If the efforts of the 10,000-plus people who developed and assembled the James Webb Space Telescope are any indication, the age of the independent scientist are well and truly over. Newton, Galileo, Keppler, and Copernicus all fundamentally altered humanity's understanding of our place in the universe, and did so on their own, but with the formalization and professionalization of the field in the Victorian Era, these occurences of an amatuer astronomer using homebrew equipment all the more rare.
In his new book, The Invisible World: Why There's More to Reality than Meets the Eye, University of Cambridge Public Astronomer, Matthew Bothwell tells the story of how we discovered an entire, previously unseen universe beyond humanity's natural sight. In the excerpt below, Bothwell recounts the exploits of Grote Reber, one of the world's first (and for a while, only) radio astronomers.
Oneworld Publishing
Excerpted with permissionfrom The Invisible Universe by Matthew Bothwell (Oneworld 2021).
The Only Radio Astronomer in the World
It’s a little strange to look back at how the astronomical world reacted to Jansky’s results. With hindsight, we can see that astronomy was about to be turned upside down by a revolution at least as big as the one started by Galileo’s telescope. Detecting radio waves from space marks the first time in history that humanity glimpsed the vast invisible Universe, hiding beyond the narrow window of the visible spectrum. It was a momentous occasion that was all but ignored in academic astronomy circles for one very simple reason: the world of radio engineering was just too far removed from the world of astronomy. When Jansky published his initial results he attempted to bridge the divide, spending half the paper giving his readers a crash-course in astronomy (explaining how to measure the location of things in the sky, and exactly why a signal repeating every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes meant something interesting). But, ultimately, the two disciplines suffered from a failure to communicate. The engineers spoke a language of vacuum tubes, amplifiers and antenna voltages: incomprehensible to the scientists more used to speaking of stars, galaxies and planets. As Princeton astronomer Melvin Skellett later put it:
The astronomers said ‘Gee that’s interesting – you mean there’s radio stuff coming from the stars?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s what it looks like’. ‘Very interesting.’ And that’s all they had to say about it. Anything from Bell Labs they had to believe, but they didn’t see any use for it or any reason to investigate further. It was so far from the way they thought of astronomy that there was no real interest.
After Jansky had moved on to other problems, there was only one person who became interested in listening to radio waves from space. For around a decade, from the mid-1930s until the mid-1940s, Grote Reber was the only radio astronomer in the world.
Grote Reber’s story is unique in all of twentieth-century science. He single-handedly developed an entire field of science, taking on the task of building equipment, conducting observations, and exploring the theory behind his discoveries. What makes him unique is that he did all of this as a complete amateur, working alone outside the scientific establishment. His job, designing electric equipment for radio broadcasts, had given him the skills to build his telescope. His fascination with the scientific literature brought him into contact with Jansky’s discovery of cosmic static, and when it became clear that no one else in the world seemed to care very much, he took it upon himself to invent the field of radio astronomy. He built his telescope in his Chicago back garden using equipment and materials available to anyone. His telescope, nearly ten metres across, was the talk of his neighbourhood (for good reason – it looks a bit like a cartoon doomsday device). His mother used it to dry her washing.
He spent years scanning the sky with his homemade machine. He observed with his telescope all night, every night, while still working his day job (apparently he would snatch a few hours of sleep in the evening after work, and again at dawn after he was finished at the telescope). When he realised he didn’t know enough physics and astronomy to understand the things he was seeing, he took courses at the local university. Over the years, his observations painted a beautiful picture of the sky as seen with radio eyes. He detected the sweep of our Milky Way, with bright spots at the galactic centre (where Jansky had picked up his star-static), and again towards the constellations Cygnus and Cassiopeia. By this time he had learned enough physics to make scientific contributions, too. He knew that if the hiss from the Milky Way was caused by thermal emission – heat radiation from stars or hot gas – then it would be stronger at shorter wavelengths. Given that Reber was picking up much shorter wavelengths than Jansky (60 cm, compared to Jansky’s fifteen-metre waves), Reber should have been bombarded with invisible radio waves tens of thousands of times more powerful than anything Jansky saw. But he wasn’t. Reber was confident enough in his equipment to conclude that whatever was making these radio waves, it had to be ‘non-thermal’ – that is, it was something different from the standard ‘hot things glow’ radiation we discussed back in chapter 2. He even proposed the (correct!) solution: that hot interstellar electrons whizzing past an ion – a positively charged atom – will get sling-shotted around like a Formula 1 car taking a tight corner. The cornering electron will emit a radio wave, and the combined effect of billions of these events is what Reber was detecting from his back garden. This only happens in clouds of hot gas. Reber was, it turns out, picking up radio waves being emitted by clouds containing new-born stars scattered throughout our Galaxy. He was, quite literally, listening to stars being born. It was a sound no human had ever heard before. To this day, radio observations are used to trace the formation of stars, from small clouds in our own Milky Way to the birth of galaxies in the most distant corners of the Universe.
