The First Autonomous Drone Delivery Network Will Fly Above Switzerland Starting Next Month
Thuy Ong | The Verge
“Logistics company Matternet has announced a permanent autonomous drone network in Switzerland that will now see lab samples like blood tests and other diagnostics flown between hospital facilities, clinics, and labs. The first delivery network will be operational from next month, with several more to be introduced in the next year. Matternet says medical items can be delivered to hospitals within 30 minutes.”

BIOTECH

China Signs $300m Deal to Buy Lab-Grown Meat From Israel in Move Welcomed by Vegans
Rachel Roberts | Independent
“For many environmental and animal rights groups, lab meat is seen as a positive move away from the slaughter of billions of animals, as well as being a greener option than traditional factory farming.”

ROBOTICS

Newly Developed Artificial Muscles Can Lift 1,000 Times Their Own Weight
Luke Dormehl | Digital Trends
“Call it one step closer to Terminator becoming a reality if you want, but researchers at Columbia Engineering have developed self-contained soft robotic muscles that are three times stronger than those made of natural tissue. The 3D-printed synthetic soft muscles boast a strain density (expansion per gram) that’s 15 times that of natural muscles, can lift a whopping 1,000 times their own weight, and — best of all for the cost-conscious — cost just three cents per gram to create.”

SPACE

Mock Mars Crew Emerges from Dome in Hawaii After 8 Months of Isolation
Hanneke Weitering | Space.com
“After spending eight months simulating life on Mars on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano, six ‘astronauts’ emerged from their Hawaiian habitat on Sunday (Sept. 17) to return to civilization. This concluded the fifth mock Mars mission of the NASA-funded HI-SEAS program (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation). Operated by the University of Hawaii, this research project studies how groups of interplanetary travelers would work together on long-term missions while in cramped quarters.”

COMPANY NEWS

Tesla’s Remote Upgrades to Its Vehicles During Hurricane Irma Are the Future of Tech
Bob O’Donnell | Recode
“The event that triggered my thought process was Tesla’s recent decision to remotely and temporarily enhance the battery capacity, and therefore driving range, of its Tesla vehicles for owners in Florida who were trying to escape the impact of the recent Hurricane Irma. Tesla has offered software-based hardware upgrades—not only to increase driving range but to turn on its autonomous driving features—for several years.”

Image Credit: Kreativorks / Shutterstock.com

See How NASA Envisions a ‘Mars 2030’ Landing in VR
Mariella Moon | Engadget
“A NASA-approved virtual experience called Mars 2030 has just landed on the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift and the PC through Steam. It puts you in the space shoes of an astronaut exploring 15 miles of Martian landscape, which was modeled after the planet’s real surface as captured by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera.”

Google Unveils ARCore, Its Answer to Apple’s ARKit, But It Will Be Hard to Catch Up
Mark Sullivan | Fast Company
“With ARCore, Google says, developers can create AR apps and games that run on virtually any Android smartphone—existing and forthcoming…ARCore games and apps will use an Android phone’s camera to determine the position and movement of the phone itself within a real-world environment.”

Now You Can Broadcast Facebook Live Videos From Virtual Reality
Daniel Terdiman | Fast Company
“The idea is fairly simple. Spaces allows up to four people—each of whom must have an Oculus Rift VR headset—to hang out together in VR. Together, they can talk, chat, draw, create new objects, watch 360-degree videos, share photos, and much more. And now, they can live-broadcast everything they do in Spaces, much the same way that any Facebook user can produce live video of real life and share it with the world.”

$99 Headset Could Be Augmented Reality’s First True Chance at a Mass Market
Rachel Metz | MIT Technology Review
“The headset, made by Mira, is like an AR version of Samsung’s Gear VR, which gives users a virtual-reality experience when they insert one of a few Samsung smartphones. With Mira’s Prism headset, though, the phone is positioned away from your face, and images shown on its display—one for each eye, as with stereoscopic 3-D for virtual reality—reflect off a clear lens and into your eyes so you perceive virtual objects at depth in front of you.”

Augmented Reality on Your Desk—All You Need Is a Lightbulb Socket
Rachel Metz | MIT Technology Review
“Called Desktopography, it uses a small projector, a depth sensor, and a computer to project images onto surfaces; the projections can move around to stay out of the way of objects that are also on the surface.”

