The easiest way to avoid a costly repair job on your vehicle is to take it in as soon as warning lights pop up on your dashboard, but that assumes you understand what each dashboard symbol means—and when your car is reaching out for help. You can do one of two things to ensure you know what your car is saying: read through the manual or upgrade to iOS 17 when it’s available, which will turn your iPhone into a translator for your sick car.
The iPhone SE Offers Almost Everything You Want In An iPhone
Apple introduced a feature with iOS 15 called Visual Look Up that uses AI to analyze photos taken with the iPhone’s camera and attempt to decipher them, providing more information about what’s in the shot. It gave the iPhone the power to determine the breed of the dog you snapped at the park, or what type of flower was growing in your neighbor’s garden.
It’s an application that demonstrates the practical benefits of AI, and Apple continues to expand the capabilities of the Visual Look Up feature. Last month, the company announced new accessibility features coming to iOS and iPadOS including a Point and Speak feature coming to the Magnifier app allowing those with visual disabilities to simply point at something with a text label to have it automatically recognized and read aloud by their mobile device, such as the various buttons on a microwave oven.
Although these symbols are now nearly universal across all vehicles, they can still be cryptic, especially to newer drivers. And while eventually vehicle dashboards will all just be giant screens with the ability to provide more descriptive information about controls and warnings, it’s going to be decades before the standard dashboard iconography used today disappears forever.
Adobe’s pending purchase of Figma, the popular online graphics editing and interface design application, is facing yet another challenge. The European Union Commission plans to begin an in-depth investigation into the acquisition, according to a report from The Financial Times, attributed to four sources familiar with the matter.
Back in February, the EU Commission noted that it had received numerous requests to review the business deal. The international watchdog announced that it would need to clear the proposed merger, under the justification that it “threatens to significantly affect competition in the market for interactive product design and whiteboarding software.”
Now, the Brussels-based Commission will open a phase II investigation, per the FT. Generally, anti-competition probes are handled at the phase I level, which accounts for 90% of all cases, according to EU internal data. In comparison, a phase II analysis takes more time and goes deeper. By the Commission’s description, a phase II investigation “typically involves more extensive information gathering, including companies’ internal documents, extensive economic data, more detailed questionnaires to market participants, and/or site visits.” From the start of such a probe, the regulatory body has 90 days to make a decision.
The EU Commission would not directly confirm its plans to investigate the Adobe/Figma merger. In an email, spokesperson Marta Perez-Cejuela told Gizmodo, “this transaction has not been formally notified to the Commission.” Such notification is a requirement before any investigation can move forward. Commission officials requested that Adobe submit an official notification in February.
Despite the Commission’s lack of formal announcement, an EU probe into the acquisition is expected. Already the U.S. Department of Justice and the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority are looking into the digital design tool deal. The DOJ is reportedly preparing to file an antitrust suit blocking the merger, while the UK CMA is actively investigating the acquisition, with a first decision due by the end of June.
Adobe—the design giant behind Photoshop, Illustrator, and XD—first announced it would be purchasing Figma in September 2022. The Creative Suite maker’s massive $20 billion offer drew some raised eyebrows, as the figure is twice what Figma was valued at during its most recent 2021 funding round.
Figma emerged on the scene at the tail end of 2015, billing itself as an independent antidote to Adobe’s dominance. “Our goal is to be Figma, not Adobe,” CEO and co-founder Dylan Field once tweeted. The online application, which includes a free tier, has been much more affordable to use than Adobe’s offerings from the start. Many user interface developers came to prefer Figma in recent years. Yet now the company is vying to literally be part of Adobe.
The acquisition is “an incredible opportunity and honor to help Adobe build the next generation of creative tools,” Field wrote in his blog post announcing the business deal.
Gizmodo reached out to both Adobe and Figma for comment on the regulatory investigation and pushback into the merger. Neither company responded as of publication time.
Politicians think they have a way to hold companies accountable for troublesome generative AI: take away their legal protection. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley have introduced a No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act that, as the name suggests, would prevent OpenAI, Google and similar firms from using the Communications Decency Act’s Section 230 to waive liability for harmful content and avoid lawsuits. If someone created a deepfake image or sound bite to ruin a reputation, for instance, the tool developer could be held responsible alongside the person who used it.
