V-Moda's new earbuds can be bought with 3D-printed lion heads made from solid gold

V-Moda announced a new “Forza” line of headphones this week. The three Forza headphones are all in-ear models designed for fitness and sport use, which represents a bit of a departure from the over-ear style that the company is typically known for.

There’s the base model, the $100 Forza, which is a fairly standard pair of sports headphones with a sweat-proof plastic casing. Next, for a bit more money, there’s the $130 Forza Metallo, which are essentially the same headphones as the cheaper Forza but upgrade the casing from plastic to metal and the cable to a reinforced cord. Internally, both sets use 5.8mm drivers, support high-resolution audio, and connect via a standard 3.5mm jack. Lastly, there’s the top-tier model, the $170 Forza Metallo Wireless neckbuds, which takes the same metal earbuds as the standard Metallo and adds a titanium neckband for a claimed 10-plus hours of battery life over a Bluetooth connection.

 

But that’s not the important part. All of the Forza models are built to be customized by a variety of interchangeable decorative 3D-printed caps. V-Moda currently offers three different cap options for purchase — although more designs are shown on the site and may be offered at some point as well.

For now, there’s the gear-covered “Steampunk,” a “V-Design” option that features the V-Moda logo, and the obviously correct choice, “Lion,” which as the name may suggest is a miniature 3D-printed lion’s head. To take it one step further, V-Moda offers a choice of materials that you can select to 3D print your chosen caps out of, from the relatively cheap $20 acrylic to 10 different precious metals, including brass, 14K gold (both plated and solid), and, for those with a cool $7,500 to spare, pure platinum.

It’s hard to know if the Forza models are good headphones without listening to them. V-Moda has a good reputation in the audio world, and early word from my colleague Chris Welch is that the entry-level Forza earbuds sound good, for the price. But I do know this: these are the only headphones in the world that can come in the form of extravagantly expensive solid gold lion heads. And if that’s not worth something, I don’t know what is.

Twitter introduces customer service bots in direct messages

Twitter is rolling out bot-like features inside its direct messaging feature in an effort to lure more brands into using it as a customer service platform. The company today introduced automated “welcome” messages for customers who send a DM to a brand, along with “quick replies” that let customers choose from pre-written messages to complete common tasks. (“What’s the status of my order?”) You can try it now by messaging beloved brands Pizza Hut and Evernote, preferably about the sorry state of the consumer productivity market (in the case of Pizza Hut) or pizza (in the case of Evernote).

Twitter has long been a popular service for airing consumer grievances, as anyone who has ever read a tweetstorm from someone stuck for several hours on a tarmac can attest. But as in so many things, Twitter was slow to take advantage of its initial lead, and this spring Facebook came along to launch pretty much exactly what Twitter launched today. So far consumers have reacted to bot-based customer service on Messenger with a collective shrug, but over here on The Verge bot desk we’re still optimistic, given that the software is improving and no one ever wants to call a 1-800 number ever again.“These features are designed to help businesses create rich, responsive, full-service experiences that directly advance the work of customer service teams and open up new possibilities for how people engage with businesses on Twitter,” Twitter says. The more that customer service grievances stay inside DMs, as opposed to the public timeline, the happier we are likely to be.

GoPro needs a very good holiday season after a disastrous third quarter

GoPro released its third quarter earnings today, and the company’s sales dropped to $240.5 million from $400 million in 2015, a 40 percent fall. The company’s stock price fell to $11.94 per share at the end of the day’s trading and was halted after hours — it had been as high as $17.15 per share shortly after the announcement of the new Hero 5 cameras and Karma drone back in September. (That was the company’s highest stock price since January.)During a call with investors, CEO Nick Woodman partially attributed the poor third quarter sales to production problems with Hero 5 and Karma drone, which he says affected their early retail availability.GoPro, which is known for its durable line of action cameras, is still betting that those new products will sell well this holiday season. The company estimates fourth quarter revenue to be $625 million — an optimistic figure in light of the fact that GoPro has only cracked $400 million of quarterly revenue four times since it went public in 2013. Meanwhile, the company’s stock has been in relative decline since the summer of 2015.

What’s clear now is that GoPro is desperate for a very good holiday season, one that brings the company close to the level of its monster fourth quarter in 2014 — the first holiday season where the Hero 4 cameras were on sale. The holiday season has historically been GoPro’s best quarter, so it’s key that the the company find a way to climb back to those heights to get close to that guidance.

Pulling that off is all about customers, and whether or not GoPro can find a way to either attract new ones or convince existing ones to upgrade to those new products. The Hero 5 Black is a good camera, and it has some compelling new features like voice control and waterproofing. The Hero 5 Session is more capable than its flailing predecessor. And both new cameras are $100 cheaper at retail than any of the Hero 4 cameras ever were. Those are all good things for new customers who might be considering a GoPro camera for the first time, but are possibly not enough to convince Hero 4 owners to make the switch (or even add a Hero 5 to their collections).

“The thesis for GoPro remains the same: the world is filled with an increasing number of consumers that are interested in capturing and expressing themselves visually and socially,” Woodman said during the investor call. “GoPro is at the epicenter of that, as a storytelling solution that really is a differentiated way to capture and share one’s life in a manner that you simply cannot do with a smartphone or DSLR.”Meanwhile, the Karma drone offers slick integration with these cameras, and at a competitive price. But that comes at the cost of expected features like collision avoidance and intelligent tracking modes, and GoPro faces stiff competition from category leader DJI.

The card GoPro still holds is its retail presence. No other camera company and few consumer tech companies have the kind of retail presence that GoPro has. You see GoPro products not just at Best Buys and Walmarts, but at places like airport newsstands as well.

If that’s the case, it could buy enough time for GoPro to keep pushing the company’s software efforts. GoPro has spent the last few years building out a significant software team, and this year that started to manifest not just in better (and new) desktop and mobile apps, but also in products like a cloud storage subscription service that gives users access to their footage on basically any device. The company is starting to position itself less as a hardware maker and more of a platform, and growth (or survival) may rely on convincing people of this.“We’ve now deployed what, in some cases, you could argue is the full GoPro 1.0 vision for the first time,” Woodman said during the investor call. “2017 will be more of an evolutionary year for us versus a revolutionary year.”

Ricoh announces a smaller, cheaper 360-degree camera

Ricoh has just announced a smaller, cheaper version of the Theta S — the company’s handheld 360-degree camera. The new camera is called the Theta SC, uses twin f2.0 lenses and two 12-megapixel sensors to capture 360-degree stills and 1080p-quality spherical video. It costs $300 and it's on sale today at Ricoh's website and other traditional camera retailers.If it’s anything like the Theta S, the Theta SC will be easy to use. But that ease of use comes at a price. The Theta S’s muddy video quality was forgivable when the camera was announced one year ago, but the 360-degree camera landscape has changed dramatically since then. Samsung, Nikon, Kodak, and dozens of startups all offer cameras that are either just as approachable as the Theta S, offer better quality, or both. It’s nice that this new camera costs less and is a bit smaller, but the Theta SC likely wont push any of the boundaries of this new type of photography.

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.