Three months ago, Spotify predicted that user growth would start falling, because COVID-19 had prompted so many people to sign up than expected. Today, the audio giant was proved right, as new signups fell to nine million new users in the most recent quarter, but slower growth isn’t always a bad thing. Of that nine million figure, seven million users signed up for Premium, versus just two million who went ad-supported. It means that Spotify was also able to announce a second successive quarter of profitability after a long period of losses.
The total number of Spotify users now stands at 365 million, of which 165 million are paying for Premium, while the remaining 210 are ad-supported. Converting more of Spotify’s vast ad-supported user base into Premium users is one way to ensure the company remains profitable. Another, of course, is to boost its growing advertising business, which has been bolstered by Spotify’s numerous podcast offerings. The company said that it saw “triple digit” year-on-year gain in ad-sales for the company’s owned podcast outlets, including The Ringer, Parcast and Gimlet.
The last three months has seen Spotify intensify work to push users toward cheaper forms of audio content than music. It says that Joe Rogan’s podcast has performed “above expectations,” while shows out of The Ringer saw big bumps in listenership as the NBA headed into the playoff season. No mention this month of how many people are tuning in to listen to former President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen hang out, which was the second biggest podcast on the platform from the start of the year.
As for the future, Spotify says that it’s hoping to add at least 12 million more users in total, and at least another five million more paying customers. It is still expecting to reach the coveted 400 million user figure by the end of the year, although given the uncertainties still present with COVID-19, you never can be sure.
One problem with our electric vehicle future is the need for ubiquitous, easy-to-use charging points all over the world. After all, the only way to avoid range and lines-at-the-charger anxiety is to make sure you can get power whenever you need it. That’s what makes a project, started by Indiana’s Department of Transport, so exciting: It’s working on a road that can charge your EV as you drive.
Backed by the National Science Foundation, and in partnership with Purdue University, the team will test concrete embedded with magnetized particles. This magnetized cement, or Magment, will be produced by a German company (also called Magment). The idea will, if early tests prove successful, see Indiana’s DOT build a quarter-mile track of Magment to see if it can charge a heavy duty truck while it trundles along.
A number of countries, including the UK and Sweden, are currently testing road-based charging. If it works, we won’t need to reorder our lives to accommodate an EV. Better still, permanently available power may make it easier to build cars with smaller batteries, knowing you’re never more than a few inches from your next set of electrons.
Steam Deck, Valve’s handheld console, brings PC gaming to your morning commute. The open question, of course, was how such a wee device would cope with the demanding, graphically intensive titles of the last few years. Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais explained that the console will ship with an option to limit the frame rate. This Frame Limiter, which has a lower limit of 30 frames per second, was tested on Portal 2, which lasted four hours without it, and six with. It seems like Valve is at least aware its handheld is more than a little ambitious and is making every effort to ensure it actually works. Continue Reading.
China has unveiled its design for a “clean” nuclear reactor, which is at less risk of meltdown and doesn’t require water for cooling. This reactor, which uses thorium and molten salt, is a bit of a holy grail for our clean energy future, at least until something better comes along. Tests should begin later this year, and there’s hope of seeing the first working commercial reactor in the early 2030s. Developed by the US in the early ‘60s, thorium and molten salt reactors are comparable to current uranium reactors. Why was the technology mothballed? For a couple of reasons, most notably because, unlike uranium, the technology didn’t work for weapons. Continue Reading.
Ingenuity, NASA’s Mars helicopter, has now covered a mile of distance flown while studying the surface of the Red Planet. On its latest jaunt, the 10th so far, it zoomed around taking pictures of the Raised Ridges region of the Jezero Crater. They will help mission commanders determine if the Perseverance rover can make it over the rough terrain. Continue Reading.
The 2020 Summer Games, before all of the running and jumping and swimming started, was a feast for the more nerdily inclined. The opening ceremony featured a light show, with a fleet of 1,824 drones taking center stage. Initially forming the shape of the five rings, the craft then recombined to create a 3D globe in the air, while a rendition of Imagine, re-orchestrated by Hans Zimmer, rang throughout the stadium. And the geeky festivities didn’t stop there: The athletes walked out to orchestrated versions of classic video game songs. Continue Reading.
Framework is a laptop designed, from the get-go, to be modular and repairable by every one of its users. Created by Nirav Patel, formerly of Oculus, the machine aims to demonstrate that there is a better, more sustainable way of doing things. It shouldn’t be that, if your tech fails, you either have to buy a new model, or let the manufacturer’s in-house repair teams charge $700 for a job that should've cost $50. After all, if we’re going to survive climate change, we need to treat our tech more sustainably and keep as much as possible out of the landfill.
Daniel Cooper
It says so much about how consumer technology has changed over the last two decades that Framework even exists. The idea that a repairable, modular laptop is somehow a radical proposition is outrageous given what lurks inside. And some corners of the tech world may think that users will need to put up with agricultural performance and looks in exchange for longevity. That’s why the best word I can use to describe Framework’s first, eponymous, machine is uncontroversial. The only time you’ll need to understand that this machine is repairable, is if it breaks.
Hardware
Daniel Cooper
It’s worth noting that Framework hasn’t invented the repairable laptop, or even the idea of modular expansion ports. The latter was common in laptops through to the late ‘00s and, even today, many enterprise laptops from the likes of HP and Lenovo have clear, detailed repair guides and easy-to-access spare parts. Framework isn’t claiming credit that it doesn’t deserve, but it is here, much like Fairphone, to show everyone that we shouldn’t tolerate the default.
There’s nothing spectacular, eye-catching or otherwise attention-seeking about the design of the first Framework laptop. Walk past it in a hurry and you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for any other 13-inch notebook made in the last half a decade. The aluminum body (made with up to 50 percent post-consumer recycled aluminum) makes it look like an old-school MacBook. From the front, it’s unmistakably a Windows laptop, but again, there are no steampunk flexes here. It’s only when you’re looking at it off-angle that you can tell something’s different.
I/O
Daniel Cooper
Rather than having ports stacked tight at the top of the mainboard, each side of Framework’s deck has two wide voids. Peer inside and you’ll see a USB-C port just visible buried deep in the machine’s guts. These voids are designed to house four “expansion cards” which can be swapped in depending on your need (so long as you press the release button on the bottom).
Each card offers a single port, connecting to the laptop over USB-C, and is designed to eliminate the need for a dedicated dongle. In the standard setup, you’ll get a quartet of USB-C cards — and you’ll need at least one for charging — but there are a number of others available. That includes options for USB-A, DisplayPort, HDMI and a microSD Card reader. You can also order an expansion card with additional external storage, with 250GB costing $69, and 1TB setting you back $149. Framework says that users can lobby for different cards in future, so all of those folks grousing for a full-size SD-card reader can get cracking.
