Tokyo Thrift: Infobar is the most beautiful series of phones ever made

I know the question of the most beautiful phone ever made is a deeply personal one. The starkly minimalist iPhone 4 would be a good shout for many. Or the luxurious pillowy plastic of the Nokia N9. But if you ask me, the distinction goes to various members of a unique and very Japanese line of phones that’s lasted well over a decade.

The Infobar line is the work of Naoto Fukasawa, one of the most famous and influential industrial designers in Japan; he’s also behind the ±0 brand and several iconic Muji products like the wall-mounted CD player. Fukasawa conceived the first phone in the line, pictured above, as an intentional breakaway from the flip phones you probably associate with Japan in the 2000s.

“I designed this mobile phone in 2000, the year in which the market for mobile phones expanded dramatically towards a situation where there would be one phone per person,” Fukasawa says in Phaidon’s excellent monograph on his work. “Manufacturers, communications companies and consumers alike were predicting that, after an over-production of certain design styles that had lasted a number of years, the new standard for mobile phones would be the clamshell — and that there was no scope for doubt.”


As a reaction against this homogeniety, Fukasawa created a candybar-style phone unlike any other. The Infobar featured an extraordinary angular design where the multicolored buttons ran edge-to-edge and interlocked like a jigsaw puzzle. And although it was available in a range of colorways, the red, white, and blue "Nishikigoi" scheme (named after a type of Japanese carp) you see here became an instant classic and one closely associated with the brand from then on out.

Although it didn’t do much to stop the explosive proliferation of flip phones throughout Japan in the 2000s, the first Infobar was nonetheless a big hit for carrier KDDI, which to this day is known for promoting design-forward products like Marc Newson’s Talby phoneand Tokujin Yoshioka’s Fx0 Firefox handset. Three years after the first Infobar, KDDI and Fukasawa continued their collaboration with my personal favorite phone from the range.The product’s design and naming speaks to the way that Japanese featurephones of the time pioneered much of the functionality of what we now know as smartphones. "Since, down the road, the phone function would become just one of the functions of this portable information device, and email, internet access, music downloads, and digital moving images would be added, it was decided that a suitable name would be Infobar — a bar for information — rather than simply a ‘phone,’" Fukasawa says.

The Infobar 2’s design is just astonishing. It extends the display right against the edge-to-edge keys of its processor, then smooths both halves out to sit flush with the phone’s gorgeous curved edges. Fukasawa describes the design as "shaped like a square candy that has melted in your mouth and has just started to take on a roundness." It’s comfortable in the hand and makes efficient use of space, but just as importantly it’s flat-out stunning to look at. It’s the first phone that really made me turn my head when I first came to Japan.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down a Nishikigoi model in time for this column. (It has to be Nishikigoi.) I’ll keep looking and follow up with some bonus pictures when I can, because it’s really worth it.



Despite some early resistance, even Japan had become swept up in the smartphone tornado by the time of the next Infobar release. As such, 2011’s Android-powered A01 was the staidest design yet, its front dominated by a 3.7-inch touchscreen. It still included three chunky edge-to-edge buttons along the bottom of the screen, but the effect was inevitably less distinctive than that of its predecessors. 2013’s HTC-built A02 excised even those buttons, although last year’s A03 marked a return to a certain degree of design flair.

There is one Infobar Android phone that fully maintains the line’s heritage, however: the wonderful C01 from 2012, which you see pictured in this column. It matches the classic physical ten-key layout to a 3.2-inch touchscreen, and the result is one of the most delightfully usable phones ever made

Through a quirk of phonology that I won’t get into here, a ten-key phone keypad is a really great way to type Japanese, so to have that in a smartphone alongside a touchscreen that you can easily use one-handed is something special. If it weren’t for the CO1’s deprecated software skin that runs atop Android 2.3 and can no longer access the Play store, I would seriously consider using this as my main phone today. That’s quite an achievement for a four-year-old handset that I bought in great condition for about $30. There’s simply nothing like it.THERE'S SIMPLY NOTHING LIKE THE INFOBAR C01

In many ways the modern smartphone form factor is the successor to the candybar — a simple slab that puts what you need front and center. So, while the Infobar series has lost a little of its distinctiveness due to the necessity of accomodating a large black rectangle, the modern smartphone paradigm serves as vindication of Fukasawa’s initial motivation.

"While we can’t really predict what form the standard of this instrument will take in the future, I’m not the only one who has the feeling that this bar type will endure as one of those standards," Fukasawa said of the original Infobar in the Phaidon monograph. "Because, after all, it’s the kind of shape that feels comfortable to the touch."

on Monday, May 30, 2016

The Indistinguishable X-Men: the narrowing range of superhero emotions

Critics agree that X-Men: Apocalypse is a troubled film. They just don’t entirely agree on the core issue. The Week says it has a villain problem. Indiewire says it has an apocalypse problem. The Hollywood Reporter says it has “severe traffic control problems.” All these things are true — it’s overcrowded, the villain is generic and forgettable, and his plan to Destroy Everything Because Reasons has turned up in far too many recent superhero films.

But none of this would entirely matter ifApocalypse’s heroes were personable, believable people who made the film’s stakes feel meaningful and specific. They certainly should be: They’re X-Men, some of the most pointedly diverse, backstory-rich heroes in the comic-book landscape. They come from different countries, cultures, and circumstances. They cover a wide variety of ages, interests, and educational levels. They should be a fractious group of distinctive individuals, struggling to come together to face a common threat.


Instead, in Apocalypse, the X-Men and the villains they face are all cut from the exact same emotional cloth. They deliver dead-eyed, monotonal speeches about their traumas and their plans for the future. They stand around in poster-ready formation, glowering with their best catwalk-fierce supermodel expressions. And even when some of them are blue and one is bald and one is black and one is blindfolded, they all end up looking pretty much the same.

Lack of emotional range has been a problem in superhero movies for the past decade, and 2016 seems like a watershed year. It started with the grimmest and grittiest comic-book movie of the decade (Batman v Superman) facing off against the silliest one (Deadpool), and then Captain America: Civil War took the normally emotionally rich Marvel Cinematic Universe to a particularly dark and deadened place. Even the MCU's most complicated heroes, developed over the course of half a dozen films, become raging, silent punch-bots by the end of Civil War. That's a meaningful emotional tragedy within the isolated context of the film itself. But watching all these movies together, it's easy to wonder: don't heroes ever get to feel joy anymore?

If Batman Begins really is ground zero for our heroes being replaced by grimaces, it's possible to lay some of the blame there. Batman is defined by his barely varying rage — there's a funny little fan-art concept about that floating around the internet in a wide varietyof iterations — and Batman Begins established a particularly grave, ponderous tone. But even before that film, there was Hugh Jackman's Wolverine in the X-movies, setting a standard for superheroes in 2000's X-Men with his peacetime glower and his wartime snarl. Superman Returns emphasized Superman's alienness and his remove from human feeling. Ang Lee's Hulk marinated in the big green guy's angst and anger without finding any of the childish glee in Hulk smashing things. Or maybe it all goes back even further, to 1994's The Crow, and the way it turned superheroism into one long session of goth seething and brooding. Part of the appeal of MCU films like Iron Man and Guardians Of The Galaxy was that they felt like a corrective to years of hero movies that took all the fun out of heroing. They let their protagonists escape the long national funk that's become as standard-issue for heroes as leather costumes and big explosions.

It's certainly understandable that our cultural mandate has gravitated toward gravity. Endless thinkpieces have been written about how the current superhero-movie boom comes from America's attempt to process the September 11th, 2001 attacks, visually andemotionally, and to simplify them into something that can be punched in the face. It took a while for movies to catch up with the grim-n-gritty trend that took over superhero comics in the 1980s, but now they seem to be trying to out-dark the comics that spawned them. So many comics-movie protagonists have taken on an edge of weary desperation, as if they're trying to reflect the way the viewers feel about living in an age of government surveillance, endless foreign conflict, and seemingly insoluble problems.

DON'T HEROES GET TO FEEL JOY ANYMORE?

But taking a subject seriously isn't the same thing as taking it without a hint of emotion. The problem isn't characters defined by anger or frustration, the problem is when they don't seem to feel anything else. In X-Men: Apocalypse, virtually everyone in the cast is emotionally shattered by traumas on-screen and off, from deaths in the family to the overall state of mutant rights. Nightcrawler, Mystique, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Magneto all walk through the movie in various states of terror and leaden despair, carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. Other characters,like Angel, Storm, and especially Psylocke, are so busy scowling that they barely get to talk.

This is a problem for the fans. The entire point of a character like Angel / Archangel is the arc between who he was at the beginning and what he became, and when he's a gloomy, almost wordless thug throughout the entire process, he becomes an empty special effect, without any narrative power. The homogeneity is also a problem for the storytelling: characters who start a story at an emotional dead end, already furious or numb with shock, have nowhere to go as the filmmakers attempt to ramp up the dramatic stakes. And it's a problem for the audience. If superheroes are meant to represent our best selves, our most brave and altruistic impulses, what does it say about us if we expect our best selves to be grimly emotionless robots?

There's a clear feeling in modern superhero films that showing too much "soft" emotion somehow weakens a character. The Batman of DC Comics is sometimes capable of laughter — remember the final page of The Killing Joke? — but the recent on-screen versions can barely crack a sardonic smirk, even in Bruce Wayne mode. Henry Cavill's version of Superman looks perpetually pinched with some sort of deep inner strain. The X-movies have almost universally been dour, sometimes to operatic ends, and sometimes just to depressing ones. Even quip-happy, smart-ass Tony Stark loses his ability to banter by the end of Civil War, and openly sets out to kill two men in a wave of blank-faced hatred.

