Sony owes Xperia owners a refund over faulty water resistance

When you buy a phone billed as water-resistant, you generally expect it to survive accidental dunks. Some Sony phone owners have a very different story, though — their supposedly resistant phones took water damage that required an expensive fix. If you’re one of them, we have good news. A preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit will offer a 50 percent refund of the retail price to US customers who bought a water-resistant Sony Xperia device and had to file water damage claims. The list of affected hardware covers a whopping 24 phones and tablets sold in the US, ranging from the Xperia Z1 through to relatively recent devices like the Xperia Z5.

If your hardware is recent enough to be covered under warranty, you should also get a year-long extension of that coverage. Just be sure to have records of your contact with Sony’s support — owning a broken phone isn’t enough to qualify by itself.

The settlement isn’t exactly timely. If you bought one of the older phones, you’ve probably replaced it. If the settlement terms are locked down, though, it’s still important. How many class action settlements have you seen where there’s a tiny payout at best? Here, Sony could pay hundreds of dollars per person. It won’t make up for the time spent getting your phone fixed, but it could soften the blow.

Via: Android Police

Source: Xperia Waterproof Settlement

Walmart uses Google’s AI shopping assistant to fight Amazon

Google’s Express delivery service has just gained another big player in addition to Target and Costco: Walmart. Soon, you’ll be able to buy items from the major retailer with your voice through Google Home or via the Google Express website or app and then have your purchase delivered to your home. That’s made even better by the fact that the service now delivers for free, so long as you meet a merchant’s minimum purchase requirement. Unlike Amazon Prime, you don’t even need to pay a membership fee.

Besides having thousands of items to choose from — everything “from laundry detergent to Legos,” the tech titan says — you can also have a personalized shopping experience by linking your existing Walmart account with Google. After you do, Google’s voice control AI Assistant can let you know what size of detergent or kind of soda you chose last time you ordered whenever you make a new purchase. It’s definitely a handy feature, especially if you’re haphazardly adding things to your cart and haven’t really made a definitive list of what to buy.

Unfortunately, Walmart won’t be available on Google Express until sometime in late September. You can sign up to receive a notification the moment you can start shopping from the store through the service, but you’ll have to make do with the other merchants for now.

Source: Google Express

Spark owners, update your drone’s firmware or it’ll be grounded

Why it matters to you

If you own a Spark drone, be sure to update the machine with the latest firmware as soon as it becomes available this week.

If you own a Spark quadcopter, this is serious. Maker DJI is ordering owners of the diminutive drone to update its firmware before September 1. If you don’t, you won’t be able to fly it.

That’s a drastic measure, so what’s behind it?

Recent reports pointed to a problem with the drone that’s been causing a small number of them to suddenly drop out of the sky. Although DJI doesn’t reference the issue directly, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday that it’s “decided on the option of a mandatory firmware update in order to maximize flight safety and product reliability.”

The Chinese drone giant says its latest firmware update “enhances Spark’s battery management system to optimize power supply during flight,” another apparent reference to the possible issue that’s been taking down some of these drones.

In July DJI told Digital Trends it tests its products “for thousands of hours, and the overwhelming number of customers enjoy using our products with minimal disruption.”

The latest update also adds support “to fully integrate Spark with the DJI Goggles, optimized the PalmLaunch function for better stability after takeoff, improved the accuracy of controls under the QuickShot Dronie mode and enhanced the compatibility of the remote controller when syncing up with new firmware updates.”

Your DJI GO 4 app will prompt you to download the update as soon as it becomes available some time this week. The aircraft and battery firmware updates can also be carried out via the DJI Assistant 2 desktop software, the company said.

But remember, If the firmware of either the aircraft or the battery is not updated by September 1, your Spark drone will be going nowhere until you sort it out.

The update follows the release a few weeks ago of new features for the Spark that improve its photo and video capabilities, as well as the addition of new control gestures and flight mode enhancements.