Stock Media provided by timofeev / Pond5

Tarzan the Swinging Robot Could Be the Future of Farming
Mariella Moon | Engadget
“Tarzan will be able to swing over crops using its 3D-printed claws and parallel guy-wires stretched over fields. It will then take measurements and pictures of each plant with its built-in camera while suspended…While it may take some time to achieve that goal, the researchers plan to start testing the robot soon.”

Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses
Tom Simonite | Wired
“Robots able to help with so-called picking tasks would boost Amazon’s efficiency—and make it much less reliant on human workers. It’s why the company has invited a motley crew of mechanical arms, grippers, suction cups—and their human handlers—to Nagoya, Japan, this week to show off their manipulation skills.”

Robots Learn to Speak Body Language
Alyssa Pagano | IEEE Spectrum
“One notable feature of the OpenPose system is that it can track not only a person’s head, torso, and limbs but also individual fingers. To do that, the researchers used CMU’s Panoptic Studio, a dome lined with 500 cameras, where they captured body poses at a variety of angles and then used those images to build a data set.”

I Watched Two Robots Chat Together on Stage at a Tech Event
Jon Russell | TechCrunch
“The robots in question are Sophia and Han, and they belong to Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company that is developing and deploying artificial intelligence in humanoids. The duo took to the stage at Rise in Hong Kong with Hanson Robotics’ Chief Scientist Ben Goertzel directing the banter. The conversation, which was partially scripted, wasn’t as slick as the human-to-human panels at the show, but it was certainly a sight to behold for the packed audience.”

How This Japanese Robotics Master Is Building Better, More Human Androids
Harry McCracken | Fast Company
“On the tech side, making a robot look and behave like a person involves everything from electronics to the silicone Ishiguro’s team uses to simulate skin. ‘We have a technology to precisely control pneumatic actuators,’ he says, noting, as an example of what they need to re-create, that ‘the human shoulder has four degrees of freedom.’”

Stock Media provided by Besjunior / Pond5

Facebook Launches “Moon Shot” Effort to Decode Speech Direct From the Brain
Larry Greenemeier | Scientific American
“If all goes according to plan—and that’s a big if—Building 8’s neural prosthetic would strap onto a person’s head, use an optical technique to decode intended speech and then type those thoughts on a computer or smartphone at up to 100 words per minute. This would be an order-of-magnitude faster than today’s state-of-the-art speech decoders.”

BIOTECH

Engineering the Perfect Astronaut
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“Let’s be clear. No one is trying to grow an astronaut in a bubbling vat somewhere. But some far-out ideas once relegated to science fiction and TED Talks have recently started to take concrete form. Experiments have begun to alter human cells in the lab. Can they be made radiation-proof? Can they be rejiggered to produce their own vitamins and amino acids?”

INNOVATION

Next List 2017: 20 People Who Are Creating the Future
WIRED Staff | WIRED
“Microsoft will build computers even more sleek and beautiful than Apple’s. Robots will 3D print cool shoes that are personalized just for you. (And you’ll get them in just a few short days.) Neural networks will take over medical diagnostics, and Snapchat will try to take over the entire world. The women and men in these pages are the technical, creative, idealistic visionaries who are bringing the future to your doorstep.”

AUTOMATION

Amazon’s Plan to Dominate the Shipping Industry—With Almost No Humans Involved—Is Taking Shape
Mike Murphy | Quartz
“Today’s announcement evokes a future where self-driving trucks could haul goods to warehouses in much shorter periods of time… Those goods could then be offloaded by robots that can sort them into buckets for Kiva robots to store them on shelves, and carry them to other robots to pack when an order is placed. Yet more robots could load them onto drones or delivery trucks for fulfillment, meaning that in the future, it could be possible to place an Amazon order and have it show up at your door without a single human touching it.”

I just got to pilot an awesome (and huge) robot thanks to Hankook Mirae Technology. Nice! #MARS2017 pic.twitter.com/MvN6ghEYFi

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) March 20, 2017

ENVIRONMENT

The Very Hungry Plastic-Eating Caterpillar
Ed Yong | The Atlantic
“People produced 311 million tons of plastic in 2014, and that figure is set to double in the next 20 years. Around 40 percent of that consists of polyethylene, in the form of plastic bags, containers, and other products, much of which ends up in landfills. Could the waxworms help to break down that mountain of persistent trash?”