In many ways, Reber’s story seems like an anachronism. The golden age of independent scientists, who could make groundbreaking discoveries working alone with homemade equipment, was hundreds of years ago. With the passing of the Victorian era, science became a complex, expensive, and above all professional business. Grote Reber is, as far as I know, the last of the amateur ‘outsider’ scientists; the last person who had no scientific training, built his own equipment in his garden, and through painstaking and meticulous work managed to change the scientific world.
Crowdsourcing automaker Local Motors will cease operations this Friday, according to employees, TechCrunch reports. The company has not yet officially announced its imminent demise, though its reactions from its workforce have already appeared on LinkedIn.
“As with most adventures, they must come to an end,” Jeff Hollowell, Local Motors VP of information technology, wrote on Thursday. “Local Motors has closed its doors. It has been an exciting, challenging, and educational experience working with Olli and all the team at Local Motors. I was fortunate to work with amazing individuals and help build what others said could not be done! I’ve been able to grow as a leader and learn new skills that I now take to my next path forward. Thanks to all the team members and partners that I was able to work with. The time spent was well worth the effort.”
Local Motors pioneered the idea of crowdsourcing the production of vehicles with 2016's, Olli, a 3D-printed 12-passenger microbus powered by now equally defunct IBM's Watson. It set off a minor arms race among automakers to produce a new class of autonomous EV people movers, however, imparting Level 4 autonomous capabilities has proven exceedingly difficult to date — in part due to technological shortcomings in the current generation of sensor and signal processing systems. Of. course, that hasn't dissuaded companies from trying, their efforts having led to a series of high-profile traffic accidents in recent years such as the Navya that wrecked in the opening hours of CES 2017, the Toyota e-Pallette that ran down a paralympian in August, and the solo-vehicle accident in Whitby, Ontario that critically injured a man last December.
Local Motors first made a name for itself with the Rally Fighter kit car before it pivoted to developing the Olli. The company had planned to launch a pilot program for the second iteration of its autonomous shuttle, the Olli 2.0, in Toronto last spring, however those plans were subsequently pushed back to February, 2022, and, with Thursday's revelation, will now likely never take place.
When you're the progenitor of an entire gaming genre and holding the reigns of a billion dollar intellectual property, imitation, it turns out, is not the sincerest form of flattery. It's the sort of thing that gets you dragged into US federal court. And that's exactly what Krafton, maker of PUBG Mobile, is doing to Garena Online over accusations that the Singapore-based game developer has once again infringed its battle royale IP. What's more, Krafton has named Google and Apple in its complaint.
This isn't the first time that Krafton has sued Garena Online. In 2017, Krafton filed suit in Singapore over the sale of Free Fire: Battlegrounds, Garena's suspiciously PUBG-like mobile shooter, but ended up settling that case. Now, Krafton is suing Garena again, over Free Fire again, but this time in US federal court.
Krafton alleges that after settling in 2017, Garena immediately resumed selling Free Fire on both Google Play and the Apple App Store without entering into any sort of licencing agreement to use the litigated game content. Additionally, Garena started selling of another battle royale game of questionable copyright pedigree, Free Fire Max, this past September. As such, Krafton is suing Garena for copyright infringement claiming that “Garena has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from its global sales of the infringing apps," and holding both the Google and Apple marketplaces liable for damages for hosting the content. Krafton, which is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, has not specified damages outside of a statutory $150,000 per infringement.
