The global smartphone market grew by just 1.4% last quarter according to Gartner, which estimated 389 million total smartphone shipments in Q3 2018. Much of the year-over-year growth came from Huawei, which shipped 52 million phones and edged out Apple (with 45.7 million shipments) for the second quarter in a row. Fellow Chinese firms Xiaomi (33.2 million shipments) and Oppo (30.6 million shipments) also posted strong growth.Samsung, meanwhile, remains the leading smartphone vendor with 73.4 million units shipped last quarter, but that’s down from 85.6 million units in Q3 2017. The company is hoping to fend off its new Chinese rivals by bringing more cutting-edge features to mid-range phones, while also betting on new high-end tech such as foldable screens and more cameras.As for Apple, the company’s peak smartphone plan includes selling pricier hardware (like the $1,100-and-up iPhone XS Max) and extracting more money from services. Along that line, Apple will no longer share device sales numbers in its quarterly earnings reports, starting with the next one.

Spain is set to replace the United States as the world’s second most popular tourism destination while France has retained the top spot, the UN World Tourism Organisation has said.It is expected that Spain will take the second position with 82 million visitors last year, UNWTO head Zurab Pololikashvili said.Definitive figures will be published in the spring.Pololikashvili did not give any details about the US, nor did he explain why Spain took the second spot despite a terror attack in August and an independence crisis in tourism magnet Catalonia, home to Barcelona and the Costa Brava. John Kester, head of tourism trends at the UN agency, said “everything indicates” France would retain its top spot in 2017 – a good year for the industry as the number of global tourists leapt 7% on 2016, the biggest increase in seven years.Europe was the star of the show as it attracted a large number of visitors, up 8% from the previous year, lured in particular by the Mediterranean’s sea and sun.This contrasts with 2016 figures that saw security fears hit visitor arrivals in Europe.“We do see that demand for European destinations has been very strong,” said Kester. “We also see important recovery in France,” he added, without giving further details about a country that was hard hit by extremist attacks.Spain also suffered a deadly jihadist attack in August in Catalonia, the same region whose leaders tried unsuccessfully to break away from Spain, triggering a major crisis that shook Europe.And while the political crisis sparked a drop in visitor numbers to the north-eastern region as massive demonstrations were staged following the independence bid, it does not appear to have dented overall tourist figures for Spain in 2017.In 2016, Spain welcomed 75.3 million visitors, just behind the US with 75.6 million, while France easily remained the world leader with 82.6 million visitors, according to the UNWTO.International tourism to the US shrank during the first five months of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to the US International Trade Administration.Arrivals fell 5% in the first quarter and 3% in the second quarter, official figures show.The Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, had already announced last week that tourism numbers had soared, saying earnings in a sector that accounts for 11% of Spain’s gross domestic product rose 12% to €87bn in 2017. Topics Spain France Spain holidays France holidays United States holidays Europe holidays North and Central America holidays

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20 million items is believed to have been destroyed.The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.“It was the biggest natural history museum in Latin America. We have invaluable collections. Collections that are over 100 years old,” Cristiana Serejo, one of the museum’s vice-directors, told the G1 news site.Marina Silva, a former environment minister and candidate in October’s presidential elections said the fire was like “a lobotomy of the Brazilian memory”.Luiz Duarte, another vice-director, told TV Globo: “It is an unbearable catastrophe. It is 200 years of this country’s heritage. It is 200 years of memory. It is 200 years of science. It is 200 years of culture, of education.” TV Globo also reported that some firefighters did not have enough water to battle the blaze.It wasn’t immediately clear how the fire began. The museum was part of Rio’s Federal University but had fallen into disrepair in recent years. Its impressive collections included items brought to Brazil by Dom Pedro I – the Portuguese prince regent who declared the then-colony’s independence from Portugal – Egyptian and Greco-Roman artefacts, “Luzia”, a 12,000 year-old skeleton and the oldest in the Americas, fossils, dinosaurs, and a meteorite found in 1784. Some of the archive was stored in another building but much of the collection is believed to have been destroyed.Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, who has presided over cuts to science and education as part of a wider austerity drive, called the losses “incalculable”. “Today is a tragic day for the museology of our country,” he tweeted. “Two hundred years of work research and knowledge were lost.”Mércio Gomes, an anthropologist and former president of Brazil’s indigenous agency, Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), compared the loss to the burning of the library of Alexandria in 48BC. “We Brazilians only have 500 years of history. Our National Museum was 200 years old, but that’s what we had, and what is lost forever,” he wrote on Facebook. “We have to reconstruct our National Museum.”Duarte said that governments were to blame for failing to support the museum and letting it fall into disrepair. At its 200th birthday in June, not one state minister appeared. “For many years we fought with different governments to get adequate resources to preserve what is now completely destroyed,” he said. “My feeling is of total dismay and immense anger.”Duart also said that the museum had just closed a deal with the Brazilian government’s development bank, BNDES, for funds that included a fire prevention project. “This is the most terrible irony,” he said.At the scene, several indigenous people gathered and criticised the fact that the museum containing their most precious artefacts has burned down seemingly because there was no money for maintenance of hydrants, yet the city had recently managed to find a huge budget to build a brand new museum of tomorrow. A crowd of several dozen people outside the gates, several of whom were clearly distraught. Others blamed the government’s austerity policies and corruption.Rio’s fire chief Colonel Roberto Robaday said the firefighters did not have enough water at first because two hydrants were dry. “The two nearest hydrants had no supplies,” he said. Water trucks were brought in and water used from a nearby lake. “This is an old building,” he said, “with a lot of flammable material, lots of wood and the documents and the archive itself.”Some Brazilians saw the fire as a metaphor for their country’s traumas as it battles terrifying levels of violent crime and the effects of a recession that has left more than 12 million people unemployed.“The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide. A crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil’s best-known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.Additional reporting by Jonathan Watts Topics Brazil Americas Museums Rio de Janeiro news