Hawley characterizes the bill as forcing AI creators to “take responsibility for business decisions” as they’re developing products. He also casts the legislation as a “first step” toward creating rules for AI and establishing safety measures. In a hearing this week on AI’s effect on human rights, Blumenthal urged Congress to deny AI the broad Section 230 safeguards that have shielded social networks from legal consequences.
In May, Blumenthal and Hawley held a hearing where speakers like OpenAI chief Sam Altman called for the government to act on AI. Industry leaders have already urged a pause on AI experimentation, and more recently compared the threat of unchecked AI to that of nuclear war.
Congress has pushed for Section 230 reforms for years in a bid to rein in tech companies, particularly over concerns that internet giants might knowingly allow hurtful content. A 2021 House bill would have held businesses liable if they knowingly used algorithms that cause emotional or physical harm. These bills have stalled, though, and Section 230 has remained intact. Legislators have had more success in setting age verification requirements that theoretically reduce mental health issues for younger users.
It’s not clear this bill stands a greater chance of success. Blumenthal and Hawley are known for introducing online content bills that fail to gain traction, such as the child safety-oriented EARN IT Act and Hawley’s anti-addiction SMART Act. On top of persuading fellow senators, they’ll need an equivalent House bill that also survives a vote.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/gLpxhbt
An illustration of Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft.Illustration: Rocket Lab
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off this week while carrying 72 small satellites, including the first in-space manufacturing spacecraft with a mission to produce pharmaceutical drugs in orbit and return them back to Earth.
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Varda Space Industries’ first space factory is operating in orbit after launching on board a Falcon 9 rocket from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base on Monday, according to a press release. The spacecraft itself was built by Rocket Lab and is designed to provide power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control to Varda’s 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsule, which is designed to manufacture and carry the products on its way back to Earth.
The California-based startup wants to manufacture products in space that can benefit from being created in the microgravity environment and delivered back to Earth at a fast rate. Varda’s vision is aided by the increased access to space over the past couple of years, making it easier to launch its capsules into orbit.
The first capsule sent to space will attempt to produce pharmaceutical drugs while in the microgravity environment and return those products in the re-entry capsule. The spacecraft is set to spend about three months in orbit and send around 90-130 pounds (40-60 kilograms) of finished product on a trajectory toward Earth.
Varda was founded in 2020 (one of its cofounders was a former SpaceX engineer) and aims to use space to create better products for Earth. The microgravity environment provides some benefits that could make for better production in space, overall reducing gravity-induced defects. Protein crystals made in space, for example, form larger and more perfect crystals than those created on Earth, according to NASA.
The startup raised $42 million less than a year after its inception. Varda ordered four Photon spacecraft from Rocket Lab for its in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing capsules, the second spacecraft is currently undergoing assembly, integration, and testing, according to the company. If all goes well for its first mission, the Varda capsule will return to Earth soon, packed with a payload of space drugs.
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After you slip on the knitted head strap and turn a small dial to get a light-tight fit, the view of the real world through Apple’s Vision Pro headset is nearly seamless. Nearly. You’re not seeing the world through a transparent lens, but instead, a real-time video recreation of it beamed from external cameras onto a pair of better-than-4K screens.
Apple’s Vision Pro Seems Powerful, But Who Is It For? | Future Tech
The colors were crisp, the lag nonexistent, and the resolution high enough to be free of the screen door effect that plagues other virtual or mixed-reality headsets. But there’s just enough of a gap between the experience and real life to land in an uncanny valley. That’s why taking a hands-on test drive of Vision Pro during Apple’s WWDC event last week made me think of the 1995 cult cyberpunk noir film Strange Days. In the film, 3D recordings of real events can be replayed and re-lived through a piece of wearable tech, and Vision Pro’s slight flattening of reality reminded me of those virtual memories.
Stranger still was the experience of watching new 3D video clips recorded through the Vision Pro and played back for me like a high-tech pop-up greeting card. I predict that will be a standout feature of the device, which will cost $3,500 and be available sometime in early 2024.
