Alexa’s new ‘Brief Mode’ makes the assistant talk less

Rolling out to Alexa users now.

Amazon’s constantly adding new features to Alexa to ensure it’s as helpful as can be, but the latest goodie actually makes the assistant talk less. As part of a new feature called “Brief Mode”, Alexa’s responses are shortened, and in some cases, replaced with just an audio cue rather than saying “Ok.”

According to users on Reddit, they were first informed of the feature when normally interacting with Alexa. In one instance, Alexa told someone that it’d start using shorter responses when they asked it to turn off the lights. Later on, a new setting for Brief Mode was discovered in the Alexa app.

You can find the new option at the very bottom of the settings, and it’s within a new page titled “Alexa Voice Responses.” Per the description for Brief Mode:

In this mode, Alexa speaks less, and for some simple messages plays a short sound instead of a voice response.

This is an interesting move on Amazon’s part, and it’s a feature that I’d actually like to see make its way to the Google Assistant at some point. I love using my Google Home to control all of the lights in my apartment, but a short audio cue would be preferable as opposed to constantly hearing the Assistant say “Sure, turning Hue White Lamp 3 off.”

What do you think? Is this a feature you’re looking forward to on Alexa?

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Microsoft is giving away ‘Sea of Thieves’ with Xbox purchases

Microsoft is gearing up to make playing Sea of Thieves as easy as possible. If you’ve heard all the hype surrounding the cartoony pirate simulator but don’t already own an Xbox (or PC) to play it on, for a limited time, when you buy an Xbox One X you’ll get developer Rare’s latest for free. The promo lasts from March 18th through the 24th, with the March 20th launch day falling square in the middle.

If there’s a catch, is that akin to most of Microsoft’s other free game deals –including PUBG most recently — this is a digital copy. But like Destiny and other games of this ilk, that’s a bit more convenient than having to get up and swap discs whenever you feel like making someone walk the plank. Can’t justify the $500 One X investment? Maybe Redmond can tempt you with a Xbox One S bundle for $200 less. And, of course, if you already have an Xbox subscribing to Game Pass means setting sail will only cost you $10 a month.

Source: Xbox Wire

MacRumors Exclusive: Twelve South Debuts Spring Break Sale With Discounts on Travel Accessories

As we draw nearer to the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere on Tuesday, March 20, many people around the world are getting ready to travel for spring break and other holidays. To prepare you for any trip you might have planned this spring or later in the summer, MacRumors has partnered with Twelve South to bring our readers exclusive discounts on five of the accessory maker’s most useful travel products.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

The promo code MacRumorsSpringBreak is live beginning today, March 16, and will be available to use on TwelveSouth.com through Friday, March 30, offering 15 percent discounts on five items during this two week timeframe. MacRumors readers around the globe will be able to enter the code and take advantage of the discounts, but shipping costs will vary by regions. For United States residents, Twelve South offers free FedEx Smart Post on all orders (5-10 days estimate), and if your order exceeds $95 you’ll gain free 2-day shipping.

From organizing your charging cables to ensuring that your iPhone and Mac will be able to charge in foreign outlets, the items included in our discount should help both domestic and international travelers this season. The products can be purchased individually or in groups, and the 15 percent discount will be taken off from the total of the order, excluding shipping. Below you’ll find the full list of Twelve South products offered as a discount exclusively for our readers.

CableSnap

Promo Price: $16.99, down from $19.99
Colors: Black, Cognac, Marsala
Compatible Products: iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Apple Watch
Description: Leather cable organizers that will help keep your iPhone and iPad cables, USB-C Mac cable, EarPods, and any other wires neat and tangle free in your travel bags. Includes one large and two small CableSnaps.

Compass 2

Promo Price: $33.99, down from $39.99
Colors: Black, Gold, Rose Gold, Silver
Compatible Products: 10.5-inch iPad Pro, 9.7-inch iPad Pro, iPad mini, iPad Air
Description: A multi-use stand that offers a stable platform to place your iPad in portrait and landscape modes so you can watch movies on an airplane, FaceTime hands-free, and even type more comfortably.

PlugBug World

Promo Price: $38.24, down from $44.99
Compatible Products: MacBook, iPad, iPhone
Description: PlugBug World attaches to your MacBook Power Adapter and provides a simple, dual-charging solution thanks to the included USB-A port for iPhone/iPad charging. Five international snap on plugs ensure charging convenience in both the U.S. and numerous other countries.

BookBook CaddySack

Promo Price: $42.49, down from $49.99
Compatible Products: MacBook, Apple Pencil, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch
Description: A compact leather case with elastic bands and pockets to organize your MacBook Power Adapter, dongles, AirPods, EarPods, PlugBug World, iPhone chargers, and more.

TimePorter

Promo Price: $42.49, down from $49.99
Colors: Black, White
Compatible Products: Apple Watch
Description: A silicone-lined case for travelers that stores Apple Watch essentials like the charging cable, USB adapter, and an extra band, while also doubling as a travel display stand that supports nightstand mode.

While our exclusive promo code provides the best price online for most of these products, those interested in the White TimePorter should take a look at Twelve South’s storefront on Amazon first. The product is $10 off, and an on-page coupon can be clipped to save an additional $7.50. If you have Amazon Prime’s free-two day shipping, that’ll make the TimePorter just $32.49.

If you’re looking for a new iPhone case to take on an upcoming trip, Twelve South on Amazon has multiple sizes and colors of its $49.99 Relaxed Leather Case for iPhone marked down by $10 or more. The savings include items like the iPhone X case in Earl Grey for $37.55, iPhone 7/8 case in Warm Taupe for $39.99, and iPhone 7 Plus/8 Plus in Indigo for $38.99. A similar discount has also hit the $59.99 BookBook case for iPhone X.

Head over to our Deals Roundup for even more of the latest offers happening this week, and remember to use the exclusive Twelve South promo code before it expires on March 30. We also have a special discount code on the BentoStack for our readers, which could be another useful item to add to your travel bags on your next vacation.

Related Roundup: Apple DealsTag: Twelve South
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One year later, Bixby is still half-baked

Oh, Bixby. What am I going to do with you? It’s been a year since the virtual assistant “launched” on the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus, and since then we’ve seen relatively little in terms of substantive improvements. It certainly doesn’t help that Injong Rhee, Samsung’s CTO and Bixby’s de facto steward, recently left the company for a gig at Google. Few things seem more disheartening for Bixby’s future than that.

Now that the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are on sale, I thought we should take some time to get reacquainted with Samsung’s ambitious virtual assistant. The sad truth is, the version of Bixby installed on the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus isn’t that much better than what shipped on last year’s Samsung flagships.

