Microsoft's HoloLens could power tanks on a battlefield

Microsoft might not have envisioned its HoloLens headset as a war helmet, but that's not stopping Ukrainian company LimpidArmor from experimenting. Defence Blog reports that LimpidArmor has started testing military equipment that includes a helmet with Microsoft's HoloLens headset integrated into it.The helmet is designed for tank commanders to use alongside a Circular Review System (CRS) of cameras located on the sides of armored vehicles. Microsoft's HoloLens gathers feeds from the cameras outside to display them in the headset as a full 360-degree view. The system even includes automatic target tracking, and the ability to highlight enemy and allied soldiers and positions.LimpidArmor demonstrated its headset at the Arms and Security show in Kiev last month, where Ukrainian military officials were in attendance. The system is only in the concept phase yet, but it's a hint that the future might include HoloLens on the battlefield, in space, and in regular retail stores.

The Mate 9 is Huawei's latest behemoth flagship and it's coming to the US

           

                           Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has unveiled its latest flagship device — the Mate 9. The handset is the company's new top-of-the-line product, positioned above the P9 family and pitched to customers who want to get the very most out of their phone. The Mate 9 comes with a 5.9-inch full HD display, 4,000 mAh battery, fingerprint sensor, rear dual-camera system, USB Type-C, 4GB of RAM, and Huawei's own Kirin 960 processor (its fastest ever). It all sounds very punchy, and the Mate 9 looks and feels like a high-end device, too, with a metal unibody design that's sleek and solid as a rock.The handset is launching alongside a super-lux variant, which has been given the clunky moniker of the Porsche Design Mate 9. This will be a limited edition device with boosted specs including 6GB of RAM, 256GB internal memory (compared to 64GB on the Mate 9), and a screen with 2K resolution. More notably, that handset's 5.5-inch display is curved like Samsung's Galaxy Edge series. Huawei certainly isn't targeting the mainstream with this one, as the Porsche Design handset costs a ludicrous €1,395 ($1,549). The regular Mate 9 is pricey too, costing €699 ($776). The latter device will launch in a number of European and Asian markets, but we do also know Huawei plans to bring the Mate 9 to the US some time in the future.

The Mate 9 arrives at an interesting time for Huawei, as the telecoms company — now also the third-biggest smartphone maker in the world — puts increasing emphasis on its consumer tech, while trying to expand its reach outside of China and nearby Asian markets. One-third of its revenue now comes from its consumer retail division (as opposed to 0 percent just five years ago), and the company is keen to muscle into the high-end phone market currently dominated by Samsung and Apple.Accordingly, this year's P9 launched in the West with a flurry of marketing, including an ad campaign starring Scarlett Johansson and Henry Cavill. And in some European markets such as Spain, Italy, and Finland, it's estimated that Huawei already controls 20 percent of smartphone sales. The big test, though, will be the Mate 9's launch in the US — a market that numerous Chinese firms are trying to crack.

               From our brief time spent testing Huawei's new flagship, it seems like the company has produced another well-designed and whip-fast phone. Barring the changes to the rear camera and rear fingerprint sensor, the handset is near-identical to last year's Mate 8, with similar polished lines and materials. It is also, blissfully, a little smaller than the Mate 8 and its 6-inch display, although it remains pretty massive. We didn't have a chance to try out the Porsche Design Mate 9, but its curved 5.5-inch display should certainly be a little more manageable.Huawei has overhauled its EMUI Android skin (based on Android 7.0) for the phones' launch, giving it a fresh and simplified look with more blues and whites and reducing menu clutter. It certainly looks better than older versions of EMUI, and Huawei is also giving users the option of using an app drawer — rather than enforcing its previous iOS-inspired system of app-placement where everything you install has to find a place on the home screen.The company says it's also introduced a number of software tweaks, including a machine learning-powered system which watches how you use the phone and changes the allocation of processing power accordingly. Huawei's promise is that the Mate 9 which actually get faster the more you use it — the opposite of what happens with most Android phones — and the company claims internal tests have found that performance improved by as much as 8 percent over 10,000 hours of simulated use. And all of this is powered by the company's new octa-core Kirin 960 system-on-chip, which supports the Vulkan API for improved graphical crunch.As ever, we'll need to see how these components stand up to real-life usage before we make our final judgement on the Mate 9, but during our brief time with the phone, the performance did seem as responsive as you could want. The impressive claim that the 4,000 mAh battery charges to 58 percent in half an hour to provide "more than a day of usage" also need to be tested.Less immediately reassuring was the phone's rear dual-camera system, which, like the P9, comes with a bit of skin-deep Leica branding. As with the P9, picture quality was inconsistent, producing mostly good images during our hands-on but quite a few lousy ones tool. Certainly, the Mate 9's camera doesn't seem like it can stand up to the likes of the Pixel or iPhone. We'll have to see if the rest of the phone will fare any better.

