A self-driving car in every driveway? Solid-state lidar is the key

Ever noticed how self-driving cars end up wearing some weird hats?

The earliest self-driving military trucks looked like they had spinning coffee cans up top. Carnegie Mellon’s iconic self-driving Hummer was topped by a giant ping-pong ball. Waymo’s smiley little prototype wears a siren-shaped dome that makes it look like the world’s most adorable police car.

Inside all three are about a dozen lasers, shooting through telescope-grade optics, slinging around hundreds of times per minute, to generate 300,000 data points per second. It’s called lidar, and without it, these cars would all be blind. It’s also one of the biggest reasons you don’t have a self-driving car in your driveway right now. At around $75,000, a single lidar can easily cost more than the car it rides on. And that’s just one ingredient in the self-driving soup.

But a new technology is popping up everywhere this year: solid-state lidar. With no moving parts, it promises to give self-driving cars sharper, better vision, at a fraction the cost of old-school, electromechanical systems. Solid-state lidar will pave the way for the first self-driving cars you can actually afford. Here’s how it works — and what’s just around the corner.

How lidar works

The term “lidar” comes from mashing together “light” and “radar,” which also makes a handy way of understanding it because … well, it’s radar, but with light.

A refresher from high-school physics: Radar bounces a pulse of radio waves off an object, like a plane, to determine how far away it is, based on how long it takes for the pulse to bounce back. Lidar uses a pulse of light from a laser to do the same thing.

“You need a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar in order to create a self-driving system.”

Take enough of those lasers, spin them in circle, and you end up with a three-dimensional “point cloud” of the world around you. You’ve probably seen these rainbow-colored dots depicting cityscapes, mountains, and even Thom Yorke’s singing, disembodied head in Radiohead’s House of Cards music video. That 360-degree 3D map is like a Rosetta Stone to a self-driving car, allowing it to decipher the world around it.

“You need a combination of cameras, radar, and lidar in order to create a self-driving system,” explains Jada Tapley, VP of Advanced Engineering at Aptiv. She would know. Aptiv built the autonomous Lyft cars that ferried attendees around Las Vegas for CES 2018. In the worst gridlock the city sees all year. And monsoon-like conditions. With zero accidents.

Those cars had nine lidar, ten radar, and four cameras. A combination of all three allow it to drive itself, but lidar performs the crucial function engineers call localization. “It’s important for the vehicle to be able to identify with a very high degree of accuracy where it is on the map,” Tapley explains. “We use our lidar to do that.”

While GPS can narrow down your location to a circle about 16 feet in diameter, lidar can do it within a circle four inches in diameter. That’s better than a lot of drivers can manage. Tapley remembers one group of wide-eyed journalists wincing as Aptiv’s autonomous car breezed past a parked bus in Las Vegas. They didn’t need to — because the car knew there was plenty of room. “As humans we get intimidated, especially by big, big vehicles like buses or semis. So we tend to kind of edge away from them,” she explains. “But an autonomous vehicle doesn’t need to do that.”

Autonomous car levels explained
International engineering organizations have settled on six levels of automation to talk about the evolution we’ll see between dumb cars and complete autonomy.

Level 0: No autonomy
This is the car you already probably own. Stop texting! You need to do everything.
Level 1: Hands on
Your car will help you in some scenarios, like adaptive cruise control slowing you down on the highway when the car ahead of you does.
Level 2: Hands off
Your car can drive just like you do — under just the right circumstances, like Tesla Autopilot on a divided, marked highway.
Level 3: Eyes off
Go ahead and send that text; this car won’t crash if it doesn’t have your attention. But you’ll still need to grab the wheel if things get complicated, like with Audi Traffic Jam Pilot.
Level 4: Mind off
Go to sleep; your car is under control. But you still need to sit behind a wheel juuust in case.
Level 5: Total autonomy
Your car has no steering wheel, because it can drive better than you can in all scenarios. Go sit in the back, feeble human.

