How smartphone cameras took over the world

In the early 2000s, the digital photography revolution made it possible for miniaturized camera hardware and image sensors to be packed into cell phones without adding a significant amount of weight. Then the iPhone was announced. As the smartphone war began, the camera became an important part of the ongoing spec race. Competitors tried to beat Apple in making an excellent camera (and app) that was easy to use — and it took until this year for that to start happening.

Now, two-thirds of adults in the US own a smartphone. The average smartphone user takes at least 150 photos per month. Instagram has half a billion monthly users. Even if it’s just selfies or pictures of lunch — nothing has familiarized people with photography like smartphone cameras. It’s now a part of our everyday lives.

I joined Chris on this week’s What’s Tech to talk about my first camera phones, why the newest smartphones have such equally excellent shooters, and where it all goes from here.

The first Google Tango phone delivers true augmented reality gaming

If it weren’t for Pokémon Go, augmented reality might have stayed another forlorn futurist technology the public paid little attention to. Instead, the AR mobile game from developer Niantic Labs, a former Google subsidiary, catapulted the technology to hundreds of millions of smartphone owners around the world. Now a few months after the game’s launch, the first fully capable AR smartphone has started shipping. It’s Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, and under the hood it contains the hardware and software neccesary to use Google’s Tango AR technology.Pokémon Go didn’t accelerate Tango’s consumer timeline, which has been in place since the team began discussions with Lenovo last year. "Actually I think Pokémon Go took everyone by surprise, including Niantic," Tango chief Johnny Lee, who spoke to members of the press at a roundtable event last week, says with a laugh. "Pokemon Go certainly made the conversation a lot easier with partners." partners."

The Pico Neo headset is a clever take on standalone VR

Standalone virtual reality headsets tend to come in only one flavor. Typically, your smartphone slides into a pair of goggles, and from there the headset becomes a single unit relying on the phone’s display. This means there are no cords keeping you tethered to a computer, but it also makes the headset heavy. Pico VR, a Chinese hardware company, has come up with a unique solution to this problem.The team designed a controller, not unlike a PlayStation Vita without the screen, that contains all the necessary hardware to power the software. By tethering the controller to an ultra-lightweight headset, you can enjoy standing or sitting VR experiences without feeling like you’re wearing a one-pound weight on your face. The controller itself contains a Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage with a microSD card slot.

At the Virtual Reality Developer Conference in San Francisco, I tried a developer version of the Pico Neo, as the product was called when it was first unveiled back in April. Although the demo offered only a stationary space shooter game, it was a surprisingly solid VR experience. Because the demo incorporated head movements to point the cursor of your spaceship turret, it meant I was moving my gaze around frequently. Using a Samsung Gear VR, this would be more cumbersome. Yet the Pico Neo, being much lighter thanks to the hardware internals residing in the gamepad, didn’t feel like I was throwing too much weight around.There are a few setbacks to this approach. For one, it involves cords. One of the primary benefits of a standalone headset like the Gear VR or Google’s new Daydream setup is the promise of cordless VR. Even Oculus is working on a cordless headset of its own codenamed Santa Cruz. The Pico Neo also undermines another benefit of standalone headsets by requiring a third, extra gamepad peripheral that you might not always have with you. Even Google’s Daydream has small carrying latches built into the headset itself so you can store the one-handed remote when you’re not using it. And the Neo runs a custom version of Android, which means it’s not entirely clear where it’s catalog of games or VR experiences will ultimately come from.The whole thing could also be more expensive than consumers are willing to pay for something that isn’t an Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, or HTC Vive. The company won’t disclose the price right now, but earlier reports put the whole package at around $550, and the headset on its own at $300 if you wanted to tether it to a PC. This could be a product of having to incorporate a display into the headset because it does not rely on a smartphone. The Pico Neo offers 1200 x 1080 resolution per eye with a refresh rate of 90Hz refresh rate and 102-degree field of view, so it’s on par with competitors.

Samsung will ban the Note 7 from connecting to mobile networks in New Zealand

Despite a global recall, airline ban, and numerous financial incentives to get a new phone, some stubborn souls are still using their Galaxy Note 7s. The next step? Stop them connecting to mobile networks.Samsung announced yesterday that as of November 18th, anyone using a Note 7 in New Zealand will be disconnected from all mobile carriers. They won’t be able to make calls, send texts, or access mobile data, be that 3G or 4G.Wi-Fi access will be be unaffected by the move, but it should get the attention of those dragging their heels on returning the phone. According to New Zealand site Stuff.co.nz, the country’s Telecommunications Forum chief executive Geoff Thorn said most of the devices had already been exchanged, but a few hundred were still out there.

Here’s an Idea: Give Special Forces Some Flying Motorcycles

ELITE MILITARY FORCES have plenty of cool ways to reach targets. Black Hawk helicopters. V-22 Ospreys. Scuba gear.Here’s one more: a jet-powered flying motorbike that can hit 150 mph and happens to be carrying four Spike missiles.When Franky Zapata showed off his Flyboard earlier this year, zooming through the air 7,000 feet up at 55 mph, I knew a military version of the Green Goblin-inspired transportation would surely follow.So I thought up the Zaxon, a tactical vehicle that uses that turbojet technology to deploy special forces on the ground to a target less than 100 clicks away, possibly after dropping from a Lockheed Martin C-5 Galaxy.The size of a standard touring motorcycle, the single-seat Zaxon would use two larger engines up front, and two smaller ones in back. The jets could tilt slightly for liftoff, landing, or full-speed flying. The large fuel tank would sit inside the bike, taking the space usually occupied by a motorcycle engine.