Image Credit: Shutterstock

NASA’s Origami Robots Can Squeeze Into Places Rovers Can’t
Mariella Moon | Engadget
“Imagine a Martian rover that can send small robotic minions to crawl into crevices or climb steep slopes—everywhere a full-sized vehicle can’t go to. That’s the scenario a team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory hopes to achieve by developing small origami-inspired robots called Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robots or PUFFERs. They’re made of printed circuit boards and can be flattened and stacked on top of each other on the way to their mission. Once they get to the location, they can pop back up and drive away.”

AUTOMATION

No Clerks Required in World’s First Unmanned Convenience Store
Rich Haridy | New Atlas
“The customer installs an app on their phone, which allows them to access the store. When inside they simply scan the bar code of the goods they want and upon leaving the store their credit card will be charged for their purchases. …Much like Wheelys’ strategy selling its bike-cafes, the company’s ultimate goal is to license the technology so any retailer can integrate it into their pre-existing stores. In the company’s words, “What Uber did for taxis, we do for retail.”

SECURITY

A Tweet to Kurt Eichenwald, a Strobe and a Seizure. Now, an Arrest.
Cecilia Kang | NYTimes
“This is an interesting and unique case in that there are lots of online attacks that can have physical consequences, such as an attack on an electrical grid or the control of air traffic control,” said Vivek Krishnamurthy, an assistant director at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School. “But this is distinguishable because it is a targeted physical attack that was personal, using a plain-Jane tool.”

VIRTUAL REALITY

Disney Researchers Catch a Real Ball in Virtual Reality
Matthew Humphries | PCMag
“It’s very difficult to convey touching something in the virtual world with physical feedback. But what if you could interact with real world objects that appear in the virtual world. Disney Research decided to carry out just such an experiment by asking the question: can you catch a real ball in virtual reality?”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

MOSTLY HUMAN: Dead, IRL
Aimee Rawlins | CNN Tech
“If you could create a digital version of yourself to stick around long after you’ve died, would you want to? …In November 2015, Eugenia Kuyda’s best friend Roman unexpectedly passed away. She created an experiment to bring parts of him back to life…Using artificial intelligence, she created a computerized chatbot based off his personality.”

Image Credit: yucelyilmaz/Pond5.com

While we’ve made progress, the dream of completely preserving knowledge across generations escapes us still, and digital bits are particularly vulnerable. There’s no guarantee our digital tools will be available forever—even a century from now. And without them, much knowledge and culture will be inaccessible, left rusting away on impenetrable hard drives.

The Long Now Foundation focuses on this vision of long-term cultural preservation, and the preservation of language—a prime tool of culture—is central to their quest.

“Fifty to ninety percent of the world’s languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation,” according to Long Now. To save these languages, the foundation invented a rather ingenious solution.   

Embedded in a sphere of steel and glass, the “Rosetta Disk” is a physical disk containing over 13,000 pages etched with information on over 1,500 different human languages. The disk itself is made of electroformed nickel, contains useful information down to the nanoscale, was built to withstand multiple generations, and only requires basic technology to read—a microscope.

That is, massive amounts of critical information stored away, no computer required.

According to the Long Now website, the disk “serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage methods.”

Depending on what the future holds, the Rosetta Disk may be the only chance for certain languages to survive beyond living members. But there’s only a few such disks.

So, the Long Now foundation decided to simplify, miniaturize, and distribute.

Now, anybody can own and wear the Rosetta Disk on a necklace. Shrunken down to a wearable size of two centimeters in diameter, the Rosetta Wearable Disk gives anyone the ability to wear the key to human language for future generations.

To make the disk wearable, the language selection was limited to around 1,000 from over 1,500. And the text included was simplified too. Chosen from freely available information to support open access, the final documents placed on the disk include:

• The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (327 languages)
• Swadesh vocabulary lists assembled by the PanLex Project (719 languages)
• “The Clock of the Long Now” by Stewart Brand
• Updated diagrams for the 10,000 Year Clock

Adhering to the principles of “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe,” the wearable Rosetta Disk has taken the first step towards preservation at scale for an archive of this magnitude. (And a copy of the full-size disk is currently sitting on a comet, deep in space.)

