nDreams, the studio behind Fracked (2021) and Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), announced Synapse, an upcoming action shooter exclusive to PSVR 2 that looks to evolve Fracked’s run-and-cover gameplay whilst making good use of the headset’s eye-tracking capabilities.
There’s still a lot to learn about Synapse, although nDreams says in its PS blogpost announcement that Fracked made a “perfect foundation to build upon with Synapse,” as the upcoming shooter looks to evolves the former’s core gameplay.
As a PSVR 2 exclusive, Synapse however is also slated to use Sense controllers in concert with the headset’s eye-tracking capabilities, something the studio head James Shepard says provides “enhanced aiming which equips players with pinpoint precision when targeting their telekinesis and combines with motion controls to make wielding telekinetic powers a full-body experience.”
In the teaser trailer we get a good look at a few mechanics too; you’ll be able to launch, levitate, and smash enemies through destructible environments.
The fast-paced run and gun style gameplay along with telekinetically moveable cover also shows just how related nDream’s upcoming shooter is to Fracked.
There’s no launch date yet, however nDreams says it’s coming exclusively to PSVR 2 later this year. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game here.
Chinese tech giant Xiaomi today showed off a prototype AR headset at Mobile World Congress (MWC) that wirelessly connects to the user’s smartphone, making for what the company calls its “first wireless AR glasses to utilize distributed computing.”
Called Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, the device is built upon the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset as Meta’s recently released Quest Pro VR standalone.
While specs are still thin on the ground, the company did offer some info on headline features. For now, Xiaomi is couching it as a “concept technology achievement,” so it may be a while until we see a full spec sheet.
Packing two microOLED displays, the company is boasting “retina-level” resolution, saying its AR glasses pack in 58 pixels per degree (PPD). For reference, Meta Quest Pro has a PPD of 22, while enterprise headset Varjo XR-3 cites a PPD of 70.
The company hasn’t announced the headset’s field of view (FOV), however it says its free-form light-guiding prisms “minimizes light loss and produces clear and bright images with a to-eye brightness of up to 1200nit.”
Electrochromic lenses are also said to adapt the final image to different lighting conditions, even including a full ‘blackout mode’ that ostensibly allows it to work as a VR headset as well.
Image courtesy Xiaomi
As for input, Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass includes onboard hand-tracking in addition to smartphone-based touch controls. Xiaomi says its optical hand-tracking is designed to let users to do things like select and open apps, swipe through pages, and exit apps.
As a prototype, there’s no pricing or availability on the table, however Xiaomi says the lightweight glasses (at 126g) will be available in a titanium-colored design with support for three sizes of nosepieces. An attachable glasses clip will also be available for near-sighted users.
In an exclusive hands-on, XDA Developers surmised it felt near production-ready, however one of the issues noted during a seemingly bump-free demo was battery life; the headset had to be charged in the middle of the 30-minute demo. Xiaomi apparently is incorporating a self-developed silicon-oxygen anode battery that is supposedly smaller than a typical lithium-ion battery. While there’s an onboard Snapdragon XR 2 Gen 1 chipset, XDA Developers also notes it doesn’t offer any storage, making a compatible smartphone requisite to playing AR content.
This isn’t the company’s first stab at XR tech; last summer Xiaomi showed off a pair of consumer smartglasses, called Mijia Glasses Camera, that featured a single heads-up display. Xiaomi’s Wireless AR Glass is however much closer in function to the concept it teased in late 2021, albeit with chunkier free-form light-guiding prisms than the more advanced-looking waveguides teased two years ago.
Xiaomi is actively working closely with chipmaker Qualcomm to ensure compatibility with Snapdragon Spaces-ready smartphones, which include Xiaomi 13 and OnePlus 11 5G. Possible other future contributions from Lenovo and Motorola, which have also announced their intentions to support Snapdragon Spaces.
Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces in late 2021, a software tool kit which focuses on performance and low power devices which allows developers to create head-worn AR experiences from the ground-up, or add head-worn AR to existing smartphone apps.
In the fiercely contested smartphone market, photography can be a key battleground. Alongside the insatiable desires for better batteries, durability, storage, and processing, camera quality consistentlyranks as a key factor when choosing a phone.
At CES 2023, Spectricity, a startup based in Belgium, unveiled a new entrant to the competition: the S1 chip.
Spectricity claims the S1 is the first truly miniaturised and mass-manufacturable spectral image sensor for mobile devices — and the company is targetting sector dominance. Within two years, Spectricity boldly predicts the sensor will be inside every smartphone.
The bullishness derives from a singular focus: measuring “true colour” in smartphones. According to Spectricty, this is something that even the best smartphones still can’t do.
The problem stems from shortcomings in their white balance software, which is used to remove unrealistic colour tones. Our natural vision system does this remarkably well. When we see a white wall under sunlight or a fluorescent lamp, our brain adjusts the colour temperatures to make both scenes appear white. Smartphones attempt to do the same thing, but the results are often disappointing.
“None of these cameras can recognise true colour.
