Researchers use quantum physics for counterfeit detection

Scientists from Lancaster University have developed a foolproof anti-counterfeiting measure using a combination of quantum physics and smartphone technology. Previously, the team created unique atomic-scale IDs based on irregularities found in 2D materials such a graphene — irregularities which, unlike current anti-counterfeiting technology such as holograms, are impossible to clone. Quantum physics amplifies these irregularities and, once turned into a tag, makes it possible to “fingerprint” objects.

The researchers have now developed a smartphone app which matches the 2D tag — a kind of graphene-based QR code — with a manufacturer’s database. Customers will then be able to instantly check the authenticity of their product. The tags can be placed on any surface, enabling producers of everything from wine to car parts to use them. That should help reduce $500 billion or so that’s lost every year in the US thanks to counterfeiting. The technology, set to debut at the Royal Society of Science’s summer exhibition, is expected on the market in the first half of 2018.

Via: Phys.org, Lancaster University

Source: Arxiv

Digitize yourself with the Copypod 3D

Copying yourself digitally is not easy. Ideally, you want multiple photos taken from every angle at the same moment with all-around, soft illumination. A company called People’s Industrial Design Office in Beijing, China has created something called the Copypod 3D that can do all that for you in one neat package. It’s based on the “Hoberman sphere,” a type of geodesic dome that can fold down to a much smaller size thanks to its scissor-like joints.

“Objects are surrounded by a spherical array of over one hundred fixed focal length DSLR cameras,” the architectural and design firm explains. “With minimal adjustment, the 3D Copypod can contract to scan small objects and expand large enough to scan a group of people.” Furthermore, the folding panels are lit from the inside “to ensure a shadowless photography environment.”

The Copypod 3D allows users to construct digital models using the photo data, which can be used to make high resolution 3D prints, the company says. People’s Industrial didn’t specify what kind of software it used to stitch the photos and convert them to a model, but given the number of cameras, it should be able to produce very accurate and high-res results.

The Hoberman sphere is a pretty ingenious take on the geodesic dome. It’s built from six interlocking hoops (called “great circles”) with numerous hinged scissor joints, and can be opened by spreading the joints apart, much like a folding chair. One model, at the AHHAA Center in Tartu, Estonia, is built from aluminum, weighs 750 pounds and can expand up to 19 feet via a motorized system (check out the video of it in action here.)

The People’s Industrial Design Office turned the concept into a nifty circular lightbox by attaching cameras to the interior and translucent panels on the outside. The stunning design resembles some kind of alien igloo on the exterior, with a fascinatingly complex skeleton on the inside. That allows the cameras to move apart uniformly if you have a larger mise en scene. “With the snap of a camera, even subjects in motion can be captured in high quality and full color,” the team says.

Source: People’s Architecture

The Dash Pro by Bragi Review: Gesture Controls Impress, But Some UI and Design Frustrations Remain

Smart wireless earphones company Bragi has been making waves in the “hearables” market since 2014, when it debuted a Kickstarter for The Dash, the company’s original pair of truly wireless intelligent earphones that subsequently launched to the public in early 2016. After numerous Bragi OS updates to The Dash, and the lower-priced, lower-specced launch of The Headphone, this year Bragi revealed the true successor to its original device in The Dash Pro.

Staying true to its predecessor, The Dash Pro ($330) remains a complete platform of its own that connects to your smartphone and provides workout tracking, 4GB of onboard music storage, a battery case that recharges the earphones for up to 30 hours, and a detailed collection of Fit Sleeves and Fit Tips to ensure The Dash Pro fits in any ear. In May, Bragi also announced an ultra-custom hearable available at select audiologists, The Dash Pro tailored by Starkey, but this review focuses solely on the mass market device, The Dash Pro.

Design

From the retail packaging to the satisfying snap of the battery case sliding home into the outer aluminum shell, The Dash Pro’s premium feel is evident throughout the initial setup experience. The new minimal packaging ties in better with The Dash Pro’s barely-there aesthetic, and not much else is lost in terms of the original box’s step-by-step instructions on how to get the device up and running.

The Dash Pro earphones are nearly identical to The Dash, so anyone looking for a massive design change from the originals will be disappointed (the only subtle difference I noted were small tweaks made to the size and angle of the in-ear curve of the earphones). I always found the sleek and smooth finish of The Dash to be visually appealing, and that remains true for The Dash Pro and its new silver aluminum charging case.

The Dash Pro (left) compared to The Dash (right)
When inside your ear The Dash Pro look like medium-sized black earplugs, and as with any pair of wireless earphones your opinion on how they look will come down to personal taste. While The Dash Pro isn’t exactly an AirPods competitor in terms of price point and advanced features, it’s interesting to see where Bragi and Apple have diverged in designing two of the better-known wireless earphones on the market.

