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Turtle Beach’s Hypersound Glass speakers use a sheet of transparent glass to drive sound in a highly focused beam directly in front of them while being inaudible outside the beam’s range. Welcome to never knowing why you’re hearing ads all the time—our Blade Runner hell future has arrived. The exact means the Glass uses to…
Tweets are mysterious things. They’re sometimes witty, usually banal, and often garbage. But if you’re Elon Musk, your tweets can have a very real impact on how companies are valued. For instance, one tweet from Musk last night wiped out $580 million from Samsung SDI’s market capitalization. No joke. Rumors had been swirling that Samsung…
Yesterday, venture capitalist and Y Combinator president Sam Altman whined on Twitter about getting booted from the Ritz bar in London for wearing sneakers. The tweet devolved into a dreadful discussion about whether any city that bans sneakers in upscale places can really be serious about startups. Really. Fashionable as the 31-year-old’s blue shoes seem,…
The web is a little fucked up right now. Governments are spying on civilians, some block specific websites, and companies like Amazon have a stranglehold on the cloud services business. But what if we could create a decentralized web, with more privacy, less government control, and less corporate influence? Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World…
Few of us are 18-year-old Go world champions, but all of us can play chess against an AI program that visualizes what the computer is thinking. The viewer makes the first move. When it’s the AI’s turn, the computer sketches out possible moves (often several steps in the future) on the screen before it makes…
In the VR future, less is more. Though video games and the like have people used to extremely complicated avatars, Google’s VR engineers are seeing how much they can strip down the avatars without making people confused. Engineer Rob Jagnow, who is working on the Daydream VR platform, writes that avatars can be“be simplified to…
Elon Musk is ready to prove that landing the rocket on a barge in April wasn’t just a fluke. Yesterday, the SpaceX co-founder tweeted that he hoped to relaunch its four landed rockets this fall for the first time. The relaunch is a little behind schedule, since Musk said after the barge landing that he…
Bodypaint artist Johannes Stötter is famous for hiding the human body in the shape of animals with the perfect amount of shading and the right mixture of paint. This time he painted three women into a sculpture of a wolf. If you’re looking closely, you can see the shape of the person on the wolf’s…
Dance meets geometry in this evocative short film, in which a pole dancer manipulates a projected screen behind her to create constantly shifting geometric patterns. Dubbed “Genese” (“Genesis”), it’s by the French performance art group U-Machine. As Giaco Furino writes at The Creators Project: U-Machine sets out to explore what they describe on their Facebook…
You made it! You’re in a movie! You’re a superstar! Not quite. Vanity Fair made this clever credits sequence showing how much people working on a film with a $200 million budget would get paid, and it’s pretty revealing. If you’re the lead actor or the director, sure, you’ll do fantastically well. Even if you’re…
The New York City Drone Film Festival put together this compilation video using footage from the official selections of the festival, and it’s really cool to see. Sure, drones can be occasionally annoying when they’re buzzing around your picnic at the park—but when they’re controlled by the right hands, they can capture some truly astonishing…
Magic Leap—valued at more than $4.5 billion—is one of the most secretive (and exciting) technology companies in the world. Despite its fruitful fundraising campaigns, the company has never released a commercial product and very few people have ever tried its state-of-the-art augmented reality headset. Now, a new patent may finally give us some insight into…
A truck collided with two other vehicles on a busy North Carolina highway today, upending a swarm of bees onto the road, and trapping at least one news photographer in his car. And every single tweet that local news station WBTV posted about this situation is a gem. First: A crash. Looks bad. We don’t…
Sometimes slow motion is used to enhance action scenes. Other times it’s done to convey love between two characters. There are even times when it’s used to replicate using drugs. Or show off a superpower. Or show dread. Or capture someone’s last moment. Point is, slow motion is used a lot in films, for many…
The iPhone 6s came with some neat gimmicky, stuff. One of those new additions that walked that perilous line between utility and stupidity was Live Photos. Apple described it as “unlike any other way to interact with photos.” We thought they were basically GIFs but less useful. Google must agree with us because the Android-maker…
Several Facebook users have taken to the platform to complain that their posts about convicted rapist Brock Turner—whose treatment and sentencing has drawn widespread criticism—have disappeared. Here are a few recent examples: The meme in question appears to be this one, which was also posted to Imgur about two days ago: It appears that these…
Each year, the opening of the Serpentine Pavilion heralds the beginning of summer with a temporary structure installed in a London garden. This year, the pavilion was designed by Bjarke Ingels, the Danish superstar architect who was recently brought onboard to design Hyperloop One stations. Depending on where you stand, it’s either a very convincing…
Apple launched iOS—then called iPhone OS—on June 29, 2007, with the very first iPhone. Since then, the mobile operating system has gone through some major upgrades. But it didn’t happen overnight. Ever year in the summer, Apple has reinvented the OS, adding new features and redefining what’s possible on all its iDevices. In 2016, we’re…
What’s your favorite version of Batman? Tim Burton’s? Christopher Nolan’s? Maybe you should consider that Batman: The Animated Series actually has the best Batman. Hear me out. Kaptain Kristian argues that Batman: The Animated Series set the template for what Batman was going to be for the next twenty years and influenced the source material…
Jacob Appelbaum, a prominent advocate for digital privacy and security, last week stepped down from the Tor Project, where he worked as a paid employee, after he was accused of sexual assault. “These types of allegations were not entirely new to everybody at Tor; they were consistent with rumors some of us had been hearing…