E-Ink technology has proven itself useful in many applications since its advent in 1997 — from digital whiteboards to laptop displays, even personal accessories. At CES 2022, that technology finally made its way to the automotive industry as BMW unveiled an e-ink vehicle exterior that can change colors depending on weather and traffic conditions, or just the driver's mood.
In answer to your first question, no, this futuristic feature is nowhere near production ready despite appearing at the show on a live demonstration vehicle, dubbed the BMW iX Flow featuring E Ink.
The electrophoretic coloring material itself is applied as a vehicle body wrap but works just like it e-ink displays do in your Kindle. The wrap is embedded with millions of microcapsules each containing a negatively-charged white pigment and a positively charged-black pigment. Depending on the setting, applying an electrical charge to the material will cause either the white or black pigments to rise to the top of the microcapsule, changing the vehicle's color in moments.
While the current iteration can only swap between a pair of colors, the palette could eventually be expanded to display a rainbow's worth of differing shades. "This gives the driver the freedom to express different facets of their personality or even their enjoyment of change outwardly, and to redefine this each time they sit into their car," Stella Clarke, Head of Project for the BMW iX Flow featuring E Ink, said in a prepared statement. "Similar to fashion or the status ads on social media channels, the vehicle then becomes an expression of different moods and circumstances in daily life."
E-ink exterior displays could also prove useful in more practical applications such as changing colors depending on the weather to increase a vehicle's battery life (and therefore, range) in cold climates or reduce the need for air conditioning in balmy weather.
We all knew this was coming. During its CES 2022 keynote address on Wednesday, GM CEO Mary Barra officially unveiled the new 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV, GM's second fully electric model built on the Ultium battery platform.
The fully-electric full size pickup will be available in two versions when it arrives late next year; the RST First Edition and a WT model designed for fleet usage. Both will offer an estimated 400-mile range, putting it on par with Tesla's Long-Range Plus Model S, as well as 10.2kW of offboard power to run anything from corded power tools to home accessories in the event of a power outage. The Silverado will also incorporate four-wheel steering and a multiflex tailgate that can accomodate cargo up to nearly 11 feet in length. On the interior, drivers will enjoy a fixed glass roof and a 17-inch LCD infotainment system. Additional features will be installed via OTA updates. Pricing and EPA range estimates have not yet been disclosed.
The Silverado joins the Hummer EV in GM's burgeoning electric vehicle lineup and will be made at the same Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant, GM's Factory ZERO, when production ramps up in 2023. They'll soon be joined by the Chevrolet Equinox EV SUV (with a starting price around $30,000) and a Chevy Blazer EV, both of which become available at some point in 2023.
Electrified pickups and SUVs may be all the rage but there's apparently still plenty of room in the EV market for more battery-powered autos and crossovers. At CES 2022 on Wednesday, Chrysler revealed its first fully electric vehicle concept, the Airflow.
“The Chrysler Airflow Concept represents the future direction of the Chrysler brand, providing a peek at the dynamic design, advanced technologies and seamless connectivity that will characterize the full-electric portfolio we plan to reach by 2028,” Chris Feuell, Chrysler CEO, said in a press statement.
Stellantis
Being a concept vehicle, the Airflow has most every bell and whistle Chrysler could include such as an in-vehicle camera for in-vehicle video conference calls as well as the company's new E/E (electrical/electronic) and software platforms, STLA Brain, STLA SmartCockpit, and STLA AutoDrive. STLA Brain serves as the vehicle's central controller, allowing it to receive OTA updates. SmartCockpit, on the other hand, runs the Airflow's infotainment system, providing navigation and voice control, as well as an on-board app store, for both the driver and passengers. Autodrive will reportedly offer Level 3 self-driving features with the capability for further feature improvements via the those OTA updates.
The Airflow concept is equipped with dual 150kW motors, giving the crossover AWD capabilities and a Chrysler-estimated 350 - 400 mile range. Exterior design details include full-width LED tail lights and 22-inch rims, while the leather-bound interior boasts individual climate control options, separate dash-mounted touchscreens for the driver and front passenger (as well as seat-back mounted screens for both rear passengers), and ambient lighting that shifts based on the passengers’ preferences and what's playing on the the central displays.
