A posture trainer works, if you want it to

In our line of work, everywhere is an office. Particularly at trade shows and other big events, you can find Engadget editors writing stories in hotel lobbies, the back of cabs or anywhere there’s a power outlet. I’m no more consistent at home. Sometimes I stare at my laptop from the comfort of the couch or sit on the floor if my desk isn’t proving to be an inspiring location. I hadn’t given it much thought until an Upright Go posture tracker arrived on my doorstep. Had a complete disregard for ergonomics made its mark on my spine? Well, I’m still not quite sure.

The $80/£70 Go is the second posture tracker from Upright after the Pro, both of which were crowdfunded into production. “Posture tracker” might be overselling it a little, though. Cut through the marketing and the Go is just a simple tilt sensor in a pretty package. The device itself has a lovely rubbery finish and comes in a neat little travel case with space for alcohol wipes and extra adhesive strips. It’s small and light, and once you’ve slapped it on your upper back, you forget about it within 30 seconds.

Posture sensors have taken many forms, such as cushions, belts and little gadgets you clip to your clothes with magnets. Upright prefers you stick its devices directly to your body. The gel adhesive that binds the Go to your skin is a bit like the glue they use to stick shampoo samples to magazines. It’s strong enough for the job but still very easy to remove. It doesn’t irritate the skin one bit, and Upright says each strip can last up to 10 days with proper care and cleaning (you get four spares in the box and can order more online for less than a dollar a piece).

In all, the device is completely inoffensive, which is essential for something you’re supposed to wear for an extended period. Even the vibration feels like it happens away from the skin, quietly whispering in your direction rather than full-on nagging.

The purpose of the Go isn’t simply to track, but also to train. When you first use the device, you plug your weight, age and height into the companion app, and it comes up with a personalized training schedule for you. Each day, you have to sit or stand with good posture for a certain amount of time to get your gold star. The time increases gradually (it creeps up in minute increments) for a few weeks until you complete the program. After this, Upright recommends training in 20-minute sessions a few times per week.

I don’t see a great deal of value in this personalized schedule. I was barely done poking around the app before my first day’s goal of nine minutes was up. The next day I was challenged to sit still for 10 minutes, and so on. Unless you’re a fidgety toddler, it’s really not hard. I came to realize it wasn’t supposed to be. The idea is to lure you, through easily achievable goals, into forming a positive habit.

When in training mode, the Go will vibrate if you lean forward too much, lightly nudging you to straighten your back and correct your posture. It’s not nearly as annoying as you might imagine, but it’s not something you can entertain all day. You see, it doesn’t account for when you’re leaning into your desk to grab that cup of coffee, getting up out of your chair or tying your shoelaces. There are countless scenarios that register to the Go as false positives, so inevitably you’re going to put it into tracking mode at some point.

Tracking mode doesn’t change much. The thing just won’t vibrate if you hunch past the threshold. Whatever mode you’re in, the device still tracks the time spent straight or stooped, presenting them in colorful, accessible graphs and charts. On the whole, the app is well designed, with an intuitive user interface, all the product information you could want and even built-in chat to get at customer-support staff directly.

But the actual data the app shows you is of highly questionable use. Seeing that you spent an hour of the day in the red zone just isn’t something you can act on. Maybe you were eating for 20 minutes of that anyway, or crawling around for a few trying to find a floor socket for your phone charger, etc. Sure, you could hop into the app to recalibrate it every time you go from sitting to standing or turn it off when you know you’re about to rack up five minutes of unavoidable hunch, but that’s just hassle. After all, one of the best things about the Go is you should forget about it until it’s time to charge it that evening.

The fact the data isn’t of great worth speaks to the imprecision of it all. From sticking the Go as best you can in line with your spine to calibrating it yourself, there’s plenty of scope for human error. It’s not a great posture analyzer, either. If perfectly positioned and calibrated, yes, it can detect you hunching over. But there are many, many ways posture can be ‘bad.’ I can shimmy my hips all the way to the front edge of my chair and slouch right back into it, putting a ton of pressure on my lower back. But according to the Go, my posture is still in the green because I’m not leaning forward.

Maybe you sit up relatively straight all day, but lean on one elbow with a phone pushed up against your ear for hours on end. While the Go might give you the thumbs up, a chiropractor would probably be horrified.

One thing I had to educate myself on was what ‘good’ posture should feel like. “Sit up straight” and “don’t slouch” are commands you might’ve heard often as a kid, but like eating your greens, it’s just something you respond to without knowing or really caring why. It’s natural to connect poor posture with back pain: Because you’re not making full use of the spine as a supportive structure, you’re taxing the muscles and joints that pick up the slack.

Image: South_agency via Getty Images

Poor posture can cause fatigue, all kinds of muscular pain and headaches. It can impact your gait, circulation, breathing and generally accelerate wear and tear on your body. Hunching over and putting pressure on your intestines can slow down your digestive system. It can also sap your energy levels, harm your mood and affect how other people perceive you.

It’s not an exact science, and some of these symptoms develop slowly over a long period. And therein lies another problem. It’s not like after a few days of using the Upright Go, you’re going to be pain free, in great spirits and evacuating regularly. It’s no quick fix, and since it’s not exactly the most elaborate posture analyzer, it might not be the right fix for you at all. The only thing I can definitively say the Go has done for me is give me upper-back pain.