Nestled between the ports is a small, white LED which lets you know when the machine is connected to power. Oh, and there’s a dedicated 3.5mm audio jack.
Daniel Cooper
My one complaint about the look of this thing is that the sides of the deck artificially taper in to make it look thinner than it really is. Because the base flares out underneath almost immediately, it looks a bit like it’s cheating. It would have been nicer if Framework had embraced the pleasant squareness of its design, rather than trying to disguise it.
In terms of build quality, the only thing to add is that the machine has a lot more flex than its contemporaries. This is, broadly speaking, the one benefit of these all-in-one, glue-heavy machines which are difficult to repair. The Framework, by comparison, squeaks and creaks when you twist the case, and you can see the dividing line between the keyboard and the rest of the deck as you do so.
Display
The 13.5-inch, 3:2, 2,256 x 1,504 display is lovely, and I feel like these days displays are so hard to mess up that there’s little more you can say about them. The backlight will push up to 400 nits, which is certainly the standard you’d expect from laptops in this class. Given that this machine is designed for productivity work you’re not going to come away with bleeding eyes if you stare at this for hours each day.
Keyboard and Trackpad
Daniel Cooper
Framework, from the outset, made it clear that it wanted to nail the fundamentals of what makes a good laptop. Naturally, a good keyboard is key, especially given how much time people will be spending on this thing each day. Here we’ve got an old-fashioned, uncontroversial chiclet keyboard with 1.5mm of travel and a soft (ish) landing. This was the standard for a good keyboard a decade ago, and little has changed, although the landing here is a little bit too soft. Clearly, this is a machine that won’t irritate other people when you’re typing on the train, but the quiet key presses come at the expense of some sharpness.
The trackpad, meanwhile, is similarly standard-issue, it’s a good size, with a satisfying click when you push it down and it’s reactive when you tap it. It couldn’t be much bigger given the size of the laptop’s deck, nor is it obtrusively placed. This is a satisfying thing to use, and I found myself defaulting to it rather than to my mouse, which almost never happens.
Webcam and Audio
Daniel Cooper
The Framework laptop is equipped with a 1080p, 60fps webcam with an 80-degree field of view, and it’s one of the best built-in webcams I’ve seen. Founder Nirav Patel told me that he had always intended to use a high-quality webcam, and felt vindicated by the pandemic. And either side of the webcam are hardware privacy switches to disable both the webcam and the microphone. These are “soft” switches that cut power to those components rather than physically obscuring the lens, and putting them on the top bezel is a strong flex, but not one I’m opposed to.
Isn't he smouldering?
Daniel Cooper
I have fewer nice things to say about the side-firing 2W speakers that are broadly, generically, sort-of okay. The sound coming out of them is tinny, weak and muddy, with bass so weak that Budweiser seems strong in comparison. If you’re going to be using this as the center of your audio/visual world, then invest in a decent pair of speakers or headphones.
Performance and Battery Life
Daniel Cooper
The model that I’m testing is the $1,399 “Performance” model, which is packing Intel’s Core i7-1165G7, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. All of the models, no matter the price, come with Intel’s Iris Xe graphics with no option for adding a discrete GPU. And certainly, in the week I used it, I don’t think I saw any lag or stuttering, and it handles undemanding games well enough. Benchmarks don’t tell the whole story, but in PC Mark 10’s standard score the machine averaged at 4927, outperforming a machine like the Surface Laptop 4.
As for battery life, I certainly didn’t find myself dashing for the nearest outlet while using this machine. In our standard rundown test, with display brightness set to 65 percent and an HD video looping, the Framework lasted 7 hours 46 minutes on its 55Wh battery. That’s enough to get you through a working day, but I would have vastly preferred it to crawl past that eight hour mark. A lot of machines in the 13-inch category can now get closer to 10 hours, and Intel’s Evo program insists upon it if your laptop has an HD-only display. The higher res screen probably offers Framework enough of a pass, but it’s something to bear in mind.
In terms of real-world performance, I spent about a week using Framework as my primary machine. Knocking around with Spotify open, several Chrome tabs and Slack all at once and I didn’t feel things dragging too much. A title like Fortnite, runs buttery-smooth on Medium settings and feels about right for this sort of work-first machine. Certainly, if you’re looking for a machine that can do work and (light) play, this will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with many ultrabooks in its class.
DIY
Daniel Cooper
Like the modular, repairable Fairphone, Framework ships with a Torx T5 screwdriver in the box, and every screw uses that same head. Five screws are all that connect the top of the laptop’s deck, containing the fingerprint sensor, keyboard and trackpad, to the rest of the base. Pull that off, and you can then gently pry off the display bezel, which is attached to the screen with a series of magnets.
Once inside, you’ll spot that every component is labeled, with a QR code which links to friendly, iFixit-style repair guides. Construction isn’t vastly different from any other laptop, the company hasn’t left big pockets of space to aid repairability. In many ways, this is the best thing that this machine can do: Show consumers (and manufacturers) that making laptops easy to repair is very easy… if you try.
Framework shipped with its default US keyboard but, in a separate package, the company sent over a UK-format keyboard and top deck. I didn’t need to change it, and ordinarily I wouldn’t start disassembling a review laptop, but Framework said people should feel free to “poke around in the guts of the project.” So, with a sense of giddy empowerment, I thought I might as well swap units to see how easy, and safe, it was to swap the keyboards.
Daniel Cooper
Armed with my screwdriver and the documentation, I was able to unscrew the mounting bolts which hold the top deck to the rest. Once lifted off, I had to unplug one clearly labeled ribbon cable, pop the replacement keyboard back on and screw everything back together. This process took me three minutes and 54 seconds, which would have been half the time had I realized sooner that the screws were captive, and so were designed to be held inside the laptop’s body.
I have never felt more confident that I could repair this machine, and that this should be the default for all consumer laptops. Imagine, for instance, when a very famous laptop maker decided to use a different keyboard technology for its most popular machines. A keyboard technology that was found to be notoriously unreliable despite a number of revisions. Now imagine how many machines wouldn’t need to be sent back for repair, and the countless hours of working time lost to them, if it was this easy to replace the keyboard at home.
More crucially, if your laptop does get too slow for you to use, you can (with patience) swap out the mainboard, which houses the CPU (and, by extension, the integrated graphics). The idea being that in several years’ time, if your speakers, display, keyboard and everything else are working fine, why replace them. Unfortunately, buying this machine does require you to trust that the company will be around long enough to make good on that promise.