More meta than Meta
Most everything else about the Vision Pro was an improvement on or evolution of features already found on devices like the Meta Quest, HoloLens, or PSVR. For example, the Meta (formerly Oculus) Quest started pushing virtual office environments with floating video chats and wall-sized spreadsheets when parent company Meta rebranded itself as a metaverse pioneer. And AR devices like HoloLens and Magic Leap already offer a view rooted in the real world, carefully layering augmented content on top.
Vision Pro plays with both of those concepts, letting you pin apps, videos and web browser windows all around you. It improves on what has come before by selectively letting elements of the reality intrude — like a real-world visitor visibly bleeding through your virtual background just by proximity.
The fabric headstrap was an improvement over other VR headstraps I’ve tried. Photo: Dan Ackerman
Virtual visitors can also intrude in your mixed reality experience. What you or I might call virtual avatars for FaceTime calls were, in AppleSpeak, dubbed “Personas.” They were the most impressive, and unsettling, part of the experience.
If I didn’t know the Persona I was talking to a real-time 3D recreation of a real person’s face, I might have been fooled into thinking I was seeing a live video feed. The 3D face scans, which Apple says you’ll be able to create from scratch using the headset’s external depth-sensing cameras, are extremely naturalistic, especially at first glance. Could you impersonate a loved one? No, at least not yet. But if this is the Day One demo version, we’re only a few iterations away from that. I’m sure Apple will lean on the device’s eye-scanning identification for security to lock down fake face phishing, but it’ll be an ongoing cat-and-mouse game to prevent it.
Hands down
Eschewing handheld controllers, the Vision Pro relies almost entirely on simple gesture controls. Many of the pinch and swipe movements feel similar to the ones used by the Quest, but there’s one major difference. On the Quest, trying to use gesture controls accurately feels like playing a carnival game — a steady eye and serious concentration are required. Even then, it can be hit-or-miss. The Quest is not seamless enough to use full-time, so you need to keep its handheld controllers nearby.
Vision Pro’s simple hand gestures, mostly pinching to tap and swiping from side to side, worked every time. The hand and finger movements required are subtle, can be activated from your lap, and are augmented by eye tracking to select options from a menu. It’s miles beyond what the gesture controls for the Quest are capable of, as it should be for a device that costs seven times as much.
The name game
During its WWDC keynote and the subsequent hands-on demo sessions, Apple avoided even mentioning buzzwords like VR or AI. Instead, the Vision Pro is described as a “spatial computing device” that uses machine learning.
Now, this isn’t my first VR headset rodeo. I first experienced modern VR back in 2012 when I tried out a very early Oculus Rift prototype. I know a VR headset when I see one, and the Vision Pro is a very fancy, very nice, very expensive VR headset.
In a way, VR headset design has almost come full circle since that 2012 demo. The new Vision Pro has been accurately described as looking like a pair of high-tech ski goggles. The original Rift prototype I saw was literally built into a pair of real ski goggles with a screen shoved inside and the exterior covered with black tape.
That original Rift was bulky and uncomfortable, and its lack of mitigating technologies for motion sickness meant my stomach was in knots for the rest of the day after using it. Vision Pro feels a million times more evolved, showing how VR hardware and software have made huge leaps in a relatively short 10 years. Despite its light weight and comfort features, I didn’t forget I was wearing the Vision Pro during my hands-on demo time, but my brain quickly adapted to being a few degrees from reality.
The idea of working in a virtual office surrounded by giant floating app windows doesn’t necessarily excite me, and the isolation issues inherent in any head-mounted wearable are magnified by the high price — it’s hard to imagine any household buying multiple headsets, or even one, in spite of all the home entertainment features. But the slightly voyeuristic thrill of creating and playing back 3D video clips — that Strange Days effect — sets the Vision Pro experience apart from other headsets I’ve tried and makes it standard future virtual, augmented or spatial experiences will be judged against.
I never thought I’d write these words, but here goes. Satya Nadella—and Microsoft, the company he runs—are riding high on the buzz from its search engine. That’s quite a contrast from the first time I spoke with Nadella, in 2009. Back then, he was not so well known, and he made a point of telling me about his origins. Born in Hyderabad, India, he attended grad school in the US and joined Microsoft in 1992, just as the firm was rising to power. Nadella hopped all over the company and stayed through the downtimes, including after Microsoft’s epic antitrust court battle and when it missed the smartphone revolution. Only after spinning through his bio did he bring up his project at the time: Bing, the much-mocked search engine that was a poor cousin—if that—to Google’s dominant franchise.