I’m pretty sure this is the good type of pain, though. The gym-goer’s no pain no gain kinda pain; a sign I’m working supportive muscles I’ve let shrivel. And perhaps that’s what I didn’t initially understand about the device. It’s not about what it does or doesn’t do. It’s about how you respond to it.

When it comes to posture sensors, there aren’t a great many to choose from. In fact, the $60/£60 Lumo Lift is the closest thing you can get to the Upright Go, and it does basically the same thing. Similar products have come and gone over the years, most starting out as crowdfunding projects. Now all you’ll find is dormant websites.

There isn’t anything out there right now that evaluates your posture any better than the Upright Go, and maybe there doesn’t need to be. Sure, the data is useless as far as I’m concerned, but there’s more to it than the core functionality. There are plenty of “smart” things that probably don’t need to exist. For example, do you really need an app to walk you through brushing your teeth? I don’t think posture sensors fall into that unnecessary category, however.

Perhaps the Go’s real power lies in the fact you bought one in the first place. It’s a physical reminder you’re trying to make self-improvements in much the same way a step-counter is a symbol of your desire to be more active. You put it on each day, switch it to tracking mode, and you try, regardless of what the data says when you eventually take it off again. There’s no immediate benefit, and there are no guarantees. There’s little need for the device or app to even function as long as you’re aware it’s on your body and what it’s supposed to mean. In this instance, it’s not the way that matters, but the will.

Source: Upright

Samsung’s 2018 QLED TVs start at $1,500

Today, Samsung released pricing details on its 2018 QLED line. The smallest, base model Q6F, at 55 inches, retails for $1,500, while the flagship Q9F 75-inch model inches is $6,000.

The full range of pricing is as follows:

• QN82Q6F: $4,500
• QN75Q9F: $6,000
• QN75Q8F: $4,800
• QN75Q7F: $4,000
• QN75Q6F: $3,500
• QN65Q9F: $3,800
• QN65Q8F: $3,000
• QN65Q7C: $2,700
• QN65Q7F: $2,600
• QN65Q6F: $2,200
• QN55Q8F: $2,200
• QN55Q7C: $2,000
• QN55Q7F: $1,900
• QN55Q6F: $1,500

The Samsung QLED TVs have quite a few impressive features. Ambient mode allows the TV to blend into the room, rather than showing a blank screen. HDR10+ features vary depending on the specific model you’re purchasing, but all TVs come with Bixby, Samsung’s smart assistant. We got to spend some time with this series of TVs and pronounced them Samsung’s smartest line yet.

Tobii’s EyeCore will make next-gen VR experiences even more immersive

VR and AR may be the next big thing immersive experiences but so far, their user interfaces have been anything but intuitive. Conventionally, head mounted displays have operated under the assumption that its users are owls: their eyes are locked in their skulls, facing forward requiring them to use their noses as VR cursors. Tobii is working to change that by integrating eye tracking into the next generation of Head Mounted Displays.

Specifically, Tobii is partnering with Qualcomm to incorporate its EyeCore tracking capabilities to HMDs running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 mobile VR platform. This promises to dramatically improve how we interact with the content of and other users within our VR and AR experiences.

For one, the EyeCore system offers Foveated Rendering. This means that the system renders whatever you’re looking at in high definition. However the rest of the field of view that you are not focused on is rendered at a lower resolution. This reduces the load on the GPU, improves battery performance and reduces the amount of heat the system as a whole produces. Additionally, the EyeCore system eliminates the need for users to manually tune the HMD’s interpupillary distance (ie how far apart your eyes are), automatically calibrating the headset’s lenses to whoever wearing it.

The Eyecore system also offers a number of other advantages over conventional HMD interfaces. In online social interactions, for example, it can make avatars appear more lifelike. Instead of the standard, 1000-yard deer-in-the-headlights look that VR avatars have, you’ll now be able to make eye contact with whomever you’re interacting with — or at least give them some wicked side-eye. In gaming situations, Tobii’s system can improve hand eye coordination since the system is empowered to infer the user’s intentions based on what they’re looking at rather than just what your head is pointed at. During a demo on Wednesday, in which I was tasked with throwing rocks at virtual bottles, the ability to look at my target with my eyes rather than my nose dramatically improved my accuracy and made the entire process feel far more natural.

Even in more mundane applications like navigating VR menus, eye tracking can vastly improve the user experience. Conventional VR menus work a lot like the PC paradigm. First you look at what you want to select, then you have to use your hands to guide the mouse/controller cursor to hover atop the item you want to activate before clicking on it. With eye tracking, the experience is far more intuitive — like modern mobile UIs. Basically, you just look at the menu item you want to select and simply click the controller button. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but actually reduces the amount of clicks needed to enjoy your VR Netflix offering by a third.

Overall, I was very impressed with how much easier VR applications were to use with eye tracking enabled. Not only that, it also reduced the amount of strain on my neck (since I wasn’t having to whip my head around to look at everything outside of my direct line of sight), reduced the effects of the HMD’s weight and generally made the VR experience seem more natural. I can’t wait to see what other applications VR and AR developers decide to work this capability into with the next generation of HMDs.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2018!

