Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/18 – New Messages, New Headsets

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, September 18th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Messages between Android and iOS are about to be encrypted. A new XR headset from HTC and new spectacles from Snap.

Starting point is 00:00:47 A big movie studio has signed up to use AI, NeurLink, has implants for blindness, and why I'm kind of not going to do a review roundup of the new iPhones. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The GSM Association plans to enable end-to-end encryption on messages between Android and iOS. Google is working to bring cross-platform E2E to RCS chats, quote, as soon as possible. Quoting the verge. In the announcement, GSM technical director Tom Van Pelt said the next milestone for RCS Universal Profile is the, quote, first deployment of standardized interoperable messaging encryption between different computing platforms. The move would help bridge a major gap in

Starting point is 00:01:33 interoperability, especially now that Apple's on board with RCS. On Monday, Apple's iOS 18 update replaced SMS with RCS messaging for text sent to users on Android. While the change doesn't get rid of the green bubbles, it will finally allow cross-platform users to share high-res media, as well as see read receipts and typing indicators. But Apple's implementation of RCS is missing one key feature, end-to-end encryption. Currently, not all RCS providers offer end-to-end encryption. messages is one of the exceptions as it started enabling E2EE by default for RCS conversations last year. Apple's proprietary iMessage system has end-to-end encryption enabled as well, but it doesn't apply the same protection for RCS messages, end quote. So yeah, speaking of RCS on iOS,

Starting point is 00:02:22 here's what that means in practice now that it's available, also from the verge. RCS chats are still missing many features Apple Bakes-in for iMessage coverage. conversations like being able to schedule messages to send later or add animated text effects to what you write. But with RCS support, a lot of the basics are now available. With RCS on iOS, you'll get major improvements like high-resolution media, typing indicators, and read receipts when you're texting with people on other phones that also support RCS. In its iOS 18 press release, Apple also highlights support for, quote, more reliable group messaging compared to SMS and MMS. When you're texting somebody not on an iPhone, take a look at the text entry box. In gray letters, you'll

Starting point is 00:03:03 see the words text message, then a dot, and then RCS or SMS. If you see RCS, you're having an RCS chat. You might see similar RCS or SMS indicators in the middle of a conversation thread. There may be, however, at least one catch. It seems that not all phone carriers support RCS on iPhone yet, while, according to 9 to 5 Google, AT&T, T Mobile, and Verizon, all support the feature in the U.S. I'm on Mint Mobile, and instead of saying RCS, my iPhone to Android conversations, still say SMS, end quote. HTC this morning unveiled the $999 Vive Focus Vision, a standalone VR headset with built-in eye-tracking,

Starting point is 00:03:47 16-mapixel stereo color front-facing cameras, and more for pre-order now. Quoting a gadget. HTCVive is following up its intriguing yet expensive XR Elite headset with something that'll still be quite pricey, the $999 Focus Vision, built on the same platform as the standalone Vive Focus 3. The upgraded model adds a slew of new features like built-in, eye-tracking, 16-magixel stereo-color front-facing cameras for mixed reality and automatic IPD adjustment,

Starting point is 00:04:16 which makes it easier to share. And with the additional $149 display port wired streaming kit, gamers can also hook the Focus Vision up to their PCs for more intensive VR experiences. While the ViveXR Elite looked almost like a pair of oversized glasses, the Vision Focus doesn't look much different than the Focus 3. It's clearly a standard VR headset, albeit one a step above the MetaQuest 3, a device mostly made of cheaper plastic and other low-grade materials. There is plenty of cushioning along the front of the headset and rear headstrap, and there's more than enough room to fit large glasses. Under the hood, the Vive Focus Vision features a 5K LCD display delivering 2.5K resolution per eye, a 90-hertz refresh rate,

Starting point is 00:04:59 and a wide 120-degree field of view. HTC says it will gain 120-hurt support over displayport, later this year. In addition to the 2 16 megapixel front-facing cameras, which are positioned like human eyes for distortion-free mixed reality, there's also an infrared floodlight for hand-tracking and low-light for external tracking cameras and the usual depth sensor. Once again, HTC has stuck a removable battery pack in the headset's rear strap, but now there's also a small built-in battery offering an additional 20 minutes of standby charge. That means you can swap battery packs without shutting down the headset and leaving your VR immersion. That feature alone could be compelling to organizations where employees will have to wear

