Month: January 2017

It was only a matter of time. In what appears to be a milestone in the Internet of things era, police have asked Amazon for data that may have been recorded on its Echo device while a murder was taking place.

As the Information reports (paywall), a man named Victor Collins died sometime during the night of November 21, 2015 while visiting a friend from work, James Andrew Bates at his home in Bentonville, Arkansas. Collins’s body was discovered in a hot tub the next morning, and Bates was charged with first-degree murder.

Bates had several smart devices in his home, the Echo among them. The device typically sits in an idle state with its microphones listening for key words like “Alexa” before it begins recording and sending data to Amazon’s servers. But as the Information points out, it’s not unusual for the Echo to wake up by mistake and grab snippets of audio that people may not have known was being recorded.

Investigators are clearly trying to be thorough, looking for any information that will shed light on what happened that night (for one thing, Bates’s smart water meter indicates he used 140 gallons of water between 1:00 and 3:00 am that evening—the prosecution claims that shows Bates was hosing down blood after he killed Collins).

But it raises a thorny question—or rather, a series of them: What is Amazon’s responsibility here? The company has so far denied the authorities’ requests, but should that be allowed? Or should investigators trying to get to the bottom of a potential murder be entitled to the data, even though it was recorded on Bates’s Echo in the privacy of his own home?

A similar problem reared its head earlier this year when Apple dug its heels in against the FBI’s request to unlock the iPhone that belonged to Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. As Stanford University’s Woodrow Hartzog wrote for us, it was already clear that the murky legal waters Apple and the FBI found themselves in would soon extend to Internet of things devices:

Consider assistance technologies like the Amazon Echo, which are designed to “always listen” for words like “Hello, Echo” but do not fully process, store, or transmit what they hear until they are activated. For law enforcement purposes, most of the information the devices listen to is functionally impossible to recover. Does this mean legal authorities should consider Echo a warrant-proof technology? The emergence of the Internet of things is shrinking the number of “dumb” objects by the day. The government has requested laws that mandate data retention for over 10 years. Must all technologies be built to ensure that what they hear is retained and made available for law enforcement’s inspection?

Hartzog argued that authorities shouldn’t be able to force tech companies to hold on to every bit of data a user creates. Allowing some information, like voice data, to vanish is not necessarily a bad thing.

Of course, the other side of that argument is what authorities in the Collins murder case are contending: There may very well be data on Amazon’s servers that can help bring a criminal to justice. If so, investigators should get access to it.

Apple fought the FBI to a stalemate over a dead terrorist’s iPhone, with no satisfying resolution. As predicted, the case in Arkansas has now brought the conflict into the realm of the Internet of things. The more we use such technologies, the more often these issues are going to come up—and the more complicated they will become until companies and legislators get together and agree on a clear way forward.

(Read more: The Information (paywall), “The Feds Are Wrong to Warn of ‘Warrant-Proof’ Phones,” “Amazon Working on Making Alexa Recognize Your Emotions,” “What if Apple is Wrong?”)

One afternoon in December, Kevin Geiger was giving one of his regular talks about storytelling in virtual reality. To a packed lecture hall at the Beijing Film Academy, he urged everybody in the filmmaking process—directors, actors, and people up and down the production chain—to think differently in order to adapt to this new medium. 

As the founder and executive director of the International Animation and Virtual Reality Research Center at the Film Academy, Geiger is at the forefront of a growing group of filmmakers exploring what the future of VR films will be in China. Geiger makes films himself and is also designing a curriculum in immersive media for the academy’s new Digital Media School.

Interest in Geiger’s topic has been growing quickly in China since 2014, when Facebook acquired Oculus VR. The deal’s $2 billion price tag raised investors’ interest in bringing a low-cost version of the device to the Chinese market. By late 2015, over 100 headset makers had popped up, churning out virtual-reality viewers akin to Google Cardboard or Samsung Gear VR.

Now the industry sees opportunities beyond hardware, turning its attention to software and the kinds of stories Geiger is focused on telling. New virtual-reality startups are exploring ideas such as VR apps for patients to use in depression therapy, VR film-editing software, and VR animation.

Consumer demand seems strong. China’s virtual-reality market will reach over $7.9 billion (55 billion yuan) in 2020, according to the China Electronics Standardization Institute, a research agency under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which has the authority to set the standards for the VR industry.

China has already become the fastest-growing film market in the world, with box office revenues reaching $6.3 billion (44 billion yuan) in 2015, according to Deloitte. That’s big enough to support feature films in a serious way, says Geiger, and one reason he has reopened the independent studio, Magic Dumpling, that he started with a couple of Chinese partners in 2009. While some touchy political topics will be off limits, Geiger says his goal is to create virtual-reality entertainment that looks at what’s going on in society and gives audiences something to think about, an alternative for Chinese filmgoers weary of the current cinematic diet of dry historical dramas.

Geiger and his partners at Magic Dumpling have created animated characters inspired by Chinese culture. These include Tofu Boy, a mischievous child who changes mood and texture as his mood swings, and two smiling stone lions, called Stoney and Rocky, both projects which were bought by Disney in 2012, when Geiger joined the company to lead its creative team in China. (He left that role in 2015.)