Price and the Competition
Daniel Cooper
Framework is releasing four versions of this machine, a $749 DIY edition which lets you choose a wide number of specs yourself, or provide your own. In the ready-to-use category, however, you have a $999 base model with a Core i5-1135G7, 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. Then there’s the Performance model, which for $1,399 gets you a Core i7-1165G7, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. Topping the chart is the $1,999 Professional edition, which has the same chip as this unit, but 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD.
Daniel Cooper
Given what Framework is offering here, it doesn’t make sense to just compare this machine to others at those $999, $1,399 and $1,999 price tiers. Instead, I checked iFixit’s chart of laptops which scored well on the repairability charts. One of the best performers was HP’s EliteBook 840 G7, which scored 9/10, and has a common screw format and easy to replace components. The 2021 version of that machine, the G8, will set you back $1,879 for a 14-inch FHD display with a Core i7-1165G7, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD (or it would, but it’s out of stock).
Conclusion
Daniel Cooper
One problem with reviewing this machine is the desire not to bang on too much about The Context. We need to be able to judge this thing on its merits and, in that regard, it’s a pretty good laptop, certainly at this price and with this performance. What will motivate you to buy one, at least right now however, is the idea that you may be able to run this thing for years. If a component breaks that isn’t on the mainboard, you should be able to find a replacement. And you should be able to swap it in without any soldering or other such expertise. Many of the other parts are standard and easily removed, so when you need more RAM, a bigger SSD or faster WiFi, that should be an easy job. And, really, that’s what you’re paying for: The hope that you can use this device without complaint not just for the next few years, but maybe the next decade.
What does the future smell like? That depends on who you ask. PUIG’s perfumiers, who produce scents for Paco Rabanne, believe that the future smells sexy, confident and energetic. That’s how they’re choosing to market Phantom, the fashion house’s latest fragrance-cum-piece of retro-futurist art. Phantom comes in a robot-shaped bottle that, when you tap your phone on the NFC tag embedded into its head, welcomes you into its own digital world. Digital trinkets on offer will include interactive filters, personalized playlists, augmented reality filters and more.
Paco Rabanne is the nom de guerre of Spanish designer Francisco Rabaneda Cuervo, who in the ‘60s was a pioneering figure in the fashion world. Both he, and the house that bears his name, has had an appreciation for the absurdity of science fiction. Rabanne began producing dresses with metal and plastic, glued, or stitched together with wire, rather than sewing. His couture work graces pretty much every retrospective of ‘60s fashion and, far more than his contemporaries, embodies the “space age” fashion of the era.
Phantom is intended as a love letter to that history, with retro-futurist design that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Barbarella. The bottle is heavy, with the traditional lower-case “pr” logo in its torso, with the outline of the “p” made out of glass. That lets you watch the water line fall as you spritz yourself every morning with the scent. It comes in two sizes: 100ml (which I’ve seen and used) and 150ml, only the latter of which is refillable.
Of course, Phantom isn’t just a fancy bottle, but the key to a whole online world of digital goodies. The top of its bottle houses an NFC chip that, when tapped, welcomes the owner’s smartphone to a list of digital trinkets as a reward for buying the bottle. At the time of writing, only two items are available, but the company says that the list of items will grow over time, as outlined above.
Daniel Cooper
First up, Boombot lets you pick a date to get a Spotify “playlist of bangers that were number one on that day.” Upon closer analysis, it looks like it’s limited to the US charts, but you’ll be able to open the playlist in Spotify and groove to half a century of tunes. It’s a feature that you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever used a website like MyBirthdayHits, which looks a little less beautiful but does a very similar job.
Second and for now last, is an exclusive Instagram filter called Paco Rabanne’s Phantom Philter. This sees a tiny AR version of the bottle sit on your shoulder, fly around your head or tell someone that it loves them, its eyes and head motion are synched to yours, too. And it’s fun, fun enough for at least one selfie with the little cartoon.
But the sci-fi isn’t just in the clothes that Phantom is wearing, but in how the fragrance was created in the first place. Perfumiers worked in collaboration with an AI that helped them explore new possibilities in crafting the scent. According to the company, the team conceived of a new smell, and then programmed the formula into an AI, which ran through a series of as-yet untried combinations to make reactions to the smell more intense.
In Phantom’s case, perfumier Loc Dong wanted to try and “over-dose” a molecule called styrallyl acetate. When he suggested this to the computer, it recommended that Dong use “ten times the usual amount,” compared to a modern perfume. Similarly, the lavender used in the fragrance was sourced through “molecular distillation” which produces a “very modern lavender note.”
In a statement, Paco Rabane added that the fragrance was tested on men aged 18-35, to determine how it made them feel. They said that Phantom made them feel “sexiness,” “alertness” and “energy,” although the specifics on that testing is a little loose.
Now, I’m no perfume reviewer, a job that I’ll leave to the vastly more qualified people over at Fragrantica. (Who knew that people could sniff a scent and wish that the designers had added more Bergamot?) I would describe Phantom as a sweet musk, one that even hours after applying, felt strong and persistent. It’s certainly a more energetic smell than the one I’m used to — my aftershave of choice is Chanel Allure Homme Sport — and felt more productive as a consequence. In fact, Phantom is a strong scent but not an unpleasant or overpowering one, and everyone who, in these COVID-sensitive times, I’ve invited to sniff me seemed to agree.
All in all, it smells pretty good.
I don’t know if the digital goodies on offer will be a compelling draw here, at least not on current evidence. Maybe this is for those menswear influencers I see all the damn time on Instagram, even if they’re more commonly repping YSL and Celine. Perhaps a little AR robot, sitting on their shoulder while they smoke and drink coffee, reclining on a Paris park bench, is what they need to bolster their effortful laid back cool. But, fundamentally, you’re going to buy this thing because it smells nice, not because you get a free Instagram filter… right?
Phantom by Paco Rabanne is launching on August 1st, 2021, and will be available in the US at Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, Dillard’s and Sephora. No word, yet, on how much the 100ml bottle will cost, but the 150ml edition will set you back $125, while the 200ml refill is priced at $130.
Ring has today announced that end-to-end encryption (E2E) has exited technical preview stage and is now available for many Ring users across the globe. Once activated, the footage captured by those doorbells is only viewable on the user’s enrolled mobile device, reducing the ability for third parties to see the clips. The news follows the rollout of a US-only technical preview from the start of the year, although it remains limited to the more premium versions of Ring’s connected doorbells.
At the same time, the company is rolling out support for third-party authentication apps for two-step verification. Similarly, users will now be greeted by CAPTCHAs when logging in to both the Ring app and Neighbors in order to further deter malicious types from trying to gain access. Plus, Ring is making it easier for you to sell your doorbell on by automating the system to transfer hardware within the app.
