Light Start – Self-driving Samsung, drag-racing tricycles, Steam records, and 3D model selfies
Brett Venter
Samsung is dumping more than $300 million into developing autonomous driving technology
The old joke goes: “Microsoft will never develop a car based on Windows because then it’d crash all the time”, but what if Samsung does it? It’ll be made from glass and the occasional model will explode? Probably not, but we might have to think about Samsung one day releasing a vehicle of their very own. The company has announced that they’re investing heavily in autonomous driving technology, with the actual development taking place at the company’s newly-acquired Harman division. The idea isn’t that Samsung will be designing their own car (though we’d love to see that, considering that the company is responsible for the K9 Thunder mobile howitzer). Instead, Samsung is working on a platform that will run self-driving vehicles from road to roof — controlling the car on the road and also serving up infotainment to the passengers inside.
And now, a water-driven tricycle — for when you really, really have to go fast
Look, we’re sucked for extreme speed but this might be pushing it. For a few reasons, actually, but the main reason is the acceleration. One François Gissy is the driver of this contraption, which is basically a tricycle with a massive water tank acting as an engine. Pressurising the water in the tank and then releasing it out the rear results in the tricycle (again, this is a tricycle) taking off at high speed. It launches off to 100km/h in just over 0.5 seconds, eventually reaching its top speed of 257km/h before running out of gas water. We have a couple of questions — how do you test drive something like this, and was the helmet going to be enough protection if something devastating happened?
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds steals Steams record for most concurrent users
Before the events of this past weekend the game with the highest number of concurrent users on Stead, Valve’s digital distribution platform, was the company’s own DoTA 2. The title’s old record, of 1,291,328 users, was surpassed by massive hit PlayerUnknown’s Battle Grounds. On 16 September the title scored 1,348374 concurrent users. That’s a whole lot of people trying to get themselves some chicken dinner using nothing but a frying pan and an AK47. BRB, we’re about to parachute in…
AI can now turn selfies into 3D facial models – because why on Earth not?
Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things these days. It can file legal documents, it can diagnose cancer, and now it can turn selfies into 3D models that look… one heck of a lot like the original faces. How do we know this? Because we’ve given it a go, of course, and we’re mightily impressed with the results. The technology comes from The University of Nottingham and Kingston University, where researchers wanted to… well, have some fun with AI. Nice. If you want to try out the selfie-converting AI for yourself, you can upload your own photo (or select a face from an example list) here.