The Spark drone impressed many when DJI unveiled the flying machine in May, 2017. The quadcopter packs a ton of tech into a tiny device, and at $499 is the company’s best-priced bird. If you’ve not seen it in action yet and want to find out more, be sure to check out Digital Trends’ in-depth review.

What’s on TV: ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Uncharted: The Lost Legacy’

We’re back! This week the big event doesn’t occur until Sunday night (unless it leaks early), when Game of Thrones wraps up its penultimate season with another super-sized episode clocking in at 79 minutes, 43 seconds. Until then we can check out Madden 18, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy and Disney’s first 4K Blu-ray release Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Amazon Prime has its first season of The Tick, while Netflix drops its Death Note live action movie. Look after the break to check out each day’s highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).

Blu-ray & Games & Streaming

• Ash vs. Evil Dead (S2)
• The Walking Dead (S7)
• Jessica Jones (S1)
• Daredevil (S2)
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (4K, 3D)
• Supergirl (S2)
• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (PS4)
• Knock-Knock (Xbox One)
• Spartan (Xbox One, PS4)
• ChromaGun (Xbox One, PS4)
• Battle of the Bulge (Xbox One)
• F1 2017 (PS4, Xbox One)
• Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS4)
• The Escapists 2 (Xbox One, PS4)
• Madden NFL 18 (PS4, Xbox One)
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm (PS4, PC, Xbox One)
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 (PS4, PC, Xbox One)
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 3: Full Burst (PS4, PC, Xbox One)
• Soul Dimension (PS VR)
• Velocity 2X: Critical Mass Edition (PS4)

Tuesday

• Difficult People, Hulu, 3 AM
• Lynne Koplitz: Hormonal Beast, Netflix, 3AM
• Black Girls Rock 2017, BET, 8 PM
• WWE Smackdown, USA, 8 PM
• America’s Got Talent, NBC, 8 PM
• The Fosters, Freeform, 8 PM
• The Challenge MTV, 9 PM
• Animal Kingdom, TNT, 9 PM
• The Bold Type, Freeform, 9 PM
• Face Off (season finale), Syfy, 9 PM
• Fantomworks, Velocity, 9 PM
• Face Off: Game Face (series premiere), Syfy, 10PM
• Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, HBO, 10PM
• Somewhere Between, ABC, 10 PM
• Shooter, USA, 10 PM
• American Ripper, History, 10 PM
• Fear Factor, MTV, 10 PM
• Adam Ruins Everything, TruTV, 10 PM
• Wrecked (season finale), TBS, 10:30 PM
• The Therapist, Viceland, 10:30 PM
• The Jim Jefferies Show, Comedy Central, 10:30 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM

Wednesday

• Big Brother, CBS, 8 PM
• Lucha Underground, El Rey, 8 PM
• Suits, USA, 9 PM
• Salvation, CBS, 9 PM
• Marlon, NBC, 9 & 9:30 PM
• Sinner, USA, 10 PM
• I’m Sorry, TruTV, 10 PM
• Snowfall FX, 10 PM
• The Auto Firm with Alex Vega, Velocity, 10 PM
• Blood Drive, Syfy, 10 PM
• Younger, TV Land, 10 PM
• Broadchurch, BBC America, 10 PM
• Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, TBS, 10:30 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM
• MTV Undressed, MTV, 11 & 11:30 PM

Thursday

• Party Boat, Crackle, 3AM
• Penn & Teller: Fool Us, CW, 8 PM
• Boy Band (season finale), ABC, 8 PM
• Beat Shazam, Fox, 8 PM
• The Wall (summer finale), NBC, 8 PM
• Whose Line is it Anyway, CW, 9 PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 9 PM
• 30 for 30: What Carter Lost, ESPN, 9:30 PM
• Zoo, CBS, 10 PM
• The Mist, Spike TV, 10 PM
• The Night Shift, NBC, 10 PM
• Queen of the South, USA, 10 PM
• The Guest Book, TBS, 10:30 PM
• What Would Diplo Do?, Viceland, 10 PM
• Nuts + Bolts, Viceland, 10:30 PM
• The Chris Gethard Show, TruTV, 11 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM

Friday

• Death Note, Netflix, 3 AM
• The Tick (S1), Amazon Prime, 3 AM
• Disjointed, Netflix, 3 AM
• Dragons: Race to the Edge (S5), Netflix, 3 AM
• Killjoys, Syfy, 8 PM
• Masters of Illusion, CW, 8 PM
• Dark Matter (season finale), Syfy, 9 PM
• Whitney. Can I Be Me?, Showtime, 9 PM
• ELeague: Road to the International Dota 2 Championships, TBS, 10 PM
• Wynonna Earp (season finale), Syfy, 10 PM
• Room 104, HBO, 11:30 PM

Saturday

• Wild West, BBC America, 9 PM
• Mayweather vs. McGregor, PPV, 9 PM

Sunday

• Twin Peaks, Showtime, 8 PM
• Top Gear America, BBC America, 8 PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 8 PM
• Sunday Night Baseball, ESPN, 8 PM
• 2017 MTV Video Music Awards, MTV, 9 PM
• Ray Donovan, Starz, 9 PM
• Game of Thrones (season finale), HBO, 9 PM
• Candy Crush, CBS, 9 PM
• Power, Starz, 9 PM
• The Nineties, CNN, 9 PM
• Steve Harvey’s Funderdome, ABC, 9 PM
• Get Shorty, Epix, 10 PM
• Ballers, HBO, 10:25 PM
• $100,000 Pyramid, ABC, 10 PM
• The Strain, FX, 10 PM
• Survivor’s Remorse, Starz, 10 PM
• Insecure, HBO, 10:55 PM
• Talking with Chris Hardwick, AMC, 11 PM
• Rick & Morty, Cartoon Network, 11:30 PM

Hulu will soon merge its two iOS apps into one

Say goodbye to confusing one Hulu app on your iOS device for another. Soon, the streaming service will condense both of them into a single one and phase out the Hulu Live TV app introduced earlier this year when the livestreaming service debuted.

For now, opening the Hulu Live TV app will redirect you to the main Hulu app, which will service both the $40-per-month livestreaming service and the standard $8-per-month Hulu content library. It’s unclear when the former will be taken off the App Store for good, but the main app’s update log confirmed it will happen:

“Heads up! We are saying goodbye to our Hulu with Live TV app so you can have all your TV in one place. We will soon unify the two Hulu apps currently available in the Apple App Store, Hulu with Live TV and Hulu, into one great on-demand and live TV viewing experience. We will let you know when this happens for good.”

Source: Hulu (App Store)

Apple Developing Self-Driving Campus Shuttle Service as Part of Scaled Back Car Effort

Apple is planning to develop a self-driving shuttle service that will transport Apple employees from one building to another as part of its autonomous vehicle efforts, reports The New York Times in a piece that explores why Apple scaled back its car ambitions.

Apple’s “open secret” car project shifted focus from a full autonomous vehicle to an autonomous driving system last year, and to test that system, Apple will reportedly use employee shuttles.

One of the Lexus SUVs Apple is currently using to test its autonomous driving software
Called “PAIL,” an acronym for “Palo Alto to Infinite Loop,” the shuttle program will transport employees between Apple’s myriad offices in Silicon Valley. Apple is said to be planning to use a commercial vehicle “from an automaker” paired with its own autonomous driving technology for the shuttles.

Five Apple employees familiar with Apple’s car project spoke to The New York Times about the shuttle program and also shared some details about the technologies Apple explored before the project was downscaled from car to software.

When Apple first started exploring car technology under the “Project Titan” name, it hired hundreds of people with expertise in everything from automation to car manufacturing. The team explored a wide range of technologies, including silent motorized doors, car interiors sans steering wheel or gas pedals, augmented reality displays, an improved LIDAR sensor that protrudes less from the top of a car, and spherical wheels.

Apple even looked into reinventing the wheel. A team within Titan investigated the possibility of using spherical wheels — round like a globe — instead of the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels could allow the car better lateral movement.