Facebook hit with fine in South Korea for limiting user access

South Korea’s telecommunications regulator is fining Facebook 396 million won (approximately $396,706) for slowing users’ connections in 2016 and 2017. ABC News reports that the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) began investigating Facebook’s actions last May and determined that the company had violated a law prohibiting the unnecessary limitation of user access. The problem arose when the social media giant began rerouting some South Korean users’ Facebook access to networks in Hong Kong and the US. In some cases that caused connections to slow by as much as 450 percent.

“Facebook did not actively look into the complaints from local telecoms service providers that users are complaining about slower connections and as a result its service quality was not maintained at an appropriate level,” the KCC said in a statement. “When controversies erupted in South Korea about Facebook’s rerouting, the company restored the connections to their original state around October and November of 2017.” ISPs in the country received multiple complaints per day regarding slow connections during the timeframe in which Facebook was rerouting to non-domestic networks.

Facebook claimed it didn’t violate the South Korean law because its terms of use say that it can’t guarantee its services won’t be subject to delays. However, the KCC didn’t accept the argument and has recommended Facebook change that section of its terms of use. In a statement, Facebook said, “We are disappointed with the KCC’s decision. We strive to deliver optimal performance for all our users and will continue working with Korean internet service providers toward this goal.”

Via: ABC News

Instagram users can now link to hashtags and profiles in their bios

Hashtags are incredibly important to the way Instagram operates; back in December, the social network began allowing people to follow hashtags like they do profiles. Now the company is bringing them even more front and center. Starting today, Instagram is allowing users to link to both hashtags and profile links in their bios. Now, when you include a “#” or “@” in your bio, it will automatically become a live link that will lead to a hashtag or profile page.

It makes sense — after all, part of Instagram’s success hinges on the ubiquitous use of hashtags and how easy it is to find new-to-you users. This move helps individuals connect more fully with the hashtags they contribute to, as well as with other accounts they run (or accounts of friends and family) on the service.

If you do link to someone else’s account, that person will receive a notification. They then have the option to remove the link from your profile. It’s a good security measure that will surely cut down on abuse of this feature.

Get Task Ant here

Spotify wants to improve in-car streaming, starting with Cadillacs

More than 70 million people subscribe to Spotify’s streaming music, and a significant chunk of those subscribers use the service in their cars. The problem is, the experience of using Spotify in a car can vary pretty wildly from the experience the company has built for other screens. In a bid to change that, Spotify and Cadillac teamed up to create an app that runs on those Caddies themselves and streams music over their built-in LTE connections. Right now, owners of the XTS, CTS, ATS, CTS-V and ATS-V can start using the app, but it’ll appear on upcoming 2019 Cadillacs and still more GMC vehicles shortly.

On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a particularly huge deal — apps for services like Pandora and iHeartRadio already exist for use in Cadillacs, after all. What seemed special after playing with this new Spotify experience for a little while is just how… Spotify it felt. Once you’ve signed into the account (either by punching in credentials on the car’s touchscreen or generating a PIN inside Spotify on a smartphone), you’ll find a slew of suggested playlists, a history of recently played tracks and full access to your Spotify library. There are some limitations due to driver distraction guidelines — you can’t sift through long lists of tracks, for instance — but the service’s suggestions are good enough that I didn’t need to worry about being served lousy or inappropriate music.

Pairing an existing Spotify account takes seconds.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

More importantly, whipping through these options and finding the right tunes to play felt incredibly fast on the Cadillac’s capacitive touchscreen. While the line between car interfaces and smartphone interfaces has started to blur in recent years, the process of navigating options and settings in a vehicle still needs a lot of polish. With this Spotify app at least, I got the impression that engineers and designers from both sides of the company wanted to stick as closely as possible to the Spotify experience everyone is already used to.

That close collaboration also means that Spotify doesn’t act like a separate app so much as a core part of these cars’ radios instead. If you turn off the car, get out, walk away, listen to some Spotify music and return to the car, the app picks up right where you left off. You’re also able to set specific Spotify playlists as radio presets, for occasions when you need those coffeeshop jams fast. If nothing else, it’s clear that Spotify wants to become the default means of listening to music in cars, and it believes deep integrations like this are how it will win the day.

Since this is the first deep car integration Spotify has worked on, a few things I hoped to see just weren’t there yet. The biggest omission (for me, anyway) was support for podcasts — Spotify has invested time and effort into fleshing out the podcast experience in its desktop and mobile apps, and considering the national average commute time hovers around 45 minutes, it seems odd that Spotify would’ve chosen to leave this out. That said, Jonathan Tarlton — Spotify’s Senior Manager of Automotive Business Development — told Engadget that the company is committing to a quick update cycle.

Still other features are in the offing. To use Spotify on a Cadillac, you have to be a Spotify Premium subscriber, but according to Tarlton, Spotify is also exploring ways to bring a free listening experience to these vehicles. There’s no voice control here yet either, though we know based on job listings that Spotify is taking those kinds of interactions very seriously.

Playlists as presets? Sure, why not.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Those shortcomings, while mildly confusing, are understandable given the time involved; it only took four weeks to go from early iteration to near-final code. While that first push is complete, teams in the US and Spotify’s native Sweden are cooking up ways to make Spotify in cars more thoughtful and responsive. Thanks to in-car sensors that wouldn’t be accessible if Spotify was just running as an app on a phone, future versions could take into account new kinds of data and fold those signals into its suggestion model. Theoretically, Tarlton said, the in-car Spotify app could tell when the windshield wipers were engaged and could proffer a handful of appropriate rainy driving playlists. (When asked for a concrete example of a sensor-driven feature in progress, Tarlton basically told me to stay tuned.)

