Of all the fictional virtual assistants we know from pop culture, few stand up to the original and perhaps most famous: the HAL 9000 from the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
We should probably be thankful for that. After all, Alexa may shut your lights off, but she won’t turn against you and wreak havoc on your life. Or will she?
In this week’s Light Start, we’ve got a folding smartphone as well as a lack of one, Samsung stops making Blu-ray players, and a Tolkien documentary series.
Imagine a house where the walls change colour depending on your mood, or your tablecloth changes shape when you’re having a dinner party. A house where every item, from your cushions to your lampshades, interact with you. This might sound like something out of Harry Potter, but such magic interior design could become a real part of our lives in the near future.
When you are asked to create a password – either for a new online account or resetting login information for an existing account – you’re likely to choose a password you know you can remember. Many people use extremely basic passwords, or a more obscure one they reuse across many sites. Our research has found that others – even ones who use different passwords for each site – have a method of devising them, for instance basing them all on a familiar phrase and making site-specific tweaks.
Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes.
The film – in cinemas from today – revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563).
So much for speculative. LG, contrary to what the company’s Ken Hong had to say a few weeks back, has revealed that it’s indeed chucking the speaker in the upcoming G8 ThinQ. Except ‘chucking’ is the wrong term. LG’s augmenting its internal speakers with something else. Something a little different.
It has become possible to 3D print with quite a range of different materials, including the likes of wood and silver. Most machines are restricted to synthetics, however, such as plastics, rubbery polymers and nylons. Machines usually only print one material at a time, or swap between a palette of two or three materials
Technology bleeds. Not in the red-and-white-cell sense (yet) but development in one area can spread to another quite easily. Case…
When the ten year challenge began doing the rounds on social media, people rushed to post profile pictures of themselves from 2009, side by side with one from 2019, to highlight how much they had changed (or not) in the meantime. It is estimated that more than 5.2m social media users participated in this challenge.
VR, much like winter, is coming. One of the best things about it is that we’re not really sure what form it’s going to take. Microsoft’s HoloLens is an implementation that we’ve been impressed with from the start, combining the best bits of a full-fat VR system with what Google Glass was supposed to be. And it looks like we’re going to get a look at the sequel in short order. HoloLens 2 should be rearing its head(gear) at this year’s Mobile World Congress.