These glasses trick facial recognition software into thinking you're someone else

Facial recognition software has become increasingly common in recent years. Facebook uses it to tag your photos; the FBI has a massive facial recognition database spanning hundreds of millions of images; and in New York, there are even plans to add smart, facial recognition surveillance cameras to every bridge and tunnel. But while these systems seem inescapable, the technology that underpins them is far from infallible. In fact, it can be beat with a pair of psychedelic-looking glasses that cost just $0.22.Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have shown that specially designed spectacle frames can fool even state-of-the-art facial recognition software. Not only can the glasses make the wearer essentially disappear to such automated systems, it can even trick them into thinking you’re someone else. By tweaking the patterns printed on the glasses, scientists were able to assume one another’s identities or make the software think they were looking at celebrities. (In the image at the top of the article, you can see the researchers wearing the glasses in the top row of pictures, and the identity they copied in the bottom row.)The glasses work because they exploit the way machines understand faces. Facial recognition software is often powered by deep learning; systems that crunch through large amounts of data to sift out recurring patterns. In terms of recognizing faces, this could mean measuring the distance between an individual’s pupils, for example, or looking at the slant of their eyebrows or nostrils.But compared to human comprehension, this analysis takes place at an abstract level. Computer systems don’t understand faces in the way we do; they’re simply looking for patterns of pixels. If you know what patterns are being looked for, you can easily trick machine vision systems into seeing animals, people, and objects in what are just abstract patterns. This is exactly what the researchers from Carnegie Mellon did.First they worked out the patterns associated with specific faces, and then they printed them onto a set of wide-rimed glasses (so as to better occupy more of the frame; about 6.5 percent of the available pixels in the end). In 100 percent of their tests, the researchers were able to use the glasses to effectively blind facial recognition systems to their identities. Results were more mixed when it came to impersonating other individuals. A 41-year-old white male researcher was able to pass himself off as actress Milla Jovovich to facial recognition systems with 87.87 percent accuracy, but a 24-year-old South Asian female researcher was only able to convince a computer she was 79-year-old Colin Powell 16 percent of the time.There are obvious limitations to this system. For a start, although the glasses are a more subtle disguise than wearing a mask or using, say, CV Dazzle (a form of bold makeup that also confuses facial recognition systems), they’re hardly inconspicuous. There’s also the problem of how and where the image is taken: the researchers didn’t test how well the glasses worked at a distance, for example, or in different lighting conditions. As ever, tests in a lab don't always equal workable results in the real world. And besides, imagine having to wear these glasses to every party you go to in future, just to avoid getting tagged by Facebook's algorithms.

Windows 10 updates are about to get a lot smaller to download

Microsoft has been promising smaller updates to Windows 10, through various methods, for what feels like years, but the company is now starting to test a new Unified Update Platform (UUP) that will make a big difference. "One of the biggest community and customer benefits of UUP is the reduction you'll see in download size on PCs," explains Bill Karagounis, a Windows program manager, in a blog post on UUP today. "We have converged technologies in our build and publishing systems to enable differential downloads for all devices built on the Mobile and PC OS."Differential downloads only include the changes that have been pushed out since you last updated a Windows 10 PC. This new change will debut with the Windows 10 Creators Update that's expected to arrive in March, but Windows Insiders can start testing the technology in today's latest build update for mobile devices. Microsoft will start rolling this out to PC builds later this year, alongside HoloLens devices. Xbox One devices running Windows 10 won't benefit from UUP as Microsoft distributes operating system updates to consoles using different methods.The real benefit for Windows 10 users will be when they move from one major update to another, as Microsoft expects download sizes to decrease by around 35 percent. That's a great saving for those on low-bandwidth connections, or people with internet caps. This new technology could also help Microsoft roll out changes to Windows 10 machines a lot faster.Microsoft has already successfully updated more than 400 million Windows 10 devices, and the company now ships out beta builds to Windows Insiders on a weekly basis. That's a big change from a few years ago, and it will likely shape the path for Windows in the future.

