Moving World Wednesday
Your weekly round up of news and views from the tech, creative and business world.
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Positive energy from Solar Impulse
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Solar Impulse, the world’s first solar powered plane to circumnavigate the globe, has completed its second leg. If this is the first you’ve heard, don’t fret. The journey will take over five months, and you can keep up to date with its progress on an impressive rolling news channel named ‘SI.TV Live.’ You can monitor the plane’s altitude and fuel levels, see live footage, and even chat live to mission control (if you’re lucky you might catch sponsor Prince Albert of Monaco dropping in to check up on his investment).
As well as travelling the world, it is also campaigning about clean technologies. Solar Impulse shows us that what it's doing in the air, we can do on the ground, to end our reliance on fossil fuels.
Over the coming months the pilots will be flying for days at a time, with only 20 minute naps and yoga to keep them awake/sane. Yoga positions have been specifically designed for each pilot to deal with the confines of the plane, and to regulate body temperature in the heat of the sun.
If solar powered clean tech isn’t pushing your buttons, may we suggest this alternative-alternative energy source. |
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Watch Apple’s ResearchKit
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This week, Apple launched its first new product category under Tim Cook’s direction. You’ve probably noticed, the world considers this pretty big news. The Apple Watch was finally given a release date and prices, from the ‘bog standard’ £299 to the laughable £13,500.
Also on the agenda was the brand spanking new MacBook Pro. It’s thinner, blingier, has a cool new battery structure and only one multi-purpose port. Kiss goodbye to charging your phone and laptop simultaneously. The USB-C is a brutal (in every sense) attempt by Apple to ensure reliance on its ecosystem. Without the traditional assortment of connections, Apple users are bound to the cloud.
The cloud is where Apple is focusing its investment and innovations. Gone are the days of a slightly better camera or a higher def screen, from here on in it's all about the ecosystem.
One example is ResearchKit. The ‘open source software framework’ shows how Apple products can be used beyond day-to-day calls, emails and tweets. Apple is now capitalising on its unique position of collecting an unfathomable amount of sensitive data from its users, and using it to create what could be real and effective change in medical research. Basically ResearchKit is a platform for health experts to gain regular and invaluable information from people they seek to help.
Usually, tech companies’ data collection practices prompt responses that range from cynicism to fury. Apple has an uncanny knack for making people do, or buy, as it says. By being so transparent when announcing its ResearchKit data collection policy at the hugely hyped keynote, it may spark a shift in consumers opting in to share their data, ‘for the greater good’. |
VR plays the long game
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The games industry isn’t just about making computer games anymore. At last week’s MWC and GDC, representatives from the gaming world presented cutting-edge tech that is bleeding into other creative sectors.
HTC and Valve partnered to create the Vive (rhymes with ‘Hive’), which unlike other VR headsets, is explicitly meant for moving around in. The Vive incorporates real space into the virtual, letting users move around a room safely while playing. The headset is tethered to two wireless sensors that define the borders of a space. Get too close to a wall, and a grid outline of your room appears, meaning we can finally prance around our living rooms in virtual reality without destroying coffee tables.
Many see the evolution of VR as part of the gaming industry’s increasing reach into other sectors. Game engines intended for developers, like Unreal and Unity, are increasingly attracting industrial designers, architects, and filmmakers. They give designers the tools to test a wider range of parameters than usual. Built-in physical simulations enable designers to better see how a product or experience may look in an environment, and how it may sound or move.
Guy Wolstenholme, Co-Founder of Moving Brands, often uses Unity for building 3D prototypes and animation quickly: “It’s not just about publishing a game anymore. You can send someone a link, and through that they are able to virtually walk around, for example, a desk you’ve designed.”
In its latest demo, the studio behind Unreal, Epic Games, partnered with FX specialist Weta to create a VR demonstration featuring the dragon Smaug from ‘The Hobbit’. Founder Tim Sweeney says: “Once all movies are made in a real-time engine… with some amount of [virtual] interaction, it’s not going to be a separate industry. Everything will come together in this common language." |
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