While cameras can identify objects, and radar can tell how far away they are, lidar can achieve both with a degree of precision neither can touch. “Imagine that there’s an 18-wheeler tire tread in the middle of the road,” Tapley says. “Radar will not detect that. Lidar will.”

That’s why a Tesla Model S, which has both cameras and radar, but no lidar, must have a driver prepared to take the wheel at any time. It’s considered a level 2 autonomous vehicle. Almost all car autonomy experts — with the glaring exception of Elon Musk — believe lidar is necessary to achieve true “sleep behind the wheel” level 4 autonomy.

And that’s a tremendous problem if you or I ever hope to own one. The silver Velodyne HDL-64E you see atop many test cars costs $75,000. Even the company’s “budget” Puck model runs $8,000. And this is not a part you can want to skimp on. Imagine your car windows going black at 80mph, and you have a pretty good idea how losing lidar would look to the computer in a self-driving car.

Like all technology, lidar has become cheaper over time, but the precision required and massive spinning parts in electromechanical lidar mean it can’t become cheaper, smaller, and better every year the same way the processor in your phone or computer does.

But what if … you could make lidar from only silicon? Take away all the moving pieces, and the future starts to look a lot brighter.

Welcome to the solid state

Solid-state electronics, which by definition have no moving pieces, have changed the way we do everything from keeping track of time to listening to music. Remember how portable CD players used to skip? That’s what happens when you rely on a laser to read microscopic grooves in a spinning disc. But you can put your smartphone in a paint shaker and still listen to Kanye, because the music is stored on solid-state memory chips that don’t mind getting shaken up. Lidar is heading in the same direction.

Like portable CD players, spinning electromechanical lidar is not ideal. “Number one, they’re big,” says Tapley. “Number two, they’re expensive. Solid-state lidar allows us to get smaller, package better in the vehicles, and reduce costs.”

How do you move light around without moving a lens or a mirror? How does lidar get to solid state? Engineers have devised some downright genius ways.

The first is called flash lidar. “Flash is basically where you have a light source and that light source floods the entire field of view one time using a pulse,” Tapley explains. “A time-of-flight imager receives that light and is able to paint the image of what it sees.” Think of it as a camera that sees distance instead of color.

Think of it as a camera that sees distance instead of color.

But that simplicity comes with some snags. To see very far, you need a powerful burst of light, which makes it more expensive. And the light can’t be so powerful that it damages human retinas, which limits range. One workaround is to blast light at a specific, invisible wavelength that doesn’t affect human eyes. Perfect! Until you bump into yet another catch: Inexpensive silicon imagers won’t “read” blasts of light in the eye-safe spectrum. You need expensive gallium-arsenide imagers, which can boost the cost of these systems as high as $200,000.

“You have to have an extremely powerful light source, or an extremely sensitive receiver, and if you don’t have those things then you have this limited range,” Tapley says. It might be perfect for government planes conducting detailed aerial surveys, but flash lidar probably isn’t fit for your Corolla.

Set phasers to scan

Fortunately, there’s another way. Louay Eldada has been cracking on the problem since he got his PhD in optoelectronics in the early ‘90s; and today he runs Quanergy, one of the preeminent players in solid-state lidar. Eldada and his team derived a different approach by looking at how radar works. It is, after all, a close cousin of lidar. As it turns out, radar used to spin just like lidar, until scientists developed a brilliant workaround known as the phased array.

A phased array can broadcast radio waves in any direction — without spinning in circles — by using a microscopic array of individual antennas synced up in a specific way. By controlling the timing — or phase — between each antenna broadcasting its signal, engineers can “steer” one cohesive signal in a specific direction.

Phased arrays have been in use in radar since the 1950s. But Eldada and his team figured out how to use the same technique with light. “We have a large number, typically a million, optical antenna elements,” Eldada explains. “Based on their phased relationship amongst each other, they form a radiation pattern, or spot, that has a certain size and is pointed in a certain direction.”

By intelligently timing the precise flash of a million individual emitters, Quanergy can “steer” light using only silicon. “The interference effect determines in which direction the light goes, not a moving mirror or lens,” Eldada explains.