The world through Bixby’s eyes

Bixby does a lot of things, but some of Samsung’s most fascinating work has gone into Bixby Vision, a suite of seemingly useful image recognition tools. Here’s the rub, though: They’re just about all powered by third-party services, and there’s often little reason to use Bixby over any of those standalone apps. Vision is legitimately useful in that it provides a single place to access these functions, but it’s hard to get excited when Samsung’s main selling point comes down to convenience.

Samsung does, however, deserve credit for dramatically improving Bixby Vision’s overall speed. With the Galaxy S8, you launched Bixby Vision through the camera, pointed it at something, and then chose what you wanted Bixby to do with that visual information after the fact. This time, Samsung streamlined the approach: You can swipe between those different Bixby modes before pointing the camera at an object. It might not sound like a profound change, but it definitely makes the Bixby experience feel more fluid.

As I write this, there are eight Bixby Vision modes, some more interesting than others. Consider the QR code scanner: It does its job well, and it’s one of the few functions I could see myself using regularly (that is, if QR codes were still a thing). And, as was the case last year, Bixby is good at identifying bottles of wine through Vivino. Would-be sommeliers will probably get some regular use out of the feature, but it still feels like a gimmick whose novelty quickly wears off.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

The rest of Bixby’s Vision features are more ambitious. The new makeup mode would be more impressive if rival apps hadn’t been on the market for a while now, but it still did a fine job shellacking my face with faux eyeliner. It’s also nice to know that whatever digital makeup gets applied to your face is (probably) available at a nearby Sephora, though I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to pick up some Rouge Volupte Shine Oil-In-Stick Lipstick anytime soon. Still, Makeup mode works consistently well — I can’t say the same for everything else Bixby Vision does.

Live visual translations are a great idea in theory, but Bixby often faltered in the situations when I needed it most. Mi español is high school-level at best, and in fairness, Bixby did a fine job translating small snippets of text like store signs and posters in Barcelona. Those translations weren’t always perfect since Bixby leans on Google’s overly literal Translate service, but they were often enough to get by on. It even handles certain potentially tricky examples, like handwritten Mandarin, fairly well. In other situations, like when you’re holding the phone sideways to translate something wider than it is tall, Bixby barely works at all.

Where Bixby can also fall short when it tries to translate lots of text at once, though your mileage may vary. I’ve often had trouble getting to translate segments of a book, or large swathes of a restaurant menu page — less than ideal when you’re trying to sort out lunch at in Barcelona. Whether or not this is a bummer falls to you, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Maybe that’s my fault for expecting too much out of a new feature, but no matter: Google’s own Translate app generally handles live translations (even weirdly oriented ones) much better, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t just use that instead.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

What I’ve always wanted, even more than a universal live translator, is a device that can identify objects out in the world so I can buy them. Bixby isn’t awful at this, but there’s a stark difference in the way its two most potentially useful image recognition modes work. More often, the so-called Image mode works better than expected — it handily surfaces photos of smartwatches when I pointed it at my Apple Watch, and was quick to offer results for things that looked like my TV’s remote control. All of those image results come by way of Pinterest, and the service’s broad database of tagged images really seems to come in handy. Image mode even managed to tell that the Adidas sneakers I pointed it at were specifically UltraBoosts. I can live with that.

Unfortunately, there’s no connection between the results generated by Image mode and the stuff that pops up when you try to use Shopping mode. That level of granularity about product makes and models doesn’t exist when you’re trying to use Bixby to buy stuff — you’ll get results for Apple Watch bands instead of the Watch itself, generic Adidas kicks when the camera is pointed at those aforementioned UltraBoost. The list goes on. It’s just not terribly helpful. What makes this whole thing more complicated is the fact that when this feature went live on the S8s last year, it pulled shopping results straight from Amazon’s near-infinite inventory. For whatever reason, Bixby Shopping on our S9 review unit only shows results from Walmart. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and Samsung confirmed that Bixby would soon scour inventories at Sam’s Club, Lowes, and Nordstrom, but Amazon’s absence is still highly noticeable.

These, uh, arent beets.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Bixby now also doubles as a calorie counter — just not a very good one. Samsung first showed it off at CES earlier this year, and even at that early stage, things seemed amiss. Never mind the fact that Bixby can’t identify multiple items on a plate — there’s no way for it to interpret the items of a single dish, making most of its calorie estimates little more than wild guesses. The S Health integration is a nice touch, but when Bixby can’t even identify a bowl of noodles , the feature borders on useless. You’re much better off taking the few extra seconds to log food in an app like MyFitnessPal.

Ultimately, what feels most disappointing about Bixby Vision is how great it could be. Having all of these features in one place is a powerful proposition, but it doesn’t count for much when many of the features themselves fall short in their own ways. To be fair to Samsung, building a suite of sophisticated image recognition features into a smartphone is no small feat. Even Google’s image-recognizing Lens feature is still a work in progress. At least Google has the courtesy to call Lens a preview. After a year, Bixby Vision still feels like one too, and most people who had hoped they could rely on it will likely come away disappointed.

Talking to Bixby

Chris Velazco/Engadget

When Bixby launched on the S8s last year, you couldn’t actually talk to it; you had to make do with Bixby’s limited Vision functions and a homescreen panel that wasn’t much more than Samsung’s spin on Google Now. The ability to have a conversation with Bixby came months later as part of an update that was itself late because Samsung needed more time to test the assistant with actual English speakers. Things are thankfully better now, but not much.

For one, Bixby guides you through a setup process where you train it to understand your understand your voice, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Even after multiple attempts, I couldn’t count on a “Hi, Bixby” to consistently launch the assistant. The only way I’ve been able to get Bixby’s voice recognition to work with any decent level of consistency was to turn up the system’s audio sensitivity, which theoretically makes it more prone to false positives. Good thing there’s a physical Bixby button, right? Erm, about that. Its placement on the S9’s left side means I’ve accidentally mashed it countless times while trying to change the phone’s volume. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to disable the Bixby key entirely — just jump into the Bixby Home panel and flick a switch.

Once those issues are squared away, actually talking to Bixby works well. It lags behind Google Assistant by a large margin when it comes to answering general knowledge questions — if that’s any part of your daily routine, you should really just default to Google. Bixby excels at handling more complex kinds of system commands that Google is only starting to get into with partners like LG. I spend most of my time customizing smartphones with new launchers and add-ons, and it’s been great asking Bixby to “open default apps” so I can switch between different homescreen setups. Want to fire up your mobile hotspot without having to dig into the device settings? Just ask. In moments of ultimate laziness, I’ve also asked Bixby to “scroll all the way to the bottom” of the story I’m reading, just to see how it ends. Bixby always made it happen.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Bixby’s value as a voice assistant is clear: It’s capable of quickly performing actions that otherwise would’ve required a few taps and a few moments to remember where you had to go to do it. As a result, it feels more like a tool for power users than it does a feature that most people would bother to use on a regular basis. In that, Bixby Voice is the polar opposite of Bixby Vision — with the latter, you might want to trust it but you can’t. And the former? You can rely on it, but you probably won’t.