Stellantis
Being but a concept vehicle, the Airflow that arrives in 2025 could — and likely will — look and perform a bit differently from what was announced today. Looking at you, promises of level 3 autonomy.
Hot on the (w)heels of our October test drive with BMW's iX, the luxury automaker has unveiled a more powerful — but equally-electrified — performance edition of the EV flagship at CES 2022 in Las Vegas, the new 2023 iX M60. Building on more than 50 years of design development with the automaker's prestigious M line, the iX M60 (along with the upcoming i4 M50) mark BMW's first forays into high-performance electric vehicles.
BMW
In addition to sporting 610 horsepower, the all-wheel drive iX M60 will offer 811 ft-lbs of torque, which translates into a 3.6 second 0-60 (not bad for a vehicle weighing 6,900 pounds), a top speed of 155 mph, and an estimated 280 mile range using the standard 21-inch wheels. It's dual synchronous motors are current-energized, meaning that their rotational speed is based on the amount of electrical energy applied — rather than relying on permanent magnets to generate the magnetic field turns the wheels. According to BMW, this improves both the vehicle's overall power density and its peak power output while eliminating the need for rare earth elements in the motors' construction.
Its battery pack has a usable capacity of 106 kWh (111.5 kWh total). A full charge (0-100 percent capacity) on an 11W AC plug will take around 10.5 hours to complete (or a whopping 33 hours at 3.7 kW). Charging up to 80 percent on a DC fast charger will take 97 minutes at 50 kW, 40 minutes at 120 kW or just 35 minutes if you're lucky enough to find a charging station outfitted with it a 250kW port (note that the M60's 369V architecture limits its DC charging rate to 195 kW even if you do get lucky with an ultrafast station).
BMW
Outwardly, the M60 is quite similar to the iX. It measures 195 x 77 x 65 inches and incorporates an aluminum space frame and carbon cage with carbon fiber reinforced plastic in the roof, side and rear. But if you look closer, you'll notice M60-exclusive blue brake calipers and optional 22-inch rims. Of the eight available exterior colors, Titanium Bronze is only available on the M60, as are the optional Titanium Bronze wheels.
BMW
On the interior, M60 drivers will have their pick of five seat color options (either using SensaTec material or perforated leather) as well as the regular set of features, gadgets and ADAS systems we've come to expect on luxury vehicles. That includes a Bowers & Wilkins Diamond surround sound system, a panoramic "Sky Lounge" LED roof, adaptive LED headlights and myriad driver and traffic monitoring sensors, and something called BMW Natural Interaction, which allows you to control the infotainment system with verbal commands and hand gestures.
Pricing for the M60 will start at $106,095 when the orders begin this June. BMW's keynote is scheduled for 11am PT on Wednesday, January 5th so stay tuned for more breaking news about the iX M60 and the rest of BMW's CES lineup.
Despite Tesla's ambitious claims of its vehicles' Full Self-Driving capabilities, today's autonomous navigation technology generally tops out at Level 2. More advanced self-driving systems are in development but likely still years away from being safe and cost-effective enough for everyday use. Seoul Robotics, however, has developed a mesh network that reportedly imparts Level 5 autonomy to vehicle fleets, if only for the "last mile."
The company's Level 5 Control Tower system sidesteps some technical challenges of self-driving technology by embedding sensors in the surrounding infrastructure — traffic lights, nearby buildings, freeway overpasses, etc — rather than on the vehicles themselves. Instead of each vehicle looking out for itself and responding autonomously to surrounding traffic, the Level 5 Control Tower uses its meshed sensor network to collect data on the overall traffic situation and automate vehicles in the area accordingly, using V2X communications and 4/5G radios.
Seoul Robotics
“Ultimately, these systems will be deployed in additional public and business settings, powering aspects of our everyday lives, such as autonomously navigated parking and public transit," HanBin Lee, CEO of Seoul Robotics, said in a prepared statement Tuesday. Eventually the technology could find its way to a number of commercial applications from vehicle distribution centers to car rental lots.