That means the nest of optics and motors inside a $75,000 lidar bucket disappears, and you’re left with only chips. Right now, Quanergy uses several chips and sells the package for $900, but future versions will become a single chip. “At that point, our sales price will become under $100,” Eldada predicts.

Quanergy can “steer” light using only silicon.

Solid state isn’t just cheaper, it’s better. “Being able to effectively change the shape of the lens to any shape you want allows you to zoom in and zoom out,” Eldada explains. “So imagine you’re looking at an object in your lane, and you want to define in high resolution what it is. You reduce the spot size and determine it’s a deer, it’s a tire, it’s a mattress that fell off a truck. At the same time, you can hop between doing that and looking at the big scene.” This “hopping” could happen multiple times per second without a driver even knowing, as an algorithm calls the shots and determines what deserves a closer look.

Solid-state devices also last longer. Electromechanical lidar can run for between 1,000 and 2,000 hours before failure. With the average American spending 293 hours in a car per year, most of us would end up replacing our lidar before our tires. Quanergy claims its solid-state lidar will run for 100,000 hours — more than most cars will ever drive.

Mirror mirror, on the wall

Flash and optical phased arrays are really the only true solid-state lidar. But there’s a third new way to do lidar, the red-headed stepchild known as microelectromechanical mirrors — or MEMS mirrors.

As the “mechanical” in “microelectromechanical” suggests, there are moving parts, so MEMS mirrors aren’t truly solid-state. But they’re also so tiny that the technology still represents an improvement over large-scale electromechanical lidar.

Aptiv is hedging its bets by working with – and investing in – all of them.

“The architecture is very simple,” Tapley explains. “You have one laser, one mirror.” The laser fires into the very tiny mirror, which spins like a top, providing the rotation that conventional lidar gets from spinning an entire bucket around.

It’s simple enough, until you want to move the laser up and down in addition to spinning in circles. Then you need to “cascade” it off another mirror, which spins on another axis. Or you can shoot multiple lasers at one mirror. Either way, the cost and complexity begin to build.

“Making sure that everything is aligned perfectly creates challenges,” Tapley explains. “If you’ve got this laser in a mirror that’s rotating on both axes, it can sometimes be susceptible to shock and vibrations.” You know, like the type you might find in a car, bouncing down the road at 70 mph.

Eldada points to other issues. “Micro MEMs mirrors drift out of alignment. They don’t maintain calibration. When there are big changes in temperature, they need to be recalibrated over the lifetime.”

“If the mirrors get stuck, you have an eye safety issue,” he points out. And sunlight can wreak its own havoc. “You have big issues when you’re facing the sun,” Eldada says. “The sunlight is going to hit it, the light is going to get reflected inside the lidar, and saturate the detectors, and drown out the signal.”

With so many differences between all three types of next-gen lidar, Aptiv is hedging its bets by working with – and investing in – all of them. “Each have different tradeoffs relative to field of view, range, and resolution,” Tapley explains. “Depending on where that lidar is positioned on the vehicle, that will dictate which one of those needs to be the most important.”

Side-facing lidar, for instance, might not need the range that front-facing lidar does. By mixing and matching between the variety, Aptiv hopes to harness the best of all worlds.

So where’s my self-driving car?

In 1999, Jaguar introduced the first radar-based cruise control in the XK, a coupe that sold for about $100,000 in today’s dollars. At the time, the sensors were so expensive that as Tapley tells it, “People joked around that you got a free Jag with every radar purchase.”

Today, you can get the same feature in a $18,000 Corolla. “We’re kind of on that same learning curve with lidar,” she says. “Until solid state becomes mature and enters mass production, these vehicles are going to be pretty cost prohibitive for an average consumer to own.”