The move comes shortly after the company announced a shift in how it dealt with requests for footage from law enforcement agencies. Rather than the previous system, officials now have a 12-hour window in which to ask users in the vicinity of an incident to submit footage via public feed. It comes in the wake of news that the company has partnerships with more than 2,000 fire and police departments, and that its Neighbors app was briefly publishing precise locations of people’s homes.
Let me ask you a question: Do you really want to buy a pair of Personal Cinema glasses? As cool as they could be, they always feel like an artefact from a dystopia that’s yet to engulf us. When the air burns and the seas boil, you won’t be able to fit a 40-inch HDTV into your existence-support-pod, so these will have to do. It hardly screams “aspirational.”
It doesn’t help that nobody — not Sony,Avegant, Royole nor others — has managed to make this concept work. Personal cinemas, then, have replaced VR as the go-to whenever anyone needs to talk about a product that’s perennially on the edge of breaking through, and never has. But, despite them being a solution in search of a problem, and their historical suckiness, things may be about to change.
You see, TCL has been banging against this particular door for years and now, it’s gearing up to launch its first model. The Nxtwear G Wearable Display Glasses solve many of the problems that dogged those earlier attempts. They’re not perfect, and you’ll probably not want to buy a pair now, but this is the closest anyone has gotten to making this concept work.
TCL’s Nxtwear G puts two tiny displays close to your eyes in order to trick you into thinking you’re looking at a bigger screen. Rather than cram the glasses full of tech, TCL put two displays, a pair of speakers and positioning hardware inside. That keeps the weight down to a very manageable 130 grams (4.5 oz), much kinder to your neck for long-term wear.
Everything else, including power, is handled by the device you plug this into, and the list of compatible hardware is pretty long. You can use major phones from Samsung, LG and OnePlus, as well as over 30 laptops and more than 25 tablets and 2-in-1s. Essentially, TCL made a plug-and-play external display for your head that should play nice with any compatible DisplayPort-equipped USB-C device.
The company decided to swim against much of the received wisdom that we’ve seen with other personal cinemas. Rather than trying to enclose the user in a black void, all the better to replicate that tenth-screen-in-a-mall-multiplex feeling, TCL wants you to see the outside world. Even when I tried the prototype, back in 2019, its representatives said that you should feel comfortable wearing this on public transport, interacting with people as you do.
Daniel Cooper
With every device I’ve tried them with, you simply need to plug the Nxtwear G in and everything starts. If you’re using a compatible TCL phone, you’ll get a pop-up asking if you want to use mirror mode, or PC mode, which sets you up inside Android’s desktop mode. The phone then acts as a touchpad for you to navigate around with your finger, although if you want to do more than hunt-and-peck, buy a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.
Connecting it to my MacBook Pro, too, and the machine recognized it as an external display and I was able to work and watch TV with my primary displays turned off. In fact, I wrote a chunk of this piece while inside this thing, even if I had to turn the zoom up to mad levels to make sure everything was readable.
The Nxtwear G packs a pair of 16:9, 60Hz micro-OLED 1080p displays that the company says is the equivalent to a 140-inch screen. That requires the usual suspension of ocular disbelief but the effect works here, and the speakers do their job well enough. It’s worth saying that they are essentially blasting audio in every direction, so grab your Bluetooth headphones if, say, your partner gets really annoyed when they can hear you watching Columbo when you’re both in bed.
I don't know if you should expect pixel-perfect video quality from a pair of screens this tiny but be advised that they won't beat your smartphone. Certainly, HD video looks fine, but the smallness of the screens means it's really tough to see good detail. Colors were washed out, certainly compared to the footage that was playing back on the TCL 20 Pro 5G and MacBook Pro I was connected to during testing.
TCL’s pitch is to say that, as well as passive viewing, you can also use the glasses to work and it’s here that I think TCL may have some success. As I said, it’s possible to work with these on, and it would make sense to use them if you had to view sensitive documents. When you’re working, say, on a train, this is the perfect antidote to shoulder surfers and other drive-by snoopers. Of course, for whoever makes the inevitable joke about watching adult content with nobody noticing, have a cookie.
What TCL has managed to do is, several times over, solve the riddle as to why you could ever want to use a personal cinema. There are times and places where you could do so both for work (more or less) and play (in some circumstances). Unfortunately, while the company was making great strides to solve the technical issues, it didn’t have a huge amount of time to devote to making this experience comfortable.
Your mileage may vary, but I found using these glasses to be a delightful experience right up until the moment it became painful. It is, right now, impossible to use these for a prolonged period of time before something starts hurting, either inside or outside your skull.
Daniel Cooper
One of the more problematic design decisions that TCL took was to include a trio of nose pads that push the screen up and higher. The idea is to keep the screens in line with your eyes, but the unfortunate result is that you need to put the nose pads way down your nose. Like, to the point where you feel like, no matter the size, it feels like you’re wearing those wire grips to close your nostrils that professional swimmers wear during sporting events.
Then there’re the Temple Tips, the part of the glasses arms which bend down to hook over your ears. Whereas with regular glasses those tips are semi-plastic and can be adjusted by an optician (or at home, with a hairdryer and some guile), the Nxtwear G’s arms are rigid. Prolonged periods of wear mean that you’ll get two slices of hard plastic sticking into the soft fleshy bit of your head behind your ears.
The solution I found to alleviate both of those issues, at least for a bit, was to pull out the nose pads entirely and wear them as I would regular glasses. After all, as a seasoned specs wearer, I accepted that the experience might not be as good — but found that this was actually better. I got a full view of the screen and it was significantly more comfortable to wear for longer periods of time. But, unfortunately, the reason the nose pads stand the glasses off your schnozz is to avoid it getting warm, since the Nxtwear G does generate a decent amount of warmth (not heat, warmth, mind you).
And then, finally, there’s the issue of eye strain which, no matter how I wore these things, still meant I had to give up for significant rest periods. Maybe, it’s because I’m short-sighted, and so my eyes are already weak and feeble compared to the average personal cinema enjoyer. But I doubt it, and suspect that lots of people may run the risk of an eye-strain headache if they use this for too long at once.
Now, I bet you’re thinking ‘gee, if these were priced like an accessory, I’d grab a pair just to see what the fuss is about.’ I don’t blame TCL for needing to recoup some of the development costs for these things, but boy. These glasses are going on sale in Oz for $899 AUS, which is the better part of $700 in the US. Heck, you can buy TCL’s new 20 Pro 5G for $500 and just hold it near to your face and pat yourself on the back for your thriftiness.