Android apps will soon be able to offer cheaper, introductory subscription prices

At its Playtime event for Android developers today, Google announced that apps on the Play Store will soon gain a new option that could have huge implications for subscriptions: temporary promotional pricing. "Coming soon, you'll be able to create an introductory price for new subscribers for a set period of time," Google's Larissa Fontaine wrote in a blog post. "For example, you can offer a subscription for $1 per month for the first three months before the normal subscription price kicks in."There are many app categories where this could make a big difference. Music and video are certainly on that list; maybe cheaper introductory pricing could boost Google's own struggling YouTube Red service, or help Spotify maintain its lead over Apple Music and other rivals. Other apps like internet TV offerings (Sling TV, PlayStation Vue) and productivity tools (Evernote) also stand to benefit if developers are willing to temporarily cut their prices in hopes that customers will stay subscribed once the normal rate kicks in — either because they forgot or, more ideally, actually find the app or service to be worth the monthly charge."Subscriptions are the fastest growing business model on Play, with consumer spending in subscription apps increasing 10x over the last 3 years," wrote Fontaine. And with that in mind, this year both Apple and Google have adjusted the revenue-sharing terms around subscriptions to give app makers a bigger cut than before. For iOS developers, apps must maintain a customer's subscription for at least 12 months before the more favorable 85/15 split takes effect; Google Play doesn't have the same long-term subscriber requirement.

Google will soon let app developers offer incentivized pricing

                             Here's how it works: Developers can set a temporary rate that will last for a predetermined period of time. Say you have a cloud storage app that typically costs $2.99 a month. You can now opt to allow new users to get the first three months for a cheaper rate.The thinking is that users will be more likely to pay full price for a service once they have had some time to try it out at a lower price. Google says it expects this change will help increase app subscriptions overall. (In a blog post, Google notes that app subscriptions have increased tenfold over the last three years.)Apple also recently changed its policies around app subscriptions, with any developer now able to make their app a subscription. (Apple is further incentivizing subscriptions with a more favorable revenue split for developers that can keep subscribers for a year or more.) Google's update may seem like a small change, but it stands to have a big impact on developers who may want to offer things like promotional pricing but have difficulty implementing such strategies within Google's developer tools. And that's good news because Android still has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to app revenue. As a whole, Android users spend way less money in apps than their iOS counterparts, despite having a larger marketshare overall.

HTC Vive's virtual reality headset is opening stores in Australia

Aussies eager to try virtual reality will soon be able to head to their local Harvey Norman or JB Hi-Fi store.

From November 18, the HTC Vive headset will be sold at the two national retailers for the (not insignificant) price of A$1,399 ($1,073). While already available online, it will be the VR headset's first foray into retail locally.Jimmy Feng, chief of staff to the CEO of HTC, told reporters Friday that people often need to experience VR to be convinced. That's where bricks-and-mortar stores can help."We can talk and talk," he said while attending Melbourne's gaming event, Pax Australia. "Once we've brought people though the VR experience, then they don't need convincing anymore. They're sold.

Raymond Pao, vice president at HTC, also announced there would be demonstration locations in the stores, as well as an online booking system to obtain a walk-through. 

"We need some education processes to tell people what VR is, I think," he said.

"We're very lucky to be partnering with two of the largest retailers in Australia to bring these demo experiences all across the country," Feng added.

Online preorders for the HTC Vive began in Australian on Feb. 29. While Feng couldn't share sale numbers for the headset locally, he said the company was happy with the uptake. "We do see a very enthusiastic use base in Australia, and this is why we want to accelerate adoption," he said.

HTC would also consider expanding its retail footprint to less technology-focused stores, depending on the enthusiasm they see from Aussie consumers.
"Obviously, we'd like to see more people go through the retail store," Feng said. "It's beyond just gaming — virtual reality is also a lifestyle."