Quanergy’s $900 solid-state lidar sensor is helping make that happen. The upcoming Fisker EMotion will be the first vehicle to hit the streets with those sensors inside — five of them — when it arrives in 2019. No bigger than the battery pack for a cordless drill, they’re buried in vents, hidden behind chrome grilles, and totally invisible unless you’re looking for them. A long way from the spinning buckets of yesterday.

Solid-state lidar means that self-driving cars won’t just be robochauffeurs for the wealthy.

Eldada believes we’ll see level 4 autonomous cars from a notoriously “aggressive” American manufacturer as early as 2020. “2021, 2022, you will see several more. 2023 is the big year. Most automakers will have self-driving cars.”

While the Fisker will be priced at $130,000, it might end up looking a lot like the Jaguar XK of 1999: An expensive harbinger of technology to come. Ultimately, solid-state lidar means that self-driving cars won’t just be robochauffeurs for the wealthy. “It means that everyone can have a self-driving car,” Eldada says. “It’s not only for the Mercedes S-Class and BMW 7 Series. This means that people driving Toyota Corollas will also have self-driving cars.”

And as fundamental as that shift may sound, cars may be just the beginning for solid-state lidar. “You will see it in devices, you will see it in wearables, in the helmets of firefighters and soldiers. The applications are almost limitless.”

Honor View 10 vs. Samsung Galaxy S9: What do you get for the extra $200?

Most buyers will be happy with either of these phones — but that doesn’t mean they’re evenly matched.

Okay, this is a weird comparison, I know, but hear me out. The Honor View 10 stood toe-to-toe against the OnePlus 5T as one of the best “budget flagships” you can buy, with great dual cameras, sturdy build quality, and a compellingly low price of $499.

On the other hand, the Galaxy S9 is the new hotness around, packing every feature under the sun into a package so beautiful and well-machined that you almost don’t want to put it down. But with a starting price of $719.99, just how much more are you really getting for the $200+ premium over the View 10?

What the Honor View 10 does better

It’s pretty obvious that the cheaper phone of the two will come with some compromises, but the View 10 still offers a ton of bang for your buck. You get the modern design we’ve come to expect of a 2018 flagship, complete with slim bezels and an 18:9 aspect ratio. That modernization doesn’t mean Honor has completely thrown out old trends, though — it still has a headphone jack!

You don’t have to spend over $700 to get a premium smartphone.

Despite a relatively low price, you still get the very best processor Huawei has to offer — the Kirin 970, complete with the same AI enhancements found on the more expensive Mate 10 Pro. In addition, the View 10 is backed by an impressive 6GB of RAM, and you probably won’t run out of space, given the 128GB of internal storage and microSD slot for expandability.

Per usual, the biggest differentiator between phones is the software, and the View 10’s software definitely isn’t for everyone. It’s still Android Oreo, which is great news, but the EMUI overlay is a far cry from stock Android, with plenty of OEM customizations throughout the interface. The same can be said of The Artist Formerly Known As TouchWiz residing on the S9, but EMUI just feels … less useful, with more redundant apps that offer little extra functionality.

One area where the View 10 easily bests the Galaxy S9 is battery life, where its massive 3750mAh — combined with power-efficient software — far outlasts the S9’s measly 3000mAh cell (and even outmatches the larger 3500mAh battery in the S9+).

See at Honor

What the Galaxy S9 does better

Wireless charging, water resistance, stereo speakers, dual apertures, and iris scanning — all things the Honor View 10 simply doesn’t have, and the list doesn’t end there. The Galaxy S9 topples over just about every other phone on the market when it comes to feature lists, and this is no exception.

It’s hard to match Samsung’s level of build quality and feature set.

The Galaxy S9 may be more iterative than some would have liked, riding on the same general design as the Galaxy S8 before it, but that just means that Samsung has had an entire year to refine its already-great hardware. The curved glass and metal pairing is as gorgeous as ever, and the fingerprint sensor is finally in a sensible place underneath the camera module.

Speaking of cameras, the Galaxy S9’s camera absolutely clobbers the View 10, even with just one lens. That’s not to say that the View 10’s dual camera module is bad — it’s pretty great, actually — but the S9 just takes stunningly good photos, and its dual aperture system is unparalleled. It also benefits from OIS for added stability, further improving its video performance and night shots (two areas where the View 10 lacks).

