Facebook and Oculus have been trying to make slimmer and more comfortable VR headsets for a while, but their latest experiment get close to the ideal: displays that are as easy to wear as a pair of sunglasses. Facebook’s Reality Labs has developed a proof-of-concept device that uses holographics with flat films for the optics, leading to displays that are less than 0.35 inches thick — much smaller than the usual LCD or OLED shining through glass. This is helped in part by polarization-based optical folding that moves the light forward and back multiple times, shrinking it well below its original volume.
It should deliver a visual upgrade, too. Although the prototype outputs in monochrome, Facebook is promising a wider color range and more vivid imagery when the technology is ready. The company also hopes to improve the resolution to the “limit of human vision” and eliminate visible pixels. The field of view should be comparable to existing headsets.
This design is unrefined even compared to prototypes like the Half Dome series, so it could be a long while before you’re wearing a finished product. In addition to color output, Facebook will have to address challenges like battery life, device connections and compatibility with conventional eyeglasses. Still, it might be worth the wait. This could lead to VR glasses you can wear for hours, which would be crucial for everything from sophisticated games through to professional uses.
Amazon’s new Prime Video feature could help you stay connected with friends even while social distancing. If you’re in the US, you can now host and attend a Prime Video Watch Party, a new option for desktop that lets you co-watch with friends and fellow Prime members. As the host, you’ll be in charge of controls, providing all attendees with a cinema-like synchronized viewing experience. And yes, you can choose what to watch from Prime Video’s TV and movie lineup, which currently includes Captain America: The First Avenger and Amazon Originals like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and The Boys.
The new feature seems to be an expansion of Watch Parties for Twitch, which Amazon launched as a test feature in late 2019, that lets streamers watch videos with their viewers. Like in Twitch’s version, you’ll have access to a chat box with built-in stickers in a Watch Party, so you can communicate with friends. If you’re the host, you’ll be able to generate a link when you start a session and then invite up to 100 people — as long as they’re all Prime Video subscribers or Prime members based in the US, that is.
Unfortunately, Amazon didn’t say if the feature will be available outside the US. If you’re in the country, though, you can simply click the Watch Party icon on desktop to get the ball rolling.
Telegram’s initial bid to launch its “Gram” cryptocurrency has failed. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced today that in order to resolve charges of violating federal securities laws, it has ordered Telegram to return more than $1.2 billion to its investors, and pay a hefty $18.5 million civil penalty to boot.
In August last year, Telegram promised that its newly-announced Gram currency — which would operate with a decentralized structure similar to Bitcoin — would be ready to by October 31st 2019. Because the initiative was largely born of a $1.7 billion investment round in 2018, Telegram said that if it hadn’t delivered Grams by the end of October it would return investors’ money. So it was already up against a tight deadline.
Come the middle of October, however, the SEC had intervened, obtaining a temporary restraining order against the company. The agency said Telegram didn’t register the offering with its office, and since it sees Grams as securities, it accused the company of violating the Securities Act of 1933. Then, in March, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction barring the delivery of Grams. And now the SEC has issued its final judgement.
"New and innovative businesses are welcome to participate in our capital markets but they cannot do so in violation of the registration requirements of the federal securities laws," said Kristina Littman, chief of the SEC enforcement division’s cyber unit. "This settlement requires Telegram to return funds to investors, imposes a significant penalty, and requires Telegram to give notice of future digital offerings." Telegram, meanwhile, accepted the penalty without admitting or denying any wrongdoing.
It’s not clear yet whether Telegram will revisit its Gram initiative in the future — if it does it will certainly do so under the watchful eye of the SEC — but the episode is illustrative of the wider problems companies face in getting cryptocurrency off the ground. Messaging service Kik was also ruled to have run its “Kin” token sale without proper regard for securities laws, while Facebook’s currency Libra has faced intense scrutiny from officials, leading to ongoing delays in launch.
Deepfakes have courted a fair amount of controversy in recent times, and with the technology expected to pose major challenges within the political arena — and notably the upcoming presidential election — platforms including Google, Twitter and Facebook are taking action on the issue. One company, however, is committed to making deepfakes more realistic than ever: Disney.
In a recently published paper, Disney Research Studios outlines how it’s utilized progressive algorithm training, stabilization technology and lighting effects to achieve thoroughly convincing face-swapping results. The results are a little unsettling, to say the least.