While the disk itself is a little pricey—a $1,000 lifetime membership donation to the Long Now—the value of the information and efforts behind it is immeasurable. For now, the wearable disk is only available as a limited numbered edition.

Over time, we’ll see how the project unfolds.

But you don’t need to own a disk to access the library. The archive is freely available online, including an interactive graphic for browsing.

Image Credit: Megan Bayley

The immediate benefits of VR are already evident for general audiences, even if mainly early adopters have engaged with the medium to date. A commonly hailed use of the medium is as a tool for empathy. One recent example of an empathy-oriented VR project was coordinated by Twine, an online creative community collaboration network.

Creatives from Twine’s community came together to provide Frank Mouqué, a WWII veteran, a trip in virtual reality back to a town he liberated during the war.

Besides instantly traveling somewhere far away, a feat that would be challenging for the 91-year-old, Mouqué also had a custom experience prepared for him. The mayor of the liberated town presented him with an award, among other heartwarming interactions.

Virtual reality already provides a relatively cheap and easy way to travel digitally, especially for people who can’t physically travel. Today, anyone can buy (relatively) affordable models at stores. And more 360/VR creators are joining the game too. Between cheap and widely available 360 cameras and big platforms like Facebook and Youtube offering built-in 360 viewing, it’s incredibly easy for anyone to play. Even a panoramic smartphone image can now auto-convert to 360 on Facebook.

While this fully immersive genre of media is still new, there’s no shortage of creators and businesses building new realities in VR. A startup named Within (formerly VRSE) is leading the charge offering a smartphone app including a wide range of VR experiences. And larger organizations like the United Nations, New York Times and BBC are already producing VR content on almost a daily basis.

This new medium can be for everyone—even those not yet connected to it.

Banner Image Credit: Twine/YouTube

You’re not alone.

As the end of 2016 is upon us, media’s role in society has never been shakier. From social media bubbles to the fake news “crisis” and a spike in user-generated content, a new era of media experiences and consequences is impacting everyone.

Much of this is the result of older technologies like social media and the digitization and democratization of online news. But it’s unlikely to end there.

What’s to come?

Very real emerging technologies look certain to continue undermining media’s once static role of “captured” content by transforming the familiar into a fluidly editable medium. Eventually, it may be difficult to separate real from fake without great effort—and video, audio, and photographic evidence are far from immune.

For better and worse, one thing is certain, we’ll soon have even more power to create and consume media. The below selection of video articles featured on Singularity Hub this year offer a glimpse of how new technologies will further redefine media as we know it today.

Welcome to the New Era of Easy Media Manipulation

“Engineered to make audio editing easier, Adobe’s Project VoCo allows users to edit voices by rearranging words or saying phrases never actually recorded, all via typing…In short, this is the audio version of Photoshop—the ability to create something from nothing. A new generation of ‘sound-shopping,’ à la photoshopping, has been born.”

New Digital Face Manipulation Means You Can’t Trust Video Anymore

“How will advanced video manipulation impact credibility? As the creators of this tool have shown, using political figures to exhibit live facial re-enactment has major implications for trusting online videos; especially when it comes to sensitive personalities and ideas.”

Algorithm Predicts What Happens Next in a Photo and Makes It Into a Video

“Predictive video from stills has a variety of immediate applications, most notably creating video ‘out of thin air.’ And there might even be room for more creative endeavors down the road…For better or worse, as media manipulation becomes more flexible and widespread, video as a medium will shift into something more fluid than static. Ultimately, how such technology is used will depend on the motivation of each user.”

This Beautiful Demo Shows How Far Video Game Graphics Have Come

“ ‘Adam’ showcases the peak of what is possible today. But it’s even more fascinating to imagine what will be possible ten years from now as tools like Unity become more ubiquitous, virtual reality becomes inexpensive and widely available, and mainstream internet tech can handle real-time massively multiplayer online games in VR.”

‘Hyper-Reality’ Is a Psychedelic Glimpse of Our Future on Digital Overload

“The visceral experience of hopping between and mixing digital and physical worlds is beautifully depicted in [this] new crowdfunded short film…While the future of augmented and virtual worlds is still just forming — spending some time thinking about what worlds we’d like to inhabit probably wouldn’t hurt.”