BMW is currently trialling the system to manage fleet logistics at its manufacturing facility in Munich. That system utilizes Seoul Robotics' SENSR software and a network of hundreds of LiDAR sensors embedded around the facility to autonomously move newly-constructed vehicles across the factory floor. Because the system has vantage points from virtually every angle, rather than the half dozen or so sensors on the vehicle itself, Control Tower can easily guide individual vehicles around blind spots and through cross traffic — even while simultaneously "driving" hundreds of other automotive drones.
With modern consoles offering gamers graphics so photorealistic that they blur the line between CGI and reality, it's easy forget just how cartoonishly blocky they were in the 8-bit era. In his new book, Creating Q*Bert and Other Classic Arcade Games, legendary game designer and programmer Warren Davis recalls his halcyon days imagining and designing some of the biggest hits to ever grace an arcade. In the excerpt below, Davis explains how the industry made its technological leap from 8- to 12-bit graphics.
Back at my regular day job, I became particularly fascinated with a new product that came out for the Amiga computer: a video digitizer made by a company called A-Squared. Let’s unpack all that slowly.
The Amiga was a recently released home computer capable of unprecedented graphics and sound: 4,096 colors! Eight-bit stereo sound! There were image manipulation programs for it that could do things no other computer, including the IBM PC, could do. We had one at Williams not only because of its capabilities, but also because our own Jack Haeger, an immensely talented artist who’d worked on Sinistar at Williams a few years earlier, was also the art director for the Amiga design team.
Video digitization is the process of grabbing a video image from some video source, like a camera or a videotape, and converting it into pixel data that a computer system (or video game) could use. A full-color photograph might contain millions of colors, many just subtly different from one another. Even though the Amiga could only display 4,096 colors, that was enough to see an image on its monitor that looked almost perfectly photographic.
Our video game system still could only display 16 colors total. At that level, photographic images were just not possible. But we (and by that I mean everyone working in the video game industry) knew that would change. As memory became cheaper and processors faster, we knew that 256-color systems would soon be possible. In fact, when I started looking into digitized video, our hardware designer, Mark Loffredo, was already playing around with ideas for a new 256-color hardware system.
Let’s talk about color resolution for a second. Come on, you know you want to. No worries if you don’t, though, you can skip these next few paragraphs if you like. Color resolution is the number of colors a computer system is capable of displaying. And it’s all tied in to memory. For example, our video game system could display 16 colors. But artists weren’t locked into 16 specific colors. The hardware used a “palette.” Artists could choose from a fairly wide range of colors, but only 16 of them could be saved in the palette at any given time. Those colors could be programmed to change while a game was running. In fact, changing colors in a palette dynamically allowed for a common technique used in old video games called “color cycling.”
For the hardware to know what color to display at each pixel location, each pixel on the screen had to be identified as one of those 16 colors in the palette. The collection of memory that contained the color values for every pixel on the screen was called “screen memory.” Numerically, it takes 4 bits (half a byte) to represent 16 numbers (trust me on the math here), so if 4 bits = 1 pixel, then 1 byte of memory could hold 2 pixels. By contrast, if you wanted to be able to display 256 colors, it would take 8 bits to represent 256 numbers. That’s 1 byte (or 8 bits) per pixel.
So you’d need twice as much screen memory to display 256 colors as you would to display 16. Memory wasn’t cheap, though, and game manufacturers wanted to keep costs down as much as possible. So memory prices had to drop before management approved doubling the screen memory.
Today we take for granted color resolutions of 24 bits per pixel (which potentially allows up to 16,777,216 colors and true photographic quality). But back then, 256 colors seemed like such a luxury. Even though it didn’t approach the 4,096 colors of the Amiga, I was convinced that such a system could result in close to photo-realistic images. And the idea of having movie-quality images in a video game was very exciting to me, so I pitched to management the advantages of getting a head start on this technology. They agreed and bought the digitizer for me to play around with.