What sets Disney’s efforts apart from others’ attempts is its focus on megapixels. Traditionally, deepfake technology has focused on smooth facial transfers — that is, making a face look like a face on a face — rather than the nitty gritty details of an image. Models from DeepFakelab, for example, produced an image that was 256 x 256 pixels. Disney however, ramps that up to a 1024 x 1024 resolution. Not only does this give deepfakes a more realistic look, but it means the images will look better on bigger screens, which is evidentally what the House of Mouse has its targets on.
The paper doesn’t detail any potential applications for the technology, but it being Disney, the chances are the company is looking at ways to enrich its future film and TV show offerings. We’ve already seen VFX used to bring Carrie Fisher back to life for The Rise of Skywalker, while James Dean is set to return to the screen this year thanks to CGI. Disney’s technology could bypass visual effects entirely, and enable the megacorp to cast anyone — living or dead — in its movies.
Between 1985 and 2010, Blockbuster Video opened thousands of stores across the US. This map shows the locations of US Blockbuster Video stores over time.
Blockbuster opened their first store in Dallas in October of 1985. They weren’t the first video rental company, but they did have the largest selection of movie titles, over 6,500, which was more than any of their competitors at the time. Their first store was a huge success and throughout 1986, they opened three more stores in Texas.
While Blockbuster’s store concept worked really well, it wasn’t unique enough to be patentable. They knew that other companies would likely start copying their business model. To overcome this, their strategy was to grab as much market share as quickly as possible to stay ahead of any potential competitors. Throughout 1989, they purchased another four established rental chains and by 1990, they had opened over 1000 stores.
Through 2005, Blockbuster began closing their most unprofitable stores while they struggled to return to profitability. By this point, in addition to Netflix, they were also facing competition from Redbox which pretty much offered the same product as Blockbuster, just as a vending machine instead of an entire store.
In 2010, they continued downsizing and closing stores and by the end of the year, they filed for bankruptcy. Blockbuster was eventually acquired by the television provider Dish Network. Dish initially had plans to keep around 1,500 stores open and launch their own streaming service to rival Netflix, but these plans never ended up happening.
The last surviving store is located in Bend Oregon, it’s not only the last store in the US, it’s the last one left in the entire world. They’re a small owner operated store which is supported by loyal local customers as well as tourists stopping by to experience the nostalgia of visiting a Blockbuster store.
In the end, Blockbuster’s competitors simply had a better product and Blockbuster was just too slow to innovate.
Call of Duty: Warzone is about to get a lot bigger. The official Call of Duty Twitter account teased an increase to 200 players, a major increase from its current 150 player maximum.
The announcement did not specify when we can expect this update to come to the battle royale mode, which originally spun off from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It’s currently in the midst of Season 4, with no set date for the Season 5 launch, so this would likely be a mid-season update.
Season 4 also added a 50v50 Warzone Rumble mode, alongside the usual spate of new cosmetics, balance changes, and other additions. Activision and Infinity Ward have been regularly updating Warzone with new modes, which sometimes cycle in with the new seasons and other times drop as mid-season surprises.
Iain Boyd, Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder
With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through space are coming. But you might be surprised to learn that modern rockets don’t go all that much faster than the rockets of the past.
There are a lot of reasons that a faster spaceship is a better one, and nuclear-powered rockets are a way to do this. They offer many benefits over traditional fuel-burning rockets or modern solar-powered electric rockets, but there have been only eight U.S. space launches carrying nuclear reactors in the last 40 years.
The first step of a space journey involves the use of launch rockets to get a ship into orbit. These are the large fuel-burning engines people imagine when they think of rocket launches and are not likely to go away in the foreseeable future due to the constraints of gravity.
It is once a ship reaches space that things get interesting. To escape Earth’s gravity and reach deep space destinations, ships need additional acceleration. This is where nuclear systems come into play. If astronauts want to explore anything farther than the moon and perhaps Mars, they are going to need to be going very very fast. Space is massive, and everything is far away.
There are two reasons faster rockets are better for long-distance space travel: safety and time.
But human safety isn’t the only benefit. As space agencies probe farther out into space, it is important to get data from uncrewed missions as soon as possible. It took Voyager 2 12 years just to reach Neptune, where it snapped some incredible photos as it flew by. If Voyager 2 had a faster propulsion system, astronomers could have had those photos and the information they contained years earlier.