As has been previously reported, Apple’s car project suffered from delays, internal strife, and leadership issues. According to the people who spoke to The New York Times, there was no clear vision for the Apple Car and there were internal disagreements over whether Apple should pursue an autonomous vehicle or a semiautonomous vehicle and what language should be used for the CarOS software (Swift or C++).

Steve Zadesky, who initially led Project Titan but stepped down in early 2016, pushed for a semiautonomous vehicle, while Jony Ive’s industrial design team wanted an autonomous vehicle that would “allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience.”

Bob Mansfield took over the car project in mid-2016, and the project shifted from vehicle to software. Many members of the hardware team were laid off, but morale is said to have improved under his leadership now that Apple has a clear focus on an autonomous driving system.

Apple is now far enough along in its software development that the company is testing it in several 2015 Lexus RX450h vehicles equipped with a host of sensors and cameras. The vehicles have been out on the roads in the Cupertino area since April. It’s not yet clear when Apple plans to expand that testing to encompass the campus shuttles.

Back in June, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke publicly about Apple’s work on autonomous driving software in a rare candid moment. “We’re focusing on autonomous systems. It’s a core technology that we view as very important,” he said. “We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on.”

Related Roundup: Apple Car
Tag: nytimes.com
Discuss this article in our forums

One of the ingredients in poop could make you fitter and healthier

Why it matters to you

It may sound counterintuitive at first, but exposure to one of the compounds found in poop could help make you healthier.

Whether it is crazy schemes to upload our consciousness into computers or cutting-edge stem cell research, there is no shortage of researchers searching for ways to extend our life span. The good news: A research project offers a new way to extend the healthy years before age-related illnesses and frailty hits. The bad news: It involves exposing yourself to poop.

More specifically, it involves indole, an is an organic compound found in the gut, which helps give excrement its less-than-pleasant odor. While the unhygienic nature of bodily waste suggests that prolonged exposure would be a bad thing, a team of U.S. researchers has discovered that indole compounds actually increase the healthy life span of animals.

“We had been studying this class of molecules for the last decade and a half,” Daniel Kalman, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, told Digital Trends. “In particular, we were using worms, which eat bacteria, as a biosensor for small molecules produced by bacteria. We showed that bacteria that produced indoles could alter the way worms perceive stress, and we showed that this effect was caused by indoles secreted by the bacteria. Health span is defined as the capacity to live better for longer. One way that happens is to have the capacity to handle stressors. Another way is to resist normal aging. Given our data showing the stress sensitivity, we reasoned health span, in general, might be improved.”

Kalman and colleagues began this experiment by testing the effect in worms, before graduating to flies, and then mice. “We showed that animals of widely divergent phyla, and separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary time, all utilize indoles to regulate how well they age,” Kalman said. “In short, indoles make older animals look younger by various metrics, including motility and fecundity.”

The team has not yet progressed to exploring how similar compounds will affect humans — and certainly is not offering any homebrew advice on ways to extend your own healthy life span.

“Animals are not so dissimilar from humans,” Kalman concluded. “Worms, for example, share roughly a third of their genes with us — and like us, they interact with bacteria. Given our data with worms and flies and mice, and observations of others that indole levels are dysregulated in people with chronic inflammatory diseases, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that indoles likewise control health span in us. We are testing that idea in various ways, [but] it will take time and further experimental work to both test this experimentally, and to develop means to introduce or restore indoles in people to levels that are both efficacious and safe.”

Virtualization updates let you use your MacBook Pro Touch Bar in Windows 10

Why it matters to you

If you’re using the Parallels Desktop 13 or VMWare Fusion 10 virtualization apps to run Windows 10 on your MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, then grab the latest versions to get the most out of your investment.

One major advantage of Apple’s MacOS platform is its ability to run Windows 10 via Boot Camp or third-party virtualization apps. While Boot Camp is likely the highest performance option, it doesn’t fully leverage the MacBook Pro Touch Bar in Windows 10 mode. Two of the more popular virtualization apps, Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion, change that equation by adding in meaningful Windows 10 Touch Bar support.