The Amiga’s digitizer was crude. Very crude. It came with a piece of hardware that plugged into the Amiga on one end, and to the video output of a black-and-white surveillance camera (sold separately) on the other. The camera needed to be mounted on a tripod so it didn’t move. You pointed it at something (that also couldn’t move), and put a color wheel between the camera and the subject. The color wheel was a circular piece of plastic divided into quarters with different tints: red, green, blue, and clear.
When you started the digitizing process, a motor turned the color wheel very slowly, and in about thirty to forty seconds you had a full-color digitized image of your subject. “Full-color” on the Amiga meant 4 bits of red, green, and blue—or 12-bit color, resulting in a total of 4,096 colors possible.
It’s hard to believe just how exciting this was! At that time, it was like something from science fiction. And the coolness of it wasn’t so much how it worked (because it was pretty damn clunky) but the potential that was there. The Amiga digitizer wasn’t practical—the camera and subject needed to be still for so long, and the time it took to grab each image made the process mind-numbingly slow—but just having the ability to produce 12-bit images at all enabled me to start exploring algorithms for color reduction.
Color reduction is the process of taking an image with a lot of colors (say, up to the 16,777,216 possible colors in a 24-bit image) and finding a smaller number of colors (say, 256) to best represent that image. If you could do that, then those 256 colors would form a palette, and every pixel in the image would be represented by a number—an “index” that pointed to one of the colors in that palette. As I mentioned earlier, with a palette of 256 colors, each index could fit into a single byte.
But I needed an algorithm to figure out how to pick the best 256 colors out of the thousands that might be present in a digitized image. Since there was no internet back then, I went to libraries and began combing through academic journals and technical magazines, searching for research done in this area. Eventually, I found some! There were numerous papers written on the subject, each outlining a different approach, some easier to understand than others. Over the next few weeks, I implemented a few of these algorithms for generating 256 color palettes using test images from the Amiga digitizer. Some gave better results than others. Images that were inherently monochromatic looked the best, since many of the 256 colors could be allotted to different shades of a single color.
During this time, Loffredo was busy developing his 256-color hardware. His plan was to support multiple circuit boards, which could be inserted into slots as needed, much like a PC. A single board would give you one surface plane to draw on. A second board gave you two planes, foreground and background, and so on. With enough planes, and by having each plane scroll horizontally at a slightly different rate, you could give the illusion of depth in a side-scrolling game.
All was moving along smoothly until the day word came down that Eugene Jarvis had completed his MBA and was returning to Williams to head up the video department. This was big news! I think most people were pretty excited about this. I know I was, because despite our movement toward 256-color hardware, the video department was still without a strong leader at the helm. Eugene, given his already legendary status at Williams, was the perfect person to take the lead, partly because he had some strong ideas of where to take the department, and also due to management’s faith in him. Whereas anybody else would have to convince management to go along with an idea, Eugene pretty much had carte blanche in their eyes. Once he was back, he told management what we needed to do and they made sure he, and we, had the resources to do it.
This meant, however, that Loffredo’s planar hardware system was toast. Eugene had his own ideas, and everyone quickly jumped on board. He wanted to create a 256-color system based on a new CPU chip from Texas Instruments, the 34010 GSP (Graphics System Processor). The 34010 was revolutionary in that it included graphics-related features within its core. Normally, CPUs would have no direct connection to the graphics portion of the hardware, though there might be some co-processor to handle graphics chores (such as Williams’ proprietary VLSI blitter). But the 34010 had that capability on board, obviating the need for a graphics co-processor.
Looking at the 34010’s specs, however, revealed that the speed of its graphics functions, while well-suited for light graphics work such as spreadsheets and word processors, was certainly not fast enough for pushing pixels the way we needed. So Mark Loffredo went back to the drawing board to design a VLSI blitter chip for the new system.
Around this time, a new piece of hardware arrived in the marketplace that signaled the next generation of video digitizing. It was called the Image Capture Board (ICB), and it was developed by a group within AT&T called the EPICenter (which eventually split from AT&T and became Truevision). The ICB was one of three boards offered, the others being the VDA (Video Display Adapter, with no digitizing capability) and the Targa (which came in three different configurations: 8-bit, 16-bit, and 24-bit). The ICB came with a piece of software called TIPS that allowed you to digitize images and do some minor editing on them. All of these boards were designed to plug in to an internal slot on a PC running MS-DOS, the original text-based operating system for the IBM PC. (You may be wondering . . . where was Windows? Windows 1.0 was introduced in 1985, but it was terribly clunky and not widely used or accepted. Windows really didn’t achieve any kind of popularity until version 3.0, which arrived in 1990, a few years after the release of Truvision’s boards.)