CHARACTERS WHO START AT AN EMOTIONAL DEAD END HAVE NOWHERE TO GO

There are so many signs that the "bigger, meaner, darker, angrier" trend isn't actually what audiences want. Every big superhero-movie-defining callout moment from the past several years has come when the script set aside emotional deadness for a moment. Audiences seem to celebrate any hint that their heroes are human. Quicksilver glorying in his powers in his high-speed action scene in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, Star-Lord's swaggering little dance to "Come And Get Your Love" at the beginning of Guardians Of The Galaxy, Wade and Vanessa's lusty sex montage in Deadpool, Ant-Man thrilling to his own sudden power as a giant in Civil War, Spider-Man's entire Civil War character — these are the moments that become fan memes and critical reference points, because they show the cracks in the heroes' dull armor.

And that's because heroes aren't just escapist, and aren't just exciting. They're aspirational. We're meant to identify with them, and to root for them, and to care about them. We're meant to want to be them. But it's hard to identify with a mirthless, expressionless chunk of granite. So many grimdark modern superheroes offer a fantasy of being tough enough to survive any trauma, not just physically, but emotionally. To people who feel battered by the world, for whatever reason, that Wolverine glare that says "I can beat whatever you can throw at me" can be inspiring and relieving. It's a fantasy not just of competence, but of indestructibility. As we collectively continue trying to process the constant political, social, and technological changes in the world, and the feelings of frustration and helplessness that sometimes comes with them, it's comforting to retreat to a fantasy of being able to deal with whatever comes.

But it's also comforting to imagine being indestructible, and still getting to share in the full range of human experience — lust and love, delight and wonder, joy and amusement, and all the other things lacking in Apocalypse and so many other superhero movies. Our collective fantasies define superheroes, and we collectively fantasize about more than one thing. By shutting out so much of the range of human life, hero movies are making superhumans considerably less than human. It makes their characters duller. It turns their movies into unvarying slogs. It limits the ways in which these films can speak to us, and engage us. It's true that too many superhero films are setting out to crowd in more action, and bigger stakes, at the expense of any kind of variety or creativity. But the small emotional apocalypse feels more disastrous than the big CGI ones. It's important that our heroes come along to save the day. It's just as important that they preserve their humanity in the process.

on

Facebook and Microsoft team up to lay a massive internet cable across the Atlantic

Facebook and Microsoft announced a partnership today to lay the highest-capacity subsea internet cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean, starting with hubs connecting Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. The cable, called "MAREA" after the Spanish word for "tide," will be capable of 160 terabits per second of bandwidth and will stretch more than 4,100 miles of ocean in a submarine cable system. The two companies have hired Telxius, the infrastructure company owned by global communications giant Telefónica, to manage MAREA and expand network hubs from Europe to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Construction is slated to begin in August of this year with a goal of October 2017 to complete the cable.

"In order to better serve our customers and provide the type of reliable and low-latency connectivity they deserve, we are continuing to invest in new and innovative ways to continuously upgrade both the Microsoft Cloud and the global internet infrastructure," Frank Rey, Microsoft's director of global network acquisition, said in a statement. "This marks an important new step in building the next generation infrastructure of the internet." Even with Telxius onboard, this new operation marks a turning point for tech companies, which have in the past joined telecom consortiums that already operate undersea cables rather than financing new cables outright.

FACEBOOK AND MICROSOFT NEED A FASTER WAY TO MOVE INFORMATION AROUND THE GLOBE

The ultimate goal here is to help both Facebook and Microsoft move information around the world — to their vast and expanding networks of data centers — at higher speeds using more reliable equipment. Both companies now maintain massive cloud-computing operations, with Facebook hosting the output of 1.65 billion users and Microsoft managing a robust suite of online services including Azure, Bing, Xbox Live, and Office 365. To continue expanding, these types of companies are increasingly moving into the infrastructure business, whether that be Amazon with its shipping network or Facebook and Microsoft with data operations to reach other parts of the globe.

Investing in subsea cables is not a new trend. Tech companies have been making sizable investments in global networking infrastructure for years, starting with server farms and data centers and onward to large-scale underwater operations. Although this new deal involves only Facebook and Microsoft, Google has invested in two undersea cables that stretch from the US to Japan, South America, and other parts of Asia.

Microsoft says its new project with Facebook provides interoperability with other networking equipment. "This new 'open' design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation," the company said in a statement.

on Friday, May 27, 2016

Mars is emerging from an ice age that ended about 400,000 years ago

Mars is emerging from an ice age, according to a new study. Studying the Martian climate and how it changes over time can help scientists better plan future missions to Mars and even understand climate change here on Earth, the study authors say.

Models had already predicted that Mars underwent several rounds of ice ages in the past, but little physical measurements ever confirmed those predictions. Today’s study, published in the journal Science, is the first to map the ice deposits on the north and south pole and confirm that Mars is emerging from an ice age, in a retreat that began almost 400,000 years ago. The researchers also calculated just how much ice accumulated over the poles; the amount is so big that if it were spread throughout Mars, the entire planet would be covered by a 2-foot thick layer of ice.

Studying climate change on Mars is important for multiple reasons, says study co-author Isaac Smith, who studies sedimentary systems on Mars at Southwest Research Institute. By understanding ice ages, we can get a better understanding of how ice — and water — behaved through time on the Red Planet. It can help us figure out how Mars went from being a wet world to the barren, frigid land it is today. And it can tell us where ice deposits can be found. That’s key if we plan to send humans on Mars. "We want to know the history of water," Smith says. "At some point, we’re going to have some people there and we’d like to know where the water is. So there’s a big search for that."



The Martian climate can also inform scientists about climate change here on Earth, Smith says. Mars is the most similar planet to Earth in the Solar System and it provides a good testing ground for climate research, because there are no people burning fossil fuels and pumping global warming pollutants into the atmosphere. "Mars is a very good laboratory for what happens on Earth," Smith says. "Climate science actually has a very simple but perfect laboratory in Mars, where we can learn about the physics of climate change and then apply what we learn to Earth."

Ali Bramson, a planetary scientist and PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, who did not work on the study, agrees. "I think it’s a really great study and I think it’s very timely," she says. "I was really excited to see it. … Climate change is obviously a very salient topic on Earth, but understanding the distribution of water-ice on Mars is also something that’s of great interest because there’s a lot of interest in sending humans one day to Mars. So if we know where there are reservoirs of water-ice, that could potentially be useful for future human exploration."


Just like Earth, Mars undergoes cycles of climate change and ice ages. But unlike Earth, climate change on Mars is affected primarily by how "tilted" the planet is. Every planet has an axis around which the planet rotates. Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees and it’s pretty stable, varying only a couple of degrees over time. Mars’ axis is currently tilted 25 degrees, but it wobbles between from 10 to 40 degrees. That happens for two reasons: first, Mars doesn’t have a moon as big as ours to stabilize its orbit; second, it’s much closer to Jupiter, and Jupiter's gravity affects Mars’ rotation. When the Red Planet’s axis is more tilted, the poles receive more sunlight and get warm — so the ice to redistributes to the mid-latitudes, just above the tropic. That’s when Mars undergoes an ice age. "The impact is pretty dramatic," says Peter Read, a physics professor at the University of Oxford.

Today’s study was based on predictions that 400,000 years ago such a shift in the planet’s axis took place. The researchers used radar instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft that’s orbiting Mars. They analyzed the radar images of the ice deposits within the planet’s polar ice caps, looking out for signs of erosion and other features, like so-called spiral troughs that are created by the wind. Tracing these features can reveal how ice accumulated and retreated through time. The researchers confirmed that around 400,000 years ago an ice age ended. Since the end of that ice age, about 87,000 cubic kilometers of ice accumulated at the poles, especially in the north pole. That’s exciting, because 400,000 years is pretty recent when talking about planets in the Solar System.

The study is "another bit of evidence that climate is still actively changing on Mars," says Stephen Lewis, a senior lecturer at the Open University, who didn’t work on the study. Mars "is not a dead, static world. Things are going on and changing."

on

Google’s Project Ara is about more than just modular phones

I had exactly half an hour with four people from the Project Ara team at Google I/O to extract as much information as I could about the mission to actually launch a modular phone. So I rattled off as many questions as I could at a rat-a-tat pace, and the Ara team had answers for nearly all of them.

Not every answer will please the people who have been waiting for this modular phone for several years now, but nearly all of them make sense from a business perspective. If there's one thing I took away from my time, it's this: the goal is to turn Ara into a real business inside Google.

And if Google can pull off the phone business, it will want to expand the Ara module ecosystem into other areas, too.

Ara is going to be the first ever phone that Google is making itself (it has already made laptops and a tablet, among other things). And even though what I saw last week was just a prototype, it was working well enough that I believe Google can fulfill its promise to release a consumer product next year. Yes, we've seen Google kill off hardware before, but this is a high-profile launch from a newly independent division. It's the first truly big swing from Google's new hardware group under Rick Osterloh, and to back off now would be a colossal embarrassment.

Given all that, really the only questions that matter are simple: Is Google really making a phone? Will this plan to make it modular really work this time? Is this more than just an experiment?

Coming out of the meeting, had I shaken a Magic 8 ball, it would have said, "Signs point to yes."



Taking any product from concept to real product involves compromises. And when the concept is as grandiose as the early plans for Project Ara, there's going to be more parts than usual left in the lab.

The original dream for Ara was to modularize everything from the screen to the processor to the camera. For the developer version shipping later this year and the consumer version shipping next year, however, some key components are going to be baked in to the frame of the phone: the screen, some basic speakers for the phone, and the processor and RAM.

