Light Start – BlackBerry expanding, SpaceX goes Heavy, Rick and Morty, and one heck of a dance
Brett Venter
BlackBerry could be expanding its branding to things like wearables, other unusual (for BlackBerry) tech
It wasn’t all that long ago that people everywhere were predicting the complete demise of BlackBerry. To be fair some things have changed but going away is something that the company isn’t doing. What they are doing is lending their name to other folks and working on what they do extremely well — securing user data. And those two items could be combining to give us more BlackBerry products, including possibly “…tablets, wearables, medical devices, appliances, point-of-sale terminals and other smartphones” If these items do pitch up it’ll be as a result of a new licensing deal that could see you toting around a BlackBerry-branded smartwatch, tablet (we don’t talk about BlackBerry’s first tablet), or other tech. How will that look? We’re not sure yet, since BlackBerry has only announced this latest development in vague terms but we could be seeing a lot more of them (in some unusual places) in the next few years,
SpaceX is gearing up to launch their first Falcon heavy, with the assistance of some pre-owned Falcon9 boosters
Like it or not, SpaceX is the best shot the average person (who doesn’t fly jets for NASA) has at getting to another planet, which is why we’re keeping such a close eye on them. The company has been landing rockets for some time and has just reused one of them (successfully) so it makes sense that they’re gearing up to finally debut their Falcon Heavy rocket. The Falcon Heavy is supposed to go into action later this year and, at least as first, it’ll be accompanied by a couple of “flight-proven” (or ‘pre-owned’) Falcon 9 boosters. Which, if you don’t know your rockets, will be the cheaper option. The Falcon Heavy is made up of three Falcon 9 cores, so being able to reuse these for Heavy launches would be quite the saving. Oh, yeah, and SpaceX wants to try and recover the second-stage booster now as well. The Falcon Heavy launch will also see the company trying to get the Merlin engine-powered second stage booster back so they can reuse that bit too. Elon Musk hasn’t told anyone how he plans to do that part yet but we’re pretty certain that if anyone can pull it off, he can.
So you probably missed the first episode of Season 3 of Rick and Morty…
On 1 April, a day that we traditionally are extremely wary of the internet, the makers of Rick and Morty decided to do the most horrible thing they could think of. They released the first episode of Season 3. Early. And… now it’s gone until the series starts to broadcast again later this year. Of course, you could probably hit up the link below, where Adult Swim is streaming every previously-broadcast episode of Rick and Morty, including the early episode, so if you’re down with watching a marathon of the show (and we totally are), then you might still catch it. Today… might not be the most productive of days at the Stuff offices…
This short performance made possible by (very) high-speed face mapping
[vimeo id=”210599507″]
Now here’s something that you don’t see every day. This short dance performance, executed by a group called Aya Bambi, is something unusual. Anyone can make a music video with post-processing but the facial changes you can see were executed in real time thanks to high-speed facial mapping projectors created by the University of Tokyo. The projectors run at 1000fps, which is might fast indeed, and the results show. There are some obvious limitations to the tech at present — there’s not a whole lot of movement by the performers in terms of body placement but the head-tracking tech is spot-on. There’s also a little explainer available about how the tech was created and how it all works — you can check it out here.