In comparison, AirPods take up less space in the ear (depending on ear size, which also affects playback quality), but Apple’s wireless earphones are still more noticeable thanks to the low-hanging design. The Dash Pro are a bit bulkier, with their large and circular black buds taking up the entire ear canal. If I had to choose, I’d go with The Dash Pro in terms of purely personal visual appeal: despite their dark black color, they look less conspicuous than AirPods to me when viewed from both the front and sides.

The Dash Pro charger (top) compared with The Dash charger (bottom)
The Dash Pro Charger and aluminum slide are beautifully made, but the reality of carrying the case around causes the cool design to lose some luster over time. Because it’s a two-piece system, the ritual of sliding the case and sleeve apart, finding a safe place to hold the sleeve, taking each earphone out, and then reattaching the case with the sleeve — it all becomes a bit finicky, particularly in a gym scenario where music playback and setup should be frictionless.

The Dash Pro charger compared with the AirPods charging case
Right-handed users might encounter some of the awkwardness I did in handling the case as well, which solely functions on a left-sliding track and encourages the left earphone to be handled first.

Setup, Playback, and Fit

Listening to music with The Dash Pro is satisfying and simple once it’s set up, but that initial process can be lengthy and confusing the first time around. I faced a few Bluetooth disconnect issues in the iPhone Settings app, as well as having trouble with getting Bragi’s own app to recognize that The Dash Pro was in my ear and ready to be paired in order to activate its various sensors.

The back sensor of The Dash Pro (left) compared with The Dash (right)
Eventually, The Dash Pro synced successfully with my iPhone, and now when I place them in my ear the Bragi Assistant greets me with the time of day and a connection successful confirmation. Since then, I haven’t yet been forced to go back into the Bluetooth settings of my iPhone to manually reconnect, and the earphones remained connected to my iPhone as it rested in my pocket or sat nearby on a piece of gym equipment. These issues were a frustration of the original device and its lackluster Bluetooth pairing, so — barring the awkward setup process — Bragi’s promise of “professional grade” Bluetooth connectivity on The Dash Pro is largely accurate.

The Dash Pro is still a modern pair of earphones and limited by today’s technology, however, so once I walked away from my iPhone and put one or two walls between The Dash Pro and the source of my music, the connection cut and popped very fast. On a phone call, someone described my voice as muffled and like I sounded slightly far away from the speaker, but on my end their voice came out crystal clear and never dropped in quality.

When listened to normally, The Dash Pro’s music playback sounds great, and fall largely in line with their predecessors. There have been a few spec bumps for The Dash Pro’s audio, including high quality bilateral Knowles balanced armature speakers with an advanced audio distribution profile, as well as AAC and SBS audio codec, all of which helps stream better-sounding audio from a smartphone to The Dash Pro with much less white noise or other distortions coming through.

The Dash Pro won’t blow other headphones in the price range out of the water, but they sound clear, deep and provide plenty of bass once you find the sleeves and tips that work for you. At a loud gym, I was able to completely block out outside noise and only hear my music, but The Dash Pro does stumble in its max volume “safety limits.” In quiet environments, altering the volume only on The Dash Pro was more than enough, but when more nuance was needed I frequently had to go to my iPhone and adjust the volume toggle in Apple Music to find a sweet spot that The Dash Pro couldn’t hit on its own.

Because of The Dash Pro’s more invasive in-ear design, I did find that after extensive sessions with the earphones I needed to take them out, essentially amounting to about two hours. As with the visual look, comfort will vary person-by-person, but I wouldn’t envision using The Dash Pro as your main earphones on a lengthy road trip or any session that would brush up against the device’s accurate five hour battery life.

The snug in-ear fit has one major bonus: they never budged at all in my time with them, through running, bicycling, and normal weight training workouts, and as a point of comparison I stopped using AirPods because they simply became too unreliable to use when I was moving around a lot. The reliable fit comes from a large variety of Fit Sleeves and Fit Tips that Bragi offers, ensuring The Dash Pro will fit securely in any ear.

Bragi OS and Daily Use

Controlling all of The Dash Pro’s features is mostly a pleasant experience, particularly in the all-new Bragi OS 3 that’s available for both The Dash and The Dash Pro. A standout is the Virtual 4D Menu, which you can activate by looking downwards, looking straight ahead (a tone will sound here), then looking upwards to confirm. Once you’re in the 4D menu, the Bragi Assistant will brightly give you context of what menu you’re looking at, which you can turn your head to select and nod to activate: start/stop activity, call up Siri (or Google if you’re on Android), play/pause music, and skip song.

When in use, it’s kind of like having four imaginary screens in front of you at all times and, most impressively, the head gesture controls never failed me, although making such erratic gestures in public can feel silly. Another one of my favorite parts of The Dash Pro’s operating system is something called My Tap, which was actually a part of Bragi OS 2 last year. With these gestures, you can set up a double tap on your cheek to either skip a song or play/pause what you’re listening to, and it’s one of the coolest and more reliable wireless headphone control systems I’ve ever used.