The news comes via 9to5Mac, which reported on both Parallels Desktop 13 and VMware Fusion 10 now enabling some nice Touch Bar functionality for Windows 10 users. The virtualization apps also add a number of other features that equate to significant upgrades for existing users.

VMWare Fusion 10’s Touch Bar support provides for “commonly used controls,” without much in the way of details. Additional updates in Fusion 10 include enhanced GPU and 3D graphics performance, and a new user interface that better leverages MacOS, Linux, and Windows 10. Enterprise users will benefit from improved virtual machine management (VM) features and enhanced support for Microsoft’s virtualization-based security features, UEFI Secure Boot, and virtual Trusted Platform Module support.

Parallels Desktop 13’s Touch Bar support for Windows 10 was explained in additional detail. Not only does the Touch Bar provide specific functionality for Windows apps that are running in a VM, but when no apps are running, the Touch Bar can be used to show items in the Windows task bar for easy access to running and available apps. The following video shows off Touch Bar support in Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac.

Other updates include enhancements to the Parallels Toolbox utility like Airplane Mode, Clean Drive, and Find Duplicates. Parallels Desktop 13 also anticipates some future Windows 10 features that will be coming in the Fall Creators Update, such as the Windows 10 People Bar and picture-in-picture functionality. Of course, performance and reliability improvements are also part of the package

The update to VMware Fusion 10 costs $49 for existing users and $119 for the Pro version. If you buy version 8.5 or 8.5 Pro now, you’ll receive an update to version 10 when it’s officially released in October. Parallels Desktop 13 is available today as a $50 upgrade for version 11 or 12 users; a new copy costs $80.

What is AMD doing in LA? Helping more filmmakers achieve Hollywood-caliber FX

For any lifelong fan of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, watching the dragon called Dragon sweeping over the onrushing Dothraki horde and spewing fire at the Lannister army was thrilling. Watching it in a TV show like Game of Thrones was simply remarkable. It wasn’t too long ago that such scenes were limited to feature films with blockbuster budgets. AMD Studios, a newly unveiled AMD venture that’s opened its first office in Hollywood, wants to make such scenes far more commonplace.

AMD Studios wasn’t involved in creating that scene from Game of Thrones. But if you’re a director who envisions a scene with 100 such dragons instead of just one, then Roy Taylor, AMD’s worldwide head of media and entertainment, wants you to give him a call.

Scenes like the one from Game of Thrones season 7, episode 4, “Spoils of War,” that caused such a stir, are incredibly expensive to make. There’s a reason why we don’t see many such scenes in a single season of a TV show, even one with an above-average budget like HBO’s production. AMD Studios wants to change that by lowering the cost of systems capable of creating those magical moments and making it easier for studios to pack more of them into a show — and for smaller studios to achieve them at all.

Being stealthy while the technology catches up

AMD Studios grew out of a friendship between Taylor and James Knight, a Hollywood veteran with production credits on films including Avatar and I Am Legend, as well as the Star Wars: The Old Republic video game. Two years ago, after Knight joined AMD Studios and became its virtual production director, the two set up shop in Hollywood and flew under the radar — listening to what Hollywood was looking for and waiting for AMD technology to catch up with the industry’s needs.

Left to right: Daryl Cameron, chief of staff; James Knight, virtual production director; Dominick Spina, head of film technology; and Roy Taylor, worldwide head of media and Entertainment

Over time, AMD Studios added new team members with some serious media and entertainment backgrounds. Dominick Spina came on board as head of film technology, bringing with him two decades of technology experience in film, broadcast, visual effects animation production, and other industries. And Robin Prybil, AMD Studios head of TV technology, added to the team’s experience with her work on The BFG, The Adventures of Tin Tin, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

AMD Studios flew under the radar — listening to what Hollywood wanted and waiting for AMD technology to catch up.

During those first two years, the team used its location in Hollywood and its industry contacts to kick off its first collaboration. Fox’s FoxNext VR and Technicolor MPC were creating the VR experience Alien: Covenant In Utero, and the studios weren’t happy with the available 4K stereo video players. AMD Studios, much to the producers’ surprise, offered to put AMD software engineers to work writing a custom player for the production. According to Taylor, the resulting 4K player contributed significantly to In Utero’s success.