An Ohioan with an easygoing manner, Geiger has a history of cleverly adapting to technological change. Shortly after he graduated from college as a painting major, Geiger realized computer-generated imagery had begun to take over hand-drawn animation, so he learned how to program. Working at Walt Disney Feature Animation in California from 1995 to 2007, he helped to create films including Fantasia 2000 and Dinosaur and later became the computer graphics supervisor for Chicken Little, the studio’s first full 3-D animated feature.

Based in China since 2008, when he accepted an invitation to teach at the Beijing Film Academy’s animation school, Geiger sees a parallel between his own life and one of the storylines common in many films, that of a character who unexpectedly is pulled toward a new fate. In his case, he says, watching VR so quickly take off in China has been the catalyst for a longer stay in China, and another career adaptation.

That rapid rate of consumer adoption gives Geiger a better opportunity to push VR in interesting directions in China than he would have in the U.S. where adoption has been slower, says Eric Hanson, who teaches at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, and develops VR content at xRez Studio in California.  

To kick-start the Film Academy’s new VR center, Geiger has proposed a number of projects aimed at taking advantage of VR’s ability to situate its audience directly in the story. With the VR audience no longer staring in one direction the entire time, as it does in traditional cinema, filmmakers must figure out how to tell a story even when a viewer might be looking in the opposite direction of where the action is taking place. Geiger’s solution is to allow people to explore the film, but to structure a way to pull them back to common experiences at key points in the story, moments every viewer must experience before going on.

One of his first projects is a planned VR short film called Four Dishes and a Soup. Its simple storyline — a foreigner having dinner with his Chinese girlfriend’s family — provides a way to discuss Chinese concerns about accommodating foreign culture while maintaining a sense of unity. Early in 2017, before writing the script, he will have the actors actually have dinner in a Chinese family setting and record the improvisation among them from the foreigner’s point of view using a stereoscopic camera.

Other planned projects are more traditional in their subject matter, such as one that will create a virtual-reality experience that allows foreign museumgoers to walk amid the ranks of China’s Terracotta Army and learn its story.

In his work in China, Geiger has focused on sharing his professional know-how, being careful not to impose his Western philosophy on his interactions with Chinese colleagues.

And there are cultural differences he has found one needs to be sensitive to that will impact his VR work as well. Whereas a Western screenwriter might (as Calder Willingham and Buck Henry did in The Graduate) have the hero express his love by bursting into the church when the heroine is about to marry another man and declaring his love in front of a roomful of strangers, a Chinese screenwriter would have the hero challenge the man who’s about to marry the heroine but never tell her his true feelings.

There are business differences, too. The Western convention is to take out insurance to compensate investors if a film is not completed, but Chinese producers see this as unnecessary, says Geiger.

The earliest examples of VR being completed in China are not full-length films but short, business-oriented pieces like advertisements and promotion videos.

VR arcades are already doing brisk business offering shooting games and short videos for around $7 (50 yuan) per person. These could become a place to roll out exploratory content, says Eric Shamlin, executive producer of Secret Location, a studio based in Toronto and Los Angeles that won a 2015 Emmy for a VR experience it created, and who has traveled to China to explore potential partnerships.

It will take some time before a true VR blockbuster sweeps the movie world in China, in part because finding investors willing to take a chance on virtual-reality movie projects is difficult, but also because filmmakers are still searching for their narrative language, says Eddie Lou, the founder of Sandman Studios, a Beijing-based startup creating VR animated features. “Everybody is testing,” says Lou. “But it’s a very thrilling process.”

In the southern Indian city of Tuticorin, locals are unlikely to suffer from a poorly risen cake. That’s because a coal-fired thermal power station in the area captures carbon dioxide and turns it into baking soda.

Carbon capture schemes are nothing new. Typically, they use a solvent, such as amine, to catch carbon dioxide and prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere. From there, the CO₂ can either be stored away or used.

But the Guardian reports that a system installed in the Tuticorin plant uses a new proprietary solvent developed by the company Carbon Clean Solutions. The solvent is reportedly just slightly more efficient than those used conventionally, requiring a little less energy and smaller apparatus to run. The collected CO₂ is used to create baking soda, and it claims that as much as 66,000 tons of the gas could be captured at the plant each year.

Its operators say that the marginal gain in efficiency is just enough to make it feasible to run the plant without a subsidy. In fact, it’s claimed to be the first example of an unsubsidized industrial plant capturing CO₂ for use.

It’s a glimmer of hope for the clean coal industry. A string of U.S. problems, among them the wildly expensive Kemper power plant and the folding of Peabody Energy, which bet heavily on clean coal, have served to demonstrate that baking carbon sequestration in from the get-go is economically challenging. But successes of retrofitted systems, such as the W.A. Parish Generating Station in Texas and the Tuticorin scheme, demonstrate that adding capture systems can prove feasible.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that solar power may, on average, be cheaper than coal by 2025—so coal’s future as a means of generating power could be limited. But we may still be able to clean up existing plants—and bake some nice cakes along the way.

(Read more: The Guardian, Bloomberg, “A Huge Carbon Capture Scheme Provides New Hope for Clean Coal,” “A Mississippi Power Plant Highlights All That’s Wrong with Clean Coal,” “Peabody Energy’s Bankruptcy Shows the Limits of Clean Coal”)