My main problem with both The Dash Pro and AirPods (and even BeatsX) is that their on-board controls are hard to find and successfully input because, by their nature, you can’t physically see them. When working out and moving around a lot, it’s even harder, but with My Tap all you have to do is tap near the upper part of your cheekbone and The Dash Pro recognizes the vibration and turns the tap and your face into a physical extension of the earphones. It’s consistent, satisfying, and just fun to use, and I hope Bragi expands it in the future to include more gestures.

Otherwise, the actual touch controls on The Dash Pro are mostly the same as The Dash, with some refinements. The right Dash is your main audio playback source with play/pause (tap), skip (double tap), previous song (triple tap), volume toggle (swipe forward, backward), and various menu/Bluetooth settings (1 second long press). The left Dash holds audio transparency and wind shield (swipe forward, backward) and other activity menu items (1 second long press).

When you aren’t moving around much, the controls are pretty easy to hit and activate, but I still had trouble finding the sweet spot of the touch center on each earphone (located on the lower half), and that was only exacerbated once I began running or cycling. I would eventually get the earphones to pump up the volume on a song as I began to run faster, or decrease audio transparency so I could hear the music more clearly, but more often than not it was only after 3-4 tries and the fumbling quickly became frustrating.

Another feature that was more miss than hit for me was The Dash Pro’s audio transparency. Bragi advertises this as a way to keep the earphones in your ears and still be able to hold a conversation, or listen to something else nearby, but I never encountered a use case where that felt natural. In the gym, when a friend began talking to me with audio transparency turned on, The Dash Pro emphasized the clanking of equipment and ambient gym noises as much as her voice, while my own voice still felt somewhat distant and strange — something I thought audio transparency would alleviate. That phenomenon was the same within a moving vehicle (the car’s engine becoming as recognizable as voices), so I eventually would just take out one Dash to talk to someone.

Unfortunately, that highlights another problem with The Dash Pro’s design: only the right Dash pauses music when removed, not the left Dash, so if you’re in a situation where taking the left Dash out is more comfortable, you’ll have to manually pause the track on your phone if you don’t want to miss anything. If you do take the right Dash out and the music pauses, it won’t automatically keep playing when you put it back in. That’s a small detail, but having experienced the seamlessness of AirPods, some of The Dash Pro’s more cumbersome design aspects become highlighted after repeated use.

Bragi App and Battery Life

The Bragi app itself has a slew of menus that can help you find more information on controlling The Dash Pro with tutorial videos, activity tracking, control customization, device calibration, and more. In my time with The Dash Pro, I never felt compelled to add the Bragi app into my daily usage. Once I customized my preferred settings, set up my user profile, and watched a few videos, the only thing that was left on offer was Bragi’s in-app activity tracking.

After a few sessions with Bragi’s tracking, I decided that any allure of The Dash Pro as an exclusive fitness tracking device is short selling the overall package Bragi is offering. While the fitness sessions were functional, tracking the usual categories like calories, distance, steps, speed, duration, and heart rate across running, cycling, and swimming workouts (The Dash Pro is waterproof up to three feet deep), the ultimate “review” tab of the app never felt particularly insightful into my fitness history.

The screens simply display the accumulated information of a workout with a descriptor like “Lunch Run” or “Evening Cycle.” Apple does pretty much the same thing with Workouts in the Activity app, so while Bragi’s solution might not be better or worse, it’s not unique enough to justify it as a complimentary experience if you’re already following your fitness data elsewhere.

The same run recorded by The Dash Pro (left, middle) and Apple Watch (right)
If you aren’t, then the Bragi app should be a decent home for you to revisit your stats, just be aware that The Dash Pro isn’t the most reliable source of information when it comes to some statistics, specifically heart rate. During multiple running workouts I performed, my heart rate ranged from mildly off track in comparison to my Apple Watch (by about 5-10 beats per minute) to downright wrong (measuring ~75 bpm as I came out of a run, with a real rate of ~165 bpm). Bragi’s app landed near my Apple Watch’s average bpm once the workouts were complete, but live tracking during a run never appeared accurate.

If you do end up using The Dash Pro as a main workout companion, you’ll never have to worry about battery life. Bragi promises five hours of battery on one charge of The Dash Pro, with the charging case refueling the earphones up to five times on one charge of its own, and my usage found that to be accurate. On the downside, checking the battery life of The Dash Pro (shaking them to reveal a color battery level) and the charging case (plugging it into a power source through the micro-USB to USB cable to read the LED battery level) is not nearly as definitive as competitor earphones, especially without any app or widget functionality that could give a clearer percentage of battery for the devices.

Bottom Line

Over the past few days that I’ve used The Dash Pro as my primary source of music playback — whether it be during workouts, on a car trip, or simply roaming around my house — the earphones’ premium price tag made more and more sense to me. The Dash Pro is undeniably impressive, and the earphones pack a boggling amount of technology in a form factor that’s nearly smaller than the tip of my thumb, but anyone interested in them will have to be able to justify all of The Dash Pro’s bells and whistles to make the $330 price tag sensible.