Next, Taylor was introduced to Red Digital Camera Company Camera President Jarred Land by a mutual acquaintance. He wasted no time in promising something that Land didn’t believe AMD could possibly provide: a solution for editing 8K footage in real time at 24 frames per second. AMD Studios is two blocks from Red’s offices, and Taylor and his team rolled a system down the street to prove they could deliver. AMD’s Radeon Pro Vega SSG with 2TB of RAM was the presented solution.  AMD software engineers were then once again put to work — this time in converting AMD’s code to support Red’s R3D file format.

Land was so impressed with AMD’s technology, and the work that AMD Studios performed, that he went on stage during AMD’s Capsaicin event, at SIGGRAPH 2017. He also took his plaudits to Facebook:

AMD, Welcome to Hollywood. Thanks for having me be part of your Siggraph reveal last night. Threadripper, Radeon SSG…

Posted by Jarred Land on Monday, July 31, 2017

Now, AMD Studios is leveraging its prime Hollywood location to keep listening to the industry. At the same time, AMD’s recent hardware advancements mean that the team has an even stronger story to tell.

Bringing film’s relationship with technology into the 21st century

Taylor opened the AMD Capsaicin SIGGRAPH 2017 event by quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V. His point: to draw a direct parallel between resource-hungry writers leaning on the Bard’s writing skills in opening a new theater in 1599, and smaller Hollywood studios today facing their own unmet technology needs. That’s exactly what AMD Studios wants to offer — to act as a partner that can deliver end-to-end digital production capability that until now has been impossible or unaffordable.

Historically, technology has been involved with film from the very beginning, starting in 1895 with Louis Lumière adding a sprocket to something akin to Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, thus creating the Cinématographe machine that could broadcast a moving picture to a screen. Today, everyone’s familiar with the impact of computer graphics (CG) in special effects. Less well-known is the use of video game engines in the 1990s for preproduction visualization, which let directors virtually place people and items in a scene on a display, without the cost of physically changing things on a set.

Next came virtual production in the mid-2000s, where actors could dress in jeans and T-shirts in real life, while being digitally displayed in full costume on a large screen suspended above a set. Virtual production allows a director to frame a final shot exactly as desired with minimal cost. Taken together, these technologies make for an end-to-end digital pipeline that includes digital preproduction visualization, digital virtual production, digital post-production, and visual effects.

Today, there is a shift from offline to CG production, or virtual production. Challenges remain, such as how to get actors into real-time CG production — consider the difference in reaction to Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher’s digital representation in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, for example. Further technologies such as volumetric capture and light-field capture should help make for more realistic movement, animation, and human expressions.

Where AMD Studios comes in is in bringing this technology down in price, making it available to smaller studios and productions with smaller budgets. Consider post-production rendering, for example. Larger studios have access to huge render farms that can churn through the special effects that make Avatar and Game of Thrones possible. Smaller studios, though, must make do with much less powerful hardware and software — so what’s possible for them is limited.

AMD Studios will help by going on set and into production houses and creating custom hardware and software solutions based on AMD hardware and software. They want to say to a director, as Taylor put it, “Oh, by the way, you want that shot to have another 10,000 troops? And you think it’s going to cost you millions to render? Well guess what, it’s not, and we can do that for you.”

As with In Utero and Red Camera, AMD Studios will pull AMD hardware and software together to create tailor-made solutions that let studios tell their stories in a more impactful way, for less money than ever.

Where the metal meets the digital cellulose

According to Taylor, AMD is uniquely suited for an initiative like AMD Studios. Intel can provide CPU-based solutions and Nvidia can provide GPU-based solutions while AMD can bring both to a studio. This is important because some tasks require superior CPU performance while others benefit primarily from GPU performance.