Limited by the three RGB colour channels of red, green, and blue, their auto-white balancing algorithms struggle to correct unnatural colour temperatures. As a result, photos taken under incandescent bulbs can appear more orange than under sunlight, while shady areas can look bluer.
“Even though there’s a lot of processing power behind these cameras, none can recognise true colour,” Spectricity CEO Vincent Mouret tells TNW.
To resolve this issue, the S1 sensor uses additional filters to analyse the spectral signature of an object. After sensing the light source in an image, the system corrects the colours accordingly.
Mouret (left) was CEO of several semiconductor startups before joining Spectricity founder Jonathan Borremans’ (right) team.
Spectricity showed TNW the effects in a live demo. Under different lighting conditions, the pictures produced by the S1 were compared to photos taken by high-end smartphone cameras.
Although the results of demos aren’t always replicated in reality, the colours rendered by the S1 appeared far more consistent under diverse illuminations.
“With our solution, you can have the same colours whatever the lighting condition,” says Spectricity application engineer Michael Jacobs.
Spectricity expects the first smartphones with the S1 to be released in 2024.
The ambitions for the sensor extend beyond better photos. As the S1 can capture the full visible and near-infrared range at video rates, the imager could enhance numerous mobile applications. Spectricity envisions using the sensor for remote cosmetics, e-commerce, ID verification, skin-health analysis, and even smart gardening.
A key component of these plans is the S1’s improved rendering of skin tones. Smartphone cameras are notoriously bad at capturing darker skin, which limits the inclusivity of photos. It also inhibits any apps that use skin analysis, from melanoma detection to virtual makeup.
The S1’s recognition of darker skin could broaden access to the benefits.
Biomarker analysis can be incorporated in personalised skin care.
Smartphone giants are also ploughing fortunes into colour fidelity, but Specriticity says they still can’t compete with the S1 sensor. This confidence emanates from a long and narrow scientific focus.
Spectricity began life as a spin-out of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC), a research lab for nanoelectronics and digital technologies. This connection has helped the startup amass 19 granted patents and 66 active applications, as well as 13 PhDs in their team.
To commercialise the innovations, Spectricity has set up a high-volume manufacturing line at the X-FAB foundry — which is now ready for mass production.
The S1 is currently under evaluation by major smartphone makers. Amid a global decline in mobile sales, Spectricity is betting that the sensor offers them an irresistible edge.
Adapting to technological advances is a defining part of 21st-century life. But it’s not unique to us: it’s been part of the human story since our earliest written records – even featuring in the plotlines of ancient myths and legends.
While ChatGPT threatens to change writing (and writing-related work) as we know it, the Mesopotamians, who lived 4,000 years ago (in a geographical area centred in modern-day Iraq), went through this kind of seismic change before us. Their civilisation is credited with the invention of writing.
The Mesopotamians are credited with the invention of writing. The city of Babylon, whose ruins are pictured here, was a centre of Mesopotamian culture. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Living in changing times
Just two months after launching in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has already reached an audience of over 100 million people.
Responses to ChatGPT and its competitors have vacillated between recognising the potential risks of the chatbot and extolling its possible benefits. We’re flooded with theories on how new advances in AI may change how we work, study and live.
Ancient Mesopotamia was home to many of civilisation’s early developments. Its people were world leaders in adapting to technological and cultural change.
Mesopotamians invented the wheel and agriculture, and pioneered advances in mathematics, urbanisation and transportation. These breakthroughs are reflected in cuneiform literature, one of the oldest known forms of writing.
The history of cuneiform writing is complex, but it seems to have initially developed to record economic data, such as debts that were owed. Over time, however, the Mesopotamians widened their use of signs inscribed into clay tablets to record a variety of information, in numerous languages. New uses covered everything from diplomatic correspondences to omen texts, to some of the world’s oldest literary masterpieces.
Tech-assisted heroes
In the world’s earliest known written epic, Gilgamesh, the eponymous hero is shown inventing and using technologies, such as diving weights and a sail, to further his journey to the edges of the world – and beyond.
Mesopotamian epics feature numerous battles, some using technology such as advanced weaponry. Wikimedia Commons
As noted by Assyriologist Andrew George, the young hero develops new technologies to help his quest for fame and immortality. These advances allow him to engage in previously unknown activities, such as sailing and deep-sea diving.
Another royal hero from Mesopotamia, Lugalbanda (sometimes known for his super speed) is also credited with technological advancement. Lugalbanda improves the technique of fire-starting by using flint to spark embers and bake bread. The heroes’ use of new tools emphasises their exceptionalism.
Inventions and ambiguity
Mesopotamian epics don’t present cultural and technological advances as unambiguously and uniformly beneficial. In Gilgamesh, the benefits of civilisation and urbanisation, such as advances in wall-building technology, are juxtaposed with their costs – such as environmental destruction and alienation from the wild.
Indeed, the epics often represent new technologies being harnessed in the service of human conflict – and disproportionately serving the interests of those with high social status. In the Sumerian epic Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, the heroic king defeats his enemy by inventing and using superior technology: the ability to write on clay tablets.