I love the tech hidden away in The Dash Pro and I see myself returning to them for the advantages afforded by the Virtual 4D Menu and My Tap features, but the newest version of the world’s first wireless smart earphones — as Bragi called the original device — still required me to make too many concessions on a daily basis to become seamlessly integrated into my routine. Bragi is a few generations away from perfecting The Dash, and getting in now — even on the second iteration — still comes with all the usual caveats of early adoption.

The Dash Pro can be purchased on Bragi’s website for $329 in the United States and €349.00 in Europe.

Note: Bragi provided MacRumors with The Dash Pro for the purpose of this review. No other compensation was received.

Tags: Bragi Dash, Bragi, The Dash Pro
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BBC’s latest app is a home for its VR experiments

The BBC is forever playing around with new forms of storytelling, but its many experimental projects can be hard to keep track of. A 360-degree video might be published on YouTube and Facebook, for example, while an animated VR tale might launch first on the Oculus Rift before being ported into a standalone mobile app. Bookmarking the BBC Taster website is one way to keep tabs on what’s new, but now the broadcaster has launched an iOS and Android app to make its projects more visible and easily accessible on smartphones.

The BBC Taster VR app doesn’t have a great deal to offer on day one. You can download an immersive trailer for an upcoming BBC Three documentary about gun crime, One Deadly Weekend in America, as well as some interactive 360-degree video from the Planet Earth II crew. More experiments will be added to the platform regularly and won’t be limited to your standard VR experiences — the BBC also intends to showcase its work in dynamic binaural (3D) audio, for instance.

BBC Taster exists so the public can provide feedback on new types of content and innovative formats, which will drive what the broadcaster pursues in the future. Making experiments more accessible can only help with that, and the app will give the BBC additional analytics like a heat map that shows what draws the attention of the user within a VR experience. “This will help BBC developers and editorial teams learn more from their content, helping them to refine storytelling techniques in this emerging medium,” the announcement reads.

Source: BBC

NASA will crash a satellite into an asteroid

NASA is one step closer to testing its proposed line of defence against the threat of a potential asteroid impact on Earth. The “kinetic impactor technique” essentially involves smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid to bounce it away from the Earth. Which sounds a lot saner than the plan hatched in Armageddon of sending oil drillers and a nuclear bomb.

Now entering its design phase, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) would be NASA’s first-ever trial of the method. DART’s target is a binary asteroid with two bodies known as Didymos* that will pass safely by Earth in 2022, and again in 2024. NASA’s refrigerator-sized spacecraft will smash into the smaller of the two asteroids, Didymos B (160 metres in size), which is orbiting the larger Didymos A (780 metres in size). DART will hurtle into Didymos B at a speed of 3.7 miles per second — nine times faster than a bullet — causing it to shift its orbit.

“A binary asteroid is the perfect natural laboratory for this test,” said Tom Statler, program scientist for DART at NASA. “The fact that Didymos B is in orbit around Didymos A makes it easier to see the results of the impact, and ensures that the experiment doesn’t change the orbit of the pair around the sun.”

Small asteroids strike the Earth almost daily, but the majority remain harmless, breaking up in the upper atmosphere. Just last month, NASA held “Asteroid Day,” its annual event to encourage the public to learn more about about both non-threatening and threatening space rocks. The festivities took place on June 30 to mark the anniversary of the Tunguska incident, which saw a 122-metre wide asteroid wipe out over 770 square miles of remote Russian forest near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia. The explosion remains the most powerful in documented history, producing 185 times more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

NASA has already located 93 percent of objects big enough to cause global impacts. And, thanks to DART, it may soon have a planetary defence mechanism that can actually prevent them from wiping us out.

*Greek for “twin.”

Via: Gizmodo

Source: NASA

Milky Way’s fastest stars could be runaways from another galaxy

The fastest-moving stars in our galaxy, known as hypervelocity stars, may have a more interesting backstory than scientists first thought, according to new research from Cambridge University.

Astronomers initially believed these super-rare stars — only 20 have been identified — had been expelled from the center of the Milky Way by a supermassive black hole, but the study shows that they may have started their breakneck journeys in another galaxy altogether: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

In a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers explain that they wanted to discover why high-speed stars have mainly been recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. If the supermassive black hole theory was correct, the stars would be more evenly-distributed across the sky.

The alternative explanation? The stars are runaways from a binary system. In binary star systems, the closer the two stars are, the faster they orbit one another. If one star explodes as a supernova, it can break up the binary and the remaining star flies off at the speed it was orbiting. The escaping star is known as a runaway.

The LMC is the perfect environment for this, according to the researchers. It’s the largest and fastest of the dozens of dwarf galaxies in orbit around the Milky Way — careening it at around 400 kilometers per second. It only has 10 percent of the mass of the Milky Way, so the fastest runaways born in this dwarf galaxy can easily escape its gravity.