A little bit of trivia: the TGA file format that’s still around today (though not as popular as it once was) was created by Truevision for the TARGA series of boards. The ICB was a huge leap forward from the Amiga digitizer in that you could use a color video camera (no more black-and-white camera or color wheel), and the time to grab a frame was drastically reduced—not quite instantaneous, as I recall, but only a second or two, rather than thirty or forty seconds. And it internally stored colors as 16-bits, rather than 12 like the Amiga. This meant 5 bits each of red, green, and blue—the same that our game hardware used—resulting in a true-color image of up to 32,768 colors, rather than 4,096. Palette reduction would still be a crucial step in the process. The greatest thing about the Truevision boards was they came with a Software Development Kit (SDK), which meant I could write my own software to control the board, tailoring it to my specific needs. This was truly amazing! Once again, I was so excited about the possibilities that my head was spinning.
I think it’s safe to say that most people making video games in those days thought about the future. We realized that the speed and memory limitations we were forced to work under were a temporary constraint. We realized that whether the video game industry was a fad or not, we were at the forefront of a new form of storytelling. Maybe this was a little more true for me because of my interest in filmmaking, or maybe not. But my experiences so far in the game industry fueled my imagination about what might come. And for me, the holy grail was interactive movies. The notion of telling a story in which the player was not a passive viewer but an active participant was extremely compelling. People were already experimenting with it under the constraints of current technology. Zork and the rest of Infocom’s text adventure games were probably the earliest examples, and more would follow with every improvement in technology. But what I didn’t know was if the technology needed to achieve my end goal—fully interactive movies with film-quality graphics—would ever be possible in my lifetime. I didn’t dwell on these visions of the future. They were just thoughts in my head. Yet, while it’s nice to dream, at some point you’ve got to come back down to earth. If you don’t take the one step in front of you, you can be sure you’ll never reach your ultimate destination, wherever that may be.
I dove into the task and began learning the specific capabilities of the board, as well as its limitations. With the first iteration of my software, which I dubbed WTARG (“W” for Williams, “TARG” for TARGA), you could grab a single image from either a live camera or a videotape. I added a few different palette reduction algorithms so you could try each and find the best palette for that image. More importantly, I added the ability to find the best palette for a group of images, since all the images of an animation needed to have a consistent look. There was no chroma key functionality in those early boards, so artists would have to erase the background manually. I added some tools to help them do that.
This was a far cry from what I ultimately hoped for, which was a system where we could point a camera at live actors and instantly have an animation of their action running on our game hardware. But it was a start.
The modern electric vehicle renaissance has been hampered from day one by the physical limitations imposed by the current state of battery technology. Inefficiencies in the form of heavy battery packs and low power densities have long limited not just the range and performance of EVs but the very forms they can take — there’s a reason Tesla started with a Roadster and not a Cybertruck. But steady advancements in power systems over the past few years — alongside skyrocketing demand for larger, electrified vehicles which cater to the US market — has led to a watershed moment in 2021: the emergence of EV pickups and SUVs.
Yes, we all know the Model X exists and Tesla “did it first” — spare me your tweets — however, the sheer number and variety of new, pure EV pickup and SUV models either ready to hit the showroom floor or in active development is staggering compared to just a few years ago. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s standouts.
The Hummer EV has been a surefire hit since its debut last October. More than 10,000 potential buyers had placed down payments on the $112,000 Hummer Edition 1 by last December. Similarly, the Hummer’s EV SUV variant revealed in April had its pre-orders sell out in minutes — not bad for a vehicle that won’t actually hit the streets until Fall 2023. Deliveries for the Hummer EV pickup are slated to begin this month. There have even been rumblings about adapting the Hummer EV frame and power system to military applications, though no firm decisions on that proposal have yet been made.