To be clear, I don’t think Bixby is a failure. The strength of its voice controls alone make me glad Samsung decided to embark on this anguishing process, and it bodes well for a future where Samsung expects us to talk to our TVs and refrigerators. With all that said, I’m running out of patience for Samsung’s assistant — at least in its current form. A little more consistency would go a long way, but for now, I just might disable that Bixby button, delete my Bixby Vision shortcut and live the Google Assistant life instead.

Alexa’s ‘Brief Mode’ makes the digital assistant way less chatty

Not too long ago, people got creeped out by Amazon’s Alexa devices randomly laughing at them. Now Jeff Bezos’ digital assistant is offering folks the chance to put a sock in its mouth. Err, speaker. Reddit users first noticed that when asked to turn light on, Alexa would complete the task and then append the exchange by saying it’d be the last time it would use a verbal confirmation. Instead, it’d beep upon a task’s completion from that point forward, noting that this was a new feature called “Brief Mode” that’d curtail its speech. That was with a first-gen Echo. In our tests with a second-gen device, the same thing happened, with Alexa asking if we wanted to enable the different audio option.

What apparently started as a quick test has rolled out to more devices, with at least one user saying it’s preferable to the constant verbal confirmations. If you have version 2.2.202313.0 on iOS (which rolled out yesterday) if you navigate to settings > general > Alexa Voice Responses you’ll see the option to turn Brief Mode on. If you’re looking for a little peace and quiet from your smart speakers, this could be just the respite you’ve been waiting for.

Via: AFTVNews

Source: iTunes, Reddit

Inside Google’s plan to build a smart neighborhood in Toronto

On the Sidewalk Labs website is a 200-page document explaining its vision for a smart neighborhood in Toronto. It’s packed with illustrations that show a warm, idyllic community full of grassy parks, modular buildings and underground tunnels with delivery robots and internet cabling inside. The text describes “a truly complete community” that’s free of cars and committed to reducing its carbon footprint. Underpinning everything is a network of sensors that can monitor noise, traffic and pollution, collecting the troves of data required to understand and improve the city’s design.

Flipping through the pages, it’s easy to see how the company — an offshoot of Google parent Alphabet — was chosen to revitalize the Lake Ontario waterfront. The lengthy pitch document, however, is just a taste of what the area might become. It’s a dreamy but meticulously thought-out mood board summarizing what Sidewalk Labs has been pondering for the past two years. Reading it cover to cover, you can get lost in the scale and ambition of such a project. Most companies would struggle to execute just one aspect of the plan: autonomous transit, for instance, or buildings that can be quickly and cheaply repurposed depending on the time of day or needs of the city.

Sidewalk Labs, however, wants to do it all.

The project started with an email sent by Eric Schmidt, Google’s then executive chairman, to Dan Doctoroff in 2014. The subject line read, “The City of the Future.” Doctoroff was the head of Bloomberg LP, an umbrella company for its terminal business, news wire service and journalistic ventures. Previously, he had worked with Michael Bloomberg as New York’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. Schmidt wanted to know if Doctoroff would meet Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and listen to their thoughts on smart cities.

At the time, Google was working on its smiley face self-driving car. Behind the scenes, however, the company was having broader conversations about technology and how it could be used to improve urban life. Page and Brin were enthusiastic but knew they needed a specialist, or some kind of leader, who understood cities as much as technology. Their conversations with Doctoroff were fruitful, and in the summer of 2015, Sidewalk Labs was announced to the world. “Every time I talk with Dan I feel an amazing sense of opportunity because of all the ways technology can help transform cities to be more livable, flexible and vibrant,” Page said in a Google+ post.

Two months later, Google announced Alphabet, a new business structure that made Google a subsidiary and its many moonshot projects, including delivery drones and life extension, standalone businesses. Sidewalk Labs was “a new company” from the start, but this corporate shuffle solidified its position as a long-term, experimental bet.

Doctoroff and his team spent the next two years studying more than 100 urban initiatives. This served as preparation for the Waterfront Toronto project, which launched in March 2017. The City of Toronto, with support from the Canadian government, was looking for a partner to rebuild and revitalize roughly 750 acres of land along the Eastern Waterfront. The first phase, or pilot, would be Quayside, a 12-acre site close to the central business district. Several local and international firms submitted proposals, including Sidewalk Labs. On October 17th, 2017, the Alphabet-owned offshoot announced that it had won the bid and given the project a new name: Sidewalk Toronto.

Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront has more than 325 hectares (800 acres) of land ripe for redevelopment.

So-called smart cities have been tried before with varying levels of success. One of the most ambitious is Songdo, a tech metropolis built 40 miles west of Seoul, the South Korean capital. In 2000, it was a marshy patch of tidal flats; now it’s a connected city dominated by glassy skyscrapers and a New York-inspired Central Park. Cameras are scattered across bridges, highways and narrow back alleys, providing an endless stream of video to a human team stationed in Songdo’s G-Tower. They monitor traffic for accidents and congestion as well as natural disasters, crime and public facilities that might require repairs.

Residents have touchscreen panels that allow them to control the temperature and lighting in their homes as well as the timing of deliveries. A citywide pneumatic refuse system sucks garbage below the surface and into a remote sorting center, eliminating the need for dirty garbage trucks. Songdo can feel a bit quiet and sterile, however, with rent prices that exceed the budget of the average household. It was meant to be a hub for international businesses — Incheon International Airport is a short drive away — but adoption has been slow. French newspaper Le Monde described the city as a “ghetto for the affluent” last year.

“Most smart cities projects are in a very early stage.”

Singapore is using a network of sensors to understand people’s energy usage and waste production. It’s also considering a mandatory GPS system that tracks every car on the road in real time. But there are privacy and security concerns born out of a government that is often described as authoritarian. Barcelona, meanwhile, has deployed an army of sensors to track air quality, free parking spaces and the amount of trash in public bins. It’s also dabbling with a superblock concept that limits the speed and volume of traffic inside small metropolitan areas, prioritizing the movement of cyclists and pedestrians instead.

These projects are small, however, compared to Neom, a planned city on the Red Sea coast that will be powered by wind turbines and vast fields of solar panels, announced last October by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to an ostentatious promotional website, the streets will be occupied by “automated, 100-percent green transport systems,” including passenger drones. Food will be supplied by giant vertical urban farms while residents enjoy “the world’s largest garden,” endless natural parkland and record-breaking theme parks.