“These stars have just jumped from an express train — no wonder they’re fast,” said co-author Rob Izzard, a Rutherford fellow at the Institute of Astronomy. “This also explains their position in the sky, because the fastest runaways are ejected along the orbit of the LMC towards the constellations of Leo and Sextans.”

The team is the first to simulate the ejection of runaway stars from the LRC, and will know as soon as next year whether its theory is correct.

“We’ll know soon enough whether we’re right,” said co-author Douglas Boubert. “The European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite will report data on billions of stars next year, and there should be a trail of hypervelocity stars across the sky between the Leo and Sextans constellations in the north and the LMC in the South.”

Via: Cosmos Magazine

Source: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Atomic ‘photos’ help make gene editing safer

Believe it or not, scientists haven’t had a close-up look at CRISPR gene editing. They’ve understood its general processes, but not the minutiae of what’s going on — and that raises the risk of unintended effects. They’ll have a much better understanding going forward. Cornell and Harvard researchers have produced snapshots of the CRISPR-Cas3 gene editing subtype (not the Cas9 you normally hear about) at near atom-level resolution. They used a mix of cryo-electron microscopy and biochemistry to watch as a riboprotein complex captured DNA, priming the genes so the namesake Cas3 enzyme can start cutting. The team combined hundreds of thousands of particles into 2D averages of CRISPR’s functional states (many of which haven’t been seen before) and turned them into 3D projections you can see at the source link.

As for what the researchers learned? Quite a bit, actually. They found that the riboprotein forces a small piece of DNA to unwind, allowing an RNA strand to bind and create a “seed bubble” that serves as a sort of fail-safe — if the targeted DNA matches the RNA, the bubble gets bigger and the rest of the RNA continues binding until it forms a loop structure. The riboprotein then locks down the DNA and lets the enzyme get to work. The whole process is surprisingly precise and accident-proof, so it shouldn’t cut the wrong genes.

The Cas3 technique isn’t what you’d call delicate. The team likens it to a “shredder” that eats DNA past the point of no return where Cas9 is more of a surgical tool. The discoveries made here could improve gene editing across the board, however. They could modify CRISPR to improve its accuracy and avoid any inadvertent effects, and methods that have only a limited use right now (like Cas3) could be used for other purposes. Ultimately, this could give scientists the confidence they need to use gene editing to eliminate diseases and harmful bacteria — they can go forward knowing their genetic tweaking should be safe.

Via: Reddit

Source: Harvard, Cell

Houses Near Apple Park Met With Increased Tourism and Rising Real Estate Values

Construction progress surrounding Apple Park has been well documented over the past few years, with monthly drone videos providing anyone interested with clear glimpses into Apple’s spacious new campus. Less discussed have been the neighborhoods surrounding Apple Park, including how they have been affected by Apple’s construction on a campus that measures 2.8 million square feet, spans 176 acres, and will eventually house around 12,000 employees.

A new report by The New York Times this week has focused on the positive and negative outcomes following Apple’s announcement of its major new site, which officially began construction in 2013. In the town of Sunnyvale, which sits across the street from Apple Park, as many as 95 development projects have entered planning stages in recent years, while local businesses in Cupertino have pivoted to meet the needs of Apple employees, including a Residence Inn opening in September that will be stocked with Macs for guests.

Sunnyvale residents, whose home sits across from Apple Park via The New York Times
Eventually, onlookers won’t be able to see Apple Park’s circular “spaceship” building from nearby streets (thanks to Apple’s sourcing of 9,000 trees coming to Apple Park as the year progresses). Until then, the campus is attracting tourists to come out and take pictures and fly drones over the site. Some who live nearby welcome to boom to businesses and tourism, even allowing tourists to stand outside on their driveways as they pilot drones over Apple Park.

Onlookers snap pictures of the spaceship from the streets. TV helicopters circle above. Amateur photographers ask residents if they can stand on driveways to operate their drones, hoping to get a closer look at Apple Park.

“I just say, ‘Hey, go ahead,’” said Ron Nielsen, who lives in Birdland, a Sunnyvale neighborhood across the street from the spaceship. “Why not?”

Residents of nearby neighborhood Birdland have been more critical of Apple’s construction, complaining about loud noises early in the morning, unpredictable road closures, unsightly barriers, and construction potholes that have resulted in punctured tires. In response, Apple has tried to appease frustrated residents, going so far as to send carwash certificates to a woman who called the company about her vehicle getting covered in construction dust, and offering to pay for a solution to bottlenecked traffic.

Homestead Road, the thoroughfare that separates Apple Park from Birdland, became its own subject of debate. Cupertino officials wanted to construct a tree-lined median to calm traffic. Apple offered to cover the costs.

But homeowners objected. Residents complained that the island would eliminate one lane, backing up the heavy traffic even more. When 20 or so neighbors approached a Sunnyvale town meeting in solidarity, the city ended up siding with the residents.