See at Samsung

Which one is right for you?

If you have the extra money, the Galaxy S9 is still the better buy. Its software is more thought out, it takes better photos, and it boasts a significantly longer list of hardware features. What’s more, you can finance it through your carrier — and speaking of carriers, it’s your only choice of the two if you’re on a CDMA network like Sprint or Verizon.

Still, if you don’t mind more reseved hardware, the Honor View 10 has a lot to offer for significantly less money. You’ll still get great specs with a top-tier processor, excellent dual cameras, and better battery life than Samsung can compete with. The design isn’t quite as futuristic, but it’s still well-built, and for the money it’s hard to complain.

Are you going all out with the Galaxy S9, or has the View 10’s lower price and competitive specs won you over? Let us know in the comments below!

Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

• Galaxy S9 review: A great phone for the masses
• Galaxy S9 and S9+: Everything you need to know!
• Complete Galaxy S9 and S9+ specs
• Galaxy S9 vs. Google Pixel 2: Which should you buy?
• Galaxy S9 vs. Galaxy S8: Should you upgrade?
• Join our Galaxy S9 forums

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AT&T
T-Mobile
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Are you going to use a screen protector on the Galaxy S9?

For a phone like this, a screen protector is a necessity.

Samsung’s Galaxy S9 is a beautifully-designed piece of tech, and will likely remain as one of the year’s best-looking phones as we go about 2018. However, as flashy as it may be, that’s not to say it’s the most durable thing in the world.

The Galaxy S9 is made mostly out of glass, and the curved edges on the front make the screen incredibly prone to unwanted scratches and cracks thanks to the slippery nature of the phone. A screen protector is one of the best ways to retain the good looks of the S9 while ensuring your display stays as pristine as possible, and there are already a lot of different options to choose from.

Some of our forum users recently started talking about which screen protectors they’ll be using on their Galaxy S9s, and this is what they had to say.

chennaite
02-28-2018 05:48 AM

“

I love to give the very first suggestion for the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus screen protector. If anyone is looking to get thin protector, get it from gadgetshieldz. And Post your personal favorite here.
Galaxy S9 – https://www.gadgetshieldz.com/galaxy-s9-plus-screen-protectors-covers-cases.html
Galaxy S9 Plus – https://www.gadgetshieldz.com/galaxy-s9-screen-protectors-covers-cases.html

Reply

zedexdriver98
02-28-2018 06:10 AM

“

Cool. That one is quite cheap, isn’t it? But I’m gonna pay like £860 to pre-order my S9 Plus so I’m definitely buying the best screen protector. I bought the Whitestone Dome for my S8 after about 3 tries with cheaper alternatives.

In the end, the Whitestone Dome is still going strong on my S8 and I have just found out they have released it for the S9 Plus so I’ll be going for it again.

You…

Reply

areyes163
03-02-2018 02:28 PM

“

I got the Zagg HD elite. I tried to wait last year with the note 8. Even me and I’m super careful with my phones. I got a ton of scratches from where I don’t know. First time that’s happened. So for me I’m gonna make sure I get a screen protector.

Reply

echo_808
03-02-2018 07:08 PM

“

I think ill try the Spigen Glass.tR nano liquid since ill be using a Spigen case again.

Or the Spigen NeoFlex again if Amazon doesnt have it stocked.

Reply

Now, we want to hear from you – Are you going to use a screen protector on the Galaxy S9? If so, which one?

Join the conversation in the forums!

Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+

• Galaxy S9 review: A great phone for the masses
• Galaxy S9 and S9+: Everything you need to know!
• Complete Galaxy S9 and S9+ specs
• Galaxy S9 vs. Google Pixel 2: Which should you buy?
• Galaxy S9 vs. Galaxy S8: Should you upgrade?
• Join our Galaxy S9 forums

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AT&T
T-Mobile
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Huawei compares the P20’s camera to a DSLR in new promo videos

How many times have we seen this comparison before?