Facetiousness aside, I think TCL deserves enormous credit for making what can only be described as the best wearable display ever made. And if you’re able, I’d say you should go and try these out, because my comfort-related dealbreakers may not affect you. And TCL deserves a fair crack at making these things cheaper and a little less prone to pinching, because we’re so damn close. Sincerely, if personal cinemas are going to become a success, it’ll be because it follows the template that TCL has laid down. It just needs a few tweaks.
The film that kickstarted (and nearly killed) Star Trek’s first second life is going to be remastered, once again. Star Trek.com (via Gizmodo), says that Paramount has green-lit a “full restoration” of Robert Wise’s 2001 “Director’s Edition” of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The site says that the project, which will take between six and eight months to finish, will be formatted in 4K, with Dolby Vision HDR and a new Dolby Atmos soundtrack. David C. Fein, Mike Matessino and Daren R. Dochterman, who worked with Wise on the 2001 DVD version, will all return to work on the 4K spruce up.
The Motion Picture (TMP)’s fraught production meant that the film was barely finished before it premiered, with Wise carrying the print himself to the premiere. Wise had said that the film was “unfinished,” and despite a healthy box office, took a pasting from critics who deemed it to be too slow and talky. At the dawn of the DVD era, Wise, Fein, Matessino and Dochterman collaborated on a re-edit of the film that better showed off Wise’s original vision. This included remastered visual effects and a remastered and re-edited score by Jerry Goldsmith. The effects for the 2001 version were produced by CGI pioneers Foundation Imaging, which was Star Trek’s (then) contractor for all computer generated work.
(After its theatrical run, ABC broadcast a “Special Longer Version” of the film that is notorious for including extra scenes with clearly unfinished effects. The most obvious of which is the start of Kirk’s EVA, where the airlock set is surrounded by studio scaffolding, intended to be replaced by a matte painting.)
It was a well-held myth in fan circles that a 4K version of the Director’s Edition was impossible because the CGI assets and film footage had been scanned and edited for standard definition. The bankruptcy of Foundation Imaging, which took place shortly after the film was released, also dashed hopes for any higher-definition re-releases. However, as Memory Alpha lists, producer David C. Fein confirmed in 2017 that the digital material necessary to facilitate a 4K remastering still exists.
Given how TMP’s reputation has been slowly rehabilitated over the last three decades, a 4K version of the film is very welcome. If only because, as well as a smart and interesting vision of the future, the model work and score are so good that they deserve to be seen in the best possible resolution. We can’t wait to experience this in 4K when it arrives at some point between December and next March.
There’s something a little counter-revolutionary about high-end gaming machines made by suit-and-tie PC businesses. The idea of Lenovo, makers of the ThinkPad, making a gaming machine worthy of comment feels a little weird, and yet the Legion 5 Pro is just that. The Walmart-exclusive model that I’m testing costs $1,530, pairing AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800H with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3070 graphics. Powerful and affordable? That’s almost revolutionary.
Rounding out that spec list is 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD and, mercifully, both components are user-upgradeable. That piddly drive will barely hold more than a couple Calls worth of Duty before you’re reaching for an external HDD. But these are the sort of smart compromises that Lenovo have opted for to keep the price down, letting you add more RAM and storage when you’re feeling more flush.
And then there’s the screen, a 16-inch, 165Hz QHD, X-Rite Pantone-validated IPS display with the new, taller, 16:10 aspect ratio. At 500 nits, the panel can hold its own in bright light compared to many of its rivals, and the matte screen reduces the risk of glare. Watching 4K video on this thing is a very pleasant experience and I’ve enjoyed working from this device across the week I’ve been using it. It certainly makes you want to spend hours at a time staring at gigapixel images of, say, Paris, which I definitely didn’t spend a long time doing this week (cough).
Daniel Cooper
Lenovo wasn’t looking to pull up any trees with this design, which is little more than a refinement of what went before. It’s not as thin or light as its rivals, and looks better in a dark room lit only by the glow of an RGB keyboard and the odd Nanoleaf panel. But if you’re buying it as a desktop replacement that’ll spend 90 percent of its time plonked on the same desk, it’s fine. Oh, and the aluminum chassis is rock solid, giving you confidence on those occasions when you do need to take it somewhere. That matte grey paint job, while very business-forward, hides a multitude of palm sweat-based sins but will attract every speck of dust in a three mile zone.
The Legion 5 Pro’s chunky chassis also means that you’ll find an excellent supply of I/O running around its deck. You get four USB-A (3.2 Gen 1) ports, two USB-C (3.2 Gen 2), HDMI, Ethernet and a 3.5mm headphone / microphone jack, as well as the proprietary power jack. On the right hand side, you’ll also find a hardware camera mute button, which replaces the dedicated hardware shutter from previous versions.
Even after several days of use, using Lenovo’s TrueStrike keyboard remains a pleasant but weird experience. The keys have a depth of 1.5mm, but Lenovo uses “soft landing” switches to make each actuation feel a little deeper than that. Every time you hit a key, you’re expecting the hard jerk of a mechanical keyboard, only to find a pillowy end and bounce back up. It’s like filling your shoes with water on a hot day and then stepping into them, it’s very useful, but your brain is telling you that something’s amiss here.
One thing worthy of comment is that Lenovo took advantage of the Legion 5’s bigger deck size to include a numerical keypad. The company says that the numpad itself is full size, but to my eyes and fingers, it feels a little squashed compared to a regular external PC keyboard. The RGB backlighting is perhaps appropriately muted but can be set to four different lighting zones when required. The trackpad, meanwhile, is perfectly functional, but the bigger size is welcome given how tight previous models have been.
Daniel Cooper
I have less to say about the machine’s 720p camera, which is the very definition of serviceable, or useful in a pinch. Light blooms, everything’s uncomfortably fuzzy and the overall effect is that of most ‘60s TV shows when they’d get the Vaseline-smeared lens for close-ups. If you’re looking to make a living from streaming, or you’re a professional Zoom-call-haver, buy an external device, please. Poor webcam aside, Lenovo gets props for offering a dedicated camera disconnect button since there wasn’t room in the space-starved lid for its customary shutter.
Benchmarks don’t tell the whole story, but the Legion 5 Pro comes in close enough to machines priced a couple hundred bucks more. When playing demanding AAA games like Cyberpunk and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I got between 50-60fps with the settings appropriately tweaked. Naturally, you’ll lose a little bit of that when you enable ray tracing, but it can handle hard work relatively well. The Legion 5 Pro has three pre-set performance modes which can be set inside the Vantage utility, or cycled through when you hit Fn+Q. One neat addition is that the power button will change color depending on which mode you’re in: Auto offers a white glow, Quiet a cool blue, and Performance an angry red.