Apple hosted over 110 community gatherings when Apple Park was in the design phase, intended to get feedback from residents who would be living near the campus. After the meetings, Apple sent out community mailers five times to around 26,000 households in the area. Apple vice president of real estate and development, Dan Whisenhunt, said that the company continues to respond to community concerns as best it can, “and if the issue is serious enough, I will personally visit to see what is going on.”

With all of the increased traffic of businesses, Apple employees, and interested civilians, the value of property in the neighborhoods surrounding Apple Park has also increased. Local real estate agents told The New York Times that in the wake of Apple’s plans for the campus being released as far back as 2011, “prices in the area really started to rise.” In 2011, a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,400 square-foot house was priced at $750,000, and has since doubled in price.

On average, prices for local homes have increased by 15 to 20 percent each year since 2011, and those bidding on homes in the area offer 20 to 25 percent over the asking price in order to secure real estate.

Birdland is already drawing Apple employees, replacing homeowners who have cashed out to move to quieter regions. Those who remain are realizing that life will not be the same when all 12,000 of the Apple workers go in and come out on a daily basis. People in the neighborhood dread the increased traffic and expect workers to park in front of their homes since there will be fewer available spaces in the company garage.

Apple’s answers to concerned residents will continue, Mr. Whisenhunt said. “When you tell people what is upcoming, some of the anxiety they have calms down a lot,” he said. And yet, he acknowledged, “you don’t make everyone happy.”

Although a small number of employees have already moved into Apple Park, construction is expected to continue into the second half of 2017, with buildings like the Steve Jobs Theater predicted to open sometime in the fall. The latest drone videos have captured shots of the lit-up Steve Jobs Theater and historic Glendenning Barn.

Tag: Apple Park
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Everything you need to know about LG Pay

Why it matters to you

The more options there are for us to pay for goods and services with our smartphones, the more convenient mobile payment systems become.

Apple has Apple Pay, Samsung has Samsung Pay, Android has Android Pay, and now LG has LG Pay. Launched in South Korea in June 2017, the new payment system works with a handful of LG devices, and although it hasn’t received a wide international launch yet, things may change in the future. Here’s everything you need to know about LG Pay.

LG Pay Launch dates

LG Pay launched in South Korea at the beginning of June, and was available in the LG G6 smartphone at the time, after a software update added functionality. What about an international launch? After all, Samsung and Apple’s mobile pay systems work in many countries around the world. LG’s mobile communications director Cho Jun-ho was quoted in early July as saying that it intends to improve the service’s convenience, and, “expand the scope of countries, payment methods, as well as devices” that support LG Pay.

While no specific regions are mentioned, to increase LG Pay’s user base, it will no doubt be investigating the U.S., Europe, and other regions in Asia. Any international launch date may not be known by LG yet anyway, as it must strike deals with banks and credit card firms first, which are often lengthy processes.

It has taken a while for LG Pay to become a reality. Rumors began in the lead-up to MWC 2016, and continued throughout the year, before the service’s eventual announcement in 2017.

What devices and cards work with LG Pay?

LG Pay works with the LG G6 and the LG G6 Plus, but other devices will follow in the future. LG’s Cho Jun-ho said in July that low-cost LG phones would be equipped with LG Pay in 2018, along with other high-end LG phones. The LG V30, rumored for announcement before the end of 2017, may also support the service. Additionally, LG Pay may expand to work online, too.

Because LG Pay only operates in South Korea at the moment, it doesn’t support credit cards or banks outside the country. At the time of writing it works with Shinhan, KB Kookmin, BC, and Lotte cards only, but there are plans for all South Korean credit cards to work with LG Pay before the end of 2017. It can register up to 10 cards, and also manages membership cards.

How does it work?

Unlike Samsung Pay, LG Pay uses a Wireless Magnetic Communication (WMC) system to authenticate payments, which are confirmed on the device with the fingerprint scanner. The system, created by a company named Dynamics Inc., allows an LG phone to read and save any standard card with a magnetic stripe, and then send that information to the majority of payment terminals used by shops around the world.

Samsung uses a technology called Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) for Samsung Pay, while Apple uses NFC technology for Apple Pay.

LG Pay will also become a smart credit card?

LG Pay is a mobile payment solution at the moment, and although there’s nothing official yet, rumors have spread a physical LG Pay card may arrive in the future. Back in November 2015, ET News reported that LG’s plan for LG Pay would be a White Card similar to Plastc or the Coin card. In other words, it would be a plastic card similar to a credit card, but it would store several credit cards and possibly connect to an app on your phone.

In late January 2016, the same site leaked images of the said card along with unconfirmed claims. ET News is reporting that the card is about the same size as a credit card, but it’s slightly thicker. Users will be able to store information for several credit cards and cycle through them using the LCD display and navigation controls. The card can also be locked so no one else can access the stored information.

Supposedly users would supposedly be able to use the White Card in ATM machines as well. The White Card may also include metal pins for charging, and a charging accessory is rumored to ship with it. The images show what appears to be a battery life indicator on the LCD display of the White Card. According to a representative of one of LG Pay’s partners, transactions won’t go through LG’s servers, so they are still controlled by the credit card companies. This means that banks are more likely to partner with LG Pay.