This invention is also thought to be referenced in the Epic of Sargon, where Sargon appears to dodge a murder attempt through his epic reading skills. The text notes that while writing on tablets had been developed at that stage, the use of envelopes to hide their contents had not (perhaps luckily for Sargon).
In some ways, the representation of new technologies in cuneiform literature echoes contemporary concerns about AI: fears of increasing social inequalities and its potential use in cyberwarfare.
In Gilgamesh, the benefits of civilisation and urbanisation are juxtaposed with their costs, like environmental destruction. This clay tablet is inscribed with part of the epic of Gilgamesh. Zunkir/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
The future of history
Studying the past can deepen our understanding of how humans have adapted to modern technology over thousands of years. Conversely, modern technology continues to broaden our understanding of history.
In recent years, AI – the newest form of writing – has been used to decipher the oldest: cuneiform literature. The Fragmentarium project, for example, uses sophisticated algorithms to determine which fragments of shattered cuneiform texts belong together; these algorithms predict the text that once filled the missing sections.
AI will likely continue to alter the way historians analyse the past. This will require new considerations around familiar issues – such as how to represent the past accurately in light of possibly biased evidence, and the need to critically evaluate sources of information.
In the broader field of academia, the boundaries of how AI may be used have not yet been clearly explained. In January, for example, a top international AI conference banned the use of AI tools for writing scientific papers – though its use in editing papers was accepted.
Considering the limits of technology
Even those early tech adapters, the Mesopotamians, ran into problems the technology of the day could not address.
Climate change is thought to have resulted in the downfall of the Akkadian Empire, sometimes called the world’s first multi-national political entity. And even the crafty Gilgamesh couldn’t escape his own mortality.
Humans have been grappling with how to invent, use and adapt to technology since our earliest civilisations. In Mesopotamian epic literature, new technology helps heroic individuals travel beyond accepted limitations and develop new skills. But the technology and resulting knowledge are not always evenly distributed.
Knowing how we adapted to changing technology in the past helps us more fully understand the human condition – and may even help us prepare for the future.
Qualcomm announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) today it’s partnering with seven global telecommunication companies in preparation for the next generation of AR glasses which are set to work directly with the user’s smartphone.
Partners include CMCC, Deutsche Telekom, KDDI Corporation, NTT QONOQ, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and Vodafone, which are said to currently be working with Qualcomm on new XR devices, experiences, and developer initiatives, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces XR developer platform.
Qualcomm announced Snapdragon Spaces in late 2021, a software tool kit which focuses on performance and low power devices which allows developers to create head-worn AR experiences from the ground-up or by adding head-worn AR to existing smartphone apps.
Qualcomm and Japan’s KDDI Corporation also announced a multi-year collaboration which it says will focus on the expansion of XR use cases and creation of a developer program in Japan.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm says OEMs are designing “a new wave of devices for operators and beyond” such as the newly unveiled Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, OPPO’s new Mixed Reality device and OnePlus 11 5G smartphone.
At least in Xiaomi’s case, its Wireless AR Glass headset streams data from compatible smartphones. Effectively offloading computation to the smartphone, the company’s 126g headset boasts a wireless latency of as low as 3ms between the smartphone device to the glasses, and a wireless connection with full link latency as low as 50ms which is comparable to wired solution.
Another Axiom, the indie studio behind wildly successful VR game Gorilla Tag, hinted that it’s now pursuing a project inspired by Echo VR.
Kerestell ‘LemmingVR’ Smith, the lead creator of Gorilla Tag, originally started working on the game thanks to his love of Echo VR, the zero-g sports game created by the Meta-owned studio Ready at Dawn.
Late last month though, Meta announced it will be shutting down Echo VR this summer as the team pursues other projects. As you’d imagine, this didn’t sit right with the small but dedicated playerbase, Smith included.
And Smith isn’t just any fan; he’s competed in and won several Echo VR competitions with his team ‘ec.lip.se’, making the loss of the game decidedly more personal.
In a recent tweet, Smith hinted that a new project is on the horizon which will be a zero-g sports game of sorts—undoubtedly a response to Meta pulling the plug on Echo VR.
Another Axion hasn’t tipped their hats beyond Smith’s tweet, so we’ll just have to wait and see what’s in store from the creator of Quest’s most-rated game, which has surpassed even the Meta-owned rhythm game Beat Saber in the number of user reviews it’s garnered.
In fact, the game has been so successful it generated $26 million in revenue from in-app purchases. The gorilla-themed game of tag has also reported a staggering (for VR) peak monthly active user count of 2.3 million in December 2022, further stating that over 760,000 users played on Christmas Day.
Thanks to Sven Viking for pointing us to the news.
On the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is commemorating horrific losses — and remarkable defiance.
The country’s fierce resistance on the battlefield has been echoed on the digital front — where Kyiv has unique experience. The conflict with Russia has become the world’s first full-scale cyberwar, but Ukraine was a test bed for digital weapons long before the invasion of 24 February, 2022. Since Putin’s troops began flooding across the border, the cyber tactics have shifted dramatically.