Hummers are only the start. In April, GM confirmed that its second EV model will be an electrified Silverado. We still don’t know a whole lot about the Silverado beyond that it will leverage GM’s Ultium battery tech, that the company is aiming for a 400-plus mile range, and that the EV pickup will offer four-wheel steering, which shortens turn radius’ at low speeds and increases cornering stability at high speeds — especially when towing loads.
We’ll have a full accounting of the Silverado’s capabilities once it makes its official debut during GM’s CES 2022 keynote address. What’s more, GM teased its third upcoming EV in July — a full-size GMC pickup, according to CNBC. Virtually nothing else is known about it at this time, not even if it will use the existing GMC Sierra branding. Hopefully, we’ll get some more hints in the new year.
Not to be outdone, the Stellantis Group (formerly FCA and umbrella company to Chrysler, Jeep Dodge, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Maserati and a host of others) announced in July that it, too, will be investing $35 billion towards its electrification efforts through 2025 and will have 55 electrified vehicles (40 BEVs, 15 PHEVs) available in the US and European markets by the end of that year. What’s more, Stellantis is working on an all-electric Ram EV to compete with the Silverado and Ford F-150 Lightning, though the Ram isn’t expected to be released until 2024. For its part in 2021, Jeep showed off a slick-looking Wrangler BEV concept in March, released its “light hybrid” Wrangler Sahara 4XE in May and debuted its PHEV Cherokee 4XE in September ahead of the vehicle’s 2022 release.
Ford also had a year worthy of honking its own horn about, starting with the February release of the Mustang Mach-E. The EV was met with a bit of trepidation to start but cemented its position with the release of the performance-focused GT edition. In all, Ford had sold more 21,000 Mach-E units through this past October, despite a handful of recalls for loose bolts and “deep sleeping” software bugs. That’s not bad for a first-year crossover SUV working to get past deeply ingrained customer nostalgia, but the Mach-E’s numbers are nothing compared to the hype Ford’s upcoming F-150 Lightning EV has garnered.
Interest in Ford’s upcoming light hybrid Maverick pickup has been no less rampant. The Detroit News reported in August that more than 100,000 people had allegedly signed up to preorder the mini-truck, a large portion of which were California residents. Granted, those folks weren’t obligated to place a down payment so whether all those pre-orders translate into actual sales — or folks just decide to restomod their existing ICE Fords with the eluminator system instead — remains to be seen.
This year, the company also announced plans to install 10,000 charging stations across North America by 2023, unveiled a membership plan for owners offering both Roadside and off-Roadside Assistance as well as exclusive OTA software updates, and outlined its Remote Care program which would offer remote diagnoses and on-site repairs for the electric trucks. The startup has big plans for the future as well. It announced plans to invest $5 billion in a second US-based production plant and is reportedly eyeing the UK as the site for its first international battery facility.
Some of those future plans will involve partnerships with other companies such as Amazon — which owns a 20 percent stake in Rivian, purchased 100,000 vehicles from the startup in 2019 and has already begun making deliveries in San Francisco and Los Angeles with them — but they won’t include Ford. Despite investing half a billion dollars in the EV startup two years ago, Ford announced in November that the two companies will no longer collaborate on an upcoming EV. Looks like that rumored electric Lincoln will likely stay dead for the time being.
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On the other end of the headline spectrum is, surprisingly, Tesla. Despite the company’s massively profitable year, the development of its Cybertruck has been slow going. While CEO Elon Musk announced in January that “volume production” of the EV SUV will begin in 2022, it’s increasingly looking like that will happen later in the year — after Ford’s F-150 Lightning and GMC’s Hummer EV hit the roads, both of which debuted well after the Cybertruck did.
We’ve seen much hype and grandiose promises about EV pickup trucks and SUVs over the last few years but 2022 will be the year when everything comes out in the wash. Consumers will finally be able to see these vehicles on the streets, in their neighborhoods, and likely breathing down their necks while stuck in traffic, rather than just on a showroom floor or livestream presentation stage. This is a huge opportunity for automakers to further evangelize the benefits of battery electrics over their internal combustion predecessors — this time using America’s favorite type of vehicle.