Allegedly, the White Card will come with a magnetic stripe at the back when launched, so it won’t work with chip readers. However, sources indicate that chip support will arrive at a later date. Whether the physical card was a test platform for LG Pay, an abandoned initial plan, or a product that will come in the future, isn’t clear.

 Update: We’ve rewritten the guide to reflect the launch of LG Pay, and added rumors the service may arrive internationally in the future.

Microsoft’s Steven Bathiche redefined the PC, and he wants to do it again

Microsoft is on a good run. Over the past half-decade, it has released a popular new desktop operating system, built multiple award-winning PCs that’ve pushed the industry forward, and established itself as a leader in exciting new fields, including augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

These victories have changed the company. Once thought of as stodgy and slow, Microsoft now looks lean and agile. It stands toe-to-toe with Alphabet (the parent company of Google) in world rankings, and its NASDAQ stock price has more than doubled since 2013.

It’s easy to imagine this turn-around as a victory for Windows 10, Surface, Azure, or CEO Satya Nadella, who took the reins in 2014 – and such congratulations would not be misplaced. Yet the story of Microsoft’s comeback isn’t just about stock prices and executive appointments. Equal credit can be given to the company’s tradition of innovative research — conducted by scientists like Steven Bathiche.

Microsoft wants to give you what you need

Bathiche, an 18-year veteran of Microsoft, is tall, lanky, and seems constantly in motion, even when he’s standing still. His title of Distinguished Scientist doesn’t imply any specific authority over Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, which he leads, and it doesn’t have to. His demeanor expresses a calm, driven curiosity that instantly beckons the inner inventor.

“At the end of the day, people’s needs are 1s and 0s.”

The philosophy behind his research mirrors his personable attitude. When Digital Trends sat down with him at Microsoft’s campus, he wasted no time describing the core tenets that drive his team.

“Technology doesn’t change what people need or want. It just changes how they meet those needs,” Bathiche explained. And what are those needs? They’re what you’d expect – security, entertainment, communication.

“In the old days, when we didn’t have video technology, you had people sitting around the campfire telling stories,” Bathiche said. “We went from caveman days of talking about and spreading stories to today, when you can watch video anytime, anywhere, of almost anything.” Technology may change, but people are always people, and people always want to communicate and entertain. Every revolutionary new device respects that, and finds an innovative way to fill a need.

“At the end of the day, people’s needs are 1s and 0s, which is just data,” said Bathiche. “Computing technology is about people, and their information.”

Cutting-edge research, Microsoft’s secret foundation

Evidence of this approach is easy to see in Microsoft’s Surface line, but it didn’t begin there. Bathiche first worked at Microsoft as an intern in 1995, before joining the company in 1999. Even then, he had an eye for how people use technology.

One of his first projects at Microsoft investigated how people could use inertial sensors to control 3D games. “One of the things I noticed, as I played a lot of console games, was that when people drive their kart around [in Mario Kart], they kinda lean. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the gaming device actually sensed that?”

Matt Smith/Digital Trends

Bathiche began prototyping a device that used accelerators as a means of input, but soon ran into challenges that went beyond the capabilities of hardware. “The thing I noticed is that when you put all the degrees of freedom into a single [device],” he explained, “it’s kind of hard to use. People would mix them up.”

The solution, it turned out, was a gamepad that used sensors to control only a limited range of movement – Microsoft’s Sidewinder Freestyle Pro. It was the first commercial device to use accelerometers, technology now common in all manner of electronics. Modern games that use accelerometers take a similar tact, limiting motion control movement to tilting left or right, or to another set plane of motion.

Today’s gamers simply assume that motion controls will only work within a limited range, but in the late 90s, when accelerometers were rare, the right way to do it wasn’t clear. A solution became clear only after experimentation with working prototypes.

This hands-on approach can be found in countless other projects, some of which were far ahead of their time. When Apple announced the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, for instance, tech enthusiasts remembered the efforts of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, which started research into what was internally called “Adaptive Hardware” in 1999, the year he was hired. Bathiche’s own notes, which imagine a keyboard using a “strip of electronic paper” over dome key switches, are immortalized on the Group’s website.

Surface first appeared in 2007, not as a 2-in-1, but as an interactive table.

No consumer device was birthed directly from that idea, but that doesn’t mean the research was pointless. The experimentation led by Bathiche’s team is needed to separate revolutionary ideas from interesting duds. It’s hard to tell which will be which, even after years of iteration.

“The original Surface was a perfect example,” said Bathiche. “It was the first mixed reality device. You had a computer understanding what was happening on the surface, you had objects you could put on top. You had this virtual-physical object interaction that could happen.”

Surface first appeared in 2007 not as a 2-in-1, but as an interactive table. Codenamed Milan, it used cameras connected to the table to help it respond to touch, or even objects laid on the table’s surface. It was a fun concept that made for great demos, but its best use didn’t become clear until years later.