Many are skeptical. “Most smart cities projects are in a very early stage,” Cesar Cerrudo, founder of the not-for-profit Securing Smart Cities, said. “If you do your research, you’ll find there are a lot of projects but there isn’t much that’s concrete. It’s a lot of publicity, a lot of marketing.”

Sidewalk Labs believes its dual expertise in technology and urban design makes it different. The company is based in New York rather than Silicon Valley to distill a sense of city living in its employees. That DNA also shaped its bid and, consequently, the ideas that it’s pushing forward for Quayside. The buildings, for instance, will use a modular design that’s cheaper and faster to build. Some of them will utilize Loft, a minimalistic interior that means they can be quickly repurposed. In this scenario, a parking lot could be converted into an office as more people start to embrace electric and autonomous ride-sharing options.

Buildings will be made from eco-friendly buildings materials, including tall timber skeletons and mycelium insulation, and powered by renewable energy sources, including roof and wall-mounted solar panels. They’ll be warmed and cooled by a thermal grid that leverages waste heat from sewers and buildings as well as geothermal sources and nearby lakes. Homes will also be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified and meet the energy-efficient Passive House standard developed by two professors in Germany (where it’s known as Passivhaus) in the early 1990s.

“By far the most important issue is affordability.”

Sidewalk is committed to affordability and avoiding Songdo’s reputation as a half-empty city for the rich. It’s banking on a blend of simple and old-fashioned pricing models, including social tenants, private renters, subsidized renters and full-fledged homeowners. “A partial homeownership program might be a perfect fit for a family looking to settle down, whereas a retiree on a fixed income may require a rental subsidy,” the company explained. “Sidewalk proposes to make Quayside a living laboratory for housing policy innovation that delivers a mixed- occupancy community that mirrors Toronto’s socioeconomic diversity.”

Doctoroff pushed this point at a community town hall meeting last November. “By far the most important issue is all about affordability,” he said. “We certainly see everyday people, middle class, lower-middle and lower-income people, being priced out of areas, suffering from the incapacity to get opportunities because distances are too great or the costs are too great. If we don’t fundamentally address that issue, the fabric of society and the whole notion of this being an inclusive community begins to fray.”

Sidewalk Labs is serious about ditching cars too. The team wants the Eastern Waterfront to be the first district in Toronto where only shared and self-driving vehicles are allowed. Non-emergency vehicles will be banned from “a large portion” of the neighborhood, giving space back to pedestrians and cyclists. A “transition zone” will exist for people who need to travel beyond Quayside, but the idea is to promote a walking, cycling and public transit culture in the center.

The absence of private cars should make the roads feel quieter and safer. It will also eliminate the need for curbside parking, freeing up crucial space for sidewalks and stores. “It’s all about getting rid of stationary cars,” Alan Penn, a professor in Architectural and Urban Computing at UCL, said. “That can transform what somewhere feels like.”

Sidewalk plans to extend Toronto’s existing bike-share scheme into Quayside. It’s also considering an LED system that can create, widen and narrow temporary bike lanes on the road. The latter is experimental but perhaps unnecessary. Michael Seth Wexler, an urban designer at cycling consultancy Copenhagenize, said permanent, protected cycleways will be critical if the city wants to get more people on two wheels. If they disappear or they’re few and far between, people won’t be able to rely on them — and casual cyclists will default to other forms of transportation.

“It’s all about getting rid of stationary cars. That can transform what somewhere feels like.”

“To know that there’s always going to be a protected path that you can take down the main street,” Wexler explained, “before any modern technology is implemented, that’s a baseline that will create a sense of reliability in the transport system.”

Above all, people want to feel safe. “They won’t feel safe unless they have a separation from other modes of transport,” Wexler added. “You don’t want to be cycling slowly with a tram zooming right by you and then you have to duck out of the way of a transport truck or even an automated vehicle.” It’s worrying, he said, that none of the illustrations in the Sidewalk Labs pitch document show a protected cycleway.

Wexler welcomes technology, however, and how it could make cycling a more efficient and attractive option in Quayside. Sidewalk Labs will pilot an “adaptive traffic light” concept that can detect and prioritize cyclists at busy intersections. It would be similar to the green-wave system in Copenhagen, which ensures that cyclists traveling at 20KMH hit green lights all the way into the city center. The company has some new ideas, too, such as automatic, retractable canopies and heated bike paths that melt snow in the winter.

Technologists vs. urbanists

Doctoroff was brought onboard to bring urban planning and design expertise to Google’s traditionally technological background. Blending these two worlds hasn’t been easy though. Developers will often use A/B testing, for instance — two versions of the same software, quietly distributed to different users — to see which solution works best. In a city, however, that’s often not an option. You can’t A/B test a traffic light system if there’s a chance one of them will cause accidents on the road. Similarly, “fail fast, fail often” is a bad ethos when lives are at risk.

Urbanists act more deliberately but can often see solutions as unchangeable. When a home is built or a cycle path is put in place, they see it as a semipermanent development. Sidewalk Labs found it “difficult” to balance these two cultures in its first year of operations. “It led to some conflicts,” said Rit Aggarwala, chief policy officer at Sidewalk Labs. “It led to a bunch of misunderstandings where it wasn’t an intentional conflict. We just realized we weren’t speaking the same language with each other.”

The urbanists had to be more explicit about the risks they were identifying, and the technologists had to be more attuned to where something could go wrong. Similarly, the developers needed to retain their enthusiasm and speed while protecting the values that urbanists believe are important.

Sidewalk Labs is envisioning Quayside as a series of layers. At the bottom is a network of tunnels, or utility channels, which serves as the city’s near-invisible infrastructure. Above is the public realm, or street level, which serves as a foundation for its mobility and building concepts. At the highest level is the digital layer, which combines a network of sensors, a detailed map of the neighborhood, simulation software and a platform where citizens can log in and manage their public and private data.

Google makes its money by tracking internet users and serving them highly targeted ads. It’s the revenue engine for Alphabet that, in turn, allows Sidewalk Labs to operate so freely. As a result, people are worried about Quayside and how residents’ data will be treated. Will Sidewalk Labs have full access to the information collected by its sensors? How will data be shared with the company’s partners? Will citizens be able to opt out of certain programs, and if so, how will it affect their quality of life in the city?

People are worried about Quayside and how residents’ data will be treated.

Aggarwala is promising a privacy-by-design approach. That means limiting data capture to the “bare minimum” throughout the city. The company’s internal Sense Lab, for instance, is developing a camera system that strips surveillance footage down to a series of faint outlines. “We don’t need an image of you,” Aggarwala said. “What we need is your outline, because then the computer can tell, ‘Oh, that’s a human. That’s a person walking.’ If all I do is outline your body and there’s no face, no color, no nothing, then there’s no way I can identify you. I’ve eliminated the privacy issue, but I’ve accomplished the goal.”