Starting point is 00:05:40 the Focus Vision for hours on an end. HTC claims the headset can last for two hours of continuous use. With the Vive Focus Vision, HTC is also making a play for high-end VR gaming. While Meta's Quest headsets can connect to gaming PCs wirelessly and with USBC cables, they're essentially delivering a compressed video feed of VR experiences from those systems. The FocusVisions DisplayPort kit functions more like a standard PC VR headset. It gives you a direct connection to your computer's video card. You shouldn't see any of the lag or compression artifacts that you occasionally do with MetaQuest to PC connections, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:22 Meanwhile, Snap unveiled new spectacles that it will lease to Snapchat AR lens developers, with a more immersive display, longer battery life, and a more lightweight design. More on that design in a second. Quoting The Verge. Spectacles announced Tuesday at Snap's annual Partner Summit in Los Angeles aren't being sold. Instead, Snap is repeating its playbook for the last version of Spectacles in 2021 and distributing them to the people who make AR lenses for Snapchat. This time around, though, there is an extra hurdle. You'll have to apply for access through Lens Studio, the company's desktop tool for creating AR software, and pay $99 a month to rent a pair for at least one year. Yes, Snap is asking

Starting point is 00:07:03 developers to pay $1,188 over the course of the course of of a year to access these spectacles. Even still, SNAP's CEO Evan Spiegel believes the interest will be there. Our goal is really to empower and inspire the developer and AR-enthusiest communities, he tells me, this really is an invitation and hopefully an inspiration to create. Without the vibrant developer ecosystem that Snap wants to create, my demo of the new spectacles felt a lot like my demo of the last spectacles in 2021. One lens showed flowers that grow where you point your hands, while another displayed the anatomy of a human body in 3D space. I could open a browser and load this very website in a floating window. The first thing that stands out when you put the new

Starting point is 00:07:44 spectacles on is the improved display quality and interface. Colors were richer and higher resolution. The SNAPOS powering the glasses has been completely redone and felt considerably more polished, even if it's still bare bones. The main way you navigate spectacles is through hand tracking and voice control, which felt inherently slow at times, but never dragged in a way that felt glitchy. Snap says this model boasts a 46-degree field of view up from 26.3 degrees for the previous version, and that its wave guide displays show 37 pixels per degree. A measurement snap believes is the right way to measure AR display quality that is about 25% richer than before. The physical lenses of the glasses auto-tint when you're looking at direct sunlight,

Starting point is 00:08:25 allowing you to see what's being projected onto your surroundings while outdoors, end quote. This might be another case, though, where it's worth clicking through for the pictures in the linked story in the show notes. The new design is, shall we say, a choice. People online are divided about the look, with some people calling it the cyber truck of AR glasses. Instagram yesterday rolled out teen accounts, a sweeping update to boost privacy and limit intrusive effects for under 18 users, including making accounts private by default. Voting the Times. Instagram said the accounts of users younger than 18 will be made private by default in the coming weeks, which means that only followers approved by an account holder may see their posts.

Starting point is 00:09:15 The app owned by META also plans to stop notifications to minors from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. to promote sleep. In addition, Instagram will introduce more supervision tools for adults, including a feature that allows parents to see the accounts that their teenager recently messaged. Adam Osseri, the head of Instagram, said the new settings and features were intended to address parents' top concerns about their children online, including inappropriate contact, inappropriate content, and too much screen time. The changes are one of the most far-reaching set of measures undertaken by an app to address teenagers' use of social media, as scrutiny over young people's experiences online has ramped up. In recent years, parents and children's groups have warned that Instagram,

Starting point is 00:09:53 TikTok, Snapchat, and other apps have regularly exposed children and teenagers to bullying, pedophiles, sexual extortion, and content promoting self-harm and eating disorders. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, called for cigarette-like labels on social media to warn of the potential mental health risks. In July, the Senate passed bipartisan legislation called the Kids Online Safety Act to impose safety and privacy requirements for children and teenagers on social media, and some states have passed social media restrictions. In 2021, Instagram announced that it would make new accounts open by those who indicated they were younger than 16 private by default. At the time, the app allowed younger teenagers to simply switch the default to public accounts. This time, 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds will be able to opt out of the privacy settings by themselves. But Instagram said users younger than 16 will now need a parent's permission to make their accounts publicly viewable, end quote.

Starting point is 00:10:53 Lionsgate Entertainment, the studio behind the Hunger Games, John Wick and Twilight, has signed a deal with runway to use generative AI in its movies and TV shows. Quoting the journal, Michael Burns, vice chairman of Lionsgate Studio, expects the company to be able to save millions and millions of dollars from using the new model. The studio behind the John Wick franchise and Megalopolis plans to initially use the new AI tool for internal purposes like storyboarding, laying out a series of graphics to show how a story unfolds, and eventually creating backgrounds and special effects like explosions for the big screen. We do a lot of action movies, so we blow a lot of things up, and that is one of the things runway does, Burns said. Nionsgate, like many Hollywood studios, had been hesitant to engage with generative AI tools given concerns among creators that the technology could replace them. How entertainment companies use generative AI was a major sticking point in negotiations during last year's Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America Strikes.