Whether it be a variable aperture system on the Galaxy S9 or crazy-good software on the Pixel 2, there’s a lot of excellent work being done with smartphone cameras right now. Huawei is expected to take things a step further by equipping its upcoming P20 Pro with three rear cameras, and to tease some of its capabilities, we have two new promo videos.

In the first video titled “See Brighter”, we see a man with a DSLR that’s struggling to get enough light in his shot. After the built-in flash fails to deliver, he then ads a more powerful one to the top. When this doesn’t work, he brings out one soft box and two umbrella lights before being pleased by the end result.

To his left, however, a woman that’s supposed to be using the P20 takes just one photo and is done before we see “#SeeBrighter.”

In the second “See Closer” clip, our DSLR-wielding friend returns – this time using three different cameras to try and get the perfect shot. Once again, the woman and her P20 beat him with ease. After this, Huawei tells us to “#SeeCloser.”

This isn’t the first time a phone manufacturer has tried comparing its camera to a professional-grade DSLR, and while that idea is still funny to think about, we’re getting closer and closer to the day where that finally becomes a fair comparison.

The P20 will be the first mainstream smartphone to have three cameras on the back, and depending on how Huawei chooses to use the different sensors, it could very well offer the best smartphone camera experience to-date.

Huawei will announce its P20 series on March 27 in Paris.

This is what the Huawei P20, P20 Lite, and P20 Pro will look like

Why is switching carriers still such a pain?

If you’re unhappy with your cell phone service, switching providers might be a necessary evil.

A few weeks ago, I finally made the switch from T-Mobile to AT&T. Nothing against old Magenta — it paid my bills for years when I worked as a sales rep! — but with spotty coverage in some of the areas I travel to for work, it was time to move on.

I walked into my nearest AT&T store and activated four new lines for the family and myself, transferring our phone numbers over and getting a couple of new handsets on BOGO promotion. My sales rep was helpful, and it turns out I was even well-qualified, giving me the lowest upfront prices! So everything went smoothly … right? If only.

Even after working for a carrier for four years, switching was still a tedious and expensive process for me.

One of the biggest pain points of switching carriers has always been figuring out what to do with the phones on your account. Most people in the U.S. finance their devices to avoid paying full price upfront, and some even finance accessories if their carrier allows it, but that can cause some problems later on down the road. If you decide to move to another service midway through your financing period, you’ll need to find a way to pay off the full balance of everything at once — otherwise, it’ll all get sent to collections and tank your credit.

Thankfully, these days a lot of carriers are willing to reimburse you for the remaining balance on your devices, with a few caveats of course. In the case of AT&T and T-Mobile, you need to trade in the financed phone, finance a new one, and port in your number. That’s not too bad — they’re all things you’d probably be doing anyway while switching — but you also have to send in the final bill from your original carrier with the remaining balances of each device, which can take weeks to receive, then wait three to four weeks for processing before you’re sent your reimbursement.

Speaking of porting numbers, that can be a little tedious, too. You’ll need to present the new carrier with your account number and PIN or password from your existing carrier. In most cases, the account number is easy enough to find — just look at the top of any bill or document they’ve sent you — but the PIN is never displayed for obvious security reasons, which means if you don’t already know it you’ll need to call in. And carriers just love to hear that you’re switching. They’ll want to talk your ear off with retention offers and reasons why they’re better than your new carrier.

If you’re like me and porting your number from Google Voice, there are a few other things you’ll need to know. You’ll have to unlock your number at least 24 hours before starting the porting process, which costs $3 unless you originally ported that number into Google Voice from another carrier. Also keep in mind that your account number is simply your phone number, and your PIN is the same one you use to access your voicemail.

Be cautious; it isn’t always over when you walk out of the store.

Once all of this is squared away, and you finally have new phones and your numbers are taken care of, you’re all set! Everything should be up and running with your new service, and you’ll hopefully be enjoying better coverage, faster speeds, and — fingers crossed — a lower bill. Except, it might not be over just yet.