That's caused no small amount of disappointment amongst the geeks who were most excited for Ara — we do love to upgrade, you see. But according to the Ara team, after "lots of research" they found that most users "couldn't care less about it" and that "most people didn't know what their processor was or did." (Do they not teach that in school anymore?)

The Ara team also claims that integrating these key components leaves more room for other modules. Ara plans to ship with six slots for modules — four if you use two double-sized modules. "If you modularize everything," they argue, "there's very little space for stuff that is really different and innovative."

While I don't doubt the user research, the decision they made based on it has changed the tenor of the Ara project. Instead of a basic "endoskeleton" that you can buy once and upgrade forever, Ara is now a good phone (I assume) that lets you swap in all sorts of extra hardware functions. That's still a very ambitious vision, but a slightly different one. The new focus is on the crazy stuff you can add on to these phones.

There are other notable changes with Ara, at least compared to what we've heard before. The original plan was to use powerful magnets to hold the modules in place and wireless, capacitive interconnects to get them communicating with the frame. In their place, Ara is going with physically connected pogo pins and an electronically actuated latch.

In our interview, I suggested that this was an example of another compromise, that the current plan for the modules is only 80 percent of what Ara was originally aiming for. Rafa Caramago, who runs Project Ara, wasn't having it: "No, I think we're doing 120 percent of the original vision." He points to how Ara is keeping the super-fast Unipro network standard and creating more software that sits underneath Android, called Greybus."THERE'S NO GRAY MARKET OPPORTUNITY."

Plus, those new connectors are made with a shape-shifting "nitinol memory alloy," Caramago says. "So when you pass a current, it actually contracts and you can do mechanical things with it — but now I can control electronically, which means I can control it from software." That enables the magic of ejecting the modules from a software screen (or by saying "Okay Google, eject the camera") with fewer breakable moving parts. It also takes up less space inside the module, giving developers more to work with.

The mechanism enables something else: locking the modules down — both literally and metaphorically. The team tells me that users will be able to set a passcode to keep people from ejecting modules. But the metaphorical sense of locking down is perhaps more interesting; all modules will be approved by Google and without Google's code, they physically won't connect to Ara.

"There's no gray market opportunity," a member of the Ara team says. "It's all coded within there." Instead, the market for selling modules will run through Google, which will sell the modules in addition to approving them. And it will take a cut too, but Google assures me it won't be a big cut, so as to not drive away developers: "Obviously, if we took high margins, it wouldn't be attractive to them."

As for who those developers will be, Google is starting with a respectably sized list of partners: Panasonic, TDK, Wistron, E-Ink, Toshiba, Harman, Samsung, Sony Pictures, and some health companies. Some of these companies will create obvious phone things: bigger speakers, extended batteries, and E-Ink displays. Some of them will create not-so-obvious things like glucose meters, for example.

Google is also going to make some modules, though all we know of for sure right now is that it'll be making some "fashion" plates that simply customize the look and feel of your phone. They're experimenting with plastics, wood, and concrete. Yes, real concrete. It's a whole new spin on "bricking your phone," I guess.GOOGLE WILL CONTROL THE MODULE ECOSYSTEM

During our conversation, a couple of words kept coming up: "fashion" and "brands." According the Ara team, there's a lot of high-end "fashion and beauty" brands that are interested in producing modules for Ara (though Google will handle most of the electronics development). And because Google is controlling the software for the latching mechanism, the company is able to assure those brands that there won't be knock-offs.

Google wants users to be able to configure a nice-looking Ara phone — even though they won't be able to have complete control over the look of every single module shell anymore. So Google is also going to be enforcing some aesthetic standards to ensure that users won't end up with a "NASCAR phone." Brands will be able to put their logos on modules, but only in small, tasteful ways.




The sum of all this? Project Ara isn't just about this developer phone or the first consumer phone — it's about opening up a whole new hardware ecosystem and partner platform for Google. Instead of being a complete Wild West, it'll be run through Google. That may be disappointing to those who want Google to be radically open in every conceivable way, but working with partners seems to be the new modus operandi for the company — especially when it's in the early stages of a product.

And building that hardware ecosystem with partners means that Ara can look to the thing that comes after the phone — and it's more than just another phone. Caramago says that as the module economy grows, he expects that other companies might be able to build frames that could run them. And not just phone frames, either. "There will also be innovation on form factors," Caramago says. The team is looking hard at enterprise applications.

A GOOGLE PHONE, THROUGH AND THROUGH

If (and it's no small if) it pans out, these modules could be a universal way to add hardware functionality to anything. You could buy one really great camera module, then use it in your phone, your tablet, your doorbell — whatever.

It's remarkable that this is the first Google phone, not a Nexus manufactured by a partner. It didn't have to go that way, Google could have spun Ara out into an entirely separate company or simply killed it off. But after speaking with the Ara team, a few things became clear to me about the strategy here:
Of course Ara needed to be a division within Google — it was the only way the team could iterate quickly enough on the hardware and software guts underpinning Android.
Of course Google is happy to have this be its first phone, can you imagine a more Google-y phone than one you can customize on the fly?
Of course Google wanted to keep Ara rather than spin it of, because this phone is only a first step toward what I think is obviously the real goal: App-Store-ifying (technical term I just made up) hardware components.

My time was up before I could really dig into any of that, though. As I got pushed out the door, I snuck in one last question: "When people inevitably call this the 'Google Phone,' are you intending on embracing it or pushing back?"

on Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Who comes up with a $700 Wi-Fi-connected juicer?

Doug Evans is trying to make me love juice.The founder of Juicero and former CEO of Organic Avenue has come to my office with his extremely fancy juicer in hand (well, on a cart, toted by two assistants). I'm excited to give it a try. I'm also thoroughly surprised that Evans has even agreed to meet with me.

When Evans visits, it's about a month after he launched Juicero. That means it's also a month after I wrote a story mocking everything his company has to offer: a $700 juicer, and the $5 to $7 packs of precut fruits and vegetables that it juices.

Juicero's juicer — also called Juicero — is easy to make fun of. Really, all you have to do is describe it. It's expensive. It has Wi-Fi. It can't juice produce bought from the store. It won't make juice if your internet is down. And it won't make juice if your pack of Juicero-approved produce is just a day past its expiration date (the juicer scans a code on each pack, then looks it up online to verify freshness). It really is a ludicrous product.

And Evans doesn't always help its cause. As we begin chatting, Evans mentions that he's recently been flying between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York almost nonstop to work on his juicer’s rollout. But it's no problem for him, he says. "I don't get jet lag," he tells me. "The greens are good at absorbing radiation."

Dubious scientific claims like these — even if based on some truth — are part of why I'm skeptical that anyone really needs to buy a $700 juicer and regularly incorporate juice into their lifestyle. Evans either hasn't noticed my skepticism or is too confident in his product to care. I suspect it's some mixture of both. I’ve never tried the Juicero, and I think Evans believes that if I just take a sip, then suddenly it'd all make sense.

So Evans unpacks not one but two juicers and is ready to make me fall in love with fresh-pressed juice. He sets one on the table, still inside a large cardboard package, and undoes its fastening, letting the box split open as though it were a cocoon. The Juicero stands in the center, wrapped in a branded tote bag. Later on, a concerned Evans asks an assistant, "Can we make sure we get a label in here that says '100 percent cotton?'"MY QUESTION IS: WHY DOES JUICERO EXIST? AND WHO IS IT FOR?

Evans' speech is calm and polite, in a rhythmic way that makes it easy to sit back and listen to him discuss juice ad nauseam. Which he'll do, if you let him. Evans' responses tend to go on and on, bouncing from one subject to the next as he discusses the many facets of the juice world. During a phone conversation prior to our meeting, I asked him whether the Juicero is a luxury product. "I'm not in any way comparing myself to Elon Musk and Tesla," Evans began, before proceeding to compare Juicero to Tesla. He also explained the landscape of commercial juice presses, visualized a future where Juicero juicers are ubiquitous, discussed the size and goals of his engineering team, and after several minutes concluded by saying, "Watermelon, you can press that in 30 seconds with 500 pounds of force."

Today, the questions I want Evans to answer seem simple: why? Why does Juicero exist? Why would anyone pay this much for juice? Why should someone pay this much for juice?

"After I left Organic Avenue, I was really wondering how I would get my juice," Evans tells me. Evans was CEO of Organic Avenue, a vegan food and juice chain, for just over a decade, more or less since its inception. He sold the chain in 2013 and was removed from the company shortly thereafter; it has since closed, filed for bankruptcy, and relaunched. "All high-end juice was made on these industrial juice presses," Evans says. "You get a better flavor. You get a better texture. ... The mouthfeel. It's a totally different experience."

Evans wanted to create a juicer that could deliver the same quality at home. Juicero isn't your average juicer. It isn't even your average high-end juicer. It's a super-high-end, cold press juicer, meaning it extracts juice by crushing fruits and vegetables, rather than by grinding them up like most juicers do. The result, according to cold-pressed juice fanatics like Evans, is a far tastier juice, because no flavor has been lost to heat.

Juicero's juice is so good, Evans says, that "we describe our sampling like a kiss. [The customer] gets kissed by the juice — they drink it — and all the sudden they want it."

"I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO HAVE JUICE BEFORE MY YOGA PRACTICE."

This makes me uncomfortable, but I am, of course, now obligated to let Evans make me a juice. The process is surprisingly simple. Evans takes one of Juicero's premade packages of chopped fruits and vegetables, inserts it inside of the Juicero's metal door, and presses a big white button in the center of the device. It begins glowing and groaning, and a moment later juice pours out into a glass, quickly at first and then slowing to a stop just under two minutes later. There's little mess, too; you just remove the packet and throw it away.