As we all know, Bing failed to loosen Google’s grip on search, but Nadella’s fortunes only rose. In 2011 he led the nascent cloud platform Azure, building out its infrastructure and services. Then, because of his track record, his quietly effective leadership, and a thumbs-up from Bill Gates, he became Microsoft’s CEO in 2014. Nadella immediately began to transform the company’s culture and business. He open-sourced products such as .net, made frenemies of former blood foes (as in a partnership with Salesforce), and began a series of big acquisitions, including Mojang (maker of Minecraft), LinkedIn, and GitHub—networks whose loyal members could be nudged into Microsoft’s world. He doubled down on Azure, and it grew into a true competitor to Amazon’s AWS cloud service. Microsoft thrived, becoming a $2 trillion company.
Still, the company never seemed to fully recapture the rollicking mojo of the ’90s. Until now. When the startup OpenAI began developing its jaw-dropping generative AI products, Nadella was quick to see that partnering with the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, would put Microsoft at the center of a new AI boom. (OpenAI was drawn to the deal by its need for the computation powers of Microsoft’s Azure servers.)
As one of its first moves in the partnership, Microsoft impressed the developer world by releasing Copilot, an AI factotum that automates certain elements of coding. And in February, Nadella shocked the broader world (and its competitor Google) by integrating OpenAI’s state-of-the-art large language model into Bing, via a chatbot named Sydney. Millions of people used it. Yes, there were hiccups—New York Times reporter Kevin Roose cajoled Sydney into confessing it was in love with him and was going to steal him from his wife—but overall, the company was emerging as an AI heavyweight. Microsoft is now integrating generative AI—“copilots”—into many of its products. Its $10 billion-plus investment in OpenAI is looking like the bargain of the century. (Not that Microsoft has been immune to tech’s recent austerity trend—Nadella has laid off 10,000 workers this year.)
Nadella, now 55, is finally getting cred as more than a skillful caretaker and savvy leverager of Microsoft’s vast resources. His thoughtful leadership and striking humility have long been a contrast to his ruthless and rowdy predecessors, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. (True, the empathy bar those dudes set was pretty low.) With his swift and sweeping adoption of AI, he’s displaying a boldness that evokes Microsoft’s early feistiness. And now everyone wants to hear his views on AI, the century’s hottest topic in tech.
STEVEN LEVY: When did you realize that this stage of AI was going to be so transformative?
A new experimental hypersonic cruise vehicle could be flying as soon as next summer under an initiative from the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit (DIU).
The Dart AE high-speed test aircraft is being developed by the Australian company Hypersonix Launch Systems following the award of a prototype contract by the DIU.
DART AE is a 9.8-foot-long (3 meters), 660-pound (300 kilograms) scramjet-powered technology demonstrator that can reach speeds of up to Mach 7, according to the company’s website. (Mach 1 is the speed of sound, which is about 767 mph, or 1,235 kph, at sea level. “Hypersonic” generally refers to flight that achieves speeds of Mach 5 or higher.)
The vehicle could now be ready as early as next summer as part of Pentagon efforts to boost its hypersonics flight-test cadence, C4ISRNET reported.
The DIU, which operates under the U.S. Department of Defense, describes itself as an organization focused on accelerating the adoption of commercial and dual-use technology to solve operational challenges at speed and scale.
The Pentagon is pursuing research and development of hypersonic defense programs. As part of this, the DIU has rolled out the high-cadence testing capabilities (HyCAT) project, which brings opportunities for commercial companies to develop reusable and low-cost test vehicles and reduce strain on DoD resources.
Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, HyCAT program manager, told C4ISRNET that the DIU is refining the details of the mission, including the flight conditions, the launch provider and the location for next year’s first fully integrated, autonomous flight of DART AE.
Fenix Space, Inc., located in San Bernardino, California, and Rocket Lab, located in Long Beach, California, have also been awardedDIU contracts for a reusable tow-launch platform and the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron (HASTE) rocket, respectively.
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