These developments have made Ukraine a bellwether for digital warfare. And to the surprise of analysts, cyber attacks have had a limited impact over the past year.
“We’re going to see cyber activity as a pre-emptive tactic to physical war.
In the lead-up to the invasion, cyber assaults were prominent. On 15 February, Russian hackers launched the most powerful DDoS attack in the history of Ukraine. A day before the full-scale invasion, several government and banking websites were struck once again.
Yet in the months that followed, reports of major cyberattacks declined. Zachary Warren, Chief Security Advisor EMEA atTanium and a regular advisor to NATO, regards this as a portent for digital warfare.
“Moving forward, we’re going to see cyber activity as a pre-emptive tactic to physical war… it’s a tool to weaken a target before moving in,” he said.
Ukraine’s government, meanwhile, asserts that Russia’s targets have changed. In a January report, security officials said the cyberattacks initially centred on Ukraine’s communication department, which aimed to disrupt military and government operations. But after Russia’s first defeat at the front, the focus shifted to maximising damage to civilians.
Notably, the officials found that all the assaults had harnessed previously known techniques.
“The attacks used by Russia have long been categorised and have straightforward solutions for counteraction,” said the report’s authors.
Analysts found that cyber attacks hit their highest levels in the build-up to the invasion. Credit: Crowdstrike
Many analysts expected cyberattacks to be more prevalent and devastating. Adam Meyers, Head of Intelligence at security firm CrowdStrike, believes Russia had expected a quick and decisive victory. As a result, the Kremlin may have initially avoided destructive cyberattacks, because it would have needed Ukrainian infrastructure to prop up a friendly government.
“As Russian operations failed to take Kyiv and make advances as rapidly as planned, we saw more tactical cyber operations paired with kinetic effects targeting Ukraine and did not see broad attacks against the West — as we all had prepared for,” said Meyers.
Cloudflare found human internet traffic dropped by as much as 33% in the weeks following February 24, but has recovered as Ukrainian refugees have returned to the country.
The modest impact of Russia’s cyber weapons has not been for want of trying. In January, Viktor Zhora, a senior figure at Ukraine’s cybersecurity agency, said cyberattacks in the country had tripled over the past year. Zhora wants the digital assaults to be prosecuted as war crimes.
Despite the onslaught, Ukraine’s networks have remained remarkably resilient. Analysts give much of the credit to Ukraine’s repair crews, its widespread connectivity to networks outside the country, and its large number of internet exchange points.
Some pundits argue that digital weapons are simply less effective than physical warfare, while others believe Russia’s capabilities were overrated.
Another factor is Ukraine’s persistent efforts to strengthen its defences. The lengthy conflict with Russia have provided immense experience of mitigating cyberattacks.
“This made us stronger,” Zhora said last year. “We took our lessons from this cyber aggression.”
There will be more more lessons to come, but Ukraine already has much to teach its allies about cyber warfare.
On February 13, IKEA launched an educational and interactive AR game called Lilla Äventyret (The Little Adventure). The AR game was made possible through IKEA’s partnership with Meta and Warpin Reality and lets users learn more about marine life and ways with which they can protect them.
This isn’t IKEA’s first foray into leveraging AR to deliver better experiences for customers. A few years ago, the company launched IKEA Place, an AR-driven app that makes it easier for homeowners to imagine what IKEA products will look like in their homes.
With Lilla Äventyret, IKEA aims to help make children’s stay in select IKEA stores more enjoyable, aside from providing them with a fun and engaging way to discover and virtually interact with marine life found in our oceans.
“This project is an interesting step in creating a richer customer experience at IKEA by weaving in technologies such as augmented reality as part of the shopping experience,” said Josefine Billström Raasakka, Creative Strategist at Meta, in a press release shared with ARPost.
Promoting Environmental Awareness With the BLÅVINGAD Collection
IKEA’s BLÅVINGAD collection is an ocean-inspired collection of soft toys and accessories like cushions, duvet covers, and towels. The toys from the collection are produced partly from a mix of recycled PET and plastic collected from oceans. BLÅVINGAD aims to bring awareness to future generations about marine life and how human activities, such as pollution and littering, can affect nature, including marine life.
“The game is based on our collection BLÅVINGAD, as well as children’s interests and curiosity, but also on their concerns related to our oceans,” said IKEA Retail Sweden Marketing Manager Helena Gouiveia. “Thanks to the game, children can learn more about marine life and what happens under the surface while they are in our stores.”
To boost interest and share more knowledge about life in the ocean, as well as pique children’s curiosity, IKEA has partnered with Meta and Warpin, an immersive tech company based in Stockholm, to develop the AR game Lilla Äventyret, which is currently available in 21 IKEA stores across Sweden.
While the AR game is designed for younger children, older kids and adults are welcome to participate and create memorable and unique experiences for the family.
Once the player is inside the AR game, they can uncover facts about marine life and take photos with the collection’s underwater creatures, such as turtles and killer whales, in AR using the game’s filters.