That simplicity is the real selling point behind Juicero. No chopping. No cleaning. You can get a fresh-squeezed juice anytime you want. "I've never been able to have juice before my yoga practice," Evans says. Now, "I press go. I come out of the restroom. There's my glass."



While this may be a luxury product at home, Evans expects that many juicers will end up in communal spaces, like offices. Others will end up in restaurants and cafes, which can use Juicero's juicer and prepackaged produce to easily offer fresh juice to customers. Evans says that Le Pain Quotidien has already ordered 21 juicers to be placed in eight of its Los Angeles locations.

When the press stops, Evans hands me a tall glass filled with a mossy-green liquid. It came from a pack called Sweet Greens, a mixture of apples, spinach, pineapple, kale, and lemon. It tastes good! It's not blowing my mind or anything — I'm not ready to go on a juice cleanse — but it's pleasant, with a very green, tart taste. We have a nearly identical cold-pressed juice with us, made by Starbucks' Evolution Fresh brand, to try side by side. Its flavor is very similar, but Juicero's is distinctly stronger, easily identifiable as the better of the two products.

JUICERO ABSOLUTELY MAKES A GOOD JUICE

So that's settled. Juicero makes a darn good juice. But still I'm wondering: why? Why commit so much money to this product? It's got to be a health thing, right? Evans’ last company, Organic Avenue, I knew best for its taxing juice cleanses. Evans once co-wrote on Gwyneth Paltrow's website Goop that drinking juice cleanses can help you lose weight, have more energy, and look younger.

"We are not in a position to make a lot of [health] claims," Evans tells me. "If you start to make claims, then this becomes a drug, and then you have to do all sorts of clinical trials, et cetera. We're keeping it very simple."

Juicero's simple message is this: people aren't getting as many servings of fruits and vegetables as the US Health Department says they ought to. And Juicero makes it easier for people to get those additional servings. Just pop in a pack, and drink up.

Fair enough. Under 20 percent of adults are meeting the recommendations, according to a CDC report released last year. But there’s something pretty extravagant about solving that problem with a $700 juicer. I guess it’ll at least enable more fruit and vegetable consumption for the rich customers who can afford it.

Ask Evans for his personal feelings, though, and his thoughts on the health benefits of juicing get more interesting. For 17 years now, Evans has only eaten raw, uncooked fruits and vegetables. It started in the late ‘90s. "I met a woman in a nightclub. She was a vegan," he says. "I had never heard of 'vegan' before." He tried it out and never looked back. "In a two week period, I went cold cucumber."

"THEY'RE NOT MEASURING VIBRATIONAL ENERGY."

Evans says the switch was like putting on glasses for the first time. But what exactly is it about raw food that makes him feel so good? "It's eating things that still have a life force," he says. "People can mock me when I talk about the Chi and life force and conventional science. When [conventional science is] looking at the nutrients, they're measuring proteins and amino acids and Vitamin E. They're not measuring vibrational energy." I guess that's why Juicero is staying away from health claims.



In fact, the nutrition community isn’t all that thrilled about juice. When I ask Mary Story, a professor at Duke Global Health Institute who was a member of the United States’ 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, she tells me that, "100 percent juice can contribute to helping Americans [get] fruits and vegetables, but the recommendation in my view should really be eating the whole fruit and vegetable and not getting juice." The problem with straight juice, she says, is that you’re not getting any of the fiber. And fiber is a huge part of the reason we need to eat fruits and vegetables. "There's very little benefit to just drinking juice by itself," Story says.

Evans has me try another pair of juices, one with beets and carrots, the other with spinach and celery. They're also pretty good. His team was supposed to bring along five glasses' worth of produce packs, but I suddenly realize that they've brought a lot more. They keep appearing on the table in front of me. And now Evans is asking to set up a second juicer in our office kitchen, so that everyone can try it out. He suggests this several times, and several times I politely shoot down the idea. The machine is noisy and people are working in there.

Instead, I invite some people to come try out Juicero's juice. As they step in the room, Evans and an assistant shoot into action, setting up the second machine and pressing juices one after the other. Try this one. Try that one. Did you get the beet juice yet? What about the spicy one? I'm not really sure what's going on. They're making juice after juice and won't stop. I'm just standing there, drinking as much juice as I can and wondering when this will all end. Will they run out of juices? Will they realize no one can drink this much?

I'm trying to politely suggest that we're finished but I've never been good at being forward, so the message doesn't get through and they just keep making juices and I don't know what to do. Can you overdose on juice? The machines keep groaning and new juices keep appearing and people keep handing me glasses of things to drink.

And somewhere in all of this I realize that the Juicero is really just the dream of one strange, juice-loving man. It is designed by him and for him. And probably there are other people who will like it, too. But the only person who really needs it is Evans, who loves juice. And who refuses to cook vegetables.

When it's finally over and the Juicero team packs up, I wipe down our conference table to clean up the red and green juice that's splattered all across it. I'm now feeling kind of bloated and full from drinking several glasses of tart juice, but there's still one thing I have to do. I find my colleague Lizzie, who had tried several glasses of juice just minutes earlier. I had to know. What do other people think of Juicero's $700 glasses of juice?

on Monday, May 23, 2016

The foggy numbers of Obama’s wars and non-wars

As the Obama administration prepares to publish a long-delayed accounting of how many militants and non-combatant civilians it has killed since 2009, its statistics may be defined as much by what is left out as by what is included.

Release of the information was first envisioned three years ago this month, as part of strict new guidelines President Obama announced for the United States’ controversial use of drones and other forms of lethal force to battle terrorism abroad. Such operations, Obama said in a 2013 speech at the National Defense University, would also be subject to new transparency and oversight.

The casualty numbers, like the guidelines, will cover places where the United States conducts airstrikes but does not consider itself officially at war: Yemen, Somalia and Libya. They will likely exclude Pakistan, where the CIA has conducted hundreds of drone strikes but which the administration has long labeled part of the Afghanistan war theater. The United States still does not publicly acknowledge CIA attacks inside Pakistan, although the Pentagon on Saturday announced it had targeted Taliban leader Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in Pakistan.

Not all strikes in the included countries are considered counterterrorism actions, which must be approved by the highest level of government. With U.S. Special Operations forces deployed to all three places, some strikes are defined as self-defense and can be approved by the defense secretary.

That was the case on March 5 in Somalia, when manned and unmanned aircraft killed an estimated 150 al-Shabab militants at a training camp, the largest such non-war strike ever, and on May 12, when U.S. forces called in an airstrike after African peacekeeping troops they were accompanying were attacked by militants west of Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

The totals will almost inevitably be challenged by independent groups that keep their own tallies and for years have charged that the administration undercounts civilian casualtiescaused by drones strikes.

Beyond debates over statistics, there are broader questions on how, when and where Obama’s guidelines apply, how they have changed amid a mutating threat, including the growth of the Islamic State, and what standing they will have after the president completes his term in January.

“My hope is, is that by the time I leave office, there is not only an internal structure in place that governs these standards we’ve set,” but also an “institutionalized process . . . so that people can look” at actions taken by their government on an “annualized basis,” Obama said last month.

The pending announcement will also be accompanied by additional information on the guidelines, perhaps elevating them to an executive order, according to several senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss information that has not yet been made public.

How Obama plans to impose the standards he has set on future administrations is unclear.

“We have a system for making rules that will bind across time that involves statutes passed, treaties adopted, constitutional change, etc.,” said Robert M. Chesney, associate dean and director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas law school.

“It’s just not possible, as a legal matter, for decisions of one administration to become binding in a legal sense on their successors — any more than Obama was bound” by policies and rules imposed by his predecessor, former president George W. Bush.

At the time the guidelines were written, drone-fired missiles appeared to have become Obama’s counterterrorism weapon of choice. By early 2013, he had launched hundreds of strikes, most of them in Pakistan, compared with around 50 throughout the Bush administration.

But the president and his top advisers were concerned that the program had too few controls and publicly stated justifications under international law. The secrecy that necessarily surrounded it — virtually all Pakistan strikes have been conducted by the CIA and are considered covert actions — limited the ways in which they could defend it. While acknowledging that some civilian casualties had occurred, they said that claims of hundreds or more deaths by non-government organizations have been wildly inaccurate.

Obama himself recalled the dilemma in a news conference last month, saying that “there’s been, in the past, legitimate criticism that the . . . legal architecture around the use of drone strikes or other kinetic strikes wasn’t as precise as it should have been, and there’s no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been.”

The beginning of 2013 seemed the right time to promulgate new rules. With the end of the Iraq War, the planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the perceived diminishment of al-Qaeda, senior administration officials said, there would be less need for drone strikes.

The goal was to establish a long-term legal and procedural framework for those occasions that required them. With operations in Pakistan gradually ending, the CIA would be eased out of the business of lethal attacks, and they would become the sole responsibility of the military.

The guidelines were only applicable to non-war zones — places defined as “outside areas of active hostilities.” A policy term that does not appear in the international laws of war, the concept can theoretically be applied anywhere in the world and has been a subject of sharp debate among international law experts.

The United States justifies its counterterrorism attacks under a variety of domestic and international laws. The Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress in 2001 allows force to prevent further attacks by al-Qaeda, responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks that year, and the government for more than a decade has construed this to include al-Qaeda’s “associated forces.”

A complete list of “associated forces” has never been released, although both Bush and Obama have said it includes Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, and Obama has said individuals in al-Shabab with AQAP ties can be subject to counterterrorism strikes. The administration also considers the Islamic State part of al-Qaeda, despite the bitter rivalry between the groups, while it has unsuccessfully pressed Congress for a new AUMF to cover the Islamic State more specifically.