AMD’s recent advances in CPU and GPU technology are contributing to making AMD Studios a viable concern, which helps explain why AMD is the first chip company to set up an office in Hollywood. The company’s new Zen architecture, Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs  and Vega GPU architecture, are leading the way in providing the tools AMD Studios needs to create its custom solutions.

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

To meet the needs of smaller studios and lower-budget productions, for example, AMD has created RS1, a system aimed directly at 8K rendering at a significantly lower price. RS1 brings two EPYC server processors and up to four high-end Vega or SSG GPUs, providing up to 100 teraflops of half-precision performance. Just as important, Taylor expects the most powerful RS1 system to come in at half the price of a similarly configured Intel and Nvidia solution.

The first RS1 samples will be rolling out in the next few weeks, and AMD Studios will also be providing access to its Project 47 server rack that delivers a petaflop of full 32-bit precision compute performance via 20 EPYC CPUs and 18 Vega GPUs. Project 47 can be leased or purchased, and it’s intended to provide massive rendering performance to smaller production houses.

AMD

While this off-the-shelf hardware will on occasion be offered up as a solution to a filmmaker’s problem, AMD Studios will be focused on providing custom solutions. That means AMD’s software engineers will remain busy, and that the usual applications in use by studios will increasingly be optimized for AMD’s newest technology. For example, two popular tools used in the industry, the Octane renderer used to create final photorealistic images and video, and The Foundry’s Nuke 11 Studio, for composing and editing scenes, now run on AMD. Adobe’s Premier is now optimized for SSG. And a fully AMD-optimized version of the popular renderer Redshift will be shipping in late September 2017.

40-percent talking, 60-percent listening

Taylor is enthusiastic about how AMD Studios will help push storytelling forward by using AMD technology, essentially “bridging the gap between Northern California’s Silicon Valley and Southern California’s Hollywood.” His team’s future success will derive from two primary efforts.

First, building on its Hollywood location and on its philosophy of “40-percent talking, 60-percent listening,” as Taylor describes it, AMD Studios will remain at the forefront of media and entertainment technology by constantly looking — and listening — for opportunities to push storytelling forward. Because its solutions will be custom-built based on what filmmakers envision, AMD Studios will avoid the tendency to let its current state of hardware and software resources define the solutions it presents.

For example, as Taylor points out, directors routinely look back after a shoot and imagine how they might have done things differently. “In an ideal world, a director should be able to wake up one morning and have a eureka moment. ‘What we should have done in Act 1 is, we should have taken this part and had that effect,’” Taylor said.

Today, studios balk at the cost of completely redoing a scene, but a fully digital production pipeline could make it possible to edit and re-edit on the fly, and provide directors with significantly more flexibility. The ability to virtually reshoot a scene could make the difference between a good film and a masterpiece — and it’s having that kind of discussion with filmmakers that will ensure that AMD Studios’ offerings avoid stagnation.

As Taylor put it, “The line between imagination and invention is indistinguishable.” He’s depending on filmmakers themselves to guide him across that line by telling him what they imagine and letting AMD Studios discover what’s possible. Taylor elaborated on this point:

“There may be some director, some writer, out there right now, who maybe has a scene envisioned for something, and they don’t really think it’s possible. But now there’s someone they can call up and say, ‘Is this possible.’ And you might very well say, ‘Yeah.’ And the impact on imagination is immeasurable.”

It doesn’t hurt that Taylor and his team are also heavily involved with media and entertainment organizations like the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). AMD Studios a BAFTA partner, and AMD will gain serious exposure at the upcoming AMD BAFTA Britannia Awards.

Teach them, and they will lead you forward

AMD Studios’ second tactic for influencing the industry is to work closely with film schools in England and the U.S. By introducing these technologies to a new generation of filmmakers, Taylor hopes to help create technology-savvy producers and directors who are fully prepped to hear AMD Studios’ message. In turn, those up-and-coming filmmakers will be the ones to guide AMD Studios’ efforts going forward, ensuring that it remains at the cutting edge of media and technology production.

AMD Studios makes digital production technology more affordable for smaller studios and productions with smaller budgets.