If you’re bringing your own phone for any line on the account, make sure you bring it in and have the sales representative enter the IMEI and proper data plan. I didn’t do this with my SIM-only line (the rep just entered all 1s into the system for the IMEI, which seems to be standard practice with BYOD lines), and that line ended up not being able to connect to the data network until I called in to have them attach the correct data plan.

You should also be aware of prorated charges — your first bill will never be as low as what you signed up for, and mine was almost double my regular bill. This is due to a combination of factors; activation fees, equipment charges, and so on. Most carriers have a page explaining your first wireless bill — you can read AT&T’s here.

At the end of the day, your mileage may vary, and you’ll hopefully run into less trouble than I did. But some of these problems are unavoidable, like the unreasonably high first bill and the waiting game of getting reimbursed for financed phones (unless, of course, you were smart and financially stable enough not to finance them through your carrier in the first place). Maybe we should all just buy Pixel 2s and switch to Google Fi for simplicity’s sake. I’m sure Google wouldn’t mind.

What’s been your experience with switching carriers? Did you run into as many problems as I did, or was your transition a bit easier? And why did you switch in the first place? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

You can pre-order LG’s Google Assistant Smart Display for $297

The company’s regular smart speaker is also available for $197.

CES 2018 is where Google showed off its new Assistant-powered Smart Displays for the first time, and a couple months following their initial unveiling, you can finally pre-order LG’s stab at this new product category.

Currently available on B&H’s website, you can pre-order the wonderfully named “LG ThinQ Google Assistant Smart Speaker With Touchscreen” for $296.99. You’ll get free expedited shipping, and if you live outside New York or New Jersey, you won’t have to pay any tax.

In addition to this, B&H is also accepting pre-orders for LG’s non-touchscreen Google Assistant speaker. Pricing for this is set at $196.99, and you’ll also find free expedited shipping with the same tax setup.

B&H simply says that these new gadgets are “coming soon”, so it’s unclear when we’ll actually be able to get our hands on them. LG has also yet to make any comment regarding their availability, so it’s really anyone’s guess at this point.

I’ll personally be passing on LG’s Smart Display in favor of either Lenovo’s option or whatever Google announces later in the year, but for folks that want to get their hands on a Smart Display ASAP, the link is waiting for you below.

See at B&H

ARK: Survival Evolved is coming to Android and iOS

The game’s expected to launch this Spring.

Since its launch in 2014, ARK: Survival Evolved has created a community of over 13 million players. Following its release on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, developer Studio Wildcard has announced it’s now bringing the game to Android and iOS.

The mobile version of ARK: Survival Evolved will be free-to-play, and while the graphics won’t be as sharp as what you’ll find on PC or console, the core gameplay will remain the same. Players can explore a large, open-world island with 80+ dinosaurs, craft and build weapons, clothes, and houses, and fight against competing tribes.

You can play an offline single-player mode to test your might solely against ARK’s dinosaurs, and you’ll also be able to jump online with up to 50 other players.

War Drum Studios is developing ARK’s mobile port, and previous games it’s worked on include mobile versions of Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, and its own Auralux.

ARK: Survival Evolved is now in closed beta for iOS, with a global launch expected this Spring on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store for iOS and Android, respectively.

For more information about the game and to sign up for the beta, head to ARK’s website.

Google’s bringing its Maps APIs to augmented reality game development

Google releases its 2017 Android security year in review, showing Play Protect has huge impact

How Android got safer and more secure in 2017.

With a platform as massive and amazingly varied as Android, security is of utmost importance. Google works tirelessly to keep Android and Google Play a safe as possible, and in the first quarter of the year it releases an annual report on how it did — today, we get to see how Android security stood throughout 2017.

The big improvement to Android security in 2017 was the launch of Google Play Protect, which is a system for scanning apps on every Android phone that has Google Play. It scans at least once a day, which comes out to roughly 50 billion apps, and identifies what Google calls “Potentially Harmful Apps” (aka PHAs) in the process.