Article II of the Constitution gives the commander in chief powers to defend the country. It is a provision frequently cited by Bush, eschewed by Obama at the beginning of his administration, but later incorporated into his lexicon of legal justifications. International law allows countries to defend themselves and their allies in the event of an “armed attack,” which the government has interpreted as extending to preventive defense against defined terrorists wherever they are located.

When the administration announced its new rules for counterterrorism, it said they went beyond those required by law. Under the 2013 guidelines, deadly attacks would be used only against those groups and individuals posing a “continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” a much smaller universe than the former “U.S. interests.” Only the president could approve such strikes, and the go-ahead would be given only when there was a “near certainty” of no civilian casualties.

Since the guidelines were adopted, and released in an unclassified summary, the terrorism landscape has changed considerably, and the administration has struggled to keep up. Two countries — Iraq and Syria — have been added to the list of designated war zones, where the military and the international laws of war impose somewhat different rules. The Islamic State, officially born in 2014, has spread its tentacles across the Middle East and North Africa.

“We are continuously refining, clarifying, and strengthening our standards and procedures for reviewing and approving direct action against terrorist targets located . . . outside areas of active hostilities,” a senior administration official said of the rules, officially known as the counterterrorism PPG, for Presidential Policy Guidance.

The reduced number of lethal actions predicted three years ago by administration officials has come to pass, but almost all of the reduction has been in Pakistan, where the number of strikes has steadily fallen from a high of more than 100 in 2010 to only two reported by outside observers so far this year before Saturday’s military strike.

But the focus of U.S. activities has expanded elsewhere, outside the war zones. In Yemen, the number of airstrikes peaked in 2012, fell over the next two years, and has begun to rise again this year. In Somalia, it has increased steadily since the PPG was first announced. Two airstrikes on alleged terrorist targets this year in Libya were the first since the 2011 joint air offensive by the United States and European allies that ousted Moammar Gaddafi.

For those trying to tally them outside the government, the number of recent counterterrorism strikes has been muddied by the separate category of defense for Special Operations forces on the ground and the fact that some strikes, but not all, are publicly announced.

In emailed responses to written questions, the Defense Department said it keeps no central list of strikes “outside areas of active hostilities.” Some are announced by the Pentagon, some by Central Command in charge of Yemen, and others by the Africa Command.

Some are not made public at all, “consistent with operational security,” the response said. The CIA, whose drone strikes remain secret, is still thought to be operating drones in Yemen.

Since the beginning of November, official releases have documented about half of more than 30 U.S. strikes — more than half in Yemen, two in Libya and the rest in Somalia — as compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one of several organizations that count them based on local reporting and other sources. Independent counts of civilian deaths in individual operations are zero or in low single digits, far reduced from previous years tallies.

“We are committed to transparency,” the Defense Department said. “While not all strikes are announced or publicly acknowledged in real time, information on all of our strikes taken outside areas of active hostilities will be aggregated for release in future annual releases.”

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Brady’s deadline to appeal suspension is about to arrive

The time to put Tom Brady’s Hail Mary Deflategate legal defense into play is here. And the Patriots’ quarterback, facing a four-game suspension, continues to add heavyweights to his legal team.

Monday is the deadline for Brady to appeal the decision to reinstate his suspension by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, two weeks after the Second Circuit granted him a 14-day extension. While Brady and his legal team have not publicly stated whether they will appeal the 2-to-1 decision to reverse federal judge Richard Berman and reinstate the punishment, Brady has little reason not to exhaust every legal remedy available to him.

Brady’s lawyers will almost certainly file for an “en banc” rehearing, in which all 13 active judges in the Second Circuit would decide whether to hear another appeal. The other option is for Brady to file for a panel rehearing, in which the same three judges from before would rehear the case, but that option seems unlikely.

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit ruled on April 25 that the four-game punishment handed down by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell took its essence from Article 46 of the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and NFL Players Association, and reinstated the suspension that Berman had vacated last September.

If there were any doubts about Brady’s intentions to continue the fight, one need only look at recent additions to his lineup of lawyers. NFLPA outside counsel Jeffrey Kessler, who has fought Brady’s legal fight from the beginning, will now step aside for two of the most impressive litigators in the country.

Former US solicitor general Theodore Olson -- who in his career has worked on federal cases including Iran Contra, Bush v. Gore, and same-sex marriage in California -- joined the team on April 29, four days after the decision. Olson now works for Gibson Dunn in Washington, D.C., and represented the NFLPA in the 2011 NFL lockout.

And on Friday, Team Brady added more legal firepower: Thomas H. Dupree Jr., a partner at Gibson Dunn in the appellate and constitutional law practice group. Dupree served in the Justice Department from 2007 to 2009, reaching the position of principal deputy assistant attorney general in 2009, “responsible for managing many of the government’s most significant cases involving regulatory, commercial, constitutional, and national security matters on behalf of virtually all of the federal agencies, the White House, and senior federal officials,” according to his Gibson Dunn bio.

Dupree seems like one of the best possible options to represent Brady in a long-shot appeal. Dupree “has argued more than 70 appeals in the federal courts, including in all 13 circuits as well as the United States Supreme Court.” Dupree was Olson’s partner in Bush v. Gore, persuaded the Supreme Court to reverse a $290 million punitive damages award against a major automobile manufacturer, and successfully represented clients such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jerry and Jessica Seinfeld, and baseball agent Scott Boras.

Olson and Dupree will square off against the NFL’s own heavyweight, Paul Clement, who like Olson is a former US solicitor general. Clement was retained by the NFL for the previous appeal and successfully argued the case.

After Brady’s legal team files to request an en banc rehearing today, it would then need seven of the 13 judges to decide that further scrutiny is warranted on the decision by Second Circuit judges Barrington Parker and Denny Chin to reinstate Brady’s suspension. Brady would then need to convince 8 out of 14 judges in the actual en banc rehearing. Because Parker is a senior judge, he will be excluded from the initial decision, but he would get a seat at an en banc rehearing because he was on the original panel.

The Second Circuit is notorious for respecting the decisions of its three-judge panels, and the odds of Brady even getting a hearing appear slim. Only eight of more than 27,000 cases were granted an en banc hearing in the Second Circuit between 2000 and 2010. Parker and Chin ruled in favor of the NFL, while Robert Katzmann, the chief judge of the entire Second Circuit, ruled in favor of Brady, which could hold some sway among the other 12 judges.

In order to convince the judges that the case deserves further scrutiny, Brady’s lawyers need to convince them that this decision carries significant, wide-ranging implications and is of extraordinary circumstances.

In the court filing on April 29 asking for a two-week extension to file an appeal, Brady’s lawyers highlighted that “the Court’s opinion will affect the rights of every player in the NFL.”

They also made sure to note that “the Court’s decision raises significant labor law issues that could have far-reaching consequences for all employees subject to collective bargaining agreements. . . . These aspects of the Court’s opinion are of great importance not only to NFL players, but to all unionized employees.”

A decision on whether to hold an en banc rehearing should come within four to six weeks. Should Brady complete the Hail Mary and receive the rehearing, his four-game suspension will be stayed until the legal process is complete. Brady could potentially play the entire 2016 season, although the original lawsuit and appeal both operated on an expedited schedule, and there are still three and a half months until the start of the NFL regular season.

If Brady’s request is denied, he still has a few long-shot remedies to try to delay his suspension. He would probably file a petition with the Supreme Court and ask the Second Circuit to stay his suspension until the Supreme Court decides whether to hear the case.

If the Second Circuit declines, Brady could then ask the Supreme Court to stay his suspension until it decides whether or not to hear his case. Instead of asking all nine (or eight, current) justices, he would present his case to the Supreme Court justice assigned to the Second Circuit, currently Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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UK's National Obesity Forum slams 'disastrous' low-fat diet advice

The UK's National Obesity Forum (NOF) has come out with a scathing report this week that condemns the common advice handed down from authorities to eat a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. It argues that "eating fat does not make you fat" and joins a growing wave of backlash against the established dietary wisdom of the past four decades — which was initiated by the US Dietary Goals that began in 1977 and concurring UK guidelines in 1983. In response, Public Health England, the body responsible for issuing diet advice, has said that "calling for people to eat more fat, cut out carbs and ignore calories is irresponsible."

A year ago, the United States made its biggest shift in policy since the start of its national dietary guidelines by dropping the warning about cholesterol. As it turns out, the scientific underpinning for the advice to reduce dietary cholesterol intake was lacking, and so the policymakers just dropped it. Numerous studies plus a growing number of academics have also suggested that diets low in carbohydrates and high in fat are more effective at controlling weight and may even be healthier for the heart. This is the position endorsed by the NOF charity in its present critique, which has been reported by The Guardian.

The alternative proposed by the charity is for the consumption of "whole foods" that include meat, fish, dairy, nuts, and everyone's favorite high-fat fruit, the avocado. In that respect, they agree with the general UK advice to consume more unprocessed, well-sourced foods, though the discord arises in the amount of carbohydrates that each advocates. The latest Eatwell Guide from Public Health England was updated in March of this year, and it advises that roughly 80 percent of the calories we consume should come from carbohydrates, through things like beans, breads, pasta, fruits, and vegetables.

The NOF alleges that the science of food has been "corrupted by commercial influences," noting that the Eatwell Guide was prepared with the involvement of a large number of people from the food and drink industries. The report has already been criticized for expressing more opinion than scientific facts and figures, however its core contention that current dietary advice is not functioning as intended is hard to argue with. If the goal of the high-carbohydrate diet advice is to keep people healthy, the rapid rise of obesity that's coincided with it — particularly in the United States and the UK, one of Europe's fattest nations — would suggest it's been counterproductive.