Since Spotify is as much a data science company as it is a streaming service, I’d argue it’s very welled suited to customizing what we hear based on the nuances of our vehicles. And to be clear, even though Cadillac gets the first crack at this new experience, Spotify is working to get similar apps up and running on cars from a wide swath of manufacturers. Spotify is coming for your car, and considering what we know about the company’s plans, this might be one invasion worth embracing.

Facebook faces user lawsuit for disclosing data to Cambridge Analytica

State, federal and legislative officials in the US and UK want to know how much personal Facebook data may or may not still be in Cambridge Analytica’s hands, but some aren’t waiting to hear what they’ll find. A user has sued the social media giant on behalf of many other individuals whose information ended up with the political firm, which acquired data on 50 million Facebook users in 2015.

Lauren Price of Maryland filed suit against Facebook today in federal court in San Jose, California, specifically for allowing her and other users’ personal information to be siphoned without authorization. The suit asserts claims of negligence and violations of California unfair competition laws, according to Bloomberg.

“This case involves the absolute disregard with which defendants have chosen to treat plaintiff’s personal information,” Price’s lawyers said in her complaint, according to Bloomberg. “Facebook, for its part, knew this improper data aggregation was occurring and failed to stop it, or actively avoided discovering such knowledge in order to profess supposed ignorance.”

This legal action comes a day after shareholders sued Facebook for the stock price slump caused by the backlash against the company’s failure to safeguard user privacy. The company has lost $50 billion in value this week.

Source: Bloomberg

Tim Sweeney wants Unreal to power the cross-platform revolution

It’s 2018 and developers are finally taking mobile games seriously — or it’s the other way around, depending on whom you ask.

“I think what we are seeing is now these AAA games from traditional PC and console developers going mobile, and they are among the most popular mobile games that exist,” Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney says.

Epic CTO Kim Liberi jumps in and adds, “I think it’s almost the other way, I think it’s that mobile developers are taking games more seriously.”

Either way, the mobile game market has shifted drastically over the past few years, and today major developers are building massive experiences for tiny screens, often putting fully fledged PC and console titles directly on handheld devices. Think Fortnite, Ark: Survival Evolved, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Rocket League. All of these games, and countless others, run on Unreal, Epic’s engine (and Fortnite is Epic’s in-house baby, of course).

Running on Unreal means these games can play across all platforms with relative ease — the same code is powering the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC and mobile editions of each game. It’s the same title across all platforms.

That means there’s no reason, say, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players can’t link up and jump into games together. Well — there’s no technical reason. Sony has long been a holdout in this space, refusing to allow cross-console play. Both Microsoft and Nintendo are open to the idea, while the PC and mobile markets have been primed for years.

“Fortnite runs on six platforms, so there are 36 combinations of platforms and 35 of them can all play together,” Sweeney says. “We’re one link away from having it all connected. But we’re talking with everybody and I feel that it’s now becoming inevitable, as these trends of people playing across platforms. Eventually you won’t be able to tell kids in school, ‘Sorry, you can’t play with those particular people who are your friends because they’re on a different platform.’ That’s just not gonna hold water anymore.”

It’s not going to make sense from a business perspective, either, Sweeney argues.

“We’re one link away from having it all connected.”

“At the core of these businesses is profit and loss calculations but really, what gaming is about ultimately is people,” he says. “Can you imagine how dysfunctional Facebook would be if people who were using Facebook on iOS weren’t allowed to communicate with people using Facebook on Android? But that’s the state of console gaming right now.”

Epic is supporting the cross-platform trend with Unreal Engine. The latest version will make it easier for developers to bring their console or PC games to mobile devices, using Fortnite as a successful case study. Another improvement heading to Unreal 4.20, which lands for developers this summer, is a new live record and replay feature. This allows players to cinematically view and edit their gameplay after the match is done — not only allowing serious players to study their strategies, but also empowering YouTubers and Twitch streamers to create movie-like highlight reels.

Coming soon

Looking to the future, Epic is working on fine-tuning high-end graphics capabilities and motion-capture animation processes — these are things that major, AAA developers might use. Partnering with NVIDIA and Microsoft on new ray-tracing technology, at GDC Epic showed off a demo in the Star Wars universe and featuring the technique running in real-time. The quality was stunning, but this kind of tech isn’t quite ready for everyday consumers.

As Liberi explains it, “It’s running on a quite powerful piece of hardware right now because experimental technology runs on a –“

“It’s one PC with four GPUs,” Sweeney chimes in.

“Four GPUs, yeah. Nvidia DGX-1 with four GPUs.”

That’s certainly not what most folks have at home, but the tech should catch up to accessible gaming hardware in the near future.

Epic Games

In other news of a visually striking nature, Epic also developed a real-time motion-capture animation system in partnership with 3Lateral. Using the company’s Meta Human Framework volumetric capture, reconstruction and compression technology, Epic was able to digitize a performance by actor Andy Serkis in a shockingly lifelike manner — in real-time and without any manual animation. The technology also allowed Epic to seamlessly transfer Serkis’ performance (a MacBeth monologue) onto the face of a 3D alien creature.

