Month: June 2016

A Google self-driving car. (credit: Google)

According to Google’s May 2016 Self-Driving Car report (PDF), the company has been teaching its self-driving prototype “bubble cars” how to honk. A human driver can be easily distracted, says Google, and if a bubble car encounters a distracted driver on the road, it should have a mechanism to get that driver's attention back on driving.

“The human act of honking may be (performance) art," says Google, "but our self-driving cars aim to be polite, considerate, and only honk when it makes driving safer for everyone.” (That’s what Google says now, but just wait until its cars achieve sentience and have something to celebrate. Or when another autonomous vehicle goes off the rails and two self-driving cars get caught in an endless honking loop.)

Prototype bubble cars equipped with internal horns can now honk when they see another car backing out of a driveway or swerving into their lane. Why no external horn? Untrained software that honks at a bad time is more likely to confuse or distract nearby drivers with an external horn than an internal one. Over the course of 10,000 to 15,000 test-driven miles per week, Google engineers noted when the cars honked appropriately and when they honked inappropriately and trained the software to become more accurate.

(credit: Adrien Hebert)

Want to set your time machine to catch a solar eclipse with a group of curious Mesopotamians in the year 700 BCE? It's not as simple as you think. You need to adjust for the subtle slowing of Earth’s rotation over time and know the history of sea level change—and even those bits of knowledge might not be able to get you there on time. That's the conclusion that a team led by Harvard’s Carling Hay reached when it looked at what the ancient astronomical record tells us about our planet's timekeeping.

Tidal forces caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon act like a brake on the spinning Earth, gradually increasing the length of the day. It takes a long time for this to add up to anything meaningful, but the Earth has been around a long time: 400 million years ago, each year contained 400 days. At the current rate, days are growing just a couple milliseconds longer per century, so it would take more than 3.5 million years to add a minute.

This is not the answer to your plea for more time in the day to tackle your workload.

The Ohio State University

The Ohio State University is getting pretty good at EcoCAR, winning the last three years.

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Imagine if Chevrolet handed you the keys to a new Camaro and told you to turn the sports car into something more environmentally friendly while still keeping the fun-to-drive aspect. Well, that's exactly what happened for the student teams that are participating in the EcoCAR 3 competition. It's the third in a series of competitions organized by the US Department of Energy and General Motors meant to provide experience and training to young engineers and other students at the 16 universities which take part.

EcoCAR 3 is now in the middle of its four-year run, and the teams recently finished putting their creations through the paces at GM's Desert Proving Grounds in Yuma, Arizona. The Ohio State University took top honors, making it three victories in three years for the Buckeyes (they won the first EcoCar 3 competition and the final EcoCar 2 competition). Virginia Tech and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University took second and third.

According to Trevor Thomkins (The Ohio State University), the team decided to convert its Camaro into a performance plug-in hybrid after conducting market research in several regions around Columbus, Ohio. That meant ripping out the 3.6L V6 and replacing it with a 160hp (119kW) 2.0L, four-cylinder engine that runs on E85 gasoline, coupled to a 200hp (150kW) electric motor from Parker Hannifin powered by an 18.9kWh battery from A123. The plug-in hybrid Camaro is able to do 45 miles (72km) on battery power alone and should be capable of 65MPGe.

Welp, looks like I won't be needing this for my games anymore.

We're looking forward to spending some time with Dangerous Golf, the destruction-focused, ball-bouncing "simulation" that just launched on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 courtesy of some veteran developers from Burnout Paradise-maker Criterion Games. Still, we're a little surprised by a prominent missing feature from the PC version. As the game's Steam page now notes quite prominently, "Dangerous Golf requires a controller to play."

A lack of keyboard and/or mouse support is more than just a rarity in PC games; it's practically unheard of. Even when games are specifically designed for a handheld controller on another platform, the PC port usually offers some sort of option for the two input methods that have been standard on practically every home PC for the past two or three decades. Console games that would be functionally impossible to control or feel incredibly compromised without a controller (EA's Skate series comes to mind) usually just don't end up with PC ports in the first place.

Aside from some recent virtual reality games (which might as well be considered a separate platform), the only PC game we can think of that officially requires a controller is Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (players report there is some basic, barely functional keyboard support anyway). That game was explicitly designed to use a console controller's dual analog sticks to allow for simultaneous, separate control of two protagonists. It would at the very least be extremely awkward to control without those sticks. Dangerous Golf, on the other hand, could probably have implemented the same basic keyboard/mouse-based control scheme that dozens of other PC golf games has used for decades without too much trouble.

(credit: Mark Walton)

Inside the surprisingly humble cafeteria on the ground floor of London's Framestore, one of the world's biggest visual effects studios, friends, colleagues, and journalists have gathered to hear a talk from its co-founder and chief creative director, Mike McGee. But rather than wax lyrical about Framestore's latest Hollywood accomplishments—from which it can count the Oscar-winning VFX in Gravity and the vast CGI sets of The Martian—or its commercial endeavours such as the famous Audrey Hepburn Galaxy chocolate TV advert, McGee is talking about virtual reality. Or rather, how Framestore is already on its way to becoming one of the biggest players in the industry.

Framestore's bullish attitude to VR—it has already developed experiences for the Oculus, HTC Vive, and Samsung Gear VR, and is working on projects for PlayStation VR and Microsoft HoloLens—stands in stark contrast to that of the games industry, which has thus far remained largely nonchalant about the platform outside of smaller developers. Just yesterday, Take-Two (the publisher of Grand Theft Auto amongst other games) CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the company simply wasn't "incentivised to be at the frontline of [VR] development," because of the high asking price and the need for a dedicated play space. Both EA and Activision are taking a "wait and see" attitude to the platform.

It's an odd turn of events given that the original VR posterboy, the Oculus Rift, was pitched (and still is pitched) as a device primarily designed for playing video games. Meanwhile, the HTC Vive is powered by Steam, the biggest PC gaming platform in the world. As Ars' own Kyle Orland pointed out, the lack of investment from games companies runs the risk of turning one of the most exciting and promising technologies of the last decade into little more than a niche fad. After all, without that killer app, what reason is there for people to pay for a headset? Conversely, without headsets—just roughly 30,000 Vive units have been sold to consumers according to Steam estimates—why should game companies invest?

Fun fact: This is what a data transfer looks like when you're inside an Internet tube. (credit: Getty Images | Yuri_Arcurs)

Frontier Communications, newly expanded after purchasing Verizon wireline networks in three states, says it has no plans to impose Comcast-style data overage charges.

"We have not really started or have any intent about initiatives around usage-based pricing," CEO Daniel McCarthy told investors Wednesday at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. "We want to make sure our product meets the needs of customers for what they want to do and it doesn't inhibit them or force them to make different decisions about how they're going to use the product."

FierceTelecom has a story about McCarthy's comments and audio is available here.

(credit: EFF / Paramount )

Have you ever read a patent and thought, "I feel like I've seen that in a Star Trek episode?"

Well, this month the Electronic Frontier Foundation's patent sharpshooters have found a patent that quite literally had all of its key claim elements described by Star Trek—specifically, a 1998 episode of Deep Space Nine.

Earlier this week, EFF lawyer Vera Ranieri described the latest "Stupid Patent of the Month."  US Patent No. 6,612,985 is a "method and system for monitoring and treating a patient" and is owned by My Health Inc. That company appears to be a non-practicing entity, and it has filed at least 30 lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas, a well-known patent troll haven.