Google says it found and removed 39 million PHAs using Play Protect, and just over 60% of them were found automatically using Play Protect’s machine learning-based scanning, which gives Google a huge head start. After identifying that many PHAs were being installed and used before a phone could be reconnected to the internet for scanning, Google started having Play Protect run while offline to further boost its power — this led to another 10 million PHAs being removed just since October.

As we all (should) know, installing apps from outside of Google Play opens up your device to security risks — Google claims your phone is nine times more likely to install a PHA when going outside of the Play Store. But Play Protect still helps — installations of PHAs from outside of Google Play have dropped dramatically, about 60%, since Play Protect came to Android. Still, I will always advise to get your apps from Google Play whenever possible.

Play Protect casts a wide net and can work on any phone or tablet, but for bigger security issues Google is also fighting a tough battle with keeping devices up to date on its latest security patches. Google says that 30% more devices in 2017 received after-sale security patches than in 2016, which is a good thing to hear but time and time again we continue to see even high-end and popular devices fall behind.

Play Protect is the wide net that saves most of us from really bad apps.

Google is quick to point out that no major vulnerabilities affecting Android were released without Google also making security patches for them available to manufacturers — but that really only helps us if those manufacturers in turn release them to our devices. Nevertheless, Google will continue to work with industry partners, participate in security competitions and run its own Android Security Rewards program to find and fix as many vulnerabilities as possible.

If you want to get really deep into the data, you can read Google’s full 2017 security report — the rest of us will simply go forward using our phones with the knowledge that Google’s doing what it can to keep our devices safe.

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Uber is releasing its London ride data to help urban planning

Uber recently started sharing its ride-sharing data in a limited number of cities in the US, and now the incredibly useful urban-planning tool is coming to the UK. Uber Movement launches today in London, letting developers and city officials see historical traffic data during road closures, infrastructure development and other major events. “London businesses will welcome this initiative as a sign that Uber is committed to working in closer collaboration with city and transport planners to keep London moving,” said London First infrastructure head David Leam.

Uber said that, for example, the data could be used to see how the 2016 closure of the Tower Bridge affected traffic at the time. As it detailed in a Medium post, that’s something that could inform planning for similar projects in the future. It can be used to “compare past travel conditions across different times of day, days of the week, or months of the year,” the company said.

Uber has a strong reasons for making sharing Uber Movement data with London, as the city denied its taxi license application last September over safety and other violations. It can still operate while it appeals the ruling, but is obviously trying to get back into London’s good graces. So far, it has introduced a range of new safety and other changes, and offering its raw data to city officials can’t hurt its cause.

London is just the beginning for Uber Movement in the UK. The company plans to launch it Manchester, Birmingham and other cities “over the next few months,” it said.

Bankrupt Toys ‘R’ Us is closing all US and UK stores

It’s a sad day for anyone who has fond memories of sliding up and down toy-laden aisles, buzzing off the synthetic smell of brand new Barbies and Action Men. Toys ‘R’ Us is about to close forever. Six months after filing for bankruptcy in the US and one month after doing the same in the UK, the company is shutting the doors of all 900 stores across both countries, unable to compete with online competitors.

According to the company, it’s filed a motion seeking approval to begin “an orderly wind-down” of its US business and liquidation of inventory. On the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC says that efforts to find a UK buyer have failed after talks with as many as 120 interested parties. Stores in Australia, France, Spain and Poland are likely to be liquidated too, but it’s working on a deal for its Canadian arm by including around 200 US stores in its proposals.

CEO David Brandon said, “This is a profoundly sad day for us as well as the millions of kids and families who we have served for the past 70 years. I am very disappointed with the result, but we no longer have the financial support to continue the Company’s US operations.” It seems that the company’s US stores will be shut down one at a time, but it’s not known in what order, so you’d better get your fill of Nerf guns and swing balls while you can.

Via: CNET

Source: Toys ‘R’ Us