Not everyone is convinced. To make a service smarter, or more user-friendly, you generally need more information. Let’s say someone clambers into an elevator; with a motion sensor you can detect their presence and light up a control panel. If you know who they are, however, you can also play their favorite song or take them to their hotel room automatically. “They can anonymize the information,” Cerrudo explained, “but in the end, the less they anonymize it, the more functionality they can give to the end user.”

Part of the solution is a simulation platform called Model. It will be “metro area scale” and cover the movement of every Quayside resident who might wander through its virtual net. Sidewalk Labs will use this data to test possible changes to roadway pricing, ride-sharing and its multiuse buildings. It will also accept data collected by the Sense Lab team to simulate what will happen in the next five, 15 and 30 minutes. Over time, the company will use the platform to test long-term changes to water, energy and other public infrastructure. It will also grow more accurate and sophisticated with use, to the point where someone could ask, “Where were the 20 people on this bus really starting from, and where were they really going?”

Rit Aggarwala, chief policy officer at Sidewalk Labs

“It’s a tool that doesn’t exist,” Aggarwala said. “We need to build it because the state-of-the-art equivalents right now are very expensive, very slow and very coarse in terms of their analysis.”

It seems inevitable, though, that Sidewalk Labs will need to change or upgrade one of its services in the future. When that happens, the company will have to survey Quayside residents or ask them for approval, just like developers do now with user agreements in the App Store. Cerrudo suspects the company will introduce an “end-citizen” agreement that includes automatic approval for all technological changes in the city. Otherwise, “the challenge is to find a way to easily ask people for feedback and get an answer,” Cerrudo said, “and then decide what to do.”

Consultations will be a political and democratic problem as much as a privacy and security issue. Decisions will need to be backed by Quayside citizens as well as local and national government. “It could be very bureaucratic,” Cerrudo said. Sidewalk Labs, however, thinks it’s a question of trust. If its policies are transparent enough and there are robust safeguards to protect user data, residents will slowly give Doctoroff and his team the benefit of the doubt. “If not, then frankly we’ve made a mistake, because we have to earn that trust,” Aggarwala said.

“There should be a whole chapter on privacy and security. There shouldn’t just be one reference.”

To do so, Sidewalk Labs will be asking for help from independent cybersecurity experts. Ann Cavoukian, a former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario and now executive director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University, has agreed to serve on the company’s advisory board. It’s a positive step, though Cerrudo is still concerned about the company’s commitment to security. In the pitch document, for instance, “I looked for ‘security’ and there are just two mentions of security, on two pages,” he said. “There should be a whole chapter on privacy and security. There shouldn’t just be one reference.”

Trust will also hinge on the people that Sidewalk Labs is able to attract to the area. The company wants the community to be multigenerational, mixed-income and diverse. If all of its residents are Google employees or Silicon Valley developer types, the project may be seen by many as a failure. That doesn’t mean Quayside will be for everyone, however. A major opportunity, Aggarwala said, will be attracting people who are open to urban innovation.

The company is thinking about a Smart Chute system, for instance, that tracks how much waste people are throwing away. It would then be possible to charge residents per bag, promoting waste reduction and generating cash for city refurbishments. Such a move would also help Quayside to reduce its environmental impact and the amount of traffic running through its underground tunnels. To be effective, though, Sidewalk Labs needs residents who can understand and embrace the long-term benefits. If a path is widened or a canopy is moved, citizens need to trust that it’s for the greater good.

“My strong belief is that we’re going to find it’s an attitude that cuts across age, gender, income, background — all sorts of things,” Aggarwala said.

Waterfront Toronto has recognized the importance of privacy and data governance too. In a memo, Kristina Verner, vice president of innovation, sustainability and prosperity at Waterfront Toronto, said Cavoukian’s help and privacy by design were “not sufficient to ensure legal compliance with relevant legislation.” The organization will, therefore, create an independent Digital Strategy Advisory Panel to assist on the project. Members will be plucked from the academic, legal and civic technology communities and help Waterfront Toronto shape its digital-governance requirements.

Sidewalk Labs owns Intersection, one of the companies behind the LinkNYC WiFi kiosks.

Sidewalk Labs is an offshoot of Alphabet, but it’s also experimenting with a subsidiary structure of its own. That’s unusual; most of Google’s acquisitions are quickly absorbed into one of its existing businesses. In June 2015, Doctoroff and his team led a consortium in the acquisition of Control Group, a New York-based technology and design consultancy firm, and advertising agency Titan. The pair were combined and rebranded as Intersection, a standalone company that has since turned thousands of old pay phones into free, gigabit-speed WiFi kiosks.

On February 1st, 2018, Sidewalk Labs announced another spin-off called Coord. The company is developing a platform with APIs that relate to road tolls, curbs and parking. It’s a small but important piece in the development of a smart city. With a custom surveyor app, for instance, Coord employees can quickly photograph parking signs and other curbside information, digitizing road regulations in minutes. Developers can then access that information as an API and use it to improve their navigation apps and software. If you run a delivery truck business, for example, you need to know where it’s OK to park and unload. Similarly, taxi drivers want to find the best places to pick up and drop off customers.

In the future, Coord will help self-driving vehicles adjust their routes in real time, preventing congestion, double-parking and unwanted toll fees. Google Maps has already integrated Coord so that drivers can find available parking near their destination. “By giving people full insight into all of their trip choices  —  and seamless door-to-door service  —  tools like this one can lead to better mobility outcomes for cities,” Stephen Smyth, CEO of Coord, said in a blog post.

It’s not clear if or how Coord and Intersection will work on Sidewalk Toronto. But a distribution of expertise could help Doctoroff’s company to focus and solve specific problems.

Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront

In many respects, Sidewalk Labs is building Quayside from scratch. The coastline area already exists, but the company is imagining a complete revamp that includes roads, buildings and public areas. It’s an opportunity for the company — a chance to implement large, experimental infrastructure from the outset — but also a great challenge. The more options that you have, the harder it is to make decisions and prove that a single component or change is having a positive impact. Penn calls it a “combinatorial explosion.” “People often think that a clean slate is an easier thing to handle in design,” he said. “In fact it’s not. It’s much, much harder.”

Most designers circumvent this problem by creating artificial constraints. They’ll look at real-world examples and choose a small selection as possible solutions. Or they’ll settle on a particular style that drastically reduces the possibilities in an urban area. Penn said, “You can say, ‘Well, actually, I’m going to build a city in a big green field.’ But how do you decide anything? Where do you start? So the first thing you do is invent constraints or you look at what constraints there are in the world. That narrows the possibilities down to the point at which you have a starting point.”