Some of Taylor’s most excited moments during our interview was when he talked about working with film students: “I really get a kick out of the students. They have such great ideas for the use of technology. The new generation of filmmakers is going to come through, which is going to say, ‘Alrighty, I’m going to keep challenging.’”

One place where Taylor is heavily involved with educating filmmakers is at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is setting up the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, and he is encouraging investments in advanced media technology like light-field capture. Another example is a scholarship that’s being established at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in Britain.

How will AMD measure its success?

The bottom line is this — providing filmmakers with access to more powerful systems at significantly lower prices means more and better scenes in more of our favorite shows. Imagine a Game of Thrones where elaborate Drogon and the Dothraki scenes aren’t limited to a single episode and a few minutes of air time.

Taylor speaks directly to AMD Studios’ potential impact by referring to one of his favorite TV shows:

“And so if you look at, for example, ‘Spartacus,’ which is a show that I love, at the very beginning they didn’t have very large scenes, and if you look at some of the crowd scenes at the beginning of ‘Spartacus,’ they weren’t that great. By the time you go to the finale, the budgets had improved dramatically and they looked that much better. I would have love to have been there and to have been able to speak to the director and producer at the beginning, and we could have helped them to make it look great right now.”

When we asked Taylor directly how he would measure the success of AMD Studios, his answer was immediate. He said, “If it’s as successful as I can imagine, we’ll hopefully one day be picking up some sci-tech Oscar awards, and we’ll be recognized for contributions to film, television, and VR. To think that we contributed enough to be recognized like that would really be terrific.”

For the larger AMD organization, the knock-on effect could be equally as profound. Just like Apple became the de facto platform for graphic artists by getting its equipment into creative schools early and making sure its technology met their needs, so, too, is AMD Studios getting AMD’s technology into media and entertainment.

And when we watch a TV show that blows our mind not just once a season but in every episode, then there’s a good chance that Roy Taylor and his staff at AMD Studios will have been hard at work making it happen.

Scientists re-create the ‘diamond rain’ effect from Neptune and Uranus

Why it matters to you

The diamond rain effect not only helps answer questions about Neptune and Uranus, it also provides a new way of making diamonds, too.

The kind of glittering “diamond rain” hypothesized as taking place on Neptune and Uranus has been replicated in a lab here on Earth. On the two icy giant planets, the phenomenon is thought to be the result of hydrogen and carbon mixing under high-pressure conditions. On Earth, scientists re-created the effect by creating shock waves in plastic using an intense optical laser.

The laser rapidly heated up the surface of the plastic, which caused it to expand and generate a shock wave. The team prompted the creation of two shock waves, with the second being the faster of the two. When the shockwaves overlapped, it resulted in pressure and temperature of 150 GPa and 5,000 K being produced. These are similar to the conditions found around 10,000 km into the interior of Neptune and Uranus.

The results turned almost every carbon atom in the plastic material into a tiny diamond, just a few nanometers wide. While that is considerably smaller than the diamonds theorized to fall on the icy planets in question, this represents the first time the effect has been demonstrated. Using short pulses of X-rays, the team were actually able to watch the diamonds being formed.

“Our experiments were able to directly measure hydrocarbon separation and diamond formation at planetary interior conditions for the first time,” Dominik Kraus, a scientist at Helmholtz Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, told Digital Trends. “Besides the pretty cool [images] of diamond precipitation inside ice giants, this is important for various reasons.”

These reasons including a better understanding of planetary interiors, which is crucial to our understanding of the solar system, as well as — with more immediate practicality — a new way of potentially making diamonds.

“Making diamonds, in the case of our experiment ‘nanodiamonds,’ from simple hydrocarbons like plastics may have interesting applications since nanodiamonds have a steadily growing range of use in medicine, electronics, and material science,” Kraus continued. “This may be another example of how physics that was motivated by trying to understand objects in the sky can lead to useful applications on our planet. Currently, most nanodiamonds for scientific and industrial applications are produced with explosives. High-energy lasers may be able to provide a more elegant and controllable method.”

A research paper describing the project was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.