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Contactless payments tripled in popularity in the UK last year

The UK is on its way to becoming a cashless society, with payments in physical currency making up less than half of all consumer purchases for the first time last year. This is according to a new study from Payments UK, and reported by The Guardian, which says that the number of contactless payments made in 2015 tripled compared to 2014. A separate study released last week by the UK Cards Association estimated that one in seven transactions in the UK are made using contactless methods, which include NFC-enabled debit cards and smartphone services like Apple Pay.

“It took almost eight years for monthly contactless spending to reach half a billion pounds — now it’s grown by the same amount in just four months," Richard Koch, head of policy at the UK Cards Association, told The Financial Times last week. "This dramatic rise shows that paying with contactless is now second nature for millions of consumers who see it as an alternative to cash.”

CONTACTLESS PAYMENT IS BOOMING, BUT OLDER METHODS LIKE CHEQUES ALSO SURVIVE

The Payments UK report found that the average adult in the UK makes 648 payments a year, or around 54 a month. On average, debit cards are used for 20 of these payments, while credit cards are used for just four. But despite the rise of contactless technology, older payment methods are still surviving. Some 546 million cheques were written in the UK in 2015, averaging about 10 cheques per adult per year. This is despite the fact that most retailers in the UK refuse to accept cheques.

It's difficult to contrast these figures directly with the US, but there are some broad comparison to be made. A study from 2012 found that cash accounted for 40 percent of payments in the US by volume, compared to the 45 percent figure in this recent Payments UK report. However, while almost half of UK credit and debit cards have contactless technology (and more than 90 percent of UK adults have a debit card), only 14 percent of Americans own a contactless card. These figures suggest that although the US is less dedicated to cash than the UK, new payment methods aren't as widespread.

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Why a glowing button might be more important than a touch-sensitive jacket sleeve

This year at Google I/O, its experimental ATAP division had not one, not two, but three mic drop moments. Project Jacquard, Project Soli, and Project Ara — all three are visions of how computers could work in the future. And all three seem like the sort of thing that will never really come to pass. But in two of the three cases, ATAP announced that they'reshipping, damn it, and doing it next year. And in the third (Soli), they're pushing very hard to ship as well.

Typically, when you see a wild technology idea go from the lab to store shelves, you end up with something quite a bit more pedestrian than the original idea. Concept cars at auto shows blow your hair back, but the actual production vehicles are lame by comparison. Jacquard, Google's project for touch-sensitive fabric, isn't entirely an exception. The touch-sensitive part of the jacket that Google is co-creating with Levi's is only on the left cuff. And to make it work, it requires a little flexible dongle that snaps into the cuff and pairs to your phone via Bluetooth.

That's not exactly the dream of touch-sensitive, computerized clothing that you can treat like any other piece of clothing. There's that dongle to charge (it should last two days). There's the fact that only one part of your clothing is touch sensitive. There's the fact that the jacket has "more than a modest premium" attached to the price, as Paul Dillinger, VP of global product innovation at Levi’s, puts it. Though he's quick to point out that "it's still definitely in the range" of Levi's other price points, this won't be the most expensive jacket Levi's sells.

But it is a solid first step. The work required to both create the flexible weave and then to make sure it could be mass produced is significant. It was just as hard to make it look good instead of looking like a cross-hatch tattoo of wires on your wrist. Close up, you have to know exactly what you're looking for to even see the tech: "The actual construction is a technical mistake," Dillinger. "It's called a missed pick in the weft. The structure of that mistake is actually what created this subtle, or authentic integrated sense for the patch."

While all the attention is on the magic of conductive, touch-sensitive area — for Ivan Poupyrev, technical program lead at Google’s ATAP, it might be the least interesting part right now. It's a problem he's already solved, and he is moving on to the next one and the one after that. He's paying attention to that little Bluetooth dongle that powers Jacquard. He's thinking a lot about buttons.
The button is "a central point of thinking," says Poupyrev. "That feels, to us, right. The device button on the jacket feels like the real thing." Someday, we'll continue shrinking down electronics so they can fit inside those buttons, and when that happens, companies like Levi's won't be limited to just making jackets.

"In the future, every [kind of garment can have] our technology woven in, and technologies added," Poupyrev says. "You can use it for other applications. Business wear, athletic wear ... we're looking very carefully at enterprise."

ATAP and Levi's worked together to craft the gestures that will work on the trucker jacket and the partners who can create apps that work with it. (ATAP isn't ready to just open it up to any developer yet — something of a common theme this year at Google I/O.) There will be eight or so gestures, all simple and designed to be easy to remember while you're riding a bike around the city.

And then there's that button. It lights up, sure, and that tiny little LED light looms larger in Poupyrev's mind than you might expect. That's because those lights are a signal — not that there's an incoming message, but that there's an incoming future — one where computers like the one in your pocket aren't going to be necessary anymore.

"I think in the future, it's going to come directly to the cloud, and you won't need the phone," Poupyrev says. To him, Jacquard isn't just about creating a remote control for your phone. That's a necessary half step, but it's not the final goal of creating ubiquitous computing. And so he's already working to minimize the phone's presence in your interactions with Jacquard: "We're talking about instead of using the phone, just using the phone as a connection directly to the services on the cloud services."

Dillinger puts it a little less technically: "Step one, put your phone away and get your face out of your screen. Step two, get rid of the phone. We've got time."

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Civil War's Arrested Development Easter egg shows why the Russos are perfect Marvel directors

Look closely during Captain America: Civil War’s biggest battle — that one in the Berlin airport, arguably one of the best superhero brawls committed to film. There’s a little Easter egg hidden in the background: the staircar from Arrested Development. It’s a perfect visual gag from directors Joe and Anthony Russo. Think about it: Arrested Development, which they had a hand in directing between 2003 and 2005, already trades on the kind of subtle background humor that you need to go back and hunt for. The show’s Easter eggs reference its hundreds of tiny, but rich stories. The smallest reference could carry a surprisingly dense backstory. The staircar’s appearance, fittingly, is no different.

But that one shot also encapsulates why the Russos are so well suited for directing Marvel’s biggest epics. It’s in ensemble sitcoms like Arrested Development, after all, that the Russos mastered the art of juggling colorful characters with interlocking storylines. That’s an essential skill for making a group like the Avengers work on the big screen, and as more and weirder characters are introduced into this ongoing saga, their ability will be crucial as Marvel barrels toward Avengers: Infinity War.

It should be clear by now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is less a string of nominally linked action movies and more a sprawling meta-narrative involving leads hopping in and out of each other’s movies. Since 2012’s The Avengers, characters like Thor and Ant-Man may have their own solo outings, but they know each other, work together, and presumably go to one another’s birthday parties. That’s not that far from episodic television. The New York Times’ AO Scott wasn’t wrong when he cheekily described the film series as "a very expensive, perpetually renewed workplace sitcom."THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE IS LIKE A WORKPLACE SITCOM

Enter the Russos. After cutting their teeth on smaller films in the ‘90s and early 2000s, the pair broke out (at least in the TV-directing community) with ensemble shows like Arrested Development and Community. Before coming on to direct Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they were established as, to quote Vulture’s Adam Sternbergh, "crackerjack sitcom directors" adept at weaving weird character arcs together. Compared to stories involving "Advanced" Dungeons & Dragons and strange mother-son bonding, the Marvel mythos almost seems straightforward.

Working on television on those particular shows taught them a unique skill set that, while it may not make them household names, allows them to thrive within the pressure cooker that is Hollywood’s current tentpole-obsessed studio system. They not only have experience dealing with the lengthy schedules of making episodic television, but they also have an ingrained understanding of continuity.

And the MCU would be nothing without its dense continuity. As the 13th Marvel film, Civil War draws from eight years of storytelling and treats them as vital to the text. Just look at Iron Man and Captain America, the two pillars of the Avengers. Tony Stark, painted as an egomaniac since his on-screen debut in 2008, is now grappling with his guilt over the team putting innocents in danger for years. Cap, on the other hand, has a point of view rooted firmly in World War II, when America deemed it necessary to take charge as a global force for good. After seeing a compromised SHIELD collapse in Winter Soldier, it makes sense that he’d balk at any kind of committee oversight. This kind of movie myth-making is unprecedented, and requires deft hands to ensure fans and casual viewers understand what’s happening on-screen, often with a quick visual or quip that must say more than a full scene of spoken exposition. It’s fitting that those same deft hands helped make Gob Bluth’s "I’ve made a huge mistake" not only a running gag, but a pop cultural refrain.

No other studio has proven itself as effective as Marvel at balancing continuity with effective storytelling. March’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is the object lesson in how easy it is to fail at creating the foundation for a massive movie universe, even if Warner Bros. has no choice but to forge ahead. But Disney has struggled at times. Joss Whedon is widely (and rightly) credited with making the best Marvel movie ever in The Avengers. He brought an auteur’s vision to a summer extravaganza. But by the timeAvengers: Age of Ultron was on the docket, that vision wound up being incompatible to the MCU’s endlessly expanding narrative. The Russos, on the other hand, had a far better go of it with Civil War, even though the film was equally complex.

That’s likely because origin stories (even team origin stories like The Avengers) benefit from a singular vision. It’s why Marvel hired horror stylist Scott Derrickson for Doctor Strange and up-and-comer Ryan Coogler for Black Panther. Those movies will inevitably have a distinct sensibility. Team-up movies at this late stage require directors to shepherd other people’s approaches while working within boundaries. The Russos are already proven successes at that kind of directorial challenge, so it makes sense that when Whedon stepped down after Ultron they were able to to pick up the slack.