It’s also inaccurate to call Quayside a clean slate, because it sits within the larger context of Toronto. It’s part of an old, established city that has its own culture and expectations. Many citizens, for instance, use cars to run errands and get to work. If the Eastern Waterfront has a complete ban on private vehicles, that will make it a difficult place to visit — a futuristic but isolated community. That’s why the company is thinking about a transition zone. Aggarwala compares it to Canary Wharf, a business district in London that was originally served by the DLR train line exclusively. It felt remote until an underground station was added as part of the 1999 Jubilee Line extension.

“All of a sudden it felt like, ‘Oh, that’s part of the city because that’s part of what the rest of the city does.’”

With Quayside, Sidewalk Labs wants to build a neighborhood with a strong sense of community. The company envisions “a next-gen bazaar” where residents can sell their “tech-enabled” wares or teach others new skills. The dense mixture of homes, stores and public facilities will encourage people to walk around and interact with one another. Community is an abstract value, however, that’s difficult to measure. It’s tied to mental health and how people feel about a place more than their physical actions.

How will Sidewalk Labs know, then, when its urban project has been successful? “That’s a really good question,” Aggarwala said. “Those things do not lend themselves to quantifiable … to measurement.” Techniques exist to measure relationships, but they’re often crude and lack nuance. At the end of a technology conference, for instance, you can count the number of business cards someone has come away with; however, that doesn’t explain how many of those interactions were deep or meaningful. You could ask how many times those people contacted one another again, but even that is a shallow assessment. One life-changing relationship, for instance, is better than a dozen emails that never went anywhere.

“We’ll have to experiment, and we’ll know it when we see it,” Aggarwala said. As a starting point, the company has identified 25 “success metrics” that relate to someone’s quality of life. These include the cost of rent and transportation as well as carbon emissions, job opportunities, park access, civic participation and time spent commuting. All of them will be tracked using sensors and the company’s Model platform.

“The idea that this somehow can’t make money or can only make money if Sidewalk Labs is capturing and monetizing private data — I don’t buy that at all.”

Many wonder how Sidewalk Labs will make money on Quayside. The company’s insistence on privacy by design suggests it won’t be harvesting data like its sister company Google. Aggarwala said it won’t be an advertising-based model, so there won’t be giant billboards beaming targeted ads like in Blade Runner 2049. When pressed, he said, “It would be inaccurate for me to say that we’re 100 percent confident that we know exactly what the business model for us, through this project, is.”

The company has some time to figure it out. It will spend most of this year developing ideas, listening to the public and crafting a Master Innovation and Development Plan. That final document will need to be approved by Waterfront Toronto, the public and a variety of government bodies before a single brick can be laid. Aggarwala acknowledges that his company, and the project, will need to generate revenue. If it struggles to break even or becomes a piece of Alphabet philanthropy, it won’t inspire other cities to do the same.

There will be opportunities, though, for Sidewalk Labs to charge a fee for its services. A city, after all, contains landlords, transport operators and utility companies; Doctoroff’s company could bill any of these for access to its technology. “The idea that this somehow can’t make money or can only make money if Sidewalk Labs is capturing and monetizing private data — I don’t buy that at all,” Aggarwala said.

Quayside will serve as a test bed for many Alphabet technologies. Once they’re perfected, Sidewalk could profit from selling the individual pieces — the blueprint behind its modular buildings, for instance, or its simulation platform — to other cities. Revenue, then, wouldn’t come from advertising but making Quayside a living, breathing advertisement for other city planners. Success, Cerrudo said, would be “great for PR and marketing, and enable them to make money in the future when the technology is widely adopted.”

Doctoroff knows how important it is to win the public’s support. On Novemver 1st, 2017, he participated in a community town hall with Will Fleissig, CEO of Waterfront Toronto, which was open to the public and streamed online. Fleissig was keen to stress that nothing about the project is set in stone. “It starts tonight,” he said. “We’re having this discussion, and we’re listening. There is no plan in place. We can actually co-create by bringing together a lot of different partners, and together, we’ll figure out what should happen on the Waterfront.”

The company has since published a Public Engagement Plan that specifies how it will discuss and consult with Toronto residents. It includes a series of public talks, roundtable meetings and a pavilion where people can learn more about the project, participate in workshops and tinker with interactive exhibits. There will also be design jams, a Fellows Program for 19-to-24-year-olds and a 36-member Reference Panel that will meet throughout the year and take a closer look at Sidewalk Labs’ work.

Later this year, the company will conduct a series of pilots to show the public some of its thinking. Aggarwala is staying tight-lipped about the details, but one is likely to including self-driving vehicles. That could be Waymo, Alphabet’s autonomous car spin-off, or another industry specialist. “There has, to my knowledge anyway, never been an opportunity for somebody in Toronto to ride an autonomous vehicle,” Aggarwala said. “We think we can help address that.”

Wexler thinks this is the right approach. Pilots are cheaper than a full rollout and allow companies to get valuable data that can be used to refine the final idea. It beats the antiquated model, anyway, of a token-gesture consultation and a shiny but ultimately unfit-for-purpose skyscraper. “Do pilot projects,” Wexler said. “Do pilot projects and collect data. And then use that data to understand if what you’re doing works, and then tweak it.”

At any moment, the city of Toronto could sever its partnership with Sidewalk Labs. The bid the company won is for a planning exercise that will run for at least a year. Doctoroff and his team are putting $50 million into the project, so clearly they’re committed to building a smart neighborhood. But Waterfront Toronto, and the people it represents, can back out at any time. “At the end of the year, if you don’t like it, if Waterfront Toronto’s board doesn’t like it, if the elected officials don’t like it, they can tell us to go bye,” Doctoroff said at the town hall meeting.

It’s a big gamble, but one that Sidewalk Labs has been preparing for since 2015. The company has ideas, and it’s confident that with proper consultation it can whip up a development plan that’s hard for the city to refuse. “We’re going to do our best possible work,” Aggarwala said, “and I think they will find it compelling.”

Images: Irena Gajic (isometric city illustration); Sidewalk Labs (Eastern Waterfront photos and Vision illustrations); Bloomberg via Getty Images (LinkNYC kiosk)

The Puffco Peak vaporizer is a quick hit of concentrated genius

Hell hath no fury like a stoner who has just had to dig his last nugget of honeycomb wax out of the carpet because the wad of sticky concentrate managed to fall off its dabbing tool. I mean, do you still fire it up — carpet fuzz, cat hair and all — or simply take the L and move on with your evening? Neither, you get yourself a tabletop cannabis vaporizer that doesn’t require a menagerie of industrial tools to operate and which can be loaded as easily as a hash pipe.