Partnering with 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Tencent and Vicon, Epic also showed off Siren, a digital character rendered in real-time based on a live actress’ performance.

“[3Lateral] is the company that actually builds the digital faces that then we work out how to make them look realistic in the engine,” Liberi says. “What they’re able to do is what they call four-dimensional capturing, which is like a scan but it’s a scan that moves over time. Because of that, they’re able to refine the facial animation systems for the digital human to get all the nuances of every wrinkle, how every piece of flesh moves.”

Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2018!

Lab-grown meat is inevitable. Will we eat it?

In 2013, two people tasted a burger made from cultured meat live on the air, and for many, it was their first introduction to lab-grown meat and the researchers creating it. The two were tasked with trying this first cultured burger and giving their honest thoughts on how it tasted, how it felt and how it compared to a typical burger. One noted “some intense taste” while the second said, “The texture, the mouthfeel has a feel like meat.” Both pointed out that the lack of fat in the burger made it a little dry, but overall the consensus was that it was very close to traditional meat. Now, less than five years later, no fewer than seven companies are developing cultured meat to bring it to the market, some aiming to sell products as early as this year.

For some, cultured meat is a tech triumph, for others it’s a cool new food and for many, it offers a way to help address some pretty major food and environmental challenges or maybe even save the world. But it’s also a fundamental break from how we’ve always interacted with meat. Eating meat has always meant the death of an animal in some way or another, but with cultured meat, that’s no longer the case. And while that’s pretty awe-inspiring, it’s also, let’s face it, really weird. Whether cultured meat becomes a commercial reality this year or a decade down the road, it’s likely on its way, so it seems wise to figure out what people think of it, how to get people to trust it and ultimately, how to sell it.

Cultured meat is meat. Its journey onto your plate might be drastically different from that of the meat we eat now, but regardless of its history, it is, in fact, meat. Scientists start with what are known as satellite cells — cells that can develop into muscle cells — and provide them with all the nutrients they need to live and develop. Throw some edible material in there that acts as scaffolding on which the cells can grow, make sure there’s the optimal amount of movement and the correct temperature, and eventually you have meat that can be cooked and eaten just like any pork, beef or chicken you get from the store today. That’s a simplification of a complicated process that scientists are still refining, but that’s essentially it. Try to do what happens naturally, but do it outside of an animal.

Plenty think that a good product at the right price will sell itself. “I think the most important thing we’re doing, and the primary thing we’re doing, is just putting our heads down and trying to make something that’s really good,” Josh Tetrick, CEO of Just (formerly Hampton Creek), said. And Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit organization that helps companies bring their cultured meat and plant-based products to market, thinks the merits of the foods will be enough to get people on board. “Clean meat gives you everything that people get from eating meat, or want from eating meat, from live animals but without the things people prefer not to think about,” he said. “It is a product that really sells itself.”

PETA has been a backer of cultured-meat research for decades, and President Ingrid Newkirk has no doubt that it’s on the way. “It’s going to happen. Younger people are very excited about it. It’s new. It makes sense. It’s not your grandpa’s idea of what you eat,” she said. “It’s going to happen. No worry at all.”

There will surely be people who jump on the cultured-meat bandwagon early on and avidly, but there will certainly be people who need more convincing. Just a few months ago, when talking to the team behind Finless Foods, a startup working on developing cultured-fish products, we also asked some individuals if they would eat fish grown in a lab. One person said she probably wouldn’t. Another said she definitely wouldn’t. When asked why, she said, “Because that’s disgusting.” And she’s far from the only person who thinks that.

Again, cultured meat requires you to reassess everything you know about meat. It introduces a new set of rules, and regardless of whatever positive impact it may have on the environment, animal welfare or sustainability, it may take some time to adjust to. But there are a few groups working to explore these foods as well as how people will react to and interact with them going forward. And while they all take different approaches, they all explore these foods in relation to what people currently accept as normal. They’re looking at what’s acceptable, what’s familiar and what are people OK with and then asking, “Now, how does cultured meat fit in?”

As a kid, Mike Lee was interested in auto shows and, in particular, concept cars. It was an industry that presented a tangible idea of what its future products might be, and to him, that was fascinating. When he started his career in food, Lee went to trade shows and was excited to see how people imagined the future of food. “I remember going to one of the early trade shows, kind of expecting to see like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m gonna see the future of food here,’ and then I didn’t,” said Lee. “I wanted to make sure there was always a space for people to dream a lot more aggressively and view that in a way that hopefully inspires how people are innovating more-straightforward things today.” That led to The Future Market.

Like the concept cars of auto shows, The Future Market presents concept food products. It tries to develop around six new products each year. Some of those products are devices like Nanobrew, a home brewing kit that uses wild, airborne yeast to produce beer; AnalyzeMe, a pill that can track and report on your microbiome; and Mini Mill, a small countertop mill that lets you make your own flour at home. Others are foods with a focus on sustainable farming. Crop Crisps, for example, are crackers that come in four flavors, but each flavor comes out every four years since the main cracker ingredient — hard red wheat, white winter wheat, lentils or chickpeas — is grown on a rotation that allows the farm’s soil to be replenished with the right balance of nutrients. And Alga Marina is pasta made from holistically farmed seaweed.