Image Credit: Shutterstock

According to the World Economic Forum, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is here. It’s a change as significant as any modern revolution before it. And if we look, we’ll see the signs.

If the first three industrial revolutions brought us the steam engine, electricity, and global communication, the fourth revolution merges the digital, physical and biological. As Ray Kurzweil often says, this trajectory will eventually eliminate the barriers between man and machine. 

“One of the features of this fourth industrial revolution is that it doesn’t change what we are doing, but it changes us,” says Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.

To some degree, we’re already engaging in this symbiotic relationship today.

Wireless earphones, for instance, signal a symbolic shift toward hardware devices more intimately connecting with our daily lives—slowly chipping away the “middleman” between our thoughts and digital activities. In healthcare, a concept called “quantified self” already allows end-users to measure, track and change habits using personalized sensors connected directly to our bodies.

The future is already here. How can we prepare and adapt to these changes?

Schwab suggests, “The response to [the Fourth Industrial Revolution] must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.”

In other words, we all need to work together as much as possible if we want the most ideal results.

One effort to make collaboration easier is the WEF’s planned  “Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” in San Francisco. The SF hub will be a “platform for interaction, insight and impact…where some of the brightest minds can help understand the trends shaping our world and navigate the future.”

In time, we’ll see how well we respond to such profound and rapid technological and social change. So far, the WEF offers a strong message of hope, a note of caution, and a call to action. Because of the massive change on the horizon, a new strategy is required if we want to continue shaping the future as opposed to simply reacting to it.

Want to learn more? This short film covers the scope and scale of the changes ahead.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Using a deep learning algorithm, MIT’s Carl Vondrick, Hamed Pirsiavash, and Antonio Torralba recently generated one second of predictive video based on a single still frame.

Called Scene Dynamics, the software has been taught with roughly two million unlabeled videos. After being fed a new image, the system runs two competing neural networks. The first generates the predictive video while the second discerns if the videos are real or fake. Beyond predicting an impressive number of frames based on assumed motion, the algorithm also classifies the specific action occurring. While clearly not perfect, the results are impressive already.

It’s notable the software learned from unlabeled videos. Deep learning programs are usually fed masses of meticulously labeled data (images, for example). This takes a lot of time and effort and limits learning to tailored experiences. The researchers hope their work will advance less laborious “unsupervised learning,” reducing the need for special data sets and allowing machines to learn from messier information.   

Also, this isn’t the only project with the goal of predictive video.

Visual Dynamics is a similar project (also out of MIT) working to generate new frames of predictive video per source frame. The difference? Visual Dynamics predicts short snippets of what may theoretically happen next, while Scene Dynamics creates entirely new longer sequences of video that didn’t exist before. Also, Scene Dynamics can separate background from subjects and generate new content for each.

Predictive video from stills has a variety of immediate applications, most notably creating video “out of thin air.” And there might even be room for more creative endeavors down the road.

“I sort of fantasize about a machine creating a short movie or TV show,” lead author Carl Vondrick told Motherboard. “We’re generating just one second of video, but as we start scaling up maybe it can generate a few minutes of video where it actually tells a coherent story. We’re not near being able to do that, but I think we’re taking a first step.”

Beyond video creation, similar motion prediction capabilities might be integrated into computer vision systems, allowing robots to better guess how people and objects in front of them will move. Such powers might help them avoid damaging themselves or hurting others around them.

More speculatively, if software like this can predict motion, what else might it be trained to predict?

One possible use in the future could be predicting what blurry or distorted pixels in videos should look like if sharpened. Low-resolution, compressed, or artifact-laden video would then be automatically upgraded to high resolution.

According to the researchers, they also see use-cases for improved security tactics and self-driving technology. But the dark side of multimedia manipulation is clear too. We may eventually see it power propaganda or generate falsified evidence (assuming fakeness can’t be easily detected).

Thankfully, we still have quite a way to go before this concern is valid. But for better or worse, as media manipulation becomes more flexible and widespread, video as a medium will shift into something more fluid than static. Ultimately, how such technology is used will depend on the motivation of each user.

The code is already available on GitHub if anyone wants to start playing around today. And the original video data set is also available on the Scene Dynamics website.

Image Credit: MIT