Month: March 2023

Enlarge / Ford is tripling the production rate of the F-150 Lightning EV this year. (credit: Ford)

There's no doubt that Ford is embracing electrification. It was first to market with an electric pickup truck for the US market, and a darn good one at that. It has a solid midsize electric crossover that's becoming more and more common on the road, even if it does still upset the occasional Mustangophile. And there's an electric Transit van for the trades. But its electric vehicle division will lose $3 billion this year as it continues to build new factories and buy raw materials.

The news came in a peek into Ford's financials released this morning. As we reported last year, Ford has split its passenger vehicle operations into two divisions. Electric vehicles fall under Ford Model e, with internal combustion engine-powered Fords (including hybrids and plug-in hybrids) falling under Ford Blue. The move was in large part to placate investors and analysts, no doubt starry-eyed during a time when any EV-related stock was booming.

"We've essentially 'refounded' Ford, with business segments that provide new degrees of strategic clarity, insight, and accountability to the Ford+ plan for growth and value," said Ford CFO John Lawler. "It's not only about changing how we report financial results; we're transforming how we think, make decisions and run the company, and allocate capital for highest returns."

Enlarge / Terran 1 lights up the night sky in Florida on Wednesday evening. (credit: Relativity Space)

The shiny white Terran 1 rocket launched on its third attempt Wednesday night, lifting off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The small, methane-fueled rocket then produced some stunning views as a blueish-green flame powered it toward space against the blackness of night. The first stage, with nine engines, appeared to perform nominally as it rose smoothly through the atmosphere, firing for more than two minutes. Then the rocket's second stage successfully separated.

After this, something happened. From the video onboard the rocket it appeared the second-stage engine attempted to ignite but could not sustain this ignition. So far the company has not stated precisely what went wrong, be it a problem with one of the propellant pumps, injectors, or igniter system. Regardless, the second stage—which carried no payload due to the experimental nature of the test flight—fell back into the Atlantic Ocean.

Enlarge / Would you believe that creating this performance took only minutes of video processing and no human tweaking? (credit: Ninja Theory / Epic)

SAN FRANCISCO—Every year at the Game Developers Conference, a handful of competing companies show off their latest motion-capture technology, which transforms human performances into 3D animations that can be used on in-game models. Usually, these technical demonstrations involve a lot of specialized hardware for the performance capture and a good deal of computer processing and manual artist tweaking to get the resulting data into a game-ready state.

Epic's upcoming MetaHuman facial animation tool looks set to revolutionize that kind of labor- and time-intensive workflow. In an impressive demonstration at Wednesday's State of Unreal stage presentation, Epic showed off the new machine-learning-powered system, which needed just a few minutes to generate impressively real, uncanny-valley-leaping facial animation from a simple head-on video taken on an iPhone.

The potential to get quick, high-end results from that kind of basic input "has literally changed how [testers] work or the kind of work they can take on," Epic VP of Digital Humans Technology Vladimir Mastilovic said in a panel discussion Wednesday afternoon.