IKEA’s partnership with Meta and Warpin has also made it the first global retailer to explore the Meta Spark AR platform on a large scale.
“It’s been great to create this innovative family experience in AR with Meta and IKEA. Working closely with Meta, we’ve challenged and tested the boundaries of Spark AR, moving from a simple filter to creating a unique experience for the whole family,” said Warpin CEO Emma Ridderstad. “It will be exciting to see how all families with children play and have fun together with IKEA’s Lilla Äventyret.”
How to Access the AR Game Lilla Äventyret
The game, which is based on the BLÅVINGAD collection, can be accessed as a filter on Instagram.
To play the AR game, users need to have the latest version of Instagram installed. Once done, they should scan the QR code found in select IKEA stores. They will start their little adventure by finding and scanning images at different stations to access different parts of the game. In each participating IKEA store, there are four different stations that hold information about marine animals.
The game is suitable for children ages three years old and up and will remain available across 21 IKEA stores in Sweden for four weeks during the winter sports holidays.
Iker Marcaide is one of Spain’s most energetic entrepreneurs. Since stepping away from Flywire, the first Spanish startup to go public on the Nasdaq, Marcaide has focused his attention on impact investing, creating new startups with his company Zubi Group, building a school, and designing an eco-neighbourhood.
Marcaide meets us in a 60-hectare plot of land dotted with trees on the outskirts of the city of València on a sunny, chilly January morning. This is La Pinada, the site where he will build a sustainable neighbourhood (“barrio” in Spanish) comprising homes, schools, co-works, and community spaces.
Today, wooden cabins on the site are filled with people working on Zubi Group startup projects. Across a wooden bridge through the trees, the Imagine Montessori school that Marcaide opened in 2016 is visible.
The Imagine Montessori school. Credit: Zubi Group
As an adviser to TNW València, Marcaide will be speaking about impact investing at our event in March. In the meantime, we’re here to talk to him about founding the foreign-currency payment platform Flywire, why he left the company, and his ambitions for Zubi Group.
Born of frustration
Marcaide came up with the idea for Flywire (then called peerTransfer) in 2009 whilst studying for his Master’s degrees in Business Administration (MBA) and Engineering at MIT. He says he didn’t think of himself as an entrepreneur back then, nor did he come from an entrepreneurial background, but he wanted to create companies that “in some way resonated with me and my needs, things I experienced first-hand.”
Back then, he was experiencing the stress and expense of getting scholarship money transferred to him at MIT from a Spanish foundation.
“I thought, ‘This is unfair, because the people that have the least purchasing power are actually paying all these banking fees… What if we create an alternative to the banking wires in a way that is more cost effective, more reliable, and more fair?’”
Marcaide decided that while they would need sales and business development teams on the ground in different markets, it would be smart to consolidate functions globally, and chose València as the main office for things like administration, tech, and product development.
The company is headquartered in Boston, and has since grown into a leader in cross-border tuition payment transfers for universities. It has also branched into travel, healthcare, and other business sectors. Flywire went public in 2021 at a $3.5 billion valuation.
So what led Marcaide to step back as CEO of Flywire in 2013, when things were really soaring?
“It was a big decision, but a lot of things lined up at that time,” he says. “I realised that you can only be CEO of one company, and assuming you want to be engaged in solving different problems, being CEO of one company would not be an option.”
“When I create companies, I always think that besides being your baby, it has to have a life of its own,” he adds. “As a founder, not becoming a bottleneck is kind of your number one role.”
The Zubi journey
The entrepreneur was already thinking about venture building and how he wanted to focus on companies that, beyond being good financial opportunities, could also play a social or environmental role.
His first big project was venture builder Zubi Labs in 2014, which creates from scratch tech companies that focus on social or environmental impact. Two years later, he founded the private Imagine Montessori school, on the same land that will house La Pinada eco-neighbourhood.
Impression of Barrio La pinada. Credit: Zubi Group
In 2017, the concept and plans for La Pinada began, followed by the creation of an open innovation centre for sustainability, called La Pinada Lab, in 2020.
In 2021, Marcaide launched Zubi Capital to invest in external companies as the first impact fund aimed at venture debt in Europe. All these companies and business units are part of Zubi Group, which numbers over 200 people.
València’s impact potential
Having been born in Boston, raised in Granada, and lived in Madrid, London and the US, Marcaide rightly sees himself as a global citizen. Now his dream is that València will become a hotspot for impact and sustainability.
“You can start something amazing from anywhere in the world, but you have to be very connected. For me, spending time internationally, then being in València as part of a global company, opened my eyes in terms of what it means to be globally connected,” he says. “It’s just a question of plugging in and connecting with like-minded people, of whom there are many.”
He believes that while València can’t perhaps become the biggest tech hub in the world, it could become the most articulated, connected and functional one — at least, that is what he would like to see happen.
“When I was coming to València in 2010 and meeting the ecosystem, I kind of lacked that sense of global connection and global ambition — I think that has changed completely,” he says.