Using a machine like this for general productivity work is a bit like taking an F-150 to buy a box of cereal, but it’s more than possible. After all, if all you’re doing is crunching documents, writing term papers, poking at spreadsheets and using Slack, then this has more than enough. When transcoding a 28.2GB UHD H.265 video file to 1080p, Handbrake was able to crunch through it at over 40 fps, making it sturdy enough for even halfway professional video editors.
The Legion 5 Pro uses a dual-fan system which pushes hot air out of its chassis through a quartet of exhausts. Two vents at the back are complemented by one on each side, and if you’re not blessed with huge amounts of room, beware. Leave your hand, mouse, gamepad or drink next to one of those vents for too long and they will become uncomfortably warm. Playing Cyberpunk and Shadow of the Tomb Raider was kicking out enough heat that I wondered if I could make s’mores.
Daniel Cooper
This problem is exacerbated with the aluminum underside of the chassis which gets too hot to touch. After a couple hours gaming, I picked up the machine to move it somewhere else and damn. I thought I’d picked up a baking sheet straight out of the oven and nearly dropped the thing through muscle memory. It’s not hot enough to burn you, but it’s not something you wanna touch if you value not being in pain.
It’s impossible to sugarcoat the sheer noise that this machine makes when the fans spin up, either. This thing is noisy, noisy enough that you’ll need to dial your speakers up to drown it out or grab a pair of headphones to claw back some of that immersion. This is an occupational hazard of gaming laptops, but it’s worth noting that this thing is loud.
Another tick in the “not ideal” column is battery life, and despite packing an 80WHr battery, it will not last for long when divorced from an outlet. Our standard battery rundown test loops a video until the computer dies, with the brightness set to 65 percent and all battery-saving tech disabled. It managed to last for four hours and 43 minutes while using the integrated Radeon graphics, which is fine in the gritted-teeth sense of the word. Certainly, while you can handle a few emails or some light browsing while sat on your couch, this is not a device you can take away from a socket for a full working day without fuss.
One of the reasons that the Legion 5 Pro is compelling despite some of its flaws is its price, which is something. Lenovo has managed to undercut several of its competitors here, and there’s no wonder it’s only intermittently on sale right now. If you want a machine from Alienware with similar specs (the romantically-named M15 Ryzen Edition R5 Gaming Laptop) it’ll cost you $1,899.99. For that, you’ll get a Ryzen R7 5800H (same as here), RTX 3070 with 8GB RAM (same as here), 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD (same as… you get the idea).
Daniel Cooper
If getting RTX 3070 graphics is a dealbreaker, then you could opt for the Razer Blade 15 Base Model with a 15.6-inch FHD display, 10th-generation Intel Core i7-10750H, 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD. You will, however, have to pay $1,999.99 for the privilege, which may be something of a dealbreaker. ASUS also offers the ROG Strix G15 — an all-AMD version of which we reviewed a few weeks back — with an RTX 3070, priced at $1,799.99. If you were looking for a machine in that $1,500-or-so bracket, you could get the $1,599.99 Razer Book, with a Core i7-1165G7 and Intel Iris Xe Graphics. Alternatively, gor $1,499.99, Acer’s Predator Triton 300 SE packs a Core i7-11375H and NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 GPU, which seems like a fairly reasonable deal all things considered.
Despite all of the chaos that has so far made up the ‘20s, we’re seeing a new dawn of AMD’s high-er end chips winding up in gaming laptops. This Ryzen 7 5800H can beat (select) Intel chips in a number of benchmarks, and you can expect to see it crop up in a number of other machines across this year. And while wealthier buyers may be tempted by a far pricier machine with RTX 3080 graphics, the 3070 here shouldn’t make you feel like a second-class citizen.
There is lots to like about this machine, although the snips made to get its price to this level will rankle. The battery life is well below par, the thermals could do with refinement, and the webcam would look retrograde on a machine five years its senior. But, if you’re going to stick this on a desk, keep it constantly plugged in to power and never do more than the odd Zoom, does that matter?
It is no longer possible to ignore NFTs, the crypto off-shoot that can tie intangible assets to specific, unalterable tokens. Interest in NFTs (non-fungible tokens) has spiked over the last year, and is now breaking into the mainstream with several headline-grabbing deals. On March 6th, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced that he would “sell” the first ever tweet on an NFT auction site. Right now, the current high bid for Dorsey’s initial missive stands at $2.5 million.
If Bitcoin has become the cryptocurrency world’s version of gold, a method of exchange that its boosters hope will always gain value, then NFTs are its asset class. Bitcoins are all equal, and can be broken down into chunks — much like turning a dollar into change — but NFTs are not, and cannot. They are intentionally unique and inviolable, allowing you to permanently tie them to a digital or real-world asset. It’s possible to produce a home ownership document as an NFT, but the world’s attention right now is on digital art, music and collectibles.
The point of tying a digital object to an NFT is to create a lasting record which can prove its identity and provenance. Because blockchain is a public ledger, it means that there’s an added layer of security and transparency which should make it harder to defraud people. Plus, in the digital world, where everything can be replicated without penalty, you can attempt to give a single copy the prominence and weight it would receive if it was a real-world asset. Yes, you can duplicate a file a thousand times and they’ll all turn out the same, but only the one tied to an NFT is the real deal.
Digitization means that you can easily and endlessly create a perfect copy of something, making it harder for creators to be compensated for their work. (Naturally, there are legal remedies for copyright infringement, but that’s a different story.) The band Kings of Leon, for instance, will sell its next album as an NFT for around $50, for which you’ll get both a physical and digital copy of the music. And, naturally, the added prestige of being able to tell your friends that you own the token that connects to the album.
To a certain extent, that is the lie agreed upon that underpins why NFTs are so in-vogue right now: Despite all digital copies being equal, the tokenized copy is more equal than others. That this one copy, out of all of those that exists, is the one that carries any value. And, if you tell enough people that this token is worth money, they’ll buy into the idea as well. Ownership of the token does not, however, convey additional rights to the buyer, you don’t own the copyright, and can’t loan the file out to others in the hope of earning an income.
IOTA co-founder Dominik Scheiner explained how the process works: You create something, let’s say an image that you have painted. You upload that file to a website, and then include the URL of that file inside the smart token that you then “mint” onto the blockchain of whichever platform you’re using. From there, you can then sell the token yourself, or more likely, using a third-party retail platform that specializes in crypto art. “What makes NFTs so unique,” said Scheiner, “is that you can verify their authenticity.”