And of course, there’s cultured meat. Heritage Culture offers premium cuts of Kobe and wagyu beef, all grown through cellular agriculture, while Faux Fin allows for guilt-free consumption of shark fin soup, since the shark meat has been cultured. And then there’s Jia Rou Canting, a Chinese restaurant that cultures its own meat in an in-house bioreactor and offers cultured meat alongside traditional meat on its menu.

To be clear, none of these things currently exist. They offer a glimpse into what could be on our shelves and on our plates in the near future. And importantly, they do it by taking a step into the future while keeping one foot anchored in the familiar. “I think the whole Chinese food menu is really kind of the epitome of what we think is necessary to get people over the hump,” said Lee. “Which is, they need some sort of anchor in the familiar, because when everything is crazy, it just throws your brain into a loop. So for that we try to say, ‘How do we make this idea, which is so fantastical and almost science fiction-like, as boring as possible in a good way?’”

The Future Market’s concept products are also introduced to people in a concept pop-up grocery store that the company has brought to the Fancy Food trade show over the past couple of years. One option for customers who visit the concept store is a way to customize their grocery order based on the issues and concerns that are most important to them. Through a series of questions, they’re asked about things like whether they’re more inclined to choose foods that reduce their weight or reduce global warming, if they’re more interested in savings or supporting sustainable farming, and if they want Michelin-star flavors or fast food prices. Their answers are then used to map their food interests, and products that appeal to their main concerns are collected. As mentioned before, these products don’t exist and can’t actually be purchased, but people can experience what it might be like to shop for them in the future by picking what they want, ordering it and having it theoretically shipped to their homes.

Lee said the people who’ve stopped by take their time looking through the products and seem to try to absorb what it might be like to see such items in real stores. “It gets them to question their values,” said Lee. “Things like Faux Fin, which is the cell-ag shark fin soup — it kind of throws your whole value system out of whack, right? If you’re a person who’s trained to say, ‘I don’t eat shark fin soup because it’s cruel to sharks,’ but you remove that whole cruel-to-sharks part out of the equation, what does that do to what you think about shark fin soup?”

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) takes a similar approach, providing examples of possible future-food products and technologies, all rooted in the familiar. As part of its Artifact from the Future project, IFTF developed Lunchabios — a Lunchables-type product that allows kids to culture their own cheese — as well as an incentivized receipt that notes discounts earned by buying sustainably sourced foods.

“What’s interesting about the artifacts is that of course they don’t exist today,” said Rebecca Chesney, a research director at IFTF, “but they’re kind of like a puzzle where we’ve layered together things that do exist.” One artifact introducing a future with cultured meat is Churchill’s Carnery. “It’s basically imagining a brewery of the future, but the brewery is not for beer, it’s for meat,” said Chesney. And its name is inspired by a 1931 Winston Churchill essay entitled “Fifty Years Hence,” which reads, “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.”

“If you’re a person who’s trained to say, ‘I don’t eat shark fin soup because it’s cruel to sharks’ … what does [using cultured meat] do to what you think about shark fin soup?”

Like The Future Market, IFTF offers people a way to experience the future of food firsthand through its Edible Futures events, which present new foods to people in an educational dining experience. Chesney said that it gets those who attend to think about these foods and realize they might be open to eating them in the future.

While The Future Market and IFTF are taking familiar products and pushing them a few steps toward the future, Oron Catts confronted the familiarity of food with the idea of cultured meat nearly a decade before that first cultured beef burger was eaten on live TV. And he did so using a fairly different method. Catts is the director of SymbioticA, part of the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia, and in 2003, he created an art exhibition called Disembodied Cuisine, an installation that put cultured frog meat on display and ended with it being cooked and eaten. According to the Tissue Culture and Art Project website, the exhibit “played on the notion of different cultural perceptions of what is edible and what is foul.”

So even in its earliest days, cultured meat has been introduced to the public by situating it in or putting it up against what is comfortable and what is familiar. It’s an interesting and active way to gauge how people feel about something they can’t yet buy. And it offers the chance to surface and maybe even address their concerns before they’re faced with them at an actual store or a restaurant.

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However, it might also be important to take a look at the ways in which cultured meat strays from what’s considered normal. “Cultured meat just isn’t normal,” said Ben Wurgaft, an anthropology postdoctoral fellow at MIT. “It’s not. There are all kinds of technical reasons why this is not normal.” Wurgraft believes that it’s important to highlight and discuss the differences between cultured and traditional meat because burying them does the consumer a disservice. Because there are differences and they should be talked about. Otherwise consumers, the people these products are entirely intended for, could feel swindled. They deserve to know how their food was made and how it got to their plate. That’s especially true for something as groundbreaking as cultured meat. Transparency about such a large departure from the norm will be crucial to its success.

“I think that it would really be beneficial for anyone who’s involved in the food system, whether they’re working on these technologies or not, to really be open about what’s happening so that people feel like they can make the decisions themselves and they don’t feel like they’ve been duped,” said Chesney.