Field of dreams
Marcaide says he would be happy to break ground on Barrio la Pinada tomorrow, but is awaiting building permits from the Valèncian authorities. At the moment, there’s no scheduled date of when the entrepreneur’s brainchild would open its doors.
La Pinada has been designed as a self-contained carbon-neutral community. By consulting with people about how they would like their daily lives to look, the Zubi team realised that everyone wanted things to be simpler in terms of how they live, work, pick up kids from school, and so on.
Impression of Barrio La Pinada. Credit: Zubi Group
“Cities are not organised that way, normally you live somewhere, you work somewhere different, the school is somewhere else, and you spend half of your day moving around — a lot of social and environmental issues are precisely derived from that,” Marcaide explains.
The Pinada project has created opportunities for new startups that could support this dream, ones working in areas like energy, waste, and the circular economy. As well as housing, the goal is to have schools, co-working spaces, living spaces, and a broad community mix of young and older people, professionals, families, and singles.
“At Zubi Group, I think we’re at that hockey stick point, when you start putting the pieces together and delivering value much quicker,” Marcaide says. “We’ve been putting in a lot of the foundations and the team, so Zubi in 10 years will be far more global, a different order of magnitude to where we are today.”
If you want to experience València’s ecosystem for yourself and listen to Iker Marcaide speaking on stage, we’ve got something special for our loyal readers. Use the promo code TNWVAL30 and get a 30% discount on your conference business pass for TNW València.
A raft of research, supported by startup developments, suggests drones inspired by nature are the future of flight.
Plans for the future of airborne transport include seeing a small army of drones competing for space in the sky with the 50 billion birds worldwide. But there’s also the potential of a halfway house, where drones that look like birds end up flying alongside the animals they’re inspired from and the traditional quadcopters.
A new raft of drones inspired by nature, many of which are university spin-offs, are capturing the attention of investors. Animal Dynamics, which was launched in 2015 as a spin-off from a University of Oxford project and has since raised £35 million, sells the Stork parafoil drone, which — while not looking much like an animal — includes inspiration from nature in terms of how it works. (A previous project, Skeeter, was more closely inspired by the movement of a dragonfly’s wings, including its flapping propulsion.)
The Stork parafoil drone. Credit: Animal Dynamics
“We understand there are things within nature that have developed really excellent solutions to problems that we also face as humans,” says Ian Foster, Head of Engineering at Animal Dynamics, who is one of the 91 staff members at the firm.
That’s something Matěj Karásek sees echoes of in his own company. Karásek is the founder of Dutch startup Flapper (previously Flapper Drones), a spin-off from Delft University of Technology, which counts two employees and has raised €100,000 in seed money. The university project had been going for the best part of two decades, and was designed to try and develop a bioinspired drone that was lightweight.
The size and scale aspect is a necessary evil, Karásek says. “One of the key advantages of bioinspired drones is they need to be small because of the physics,” he explains. That enables them to do more detailed, fine-skilled tasks that bigger drones can’t — making a virtue out of what may initially seem like a limitation.
Creating a large nature-inspired drone runs into the same problem that the dodo had: it can’t fly. Small size brings another benefit as well: “If you keep them small, they’re very safe, not only because of their size, but because they have wings that are soft,” Karásek says.
“Quadcopters are sensitive to damage,” he says. “If they hit something, they break. Flapping ones might be less sensitive and potentially something that could restart again if it crashes.”
Points of differentiation
Animal Dynamics’ Stork drone doesn’t see size as an issue. Its parafoil can carry a payload of 135 kilograms up to 400km, thanks to the nature-inspired revolution of simply gliding for kilometres without powering the engine — something that Foster, the company’s Head of Engineering, believes makes it useful for work in less built-up areas.
“We want to be able to operate in places where they’re very remote,” he says. “We’re delivering aid to an area that has collapsed infrastructure. There isn’t going to be an airport there.”
But for drone companies like Flapper trying to find a niche in more built-up, populated environments, safety is one area where it sees its range of bioinspired drones as offering a key point of differentiation. “If you fly into something with a conventional drone, the sharp propellers could cut into things, but with soft wings, they actually bounce off objects,” Karásek says.
Flapper was founded in 2019 to solve an entirely different market need in the world of entertainment. Karásek envisaged his bird-like drones taking the place of actual birds in theme park shows. Then the pandemic hit, and demand in the sector suddenly cratered. Flapper has since looked beyond the entertainment industry, touting its drone as the world’s first commercially-available bioinspired drone that can hover in the air.
The Flapper Butterfly. Credit: Flapper Drones
And it’s not just hovering that the new raft of bioinspired drones can do differently to quadcopters already on the market.
“There are still a bunch of things that animals do way better than mechanical drones,” says Arthur Holland Michel, author of a book on the history of drones. “The ability to perch on a range of surfaces and structures, for example. Or to take off and land vertically without using a lot of energy, to be nimble and fast in flight, or to fly for a really long time.” For those reasons, bioinspired drones hold huge promise,” says Michel.
