If you’ve ever dreamed of playing the legendary shoot-em-up game of Doom on your robot lawnmower, your (strange) dreams have come true.
This is one of the more wacky pieces of new technology on show at MWC Barcelona this week. The world’s largest telecoms conference is also a good place to demonstrate new cutting-edge technology – and in this case, the technology actually does cut edges.
Your grass is Doomed
Ever wanted to play the original Doom on your robot lawnmower? @shapshak @Husqvarna_ZA#MWC2024 pic.twitter.com/98jWVZh3BU
— Stuff South Africa (@StuffSA) February 26, 2024
Husqvarna, the Swedish company that makes robotic lawnmowers and chainsaws, has revived the iconic game of Doom and is running it on its latest self-driving Automower Nera range. Some 30,000 owners of these lawnmowers can play each other from April to September this year, after which it will presumably be disabled.
Launched in 1993, Doom is one of the early first-person-shooter (FPS) games and still has a faithful following, seemingly including Björn Mannefred, Husqvarna’s head of software engineering.
He was originally hired 10 years ago and told to make the firms’ chainsaws safer, he told me, and has worked on a range of upgrades to robotic lawnmowers.
The latest models use GPS positioning, provided by Swedish mobile operator Telenor, to define where the mower should cut the lawn – instead of burying a copper wire around the perimeter of your garden.
Mannefred joked that the computing power of the lawnmower matches that of the PCs from 20 years ago.
It does seem appropriate, for a tangential reason, given that Husqvarna was originally a firearms manufacturer when it first started in 1689.
Flying taxis
A full-scale, pilot-less and electric aircraft from Joby Aviation was mounted on its stand at the conference, with a giant curved screen to give a virtual simulation of what flying through Seoul will ultimately look like. The electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is similar to those shown off by Uber in 2019 at its own urban air mobility (UAM) conference in Washington.
Hopefully, UAM will evolve from an acronym into a real service. These electric aircraft will only fly in specific air routes – and won’t be as busy as air traffic in films like The Fifth Element and drive better than Bruce Willis as a futuristic, rule-breaking taxi driver.
Feeling a virtual puppy
Japanese telecoms giant Docomo showed off its own virtual reality technology, called Feel Tech. Wearing a VR headset and sensors on your fingers and wrists, you could stroke a puppy in VR. It was meant to demonstrate the potential of much-faster 6G mobile networks and aims to “revolutionise the sharing of sensory information between people”.
Like every dog-loving dog owner, I wanted to experience this. But the queue was so long I had to settle for taking a picture of someone else stroking a Japanese dog that wasn’t there. The smiles on the faces of the Docomo staff say it all.