When it comes to transparency, the companies developing cultured meat recognize the importance of it. “I think having a really open and honest conversation about what this technology is is extremely important,” said Selden. In that interest, he tries to talk to people about cultured-meat technology as much as he can, whether that be to the media or at conferences. Mark Post, whose Maastricht University lab was behind that first cultured burger, spun out his research into Mosa Meat and has continued to participate in the university’s annual conference on cultured meat. And Memphis Meats, which declined an interview for this piece, updates its website with images and videos of its ongoing product tastings.

But these companies, which are all working to develop commercially available products, have proprietary secrets that they have to keep under wraps. And while that hasn’t prevented many of them from discussing cultured meat, it has kept them from giving us a solid look at their progress and their technology.

Wurgaft, who’s working on a book about the effort to create cultured meat, said he’s not one to assume it’s right around the corner. “You have interested parties telling us that they’ve made progress, and they may have resolved some of the basic technical problems,” he said. “But at present we have no way of really confirming this.” He argues that the closed nature of this industry makes it hard to instill trust.

“It’s hard to establish not just public trust but trust of people like myself if you can’t tell us the full story about what’s happening in labs,” said Wurgaft. “I understand completely that they can’t because of the nature of their responsibility to investors. And my beef isn’t with the venture capital system itself, rather with its promissory character: We’re saddled with stories and promises that we can’t confirm, so we don’t know how much hope to invest in them.”

“We’re saddled with stories and promises that we can’t confirm, so we don’t know how much hope to invest in them.”

Where cultured-meat companies can’t fully deliver, independent groups have stepped in. New Harvest, a nonprofit organization that funds cultured-meat and cellular-agriculture research, agrees that openness and transparency are necessary. It makes an effort to host honest discussions about the technology, its limitations and what it realistically can offer here and now. Erin Kim, New Harvest’s communications director, said that misrepresenting the success of current technologies “just creates a disconnect between the public understanding of where the science is and where the products are versus the reality of it.” She added, “I think that we should always maintain a critical eye to these things as well, and I don’t think that this field should be afraid to critique itself and to be critiqued. We are definitely coming from a place of recognizing that there’s still so much science that is yet to be done and that a lot of the conversation right now is still very speculative.”

New Harvest currently funds six researchers working on cultured meat and offers smaller, shorter-term grants as well. One group receiving such funding is working on a bioreactor — the device required to grow cultured meat at scale. “There has been all this talk about bioreactors for all these years, about how they’re going to be like breweries and so on,” said Kim. “Still, there was not an actual visible prototype of one of those bioreactors.” But in January, New Harvest posted a picture of the research group’s unfinished prototype, and the response was wild. “I think people were so excited to see, OK, this is potentially what one of these bioreactors could one day look like,” said Kim.

It’s not just academic groups that benefit from the work New Harvest does. Companies like Perfect Day Foods, which makes animal-free dairy products; Clara Foods, which is working on an animal-free egg white; and Finless Foods all have roots in New Harvest.

New Harvest’s academic and open approach to cultured meat is shared by another group on the other side of the world. The Shojinmeat Project, based in Japan, is a citizen-science cultured-meat venture that encourages anyone who’s interested to try their hand at growing their own meat. People involved in the project are growing everything from seashells to sea urchin, and Yuki Hanyu, Shojinmeat’s founder, cultured and tried foie gras with a few other amateur meat growers. Additionally, in the spirit of open access, the group has published a cultured-meat recipe and instructions on how to build a small bioreactor at home, both online and in a comic book about cultured meat. “I appreciate the openness, because I think that there’s still such a need for that that is unmet. And we’re trying to fill those gaps with our effort, but the more other players can get in on that, the better,” said Kim.

The need for transparency and openness in the introduction of new foods was a lesson learned quite deeply through GMOs. The technology was introduced and its products put into the food supply without a conversation with the people who would be eating it. To many, that felt like a trick. It looked like an industry was messing with their food and doing so secretively, and it led to a massive public backlash.

“I think a lot of the agriculture industry has learned lessons the hard way from the rolling out of GMOs,” said Mary Haderlein, a new food and beverage strategist and principal of Hyde Park Group Food Innovation. “If you look at that history and you see what they did right and what they did terribly wrong, to kind of instill consumer confidence or nonconfidence, you just don’t want to go down that road anymore.”

“Not talking to the public about what you’re putting into the food supply is a gigantic mistake,” said Finless Foods CEO Mike Selden. “The backlash against GMOs was, in a way, warranted, not because GMOs are bad and not because GMOs are unhealthy or bad for the environment but because you’re changing someone’s food without explaining to them what you’re doing. That warrants backlash.”

Even those instrumental in bringing GMOs to the world realize that the lack of communication surrounding them at the time was a problem. About GMOs, Monsanto CTO Robert Fraley has said in the past, “If I could have do (sic) one thing differently I would have focused on communicating to the public.”

With cultured meat, we’re already seeing a difference. Cultured-meat products aren’t even on the market yet, but the development of them has been in the news for years. Even if they can’t give details on their own technology, cultured meat CEOs are talking about the products, answering questions and putting information in places where it’s easy to find. Because secrecy about food doesn’t do anybody — consumer or producer — any good.

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And as Wurgaft pointed out, one more issue that will play a hand in cultured meat’s success is trust. That can be hard to instill, especially with something as intimate as food.

The good news is that we don’t have to rely on companies themselves to foster trust in their products. They should do as much as they can in that regard, but having an outside opinion from someone who doesn’t have a stake in the game can often go even further. That’s where regulation comes in.