Safety and subtlety
The lack of intrusiveness is one way in which Flapper hopes to market its wares. Alongside the drone’s ability to hover and its safety, should there be a collision, Flapper also says that it’s quieter than the more traditional quadcopter competitors. “It’s a different frequency,” says Karásek. “It’s not this high-pitched buzzing of a propeller, but it’s more low frequencies, less intrusive, and more pleasant.”
All of that is important, reckons the Flapper team, as drone use becomes more commonplace and integrated into our daily lives. The commercial drone sector is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 24% each year to 2030, according to one industry analysis.
“As we use robots and flying robots more and more, we’ll be surrounded by them,” says Karásek. “Safety will become very important, because right now that’s what’s limiting the use of drones.”
Regulation is cited by both Karásek and Foster as one of the key curbing factors on their growth. “As we build confidence with regulators, we can expand out,” says Foster. “It’s a staged, incremental approach. It’s not a case of developing a product, selling it to someone, and away you go. The regulatory framework isn’t there at the moment.”
Even if it were, these bioinspired drones have their drawbacks. The most sci-fi-like plans for the future use of drones include carrying relatively large payloads, freeing up road networks from cargo trucks, and instead putting the transportation of products into the sky. That’s something that bioinspired drones will struggle with.
Right now, Flapper sells drones with a 50cm wingspan, which Karásek calls “quite large”. The company plans to miniaturise, rather than expand, the size of the devices. With the current state of tech and hardware, Karásek believes it’s possible to make his drones half the size they currently are, but that includes trade-offs, thanks to limitations on actuator technology.
The Flapper NimblePlus drone. Credit: Flapper Drones
Karásek declined to share the number of drones Flapper had sold, but said the company was focused more on quality, than quantity — and was seeking to find markets outside the mainstream.
“If we compete against toy manufacturers, they’ll just copy us,” Karásek claims. “If we compete against [giant Chinese drone manufacturer] DJI, they’ll just copy us as well. We’re trying to find our own way to keep developing the technology but keeping our niche.”
The current focus on bioinspired drones reflects an interest in the romantic nature of the drone, reckons Michel.
“Beyond their potential practical benefits, bioinspired drones also have a significant narrative power,” he says. “They just seem so futuristic, and they tap into a primal human fascination. A drone that looks like a bat or an eagle is far more likely to generate interest than a regular old quadcopter.”
The nature-inspired designs also benefit from a broader push towards sustainability, reckons Foster.
“Nature is very efficient,” he says. “Nature doesn’t have an awful lot of energy to throw around. We’ve been through a phase as humans where energy was cheap. You could mine another bit out of the ground and throw some more fuel on it.”
The niche of bioinspired drones is also one that European countries feel better placed to tackle, rather than competing with Chinese and US giants on more mainstream drones, which have incumbent companies that are already well-established. The point of differentiation is key in a competitive, growing sector. And in a space where off-the-shelf drones are traditionally seen as quadcopters, these more bioinspired versions stand out.
Schell Games, the team behind the I Expect You To Die franchise, announced the third game in the series is slated to arrive on VR headsets this year.
Called I Expect You To Die 3: Cog in the Machine, the latest installment of the spy-flavored puzzle-adventure is expected to come to Meta Quest 2 and SteamVR headsets later this year.
The studio hasn’t mentioned PSVR 2 support yet, although it’s likely we’ll be waiting on a bigger announcement surrounding PSVR 2 versions of both the first and second I Expect You To Die games.
In I Expect You To Die (both one and two), the player is confronted with escape room-style puzzles, requiring you to use your wits to defy death as you defuse bombs, solve complex object-oriented puzzles, and maneuver your way ever closer to defeating the evil Dr. Zor and his henchmen.
Here’s how Schell Games describes the upcoming sequel:
Outwit your most cunning adversary to date in the latest installment of this award-winning, spy-themed VR puzzle series. Wield new gadgets, visit action-packed locales, and wear custom disguises as you dive back into the world of espionage in this escape room game.
Your skills, and survival rate, make you one of our most capable agents, and you’ve resurfaced right on time. Zoraxis, our sworn enemy, has something new up its sleeve and we fear dire consequences if we don’t stop its diabolical schemes. We’re counting on you to throw a wrench into whatever evil is brewing. In this escape-the-room VR puzzler, you need to protect the Agency and the world as we know it, without losing your wits…or your life!
In a Meta blog post, I Expect You To Die 3 Project Director Matt Mahon said this:
“We have some unique and exciting locations in I Expect You To Die 3, and we can’t wait to see how players creatively solve puzzles in a race to beat Dr. Zor at their own game,” said Mahon. “Players new to the series can jump right in and have a great time, and returning fans will appreciate some fun nods to the prior games.”
I Expect You To Die 3 is scheduled to launch later this year. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam.
When a polar bear sees the northern lights for the first time, he wants to reach out and touch them. How will he get there and who will he meet along the way? That’s up to you with this charming interactive AR story puzzle.
The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights
“The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights” is a sort of choose-your-own-adventure AR story for children where the “chapters” are physical puzzle pieces. The artwork and story are by Julie Puech and Karl Kim.