Speed is good. But why are nuclear systems faster?
The Saturn V rocket was 363 feet tall and mostly just a gas tank. (Image credit: Mike Jetzer/heroicrelics.org, CC BY-NC-ND)
Systems of today
Once a ship has escaped Earth’s gravity, there are three important aspects to consider when comparing any propulsion system:
Thrust – how fast a system can accelerate a ship
Mass efficiency – how much thrust a system can produce for a given amount of fuel
Energy density – how much energy a given amount of fuel can produce
Today, the most common propulsion systems in use are chemical propulsion — that is, regular fuel-burning rockets — and solar-powered electric propulsion systems.
Chemical propulsion systems provide a lot of thrust, but chemical rockets aren’t particularly efficient, and rocket fuel isn’t that energy-dense. The Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon produced 35 million Newtons of force at liftoff and carried 950,000 gallons of fuel. While most of the fuel was used in getting the rocket into orbit, the limitations are apparent: It takes a lot of heavy fuel to get anywhere.
Electric propulsion systems generate thrust using electricity produced from solar panels. The most common way to do this is to use an electrical field to accelerate ions, such as in the Hall thruster. These devices are commonly used to power satellites and can have more than five times higher mass efficiency than chemical systems. But they produce much less thrust — about three Newtons, or only enough to accelerate a car from 0-60 mph in about two and a half hours. The energy source — the sun — is essentially infinite but becomes less useful the farther away from the sun the ship gets.
One of the reasons nuclear-powered rockets are promising is because they offer incredible energy density. The uranium fuel used in nuclear reactors has an energy density that is 4 million times higher than hydrazine, a typical chemical rocket propellant. It is much easier to get a small amount of uranium to space than hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel.
So what about thrust and mass efficiency?
(Image credit: NASA/Wikipedia)
Two options for nuclear
Engineers have designed two main types of nuclear systems for space travel.
The first is called nuclear thermal propulsion. These systems are very powerful and moderately efficient. They use a small nuclear fission reactor — similar to those found in nuclear submarines — to heat a gas, such as hydrogen, and that gas is then accelerated through a rocket nozzle to provide thrust. Engineers from NASA estimate that a mission to Mars powered by nuclear thermal propulsion would be 20%-25% shorter than a trip on a chemical-powered rocket.
Nuclear thermal propulsion systems are more than twice as efficient as chemical propulsion systems — meaning they generate twice as much thrust using the same amount of propellant mass — and can deliver 100,000 Newtons of thrust. That’s enough force to get a car from 0-60 mph in about a quarter of a second.
The second nuclear-based rocket system is called nuclear electric propulsion. No nuclear electric systems have been built yet, but the idea is to use a high-power fission reactor to generate electricity that would then power an electrical propulsion system like a Hall thruster. This would be very efficient, about three times better than a nuclear thermal propulsion system. Since the nuclear reactor could create a lot of power, many individual electric thrusters could be operated simultaneously to generate a good amount of thrust.
Nuclear electric systems would be the best choice for extremely long-range missions because they don’t require solar energy, have very high efficiency and can give relatively high thrust. But while nuclear electric rockets are extremely promising, there are still a lot of technical problems to solve before they are put into use.
Why aren’t there nuclear-powered rockets yet?
Nuclear thermal propulsion systems have been studied since the 1960s but have not yet flown in space.
Regulations first imposed in the U.S. in the 1970s essentially required case-by-case examination and approval of any nuclear space project from multiple government agencies and explicit approval from the president. Along with a lack of funding for nuclear rocket system research, this environment prevented further improvement of nuclear reactors for use in space.
That all changed when the Trump administration issued a presidential memorandum in August 2019. While upholding the need to keep nuclear launches as safe as possible, the new directive allows for nuclear missions with lower amounts of nuclear material to skip the multi-agency approval process. Only the sponsoring agency, like NASA, for example, needs to certify that the mission meets safety recommendations. Larger nuclear missions would go through the same process as before.
After 60 years of stagnation, it’s possible a nuclear-powered rocket will be heading to space within a decade. This exciting achievement will usher in a new era of space exploration. People will go to Mars and science experiments will make new discoveries all across our solar system and beyond.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