Agencies like the USDA and the FDA lay out ground rules for our foods already, and while not everyone may agree on their process or their standards, setting safety requirements does offer some level of order and assessment on which trust can be built.

The bad news is that neither of those agencies has a plan for cultured meat yet. As of now, it’s not entirely clear how the US government will regulate it, or even who. While a spokesperson declined to say how the FDA might regulate cultured meat, they said, “Given information we have at this time, it seems reasonable to think that cultured meat, if manufactured in accordance with appropriate safety standards and all relevant regulations, could be consumed safely.”

While the USDA is largely concerned with slaughtered meat, it’s still up in the air as to whether it will be involved with cultured meat. “USDA has not made any determinations on ‘cultured meat’ (i.e., animal species-specific tissues cultivated in vitro from livestock stem cells),” a spokesperson said. “FDA would need to evaluate the safety of ‘cultured meat’ first before USDA could make any type of labeling determinations and determine whether it meets the definition of ‘meat.’” So for now it seems regulation, like cultured meat itself, is still being worked out.

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While there are still so many unknowns when it comes to cultured meat, there is evidence that people are generally on board. A study published last year in PLOS One found that 65 percent of 673 surveyed US individuals would probably or definitely try cultured meat while only 8.5 percent said they definitely would not. And adding to the evidence of public support, in 2016, Israel-based SuperMeat raised more than $230,000 in an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. In an email, SuperMeat co-founder Shir Friedman said, “The crowdfunding was a way for SuperMeat to show potential investors, as well as the world, that there is massive public support for clean meat.”

Tetrick said Just will have a nugget, foie gras or sausage on the market this year. Only time will tell if that’s the case, but in the meantime, there’s still one major issue for cultured-meat companies to address: What do you call it? “I think it’s going to be important because there’s so much interest in this, and so many people writing about it, and there’s so much opportunity for confusion,” said Haderlein. “I think they should all get on the same page.”

GFI is a proponent of the term “clean meat.” Friedrich said, “The reason we’re using clean meat is that it didn’t previously have a meaning in food. Then it’s also sort of a nod to clean energy. Clean energy is energy that’s better for the environment. Clean meat is obviously better for the environment. It also is just a cleaner product because it doesn’t have any of the contamination or any drug residues or whatever that come with live animals.” Selden told me that he believes clean meat is the most accurate. “It gets across really what we’re doing here,” he said. “We’re creating something that is actually cleaner.”

But not everyone is totally behind that term. “The main reason I don’t like clean meat is its substantial, moral indictment of contemporary carnivory,” said Wurgaft. “It’s an effort to superimpose the logic of animal rights vegetarians on existing dietary practice. I also don’t think it’s clean, because I don’t think that we know that it’s clean, environmentally speaking.”

New Harvest tends to use the term “cultured meat,” and Kim said that’s partly because clean meat can have different meanings depending on who’s using the term and it can become an ideological issue that New Harvest doesn’t want to get involved in. She also said that because of New Harvest’s academic approach to the field, cultured meat makes more sense for it. “It may not be the most appealing term, but it’s one that has been accepted by the scientific community,” she said. “It’s still the one that, if you do searches for academic papers, you’re going to find stuff written about cultured meat and not clean meat.”

Tetrick said that while he once stood behind clean meat, he’s come to think that it might not be the best term for it. But he also doesn’t like cultured meat or “lab-grown meat.” “Most people, most of my friends, don’t really have an understanding of what the word ‘cultured’ means, in connection with meat,” he said. So now he’s leaning toward just calling it meat and adding a description of what makes it different. He said that once it becomes more accepted, that’s probably where the term will end up anyway. “When smartphones first came out, it was a smartphone, but today I don’t refer to my phone as a smartphone. I say it’s my phone,” said Tetrick. “So I bet tomorrow, when it’s normalized, we’ll just call it meat.”

Images: New Harvest (cultured meat); Getty Images/iStockphoto (meatless meat vessels)

YouTube will ‘frustrate and seduce’ you into its music service

It’s no secret that many people use YouTube as an unofficial Spotify alternative, and artists aren’t happy knowing that many of these listeners have little incentive to pay for music as a result. YouTube has a new solution, though: nag users until they switch over. The service’s music head Lyor Cohen told Bloomberg in an interview that YouTube will boost the number of ads you see between music videos. This would theoretically “frustrate and seduce” you to the point where you subscribe to YouTube’s next-gen streaming service.

This would give the new service a head start, and might soften complaints that it neither pays artists enough nor does much to encourage paid streaming. YouTube has offered paid music services for a while, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the clout of Spotify or Apple Music and their tens of millions of subscribers. Why pay for music on YouTube when you can listen to it for free with only occasional ad interruptions? While more frequent ads are bound to irritate some listeners, they might create a clearer division between free and paid access.

Whether or not it works is another story. Apple and Spotify have a gigantic head start in a market where there isn’t much room for other competitors. Frequent ads are only going to do so much to convert users. There’s also the question of the network effect (you listen to Spotify because your friends do, for example) and deep integration with devices. YouTube will have to make itself relatively ubiquitous if it’s going to grab a significant chunk of the paid music market.

Via: Variety

Source: Bloomberg