, again raising concerns about consumer drone operators flouting regulations and endangering aircraft. (credit: British Airways)

Police at London's Heathrow Airport are investigating a possible drone collision with a British Airways jet while the airliner was landing. The pilot of the Airbus A320, carrying 132 passengers, reported that an object had struck the front of the aircraft around 1pm British Standard Time on Sunday.

The aircraft was inspected for damage by British Airways engineers and cleared for its next flight, an airline spokesperson told the BBC. Any damage done to the aircraft was apparently superficial. But the incident adds to fears, supported by recent aviation safety reports released by the British government, that consumer drones pose a danger to commercial aviation.

Flying a drone near an airport in the UK is already a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. And rules set by the UK's Civil Aviation Authority ban flying drones above 400 feet anywhere and flying drones out of a direct line-of-sight of the operator. The US has similar guidelines, with most metropolitan areas essentially designated as no-fly zones for drones because of how the Federal Aviation Administration defines airports—a definition that includes any hospital or building with a helicopter pad.

If you want a forecast for July, 2016, in Houston AccuWeather has one for you. (credit: AccuWeather)

The ability to throw more computer processing power at forecast models has substantially improved the ability of meteorologists to predict the weather. A recent analysis found that a modern five-day forecast is as accurate as three-day forecast was in 1995. In the last three decades, thanks largely to numerical weather prediction, the useful window of forecasting has moved out from about 7 days to 10 days.

Yet beyond 10 days, most meteorologists will say, there is little predictive skill. This is largely due to the "butterfly effect," in which only a very small change in initial conditions will have huge changes after about 10 days. However, in August of 2013, this basic mathematical principle didn't prevent AccuWeather from beginning to issue 45-day weather forecasts.

According to an analysis by the Capital Weather Gang, a widely respected site that forecasts conditions for around Washington DC, these 45-day forecasts showed no "skill" after about 10 days. "AccuWeather is a for-profit company and they have every right to pass off less-than-accurate forecasts as they wish, but the public deserves to know that these 45-day forecasts are not rooted in any science currently available to meteorologists and have not demonstrated value," the site concluded. "Caveat emptor."

Andrew Cunningham

OWC's Aura drive for newer MacBook Airs and Pros.

6 more images in gallery

MacBooks (and iBooks and PowerBooks before them) have never been renowned for their repairability, but post-2010 MacBook Air models have been particularly bad. RAM is soldered to the motherboard. Drives use proprietary connections. The Retina MacBook has no user-serviceable parts on the motherboard, which is so tightly integrated that it’s more like an iPad motherboard than a Mac.

There’s not much you can do about parts that are soldered to the motherboard, but when it comes to proprietary connectors, the folks at Other World Computing are pretty good about offering aftermarket upgrades. OWC’s Aura SSDs, launched last month, finally give owners of post-2013 MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros a way to increase their internal storage, in some cases well beyond the capacities that Apple itself offered.

We got a 1TB drive in for testing and came away mostly impressed. The drive isn’t perfect, but it's a decent way to lengthen the life of your Mac and give yourself more storage space if you regret buying one with a 128GB or 256GB SSD.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Mio has been in the fitness tracker market for a long time, but it's seldom mentioned in the same breath as Fitbit, Jawbone, and Garmin. Mio was one of the first companies to focus on wrist-bound heart rate monitoring, and its monitors are known for their accuracy. The $129 Fuse is the middle-of-the-road Mio device, competing with some of the newest products from Fitbit and Garmin. It features an optical heart rate monitor and daily activity tracking, but not much else.

Now after a few updates, the Fuse also tracks sleep, and it works with Mio's new PAI app, which uses its heart rate analysis to give you personal activity intelligence points when you keep your pulse elevated. While the Mio Go app gives you a daily picture of your activity, PAI provides a long-term view to encourage you to complete high-intensity activities as often as you can. If you're considered a mid-level Fitbit or Garmin device, the Fuse is another viable option if you're looking for a no-frills, no-nonsense tracker.

Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

What role do smartphones play in the refugee crisis that has left almost 60 million people displaced from their homes because of violence and war in places like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq?

Tech has made this crisis “very different than any other refugee crisis before," Brian Reich told us. Reich is the managing director of The Hive, a special US-based project of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "They have access to the Internet. They are using Facebook and Whatsapp to communicate with each other, to share information about the safest route.”

In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed “roboceptionists.” Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English.

In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala’s purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like speech recognition and the ability to perceive users’ facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, “culturally appropriate” exchanges.

Among the school’s robotics department, Hala’s development sparked a flame of inquiry. If a robot could read different linguistic and visual cues, could its communicative abilities improve? What might that mean for the future of HRI?