Musician Claire Boucher, who records under the name Grimes, recently sold NFTs of digital artwork made in collaboration with their brother, Mac Boucher. The Guardian said that the series, WarNymph Collection Volume 1, made more than $6 million in sales, with up to 300 copies of one piece selling for a fixed price of $7,500. In February, Chris Torres, creator of Nyan Cat, sold an NFT version of the internet-famous animation for $650,000.
Crossroad 1/1 is a looping video, 10 seconds long, created by the digital artist Mike Winklemann, who works under the name Beeple. It was one of a pair of artworks prepared in anticipation of the outcome of the 2020 US elections, depending on the result. The clip features a nude, orange-haired, overweight figure, several meters tall, lying prone in a public park. The body has been covered in graffiti while indifferent pedestrians go about their day, oblivious to the spectacle beside them. On November 1st, 2020, the clip was published on the Ethereum blockchain and purchased by collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile for $66,666.60. On February 5th, 2020, an anonymous buyer bought the same artwork from Rodriguez-Fraile for $6.6 million.
But NFTs aren’t just the reserve of oblique art collections and musicians looking for ways to monetize their work. The NBA, in partnership with Dapper Labs, the Canadian company behind Cryptokitties (essentially digital Beanie Babies), launched Top Shot in October 2020. Top Shot is, essentially, a form of card collecting, but rather than static images, you’re buying “moments.” These are short video clips highlighting a specific basketball play that is worthy of commemoration.
On Top Shot, you can buy a 12-second clip of Orlando Magic forward Aaron Gordon’s dunk against the LA Lakers on January 15th, 2020. At the time of writing, there are five copies of that dunk, with various serial numbers, on sale from private collectors. Prices from the clip range from $74,000 for serial number 41, through to $129,000 for serial number 12. The company says that more than $200 million in sales has been made since the site launched.
Jack Settleman is the founder of Snapback Sports, a multimedia company that includes one of the world’s most popular Snapchat channels. “I’d been buying Bitcoin since 2018,” he said, “built a business on social media, and loved the NBA,” which drew him toward Top Shot. In January, he and his friends paid $47,500 for a copy of a famous LeBron James dunk. In the clip, James mirrors a move made by Kobe Bryant back in 2001 in tribute to the late star.
Settleman and his friends bought serial number 23 of the card — James’ shirt number — which they felt was “the holy grail of the platform.” “The best player on Top Shot,” said Settleman, “with his jersey number, matched with the most meaningful play on the platform.”
“There was never an ‘oh shit’ moment,” he said, when asked if he was ever clutching his head wondering if spending $50k on a video clip was a smart idea. “When making decisions of that scale, you’ve already run the calculations on what can go wrong, so I wasn’t too worried.” But despite the skyrocketing value of the moment, Settleman isn’t going to sell it to anyone but James himself. “We’ll sell it to LeBron for $1 million,” he said. Representatives for the basketball star have yet to get in contact.
“When I jumped in, I was [only] focused on the investing aspect,” said Settleman, “but now I have moments that have appreciated 10,000 percent, and I would never let them go as I’m too attached to them.” The entrepreneur added that he has also become attached to Top Shot as part of his love of “building communities and connecting with new people.” He said that he has spent around $75,000 so far, and is currently working on a way to display the moments in his home.
The sudden rise of NFTs, as well as the renewed interest in crypto and share-dealing more generally is, financial types say, due the amount of cash sloshing around the financial system. Jason Welz is an investment analyst at Invictus Capital, who said that the movements we’ve seen in the last year reflect “extremely loose monetary policy from central banks globally.” “We’re seeing unprecedented demand and price performance for penny stocks,” he added, “I think we’re seeing a similar scenario play out in the NFT space.” He did note, however, that investors need to be on the lookout for “bubbly conditions” which could see speculators lose their money.
Adrian Krion, founder of Spielworks, says that the spike in interest is little more than a gold rush, with everyone speculating on high-worth assets. “The latest crypto bull market has people who hold a lot of money investing in objects that are provably scarce, like waterfront apartments in top locations or digital items like NFTs, which can be liquidated easier.” Krion himself said that he is spending “a few hundred dollars monthly on NFTs,” mostly in the form of online games like Splinterlands, NBA Top Shot and The Sandbox, as well as the “occasional piece of art” through online galleries, “because they look cool, not for investment purposes.”
“I believe the overwhelming driver of the hype is greed,” said Welz, “people believe that getting in early and owning some of the earliest NFT artworks or collectibles will, in the long term, become extremely valuable, in the same way that work from old masters continues to appreciate in value.” He said he didn’t know if we’d see a similar rise in the value of NFT artwork but that putting money into the space seemed like a “rational, albeit high risk, punt.” One that, given the profit Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile made in less than a year, is likely to encourage more speculation.
The art world is happy to embrace this speculation, as a potential rush of new collectors look to build their portfolios. Noah Davies, a specialist in contemporary art at Christie’s New York, told Art Market Monitor that the current movement could represent a “drastic shift” in art collecting. He said that “Christie’s, as an organization, is really excited about a moment in time where you see $3.5 million of sales just organically appear out of thin air. That’s something we want to capitalize on.” Davies also said that the potential buyer of an NFT skews “definitely male and more American than not.”
NFTs have the potential to be better for the artists themselves, as Joanie Lemercier explained. Lemercier is a French artist who specializes in computer art, light projections and mapping, and has exhibited across Europe, China, Japan and the US. He runs his own studio in Belgium and has also worked to raise global awareness around climate change. One of the best features of crypto art, he explained, was knowing where your work winds up.
“When an artwork is sold through my gallerist,” he said, “I know it’s been sold, but I have no way of knowing when it will be sold again.” If he wanted to know if a piece was being exhibited, or stored away in a vault somewhere, he’d need to track it down on his own. “What the [block] chain allows me to do is track who owns the work and when a sale is made again,” he said. He added that NFTs have the potential to help artists from being boxed out of the blockbuster fees you sometimes see on the secondary market. If a piece is re-sold through the same marketplace, the artist can receive a cut of the sale, which can be around 15 percent.
Some examples of CryptoArt from NiftyGateway
NiftyGateway (Respective artists)
As part of his climate change work, Lemercier began working to reduce his studio’s energy consumption by 10 percent every year. “I wanted to reduce consumption at the studio,” he said, “because I knew I was spending a lot of money on electricity and gas.” Spurred on by the pandemic, he was hoping that embracing NFTs would be a key plank in his plan to make his artistic career more sustainable. That “very hard work” saw the energy consumption fall from 4,618kWh in 2018, down to 3,800kWh in 2020. “Then, I was introduced to crypto art by my friend.”