Two jet nozzles would help with lateral stability, making small adjustments when necessary. An onboard flying system would help stabilize the vehicle automatically, although the pilot would need to be trained to properly feel the bike and learn how to react to its movements.The Zaxon would have landing skids like those on a helicopter. After dropping from the plane and free-falling, it would power up, then come in a for a low-speed landing and skid just a bit when touching down. As a backup, the Zaxon would carry a parachute for flights over 1,000 feet, and infrared lights for landing in darkness. Small wings could create more lift in level flight.

Like so many military vehicles, the Zaxon would cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, so a government arm like Darpa would be best equipped to make it reality. But once it exists, if costs come down, the nonmilitary types might be able to enjoy a civilian version.I developed the Zaxon concept in collaboration with Ashish Thulkar, an industrial designer from Bengalore, India. He also created the Drone Tower concept and the Tridika people mover.

It’s Finally Legal To Hack Your Own Devices (Even Your Car)

YOU MAY HAVE thought that if you owned your digital devices, you were allowed to do whatever you like with them. In truth, even for possessions as personal as your car, PC, or insulin pump, you risked a lawsuit every time you reverse-engineered their software guts to dig up their security vulnerabilities—until now.Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA’s ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair.

“This is a tremendously important improvement for consumer protection,” says Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “The Copyright Office has demonstrated that it understands our changed technological reality, that in every aspect of consumers’ lives, we rely on code,” says Matwyshyn, who argued for the exemptions last year.For now, the exemptions are limited to a two-year trial period. And the security research exemption in particular only applies to what the Copyright Office calls “good-faith” testing, “in a controlled environment designed to avoid any harm to individuals or to the public.” As Matwyshyn puts it, “We’re not talking about testing your neighbor’s pacemaker while it’s implanted. We’re talking about a controlled lab and a device owned by the researcher.”

But within those restrictions, the exemptions remove a looming fear of DMCA lawsuits that has long hung over the security research community. “There’s a universe of security vulnerabilities that the law keeps researchers from figuring out and telling you about, but are nonetheless present in devices you use every day,” says Kit Walsh, an attorney with the Electronic Freedom Foundation. “For the next two years, that threat will be lifted for many forms of security research that are really important.”Section 1201 of the DMCA has for years forbidden hackers from reverse-engineering many computer systems—even ones that they owned—in an attempt to prevent Americans from circumventing protections on the intellectual property of manufacturers. Sony used the law, for instance, to sue reverse-engineer George Hotz for hacking the Sony Playstation to allow it to run unauthorized software. (Sony and Hotz eventually settled that lawsuit in 2011, after Hotz agreed to stop reverse0engineering Sony’s products.) Tractor manufacturer John Deere last year cited the law to argue that tractor owners couldn’t repair certain software components of their vehicles.

Electron Microscopes Can Finally See in Wonderful Color

Imagine a Where’s Waldo book with nothing but black and white pictures. Good luck using his candy-stripe sweater as a visual cue. Now you know what it’s like trying to find a virus on a greyscale microscopic image. Microbiologists have dealt with this problem for decades, because when things get small, things go dark. Photons, bits of light essential to discerning color, are too clunky to resolve anything much smaller than say, a synapse connecting two neurons. If you want to look at things like viruses, bacteria, or molecules passing through cell walls, you must use an electron microscope.The devices, developed in the 1930s, use electromagnetic coils to bombard a chemically-prepped, vacuum-sealed specimen with, you guessed it, electrons. The resulting image is more like a shadow casting than a photograph, with the particles revealing shapes, depth, contours, and texture. But not color. Which sucks, because color is an excellent way of finding things—important things—hidden in an image.

Finding all those microscopic Waldos will be much easier, because investigators at the Center for Research in Biological Systems at UC San Diego developed a method for adding color to electron microscopic imagery. The method, published today in Cell Chemical Biology, involves two key technological developments: Treating specimens with rare earth metals, then examining them under a special type of electron microscope typically used to analyze novel synthetic materials.The colorizing process starts like normal electron microscopy. Electrons like metal, so the microscopist treats the specimen with a heavy metal, like lead, then creates a greyscale image—the base layer. The next step is treating the specimen with different types of rare earth metals called lanthanides (also used in lithium-ion batteries). Lanthanides are pickier than heavy metals and only stick to certain molecule types, which makes those the only molecules the electron microscope sees. The microscopist processes the image, assigns the layer a color—say, green—and layers it on top of the grayscale base layer.

“So now we have something that makes Waldo stand out from everything else, because we take one picture where everything that wasn’t Waldo disappears into grayscale, and then assign the Waldo molecules a color, like orange, and then put that back together with the greyscale,” says Mark Ellisman, microscopist at CRBS and co-author of the study. “We’ve found a way of making multiple Waldos stand out based on the way they interact with the electrons we throw at them.” That’s fine, but Waldo wore a red (striped) shirt, not orange.At the moment, the team can add just two or three colors per image. “The hardest part is being able to use several metal treatments in sequence without one cross contaminating the others,” says Ellisman. This electron colorizing work builds upon research that earned co-author Roger Tsien, who died in August, a Nobel in 2008. His death has done more than leave the team without a leader. It’s left them hurting for money. “We are thinking of crowdfunding to keep his vision going,” says Ellisman. The next big goal, in other words, is finding the color green.