THE RUSSOS PULLED OFF WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN AN IMPOSSIBLE JUGGLING ACT WITH 'CIVIL WAR'

Consider this: Civil War, while certainly imperfect, brings the long-brewing conflict between Captain America and Iron Man to a head, adds depth to Bucky Barnes, reintroduces General Thaddeus Ross from The Incredible Hulk, introduces Black Panther and Wakanda, essentially revitalizes Spider-Man, and manages to cram all this into a movie that grapples with higher-order political questions about superheroes on the global stage. Pulling that off should be next to impossible, but it’s no accident the Russos managed to do so with a modicum of grace — and the help the producer Kevin Feige, of course, who deserves plenty of credit in this miracle.

Of course, as Marvel’s "Phase Three" shifts into high gear, things are only going to get crazier and more complicated. As such, it’s easy to expect the next two Avengers movies to be even more challenging, and it’s an open question whether or not the Russos are up to that task. But if just one Russo could make an episode of Community about foosball and Abed dressing up like Batman both make sense and one of the best episodes the show produced, the MCU’s endgame might be in the best hands possible.

on Sunday, May 22, 2016

AudioQuest's NightHawk headphones sound as beautiful as they look

Modern life is too full of disposable things. From the simplest pen to the smartest phone, we just consume our way through a litany of gadgets, tools, and devices without ever stopping to truly appreciate them. AudioQuest's NightHawk headphones, however, demand to be treated differently. Nothing about these cans has come from some generic shelf, and they're built and presented as something that will stay with you for years. With an eye-grabbing design and an emotion-stirring sound, the NightHawks are one of the most unique sets of headphones out there.

It's impossible to tell the NightHawk story without recounting some of AudioQuest's history. This California company has been making audio cables since 1980, building a reputation among audiophiles with a penchant for extravagant over-engineering. I have my doubts about the tangible benefits of expensive cables, but I don't doubt AudioQuest's sound expertise, which manifested itself in 2012 with the critically acclaimed DragonFly digital-to-analog converter. That tiny USB accessory was the first sign of AudioQuest exploring markets beyond the fanatical audiophile community, and 2015's NightHawks are the company's arrival in the mainstream.

These $600 headphones aren't intended for sound purists. AudioQuest might claim they are, but the truth is that their sound is too smooth, mellow, and alluring to be considered neutral. Like the lacquered finish of their ear cups, the NightHawks sound pretty and polished. You won't hear any harsh treble, even when it exists in the original recording. Opinions will be split on whether that's a good or a bad thing, but I happen to think it's great and I suspect most people who just want to enjoy their music will agree.

Before I get too deep into how the NightHawks sound, I have to recount the experience of actually wearing them. It is, in a word, sublime. Okay, another few words: sumptuous, luxurious, awesome. The comfort of these headphones is beyond reproach, thanks to their self-adjusting strap and ingenious suspension design. I don't have to tinker with notches to adjust the size of the headband; it just stretched to accommodate me. The clamping force around my cranium is perfectly distributed across the full width of the headband, and because the ear cups attach via a suspension system, I can adjust each one independently with ease.

It's easy to overlook the importance of fit with something like a pair of headphones, but it's the most fundamental requirement. I loved the sound of Beyerdynamic's T5p.2s, but wearing them over long periods of time was fatiguing. Unlike the perfectly circular cups on Beyerdynamic's cans, AudioQuest uses a D-shaped cup that better adheres to the ear's natural shape. The NightHawks' synthetic leather pads just ensconce the ear in soft and velvety loveliness. I've ridden in Bentleys and Rolls-Royces and Ferraris, and not one of those experiences has been as comfortable as these headphones.

The biggest downside to AudioQuest's design is practicality. The NightHawks' size — they're very large and oh so very eye-catching — and semi-open architecture make them unsuitable for outdoor use. I mean, I would wear them outside my home, but I doubt many others would, and these cans just don't have the sound isolation to contend with street noise. One curious thing: though the NightHawks are described as semi-open, they dooffer a level of noise suppression that approaches that of a closed-back headphone. I sense no difference between them and the nominally closed-back Beyer T5p.2s. AudioQuest's secret sauce is a custom diffuser grille behind each driver, which was inspired by the diamond-cubic latticework of a butterfly's wings.

EVEN THE CASE IMPARTS A SENSE OF LUXURY

AudioQuest complements the NightHawks with a handsome synthetic leather case, which also serves as the headphones' retail packaging (bonus marks for sustainability). It's got hard sides and a smooth fabric finish on the inside that really augments the whole premium, luxurious feel. Two cables are provided for the NightHawks, as you might expect from a company with expertise in cables, with the thinner one offering gold-plated plugs and a slightly warmer sound. The more sophisticated cable has silver-plated connectors and high-purity solid copper conductors, borrowing some of AudioQuest's high-end loudspeaker interconnect tech. One minor issue with both is that you'll get plenty of microphonics — hearing the cable rubbing against your chest — when wearing the headphones without having anything playing.

I've been listening to AudioQuest's NightHawks for a few months now, primarily comparing them against the aforementioned pair of Beyerdynamic T5p.2s. The remarkable thing is that the NightHawks hang in that fight, in spite of being roughly half the price of the $1,099 Beyers. For sheer purity and accuracy of sound, Beyerdynamic wins, of course. However if I'm picking a pair of headphones for a day's leisurely listening, I'd opt for the NightHawks. When I needed to lend my mother headphones to watch a movie with, I handed her the NightHawks, knowing their fuss-free fit, excellent comfort, and impressively wide soundstage will serve her well. For regular humans that seek a painless and frictionless listening experience, the NightHawks are an easy recommendation.

AUDIOQUEST TUNED THE NIGHTHAWKS TO BE PLEASURABLE AND NOT FATIGUING

As I noted above, the aesthetic smoothness and polish of the NightHawks extends into their sound as well. Treble response from these headphones is present, but deemphasized. You won't lose any meaningful detail while listening to them; it'll just be less pronounced than on headphones tuned for a more prominent high end. Remember that treble is where all the most fatiguing and screeching notes live, so less of them just makes for a happier, more pleasant sound. Is that perfectly faithful to the original recording? No. But is it more enjoyable over longer periods of time? Heck yes.

The part of the sound spectrum where the NightHawks do most of their work is the low end, where they rumble and grumble with a satisfyingly full and rich bass. It can be a little too much at times, such as when watching John Wick thrashing his 1969 Mustang around an airfield, but that's really the exception. It might not be neutral — whatever that even means — but I enjoy the NightHawks' warm presentation, which makes voices sound a little huskier and more full-bodied than other headphones. There's a pleasing balance to everything, and the best way I can describe the NightHawks is that they just sound musical. All instruments are beautifully and dynamically recreated, from strings, to percussion, to brass, to piano, and these headphones are just as adept at handling the synths and drum machines popular in electronic music.

Put on some hip hop or EDM and you'll hear the NightHawks at their best. London artist Burial's eponymous album sounds utterly enthralling through these headphones. It's more of an urban soundscape than a musical composition, meandering through a series of drawling, bleak melodies — which can sound tepid with lesser headphones, but are given the right treatment from the bass-loving NightHawks. Booka Shade's Movements is another favorite of mine, with a multi-genre diversity that tests headphones' versatility. It also sounds great on the NightHawks. Okay, some of the snares aren't as punchy as I might hear them on, say, the Noble Audio Kaiser 10s, but then I wouldn't listen to the K10s for hours on end the way I would with the NightHawks. There are some songs that I'm simply afraid of listening to on the typically tuned high-end headphones, but the more relaxed NightHawks let me blast anything and everything.

At $600, the NightHawks are clearly a premium-class set of headphones. You could probably get a matching set of his and hers Beats cans for that much. But here's the difference between a pair of Beats and a pair of NightHawks: quality. The NightHawks offer bass that is not only plentiful, but also silky smooth. Their soundstage is exemplary, their musicality unquestionable. And the way they fit is probably the best of any set of over-the-ear headphones out there. I've certainly never worn a more comfortable pair of headphones. With their unique design and thoughtful engineering, the NightHawks are the antithesis of the disposable gadget. You might like a pair of Beats, but you'd never love them the way you would the NightHawks.

AudioQuest's first and only pair of headphones is one of those products that make my job as a reviewer an enjoyable one. I can happily, gleefully recommend them. No, they're not a precision instrument for audio diagnostics, but we're not talking about stethoscopes here. As I wrote earlier this year, headphones are a tool of entertainment, first and foremost, and that's where the AudioQuest NightHawks succeed. They fit like earmuffs, they are built with assiduous attention to detail and no small measure of ingenuity, and they have a gorgeous case to transport and keep them safe in. What's not to love?

on

Will virtual reality kill the YouTube comment?

When Google revealed that it was rebuilding YouTube for its new Daydream virtual reality initiative, I began wondering what would happen to one of the platform's notorious weak spots: the comments, often vitriolic or racist or generally incoherent, that cluster under videos. The answer, apparently, is that Google doesn't know.

"A lot of those things are still coming together, so I can't give you a concrete answer right now," Google's VR czar Clay Bavor told me. "I think we're learning a lot about what's interesting and what works in VR, and so certainly many of the familiar elements — I don't know that those all will be there." For a second opinion, I turned to YouTube product manager Kurt Wilms, whose response was just as noncommittal. "We're still working through exactly what we'll do related to comments," he said. "But we're trying to bring as much of the functionality that makes sense to interact [with] in this experience."