Cannabis concentrates possess a number of advantages over the flowers from which they’re derived but “ease of consumption” isn’t one of them. Depending on the extraction method, they can range from crystalline crumbles to sticky honey oils and tar-like rosins. Ingesting them isn’t a walk in the park either. While you can simply roll up loose leaf weed in a sheet of paper and be good to go, concentrates typically require convoluted heating implements and specialized tools. Seriously, getting lit should never require the use of a blowtorch. With the new Puffco Peak, you won’t need rigs, nails, spikes, e-rings or any of the other conventional accoutrements dabbing used to demand.

Though it is a vaporizer, the Peak is shaped like the lovechild of a conventional water pipe and Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head. It offers an upward-facing ceramic bowl situated in front of a tapered glass stem which can be removed from the rest of the unit and filled with water to improve vapor filtration. All of the electronic guts are hidden in its sturdy base. The entire unit stands 7-inches tall and I really appreciate how bottom-heavy the Peak is. My old Cloud EVO rig, for as much as I loved it, was notoriously unsteady and would topple if I so much as looked at it sideways. The Peak, on the other hand, is practically a Weeble-Wobble — you’ve got to give it a good shove to knock it over.

While it isn’t quite as intuitive to use as the water pipe it’s designed to resemble, the Peak is still far easier to use than virtually any other tabletop vape rig I’ve used. You load your concentrate into the bowl (heating crucible) and place the carb cap on top. The cap helps regulate airflow through the bowl and prevents your precious vapor from wafting away when you aren’t drawing on it. To turn on the device, you will first need to charge it using the included micro USB cable and wall adapter, then press a button on the front of the Peak just below the bowl. Once charged, click once to cycle through the four color-coded heat settings — blue (450 degrees F), green (500 degrees), red (550 degrees), and white (600 degrees) — then double click the same button to activate the heating element. Unlike other electronic dab rigs, the Peak takes around 20 seconds to reach its operating temperature, not upwards of four minutes as my Cloud EVO did.

Best of all, the Peak will buzz slightly to indicate that it’s ready for use. That way you’re not left to watch the clock or, even worse, wander off to find a snack and come back to a burnt bowl. The Peak will automatically turn itself off after about 10 seconds to conserve battery but can quickly be reactivated with another double-click. You can keep clicking for the duration of your session and the Peak will maintain the same temperature throughout. This is especially helpful feature when you’re vaping with a group, because it ensures that there will be minimum lag time between passes and that everybody will have a similar experience — nobody gets saddled with a cold bowl.

Depending on your preferred temperature settings, how much concentrate you put in and how many times you extend your session, the Peak will hold a charge for between four and six bowls or around 30 individual dabs. Once the battery is exhausted, you’ll need to plug it into a wall socket for two hours to fully recharge it. Unfortunately, the Peak doesn’t operate while charging.

The Peak is also technically portable, I’m just not sure I’d really want to go hang out in a park or see a concert with a $380 electronic vape rig I brought from home. But if that’s your thing, you do you. The Peak is currently available for order at the Puffco website.

We got our first glimpse of the Peak earlier this year at CES 2018, and I’ve been hyped to try it ever since. The Peak did not disappoint. It handled every type of concentrate I loaded into it with aplomb: cold water crumbles, shatter, honeycomb wax, even some straight up butane hash oil. It’s more affordable than the Herbalizer, more versatile than the Volcano, and requires a fraction of the setup time that the herbalAires demand. Best of all, the Peak offers virtually zero opportunity to spill its concentrate cargo once loaded which means I won’t have to smoke cat hair anymore.

‘Battlefront II’ will finally make in-game progression fair next week

Electronic Arts’ long, awkward nightmare over Star Wars Battlefront II’s multiplayer progression might finally be over. With next week’s patch, dubbed the “Progression” update, EA promises that Star Cards (power-ups) or any other item that impact gameplay will only be earned through gameplay from here on out — not via paid loot crates. Previously, EA had adjusted and removed some of the pay-to-win aspects, saying that eventually real-money transactions would return.

Now, daily play is the exclusive way to earn crates, which will only include emotes and cosmetic tweaks for your gear. In the bullet point on the blog post, EA repeated that crates won’t contain anything that impacts gameplay. Anything you’ve already bought or earned will stay in your possession regardless of how you came about it, as well. If you still feel like dropping real-world money for Battlefront gear in-game, however, EA isn’t going to stop you. But, the appearance packs and skins you buy with Crystals, are again, purely cosmetic. You’ll also be able to purchase those with in-game credits earned from gameplay.

It sounds like pressure from lawmakers in Belgium, Hawaii and Washington worked as intended. Now that this seems to be taken care of, we can start speculating how EA will bungle Battlefront the next time.

Source: EA

Facebook search briefly suggested sexual content involving kids

Yesterday, Facebook users reported that the website’s search function began suggesting autofills of their searches that included sexually explicit phrases. After typing “videos of,” the predictive search feature suggested phrases like “videos of sexuals” and “videos of little girl giving oral.” Facebook users posted screenshots of their searches on Twitter. According to the Guardian, users also reported other search suggestions that strayed from those typically offered by Facebook search like “zodwa wabantu videos and pics,” which refers to a South African celebrity, and “cristiano ronaldo hala madrid king video call.”

@facebook @fbnewsroom @fbanalytics @fbOpenSource #Facebook #ChildAbuse FACEBOOK.This top 1st trending topic is popping up for every1 who types in “Search of”, why is that? I am SO close 2 4ever deleting my account allowing pedofiles 2 use FB as a tool 2 distribute child porn 😡 pic.twitter.com/ysCkqzWf50

— Keisha 👩🏼‍💻 (@FollowKeisha) March 16, 2018

Very normal predictions when you type “video of” in Facebook’s search bar pic.twitter.com/6jm0j696O0

— Eric Morrow 🧐 (@morroweric) March 16, 2018

It appears that Facebook quickly fixed the problem and today it released a statement apologizing for the alarming issue. “We’re very sorry this happened. As soon as we became aware of these offensive predictions we removed them,” the company said. “Facebook search predictions are representative of what people may be searching for on Facebook and are not necessarily reflective of actual content on the platform. We do not allow sexually explicit imagery, and we are committed to keeping such content off of our site.”

But this is the second Facebook issue to involve sexual content and children this month. The website recently ran a survey that asked users if adults should be allowed to ask children for sexual pictures. Facebook removed the survey and said in a statement, “We have prohibited child grooming on Facebook since our earliest days; we have no intention of changing this and we regularly work with the police to ensure that anyone found acting in such a way is brought to justice.”