“I knew about how proof-of-work is based on, basically, wasted energy” said Joanie Lemercier, “I did some basic calculations and said ‘I will be careful and use the profits to do the insulation’ [on the studio] to [further] lower my consumption.’” He released a series of six artworks on NiftyGateway which was successful enough that he had already begun work on a second collection, due to launch on February 17th, 2021. “I thought my impact would be pretty low, and I asked NiftyGateway to help me with my calculation, but they said nothing.” (NiftyGateway disputes this, saying that it had conversations about “the environmental impact of minting NFTs,” with artists “including Joanie Lemercier.”)
Lemercier said that he then further calculated the energy cost of the artworks he had sold as NFTs. “I realized that those pieces, which had sold out in less than ten minutes, used more than 8,000kWh, more than my studio’s power consumption for the last two years.” “With secondary sales, this figure has already jumped to 9,000kWh,” he added, “and will [continue to] grow over the years.” “I could do anything with the profits to lower my consumption, but it will have zero effect because of proof-of-work.”
The role of cryptocurrency energy consumption is a contentious one, with its critics saying that it’s needlessly wasteful. Its supporters, meanwhile, assert that the global banking system uses far more energy, and that the criticism is unfounded. What isn’t in doubt, however, is that Bitcoin and Ethereum — which underpins a number of NFT transactions — both use Proof of Work to validate transactions. Rather than a central banking authority ensuring that Person A has paid Person B, hundreds, thousands or even millions of computers race each other to calculate artificially-complicated equations that then approve each deal. The computer which successfully solves the problem gets a financial reward, while the others do not. As a consequence, the system is relatively secure, but countless numbers of computers are running equations and burning energy for no real reason.
The Cambridge University Centre for Alternative Finance believes that Bitcoin, on its own, burns around 130TWh of power a year. BBC News reported that, if Bitcoin were a country, it would consume more energy per year than Argentina. Digiconomist, meanwhile, estimates that Ethereum consumes around 26TWh of power per year. There have been moves to push Ethereum onto Proof of Stake, a system which is much more power-efficient than Proof of Work. IEEE Spectrum reported at the start of 2019 that the team behind the cryptocurrency would make the transition by the end of that year. Two years later, it’s still being worked on, although it’s believed that we may see some movement at the end of 2021. Until the working method changes, there are valid questions to be asked about how much CO2 the crypto world emits.
The majority of mainstream NFT sales are currently made on Ethereum, including Cryptokitties, NiftyGateway and OpenSea. Even if those transactions make up a small percentage of all ETH traffic, artists and activists are already working to determine cryptoart’s environmental impact. Everest Pipkin has produced a lengthy explainer on the issues here, while Memo Akten has released Cryptoart.wtf, a website that calculates the potential emissions of a single piece of art when it’s bought and sold.
NiftyGateway said that it was “open to [...] conversations and [is] committed to transparency.” It added that it had engaged in conversations with Lemercier and was willing to continue this dialog in future. The company spokesperson added that “Ethereum transactions interacting with NFT contracts comprise roughly one percent of all transactions on the ETH network.” They added that “Ethereum 2.0, which will roll out in phases this year, will focus on improved sustainability, among other benefits.”
On March 2nd, SuperRare, another portal selling crypto art, issued a similar statement to rebut the environmental criticism of the platform. It posted on Medium, saying that NFTs do not directly increase the energy consumption of Ethereum since the network is already in use.
Proof of Stake would, on paper, dramatically reduce the potential energy that is consumed by cryptocurrency mining. Put simply, it essentially uses a random number system to assign work to computers that hold a certain value of the currency already. One blockchain that already uses Proof of Stake consensus is Flow, the system underpinning NBA Top Shot.
Weilei Yu, product marketing director at Dapper Labs, said that while it was “really hard to get exact figures,” he estimates that Flow is far more energy efficient than Ethereum. His analysis suggests that each node consumes around 250W of energy per hour, meaning over a year, the roughly 330 currently active nodes consume “less than 1GWh of power in a year.” While consumption does increase with each node added, if those figures are accurate, Flow offers a significant advantage over Ethereum and Bitcoin in sustainability terms.
Flow has a number of other big names signed up to adopt its platform, as well as Cryptokitties, which will make the switch from Ethereum in the near future. MotoGP Ignition, a management and collectibles game tied in to the racing series, will launch on Flow on March 26th. And OpenSea, one of the biggest NFT marketplaces, has said that it has begun working on support for Flow.
Right now, we are on a tipping point that will see NFTs either become part of many peoples' investment strategy, or go through another cycle of boom and bust. The move to a more sustainable blockchain could remove one of the biggest objections to NFTs, and crypto, in general. But if you’re looking to invest, you should always remember that the value of your purchase can go down as well as up. Or hope that a basketball star returns your calls.
HTC is today launching its third-generation Vive Tracker, which is significantly smaller in size and weight than its immediate predecessor. The Vive Tracker 3.0 is around 33 percent smaller than the 2018 model, and 15 percent lighter, with a footprint roughly 10 centimeters, or four inches, smaller. These quality-of-life size reductions mean that the device is much easier to strap to your body, or an accessory, something very onerous on the bulky older models. Oh, and it now uses USB-C.
Daniel Cooper
Despite the smaller body, the company says that the device will last up to 75 percent longer on a single charge, pushing the quoted battery life close to seven hours. HTC has made the point that the smaller trackers should make it easier to strap them to wrists and ankles for full-body tracking in VR. Compared to testing the bigger version in Rezzil Player 21 a few weeks back, the improvement is significant. But HTC has said that there is no compromise in the tracking precision compared to its older siblings.
Daniel Cooper
There should be no complaints about backwards compatibility between the new trackers and the older hardware. The company says that it’ll easily integrate with SteamVR 1.0 and 2.0, and remains compatible with any accessories you already own that use the pogo pin connectors. The HTC Vive Tracker 3.0 is available from today in both the US and Europe, priced at $129 / €139, both from Vive’s own site, as well as Amazon and other participating retailers.
HTC
At the same time, HTC is also launching the new Vive Facial tracker, which “seamlessly tracks 38 facial movements across the lips, jaw, teeth, tongue, chin and cheeks.” The idea being to enable people in VR to project their own avatar with an accurate version of their own face, tracked in real time. The system uses an IR illuminator connected to two cameras that monitor (presumably similar to how FaceID works) the motion of your mouth.
The company says that it is both a new tool for gamers and developers, but also a way to “build momentum” for future methods of storytelling. It could also come in handy for enterprise users who need to monitor facial feedback during product testing, as well as in medical situations. Plus, it may offer cheap and cheerful motion-capture for filmmakers who can’t afford to shell out for pricier, more comprehensive methods. And this, too is available to buy from today, from HTC’s website.