“A touchscreen is in fact a spatial camera,” Bathiche told us, helping to draw the connection. “It’s trying to see your intent on the screen, and it maps that to a virtual thing.” The technology in today’s Surface Pro is far more precise, and far smaller, than anything in the Milan concept — but a PC built for direct interaction, through touch and through objects, was always the goal.

Microsoft could’ve thrown in the towel after Milan, deciding it was too heavy, too large, too complex. Instead it played the long game, and remained faithful that people want to interact more directly with their PC, even if no one knew exactly what that’d look like in practice.

“We realized when we had heavy competition from Apple, that we had to innovate in the PC space,” Bathiche recalled. “That recognition happened. It happened with [former CEO] Steve Ballmer, it happened with [former President of the Windows Division] Steven Sinofsky. They saw this team […] and said ‘let’s go build a new computer.’”

Building tomorrow’s PC, piece by piece

The success of Surface has given the company’s design excellence well-deserved attention, and the sudden appearance of its cutting-edge PCs left many wondering what changed. The answer, according to Bathiche, is nothing.

“People think that we’re kind of new to hardware,” he said. “We’ve been doing hardware for 30 years. Maybe we’re new to building computers, but not really, we’ve been doing it now for six or seven years. If you count the original Surface table we’ve been doing it for a decade.”

In fact, Microsoft has shipped hardware from its infancy. The company’s Hardware Division, founded in 1982, crafted its first mouse in 1983 and has since worked on everything from PC speakers to interactive toys.  This experience came invaluable when Microsoft decided to commit itself to a game console. “The only reason the company was able to ship [Xbox] within a year,” Bathiche said, “was because they had a hardware division. Those people who shipped Xbox were the people who were building mice, keyboards, gaming devices.”

Matt Smith/Digital Trends

Importantly, this expertise is practical. “We build functional prototypes, and then we try it, and we put people in front of it,” Bathiche told us – and followed up with a whirlwind tour through the company’s prototyping facility. His team doesn’t have to wait to implement an idea, because everyone works just a few feet away from a small-scale production line that includes 3D printers, CNC machines, and a collection of premium materials, such as the Alcantara that’s become part of the Surface brand.

“This was hard,” Bathiche said proudly of the Surface Laptop’s fabric interior. “No one’s done this before, putting fabrics on a keyboard with new frayed edges.” Such innovation is only possible because Microsoft puts its innovators in front of the tools they need to produce a working prototype that looks very much like the final product. “Everything is prototyped here first. That’s how we do all our new concepts. Which I think is an important distinction – not all computer companies do that.”

Satya Nadella, in a 2014 memo, mandated that “each engineering group will have Data and Applied Science resources that will focus on measurable outcomes for our products and predictive analysis of market trends.”

Now, Microsoft is taking that a step further by putting its Devices Design Team under the same roof as the Applied Sciences Group. The new space, which is under construction at Microsoft Building 87, will have the inventive geniuses at the Group work side-by-side with the creative minds that imagined Surface’s unique look.

What do you do after you invent the next PC? You do it again

The release of Surface has given the Applied Sciences Group plenty to do, and Bathiche remains interested in tearing down the barriers between man and machine. The pen, for instance, remains a key focus. “On the hardware side, we want to innovate to be like paper. On the software side, we want to be better than paper, we want to go beyond paper.”

Bathiche and his team is looking forward to its newest horizon, a concept called Ambient Computing.

Yet success hasn’t bound the Group to Microsoft’s new hardware. Instead, Bathiche and his team is looking forward to its newest horizon, a concept called Ambient Computing. He sees a future where advanced sensors and artificial intelligence will combine to make the PC ever-present, usable even when you’re nowhere near a keyboard, mouse, or screen.

“The big evolution today […] is this new layer of intelligence. This takes the information people have generated, with their hardware devices, using applications as a media, and helps you intuit on that information, makes it work on your behalf.” Bathiche went on to say Microsoft wants “to create a vicious cycle of people and their information. The more information we can help people communicate, the more we’ll be able to intuit, the more value we’ll be able to create for the person.”

Prototypes of this, which are already underway, remain under wraps, but Microsoft’s last Build conference hinted at what’s next. There, the company showed several high-concept demos, including a workplace where computers identified workers by sight and sound, and could even determine when a worker picked up equipment he wasn’t certified to use. Such a network of sensors and intelligence could, in many situations, erase the need for a physical interface altogether, removing one more barrier between PC and user. Computers could transition away from a device you use and instead become a constant companion.

That, of course, ties right back into the mission of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, and Bathiche’s philosophy of needs and wants. The world has become used to the idea of physical electronic devices, but nothing about our needs or wants demands we sit down in front of a PC – for most uses, at least. Bypassing the hardware may seem a dangerous proposition for Microsoft, but the company wants to make the next leap forward – whatever that might be — before anyone else. “We try to invent new ways you talk to the computer, and the computer talks back to you,” Bathiche said, “because we want to invent the next computer.”