Starting point is 00:11:49 Burns said the studio realized in recent months that if it didn't move quickly, it could fall behind its competitors. Other companies like Disney and Paramount have had discussions about partnering with generative AI providers, the Wall Street Journal has previously reported. Runway and other generative AI startups have been sued by groups representing visual artists who allege that the tech companies violated copyrights by using their work to train their AI models. A spokeswoman declined to comment on the pending litigation. The company has filed a motion to dismiss the case. While many entertainment companies are discussing signing deals with generative AI providers, few have actually allowed these firms to use their film and TV libraries to create proprietary models, said Jeff Katzen, a partner at Bain and company which has worked with Lionsgate on its AI strategy. quote. Neurrelink says Blindsight, its experimental implant aimed at restoring vision, has received the FDA's breakthrough device designation here in the U.S., quoting Reuters. The FDA's breakthrough tag is given to certain medical devices that provide treatment or diagnosis of life-threatening

Starting point is 00:12:52 conditions. It is aimed at speeding up development and review of devices currently under development. The experimental device known as blindsight, quote, will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see, Elon Musk said. Neurrelink did not immediately respond to a request seeking details about when it expects the blind sight device to move into human trials. The FDA also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Founded in 2016 by Musk and a group of engineers, Neurlink is building a brain chip interface that can be implanted within the skull, which it says could eventually help disabled patients

Starting point is 00:13:25 to move and communicate again and also restore vision. Neurlink's device has a chip that processes and transmits neural signals. that could be transmitted to devices like a computer or a phone. The startup is separately testing an implant designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone, a prospect that could help people with spinal cord injuries. This trial is expected to enroll three patients to evaluate its device in a study expected to take several years to complete.

Starting point is 00:13:51 According to details on the U.S. government's ethical trials database earlier this year, Neurrelink successfully implanted the device in the second patient who has been using it to play video games and learn how to design 3D objects, end quote. Finally today, hey Brian, the embargo on reviews broke for the iPhone 16 phone lineup this morning. So like you've done every time for six years now, are you going to do a whole review whip around? Uh, maybe not. I mean, what is there to talk about? The Apple intelligence features aren't there yet. The camera control button? Okay, fine. Here's Neli on that, quote. The button itself is a hybrid. You can press, it down all the way to take a photo or give it a light press to trigger a haptic click and bring up a

Starting point is 00:14:40 setting like zoom or exposure, which you can adjust with a swipe. A double light press lets you switch between those settings. You can adjust the pressure sensitivity of the haptic press in the accessibility settings, which is nice, although I found the default to be just fine. By default, a single click opens the camera when the phone is unlocked and another takes a photo. It's pretty fun to flip the phone on its side and shoot with the button like a normal camera, Although the physical button is a bit stiff, a few verge staffers found themselves moving the phone slightly when pushing all the way down to take a photo, although I thought it was fine. I found myself accidentally opening the camera a lot at first since I'm left-handed, and the button is placed where my fingers tend to rest when I hold the phone. You can set it to require a double-click, and that's solved the problem for me.

Starting point is 00:15:22 You can also set the button to open third-party camera apps. It works well with the new version of Halid that has been updated to support that functionality. The reason Apple calls it camera control and not just shutter button is the capacitive controls on the top, which should ideally let you adjust various settings with a quick swipe. I was really hoping I'd find myself using the capacitive controls to adjust things like exposure and focal length, but it's all a bit fiddily, switching between everything with the light presses and far too easy to end up changing things you weren't intending to. The whole thing would be greatly improved if a second light press dismiss the control.

Starting point is 00:15:57 once they're open, they tend to stay open, leading to inadvertent changes when your finger slides along the button. In a real theme for the iPhone this year, the camera control is shipping in an unfinished state. Apple says a software update later this year will allow the button to emulate a traditional two-stage shutter button where a half-press focuses and a full press takes the shot. I asked, but the company isn't giving a firm date for this. It's hard to know how big a deal this will be until it arrives. I've had a lot of complaints about iPhone cameras over the years, but setting focus has never been one of them. And then from his conclusion further down, quoting again, it really does feel like Apple intended to ship these things with Apple intelligence,

Starting point is 00:16:35 but it's simply not here yet, and the complete feature set Apple's announced with things like image generation and chat GPT integration won't be here until next year. And if you're in the EU or China, you might be waiting for quite a while, as Apple navigates various regulatory hurdles in those regions to even launch this stuff at all. That's not to say the iPhone 16 Pro is a bad phone.

Starting point is 00:16:54 it's a great phone with some fascinating ideas about smartphone photography embedded in it, but it's also clearly unfinished, and I think it's worth waiting to see if Apple Intelligence can complete some of these thoughts before spending the money on an upgrade, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 09/18 – New Messages, New Headsets

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