However, Facebook isn’t the only major company to let such disturbing search suggestions through. Last year, YouTube came under fire for its predictive search function which also suggested sexual content involving children. Google has also had to address issues with offensive results in both its search and in Maps.

Facebook is looking into why the phrases suddenly began appearing in users’ searches and the company says it’s working to improve the quality of its suggestions, CNET reports.

Via: CNET

‘#WarGames’ is the ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ of interactive cinema

The line between film and video game is blurring. Much of this has to do with the shifting ways we consume media: Our screens are smaller, more personal and imbued with interactivity. They’re meant to be tapped, swiped, clicked and pinched, and we expect the images under the glass to respond to every prod. We’re pulling these screens closer and closer to our bodies, teaching them to respond to physiological output and unconscious gestures, until eventually, they’ll simply be a part of our anatomy. Everything will be interactive.

But we’re not quite there yet. In 2018, creators are figuring out how to bridge the gap between traditional cinematography and interactivity — and few people are driving the medium forward as directly as Sam Barlow. Barlow is the creator of Her Story, a critically acclaimed 2015 video game that imitated an old-school database packed with VHS clips of police interviews. It featured a live actor, and introduced innovative mechanics based around tagging and the start-and-stop nature of VHS tapes.

Her Story is a video game, so players accepted its interactivity without question. Barlow’s latest project (which just went live this week on Steam and Eko) is an updated version of the beloved 1983 sci-fi hacking film WarGames — and it’s also interactive. But #WarGames is not a video game; it’s a new kind of TV series.

“I think the two projects are actually super different,” Barlow said. “And it’s definitely the thing I have to over-explain to people. Her Story, essentially, made a virtue of being a very-low tech solution. If you look at the history of live-action video games and you look at what happened in the ’90s, people were really struggling to create a traditional video game experience using video. You have so many problems with that.”

Her Story embraced the limitations of a live-action format, imbuing the game with hard stops and placing players in the clear role of an observer, rather than attempting to make them part of the scenes.

#WarGames approaches the modern technological landscape in a similar way. It takes something that we’re extremely familiar with nowadays — video chat — and uses the strengths of this format as an interactive mechanic. Viewers don’t simply sit back and watch all of the video chat windows at once; instead, they click around and pull the conversations that most interest them to the front. It’s interactive voyeurism.

Eko

“We kind of riffed on the idea of video conferencing, of video chat,” Barlow said. “And there were some great examples of a few particular sites where members of some of these hacking groups would hang out in video chat just to kind of shoot the shit and socialize. When we started talking about this, thinking about it, it was a really neat interface. Because we’re all now used to using video chat ourselves. The phone that I might be watching #WarGames on might be the same phone that I use to FaceTime my kid.”

Meanwhile, the series itself tracks which scenes each viewer watches and the narrative shifts according to their preferences. It’s a living, interactive TV series powered by technology from Eko, the company Barlow joined in 2016.

“We got the idea that if we give people that environment and give them some level of interaction, some reason to be touching the screen, then it will draw them in closer into the experience,” Barlow said. “And we can possibly create something which lets you feel like you’re sat in the conversation with these people, hanging out with these other people online. So that was something that was carried over from Her Story, was just thinking about how we can use very non-cinematic video.”

All of this experimentation is in the interest of creating new and better forms of immersion, whether it’s labeled a video game, TV series or something new altogether. Interactive media is the next big evolution in entertainment, according to Barlow. Take the horror genre for example: In the 1960s, audiences were used to monster movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Blob — and then Rosemary’s Baby hit theaters.

“They said, well what if we make it, if we set it in the real world and actually the thing that’s terrifying here is this relationship and this woman’s pregnancy,” Barlow said. “That certainly makes it feel real again.”

Rosemary’s Baby helped reinvigorate the horror genre and ushered in a new era of introspective, human-centric films. This fresh approach felt more real, more relatable to the times, more immersive overall. Barlow noted the same thing happened in 1999 with the debut of The Blair Witch Project, which popularized the found-footage genre.

“We’re constantly trying to hijack that.”

These evolutionary spikes worked because they created a more immersive environment, allowing the audience to place themselves in on-screen scenes in ways they hadn’t imagined before. Interactive entertainment is doing the same thing now, but on an even more powerful scale, Barlow says.

Essentially, #WarGames is an attempt to overwrite the brain’s natural processing systems and make it believe in a new kind of reality. Imagination, as Barlow explains it, is the result of our brains constantly running simulations on all of the ways we might be killed at any given moment.

“When we’re running around in the grass, foraging for food, our imagination was there to tell us that bit of grass that rustled over there could be a snake,” he said. “Could be the wind, but I’m gonna make you imagine there’s a snake in that grass. And the nine times out of ten it isn’t a snake, that’s fine. If there is a snake there, I’ve just saved your life. That’s essentially what the imagination does. We’re constantly trying to hijack that.”

Video games do this in spades — simply having to think about certain scenarios in a critical way makes them, in effect, real to our brains, Barlow says. Cinema accomplishes this brand of immersion, too, but it works even better when people are forced to touch the screen and consider how their actions might impact the story.

“Just by physically involving the audience’s body, you are telling the brain this is real,” he said. “With #WarGames … you are touching or clicking to choose which window to look at. And you can do this as often as you want. There is this constant, simple layer of interaction and reaction. There is the ability to peer in and look more closely at something. The fact that it recalls the interface that we’re used to from FaceTime or Skype or whatever, this is this extra layer which tells you something is going on here, and we’re interacting, and we’re involved in it, so there’s a higher chance that this is real.”

Barlow sees #WarGames as something new in the entertainment field. It’s not a choose-your-own-adventure book where viewers attempt to unlock the best outcome; it’s not a role-playing game where the audience is a hero on a quest to save the world. Instead, you’re an observer deciding which screens look the most interesting at any given time, navigating the chat windows like you would Discord, Skype or FaceTime. The fact that the series actually responds to your decisions only increases the level of immersion, how real the on-screen action feels.

#WarGames is not the end of entertainment’s evolutionary cycle. Eko has already created a suite of interactive music videos and series, and the technology is only going to improve as time rolls on.

“At some point in the future, we’re gonna have the fully realized tech that will allow us to track where you’re looking at, read your chemical levels in your bloodstream and extract things from that,” Barlow said.

For now, #WarGames is one of the first attempts to push interactive media into the mainstream. It doesn’t tap into your synapses or read your heartbeats, but it follows your thought processes, all in order to twist and trick your brain into accepting a new reality.

“What this allows you to do is perhaps be slightly more truthful in exploring some of these more complicated questions,” Barlow said. “By allowing people’s preconceptions to steer the story to some extent, you actually get to introduce slightly more variability and acknowledge that you’re exploring the question itself rather than presenting an answer.”