The first Daydream phones aren't coming out until this fall, so Google still has months to make a call on including comments. But it will be dealing with what is, at this point, a very familiar question: are comments worth saving? And if they are, what should they look like in an experience that encompasses the viewer's entire world?
YouTube comments are notoriously bad, and fixing them has never seemed high on Google's priority list. But Daydream could change that. Like many VR platforms, its creators are desperate to create a welcoming environment for users. Web services are so entrenched that there's no real incentive to make things better: if you hate YouTube, you still probably can't avoid it. But if Google can't actively draw people into things like YouTube for Daydream, then Daydream — and possibly virtual reality itself — dies. That threat has already gotten Google to lock down specs for Android phones and curate Play Store apps in a way it's never done before, and it wouldn't be surprising to see it crack down on content as well.

The simplest answer would be to just kill the comment. VR is a rich, attention-focusing medium, so the ideal method of reading comments — scrolling for a few seconds to scan the occasional sentence for something interesting — no longer works in quite the same way. At the very least, comments would need to be hidden behind a menu, and even then Google's going to have to decide whether there's enough signal in there to justify putting the noise on full blast. Do you want to pause your fully immersive virtual travel experience to see someone rant about the international Jewish conspiracy?

But while I wouldn't exactly mourn the loss of YouTube comments, just doing away with them would feel like a missed opportunity to explore what online interactions should look like in VR. Right now, social VR overwhelmingly refers to live virtual meetings, whether that's a one-on-one call or a group event. There's very little of what we think of as social networking: posting communications that people can view and respond to at their leisure. And there's even less interaction with actual content inside VR, whether that's sharing it, commenting on it, or responding to it with your own work. Facebook announced a few months ago that it would add liking and sharing to videos in the Gear VR, but that's just a first step. Right now, we've got lots of virtual chat rooms and virtual TV channels, and not a whole lot in between.

Oculus and Facebook are putting real effort into figuring out what kind of social interactions we can have in VR, and so are many independent companies. But Google is right in the middle of overhauling a massive platform that's ripe for experimentation. Nobody is in a better position to figure out how we can communicate with each other in VR, beyond mimicking face-to-face meetings. And Google's messaging service Allo, which it announced at I/O, is already leaning heavily into messages that rely on doodles and emoji — things that could translate well into VR — instead of pure text.

The catch, of course, is that virtual reality won't fix people. That requires a trial-and-error process of creating incentives for good behavior and moderating bad actors, something that online games are getting better at but social platforms either ignore or simply can't manage at a huge scale. And it's going to be a bigger deal than ever before in virtual reality, not because VR is more "realistic," but because we've still got a chance to decide what kind of spaces we want.

So far, the VR online community has mostly been small enough to patch problems when they crop up. But if Google has its way, Daydream will change that very quickly — and whoever builds the bones of the system will determine what grows out of it.

on

Google built a tiny radar system into a smartwatch for gesture controls

"How are you going to interact with an invisible computer?"
When you hear a question like that posted in a conference room at a major tech corporation like Google, you expect you're going to be in for an hour or two of technophizing with few tangible results at the end of it.
But then somebody sets a smartwatch on the table in front of you. You snap your fingers in the air just a couple of inches away from it. And the digital watch face starts spinning.

Ivan Poupyrev, who posed that question (and many more) works at Google's ATAP research lab and is the technical project lead for Project Soli, which is designed to prove that we can embed tiny radar chips into electronics so that we can use minute hand gestures to control the digital world around us. Why on earth would you want radar in a smartwatch?

ATAP, which stands for Advanced Technologies and Projects, is a division within Google that's at a crossroads. It was formerly led by Regina Dugan of DARPA fame, and her influence led the division to pursue technologies ranging from modular phones (Project Ara) to real-time 3D mapping (Tango) to cinematic, live-action virtual reality movies (Spotlight Stories). Dugan left for Facebook earlier this year, however, and so it was an open question whether the projects she left behind will continue. Tango has "graduated" into Google, while Ara seems mired in the muck.

But the Jacquard touch-sensitive fabric project and Soli are still at ATAP, and Soli, at least, has a new and singular goal: create both the industry and the design language for radar-enabled consumer electronics. That's why Poupyrev directed his team to do more than just experiment, but to prove that radar can work in a smart watch.

"IF YOU CAN PUT SOMETHING IN A SMARTWATCH, YOU CAN PUT IT ANYWHERE"

"If you can put something in a smartwatch, you can put it anywhere," Poupyrev says. So ATAP redesigned the Soli chip to make it smaller and draw less power. And then it redesigned it to do the same thing again. And again. Finally, according to Hakim Raja, Soli's lead hardware and production engineer, the team created the tiniest of the chips you see above. It's a tiny sliver you could balance on your pinky toenail, with four antennas that provide full duplex communication for sending and receiving radar pings. The first iteration of Soli, which shipped to in a development kit, drew 1.2w of power. This one draws 0.054w, a 22x reduction.

But making a chip that tiny has drawbacks. Radar was designed to detect massive flying metal objects from miles away, not tiny millimeter movement from your fingers inches away. Until very recently, nobody bothered worrying about the power draw at this scale and nobody had to deal with figuring out what the signal would even look like when it was shrunk down this small.

Jaime Lien is the lead research engineer for Soli, and it's her job to tune the machine learning algorithms which ultimately get hardwired into the chip. Her first realization was that it made sense to convert the spatial signal radar provides into a temporal one that makes more sense on a computer. But that was nothing compared to noise problems you run into at these tiny scales. She showed me the "glitch zoo," a huge set of screenshots of every kind of impenetrable noise that her algorithms have to find signal in. At these scales, it's impossible to do any sort of beam forming and the very electrons running through the chip have to be accounted for.

It's complicated, in other words.

By comparison to the electronics and the machine learning algorithms, actually deciding which gestures should do what seems easy. But if you think about it a minute, maybe it's not. With a touchscreen, you can see buttons and sliders. With physical switch, you can feel the snick when you flick it on. But if there's nothing but air, how do you guide the user?

IF THERE'S NOTHING BUT AIR, HOW DO YOU GUIDE THE USER?

"Is everything going to have its own interface?" Poupyrev asks. "Is every switch, every smart sprinkler, or cup going to have its own? It's going to create confusion." One of Soli's goals is to create a common design language that's easy to learn but flexible enough to control a lot of things.

Nick Gillian, lead machine engineer for Soli, walked me through the basic gestures that the team has settled on. There are essentially two zones, near and far. From far away, you don't do much (or you could wave your arm around, Kinect-like). But when you get close, Soli is able to detect finer and finer movements. So the first gesture is simple: proximity. As you move your hand closer to the watch, it lights up, showing you information and letting you know your hand is in the zone of real interaction.

YOU CAN PHYSICALLY FEEL YOUR OWN FINGERS

There, Poupyrev says, Soli is "basing this language on the metaphors which are already established in the world. We're borrowing this language from physical controls." Those controls are the dial (rubbing your finger and thumb together as though you're twisting a toothpick), the button (tap your thumb and finger together), and the slider (slide your thumb along your finger).

The nice thing about all of these gestures is that it provides the interaction with two levels of feedback: you can see the screen responding to your gestures, sure, but you can physically feel your own fingers. It sounds silly, but the touch of your fingertips against each other is literally tangible.

But why even bother? "On a really simple level, it means you get to use your entire screen for what screens are meant for: showing you stuff," says Poupyrev. If you can control your devices by wriggling your fingers in the air above them, you don't need to mess around with littering the screen with buttons. "You're pretty much wasting precious screen real estate which could be used for something useful," says Poupyrev. That's meaningful on a screen as small as a watch. The team could just "design for the eye ... rather than for the finger."

"DESIGN FOR THE EYE ... RATHER THAN FOR THE FINGER."

That's interesting for a touchscreen, but Poupyrev's vision is something larger: as computers become smaller, they're eventually going to be everywhere. When than happens, we will need a way to interact with them. There are a lot of bets on using voice for this, but why not use our hards too?


As humans, we evolved to use our hands as the primary way we interact with the real world. And it's only as we start to build technology that we have to stack additional sensors and buttons and touchscreens, because we cannot interact with the digital content directly.

Soli and Jacquard are ATAP's projects to help everybody get ready for a future where everything is a computer. That future could be a hellscape of screens and beeps, or it could be more naturalistic. Where you can touch your sleeve to start your music, you can speak out loud to search the internet, and snap your fingers to start a program.
"We're coming back to this humanity, where the digital becomes part of the real," Poupyrev says. But that's a heady dream, and usually you wake up from a dream and get back to the real world. To keep his dream from fading away and being forgotten like most dreams, Poupyrev has to do something now.

The first Soli prototypes are an LG Watch Urbane and a JBL speaker, and neither is anywhere near close to being a consumer product. Speakers vibrate to make sound, so there are hard problems to solve when you're trying to add a chip that detects millimeter-scale movements. The watch still has power and interaction issues to suss out.
But ATAP isn't just building these to prove they're possible in theory. They're doing it in partnership with LG, Qualcomm, JBL, and others to prove to these companies that they can put them in real, shipping consumer products.

When Dugan was running ATAP, her mantra was that each team had to produce a "demonstration at convincing scale" within two years. Every one of those words has a driving force behind it, but even though Soli is two years into its project, it's still going. Poupyrev says that he believes that Soli has already achieved that demonstration. It's gotten the chips made, it's created software that could work on those (or any) chips, it's created a design language that could extend to lots of devices.

ATAP IS SERIOUS ABOUT PUTTING THIS TECHNOLOGY ON STORE SHELVES

Now the goal is to work with consumer product companies to put that whole stack into a shipping product. It's not quite the way that ATAP worked before, but Poupyrev says "we are serious" about the goal of putting this technology on store shelves. That's an entirely different scale than what ATAP has done before, and to convince us that it's possible the Soli team will need to demonstrate that it can make as much progress in the next two years as it has in the last two.

on Saturday, May 21, 2016