The ways in which these pieces fit together (or don’t) helps the AR story keep a logical narrative. However, pieces can be added and removed or swapped out resulting in multiple different possible tellings of the tale.
Of course, the adorable puzzle doesn’t tell the whole story. The puzzle pieces come to life with the help of a free AR mobile app for Apple and Android devices. The mobile app recognizes the pieces and animates their artwork, as well as queueing an audio narration by Kasey Miracle.
As a weary old XR veteran with a cold little heart, I sometimes find it helpful to recruit fresh eyes for product reviews – like when my younger brother provided his insights for my Nreal Air review. This time I recruited the help of my fiancée’s eight-year-old daughter.
What’s in the Box?
The puzzle comes with 15 AR story cards and an instructional booklet. The instructional booklet has information about the product, links to the app, and some advice for doing the puzzle for the first time – but don’t panic if you lose it. The puzzle information and a QR code to the app are both on the outside of the box and the first puzzle piece triggers an AR guide to using the app.
The free app, powered by Unity, opens with a quick warning about being aware of your surroundings while using AR and encourages you to supervise children when using the app. From there, the app only has a play button and a settings button. Settings include background dimming to make the animations stand out better, or an option to turn the animations off.
Do be aware that the app is 394 MB and does require a fairly modern device to run. Like any AR app, it requires the use of your camera while the app is running.
Following Directions
Some pieces have special icons on them. Cards with a blue “+” are optional chapters that don’t have to be included in the AR story. Cards with green and orange arrows can be swapped out for one another, changing how the story unfolds.
The play guide recommends that you remove the optional chapters and two of the interchangeable chapters the first time that the puzzle is constructed. This is presumably an introductory version of the puzzle to avoid throwing too much at first-time players.
As with any puzzle, it’s important to find a flat surface large enough for the puzzle when completed. The play guide recommends a space of two feet by three-and-a-half feet. The AR story puzzle is long and narrow in nature, particularly with all of the possible pieces in play, but has some curves in the overall shape so it isn’t just a straight line.
The AR instructions at the beginning of the puzzle remind you that you also need to have space to sit comfortably with the puzzle in front of you for about 20 minutes (give or take). After all, the play guide also recommends additional activities like asking the child to try to construct the story from the puzzle before watching the narration.
Putting the Pieces Together
The first time putting the puzzle together, we followed the play guide’s advice to remove extra pieces and one set of interchangeable chapters. The shapes of the pieces are similar enough to make it a little challenging for young hands to assemble without it being frustrating. They’re also different enough that the story can’t be constructed in an order that wouldn’t make sense.
It only took a few minutes to assemble the puzzle for the first time, and then we fired up the app. The AR instructions are short, cute, and very informative, telling us everything we needed to know without being boring. It takes the app a second or so to recognize the cards, so moving from one chapter to the next is neither seamlessly fast nor frustratingly slow.
The animations are cute and colorful, and the effects are simply but beautifully done. The default background dimming on the app is 35%, and it certainly worked. Turning it up can make the background disappear completely, which makes for optimum viewing quality, but also makes it harder to find the pieces in the camera. Pick what setting you like best.
At one point in the story, the bear starts receiving items for his journey. The Child got to choose which items he used when, but only one item was ever needed in the story, and selecting the wrong item isn’t penalized – you just pick again. We were split on this. It’s nice that we couldn’t pick wrong, but picking at all felt kind of unnecessary. (This made more sense later on.)
We reached the end of the AR story. Sort of. Immediately upon finishing the puzzle and the story the first time, The Child asked to do the puzzle again with the extra chapters.
Putting the Pieces Together Again
We added in the two optional AR story pieces and swapped out both of the interchangeable pieces and put the puzzle together again. Suddenly, the choices made a much bigger difference and a lot more sense.
The interchangeable pieces provide the bear with a different item and see him use it in a different way. The additional chapters introduce new characters, which the bear befriends by using the different items. This gave The Child a new appreciation for the AR story, but it gave me a new appreciation for the AR app.
Doing the puzzle the first time, one would be forgiven for assuming that the chapters are stand-alone pieces that don’t affect one another. Doing the puzzle again makes it clear that the app is telling a new story each time based on the pieces, their placement, and your choices throughout the story.
We’ve only done the puzzle those two times so far. I haven’t done the math to figure out how many different versions of the story are possible with different choices, pieces, and arrangements, but I know that there are a lot of versions of the story that we have yet to hear.
And that’s a good thing. As soon as we finished doing the puzzle the second time, The Child immediately asked if there were any more AR story puzzles like this one.
Where to Find the AR Story Puzzle
So far, The Bear Who Touched the Northern Lights is the only product by Red+Blue Stories (but we’re hopeful for more). The company is based in Canada but also ships to the US. Prices start at around US$34, but you can pay more for different shipping options. As of this writing, the AR story puzzle is not available on other online retailers like Amazon.
The AR instructions say that a child can use the product by themselves after the first go-around. That may be true, but if you’re letting your child construct this AR story puzzle without you, you’re missing out.