PARIS (Reuters) - French police are investigating the disappearance of Interpol chief, Meng Hongwei, who was reported missing after traveling from France to his native China, while his wife has been placed under police protection after receiving threats. Meng’s wife contacted police in Lyon, the French city where the international police agency is based, after not hearing from him since Sept. 25, and after receiving threats by phone and on social media, France’s interior ministry said. A person familiar with the investigation said the initial working assumption was that Meng had antagonized Chinese authorities in some way and had been detained as a result. “France is puzzled about the situation of Interpol’s president and concerned about the threats made to his wife,” the ministry said, adding that it was in contact with China. Meng’s wife, who has remained in Lyon with their children according to police sources, was receiving protection, it said. It was not clear why Meng, 64, who was named Interpol’s president two years ago, had traveled to China, which has not commented officially on his disappearance. China’s Ministry of Public Security did not immediately respond to a faxed request for comment and there was no mention of him in official media on Saturday. There have been several cases in recent years of senior Chinese officials vanishing without explanation, only for the government to announce weeks or even months later that they have been put under investigation, often for suspected corruption. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post quoted an unnamed source as saying Meng had been taken for questioning as soon as he landed in China, but it was not clear why. French police are investigating what is officially termed in France a “worrying disappearance”. Interpol, which groups 192 countries and which is usually focused on finding people who are missing or wanted, said in a statement from its secretary general, Juergen Stock, that it had asked China for clarification. “Interpol has requested through official law enforcement channels clarification from China’s authorities on the status of Interpol President Meng Hongwei,” Stock, who is in charge Interpol’s day-to-day running, said on Saturday. Roderic Broadhurst, a professor of criminology at Australian National University, said Meng’s disappearance would be “pretty disconcerting” for people in international bodies that work with China, and could ultimately damage China’s efforts to develop cooperative legal assistance measures with other countries. “It is bizarre,” Broadhurst said on Saturday, adding that China was likely to “brush off” any political damage that it would cause to Beijing’s involvement in international bodies. “It’s a price that might have to be paid, but I guess they would see that as a cost worth bearing,” Broadhurst said. Presidents of Interpol are seconded from their national administrations and remain in their home post while representing the international policing body. Meng is listed on the website of China’s Ministry of Public Security as a vice-minister, but lost his seat on its Communist Party Committee in April, the South China Morning Post reported. Meng has almost 40 years’ experience in criminal justice and policing, and has overseen matters related to legal institutions, narcotics control and counter-terrorism, according to Interpol’s website. Interpol staff can carry special passports to help speed deployment in emergency situations but that would not have given Meng any specific rights or immunity in his home country. FILE PHOTO: INTERPOL President Meng Hongwei poses during a visit to the headquarters of International Police Organisation in Lyon, France, May 8, 2018. Jeff Pachoud/Pool via ReutersWhen Meng was named Interpol’s president in Nov. 2016, human rights groups expressed concern that Beijing might try to leverage his position to pursue dissidents abroad. Beijing has in the past pressed countries to arrest and deport to China citizens it accuses of crimes, from corruption to terrorism. At the time, Amnesty International called Meng’s appointment “at odds with Interpol’s mandate to work in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Reporting by Catherine Lagrange in Lyon, Richard Lough, Simon Carraud, Sarah White and Sudip Kar-Gupta in Paris, Mark Hosenball in London, Yawen Chen and Michael Martina in Beijing; Editing by Richard Balmforth/Raju Gopalakrishnan/Alexander SmithOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Jack Weaver and his brother-in-law Patrick Widen walked around police barricades, through a creek and up treacherous hilly roads to film the devastation caused by the wildfires in Santa Rosa, California. Weaver's mother, Katherine, was convinced the family's dog, Izzy, had died in the fire that destroyed their neighbourhood. When the men reached the end of the narrow road, they saw their house was completely ruined. But then Izzy came bounding out of the rubble for a joyous reunion. Weaver captured the scene on his phone

Got an Amazon Echo for Christmas, just like every other basic-issue human. I’m under no illusion it’s anything other than the larval cell of a cybernetic panopticon that will eliminate our species. But I love it, because it’s allowed me to turn my home into a centrally heated jukebox, with snacks in. “Alexa, play Whiter Shade of Pale,” I bellow the instant I get in the door, before I turn cartwheels across the floor. And it happens, like magic. Majestic, organ-led magic, the vibrations of which make the neighbours experience a creeping sadness they didn’t know they had.There’s clearly Stasi-like potential to a networked machine that is always listening to you, yet it’s also clear we’ll put up with any sinister technology – if it’s cool enough. It also has to work, though, and Alexa users have reported a few problems. Such as her randomly crying out in the night, like a ghostly child. Or autonomously flirting with the voice of Google’s electronic domestic, like a confusing, modern version of Upstairs Downstairs. Or adding “cancer” to one woman’s shopping reminders, instead of Pampers. Of the ways to receive bad news, that has to be near the top of the list.My Alexa and I have had our share of run-ins, like any two people who share a cell. I know smart assistants are still learning. That’s clear from her voice-recognition abilities, which are both incredibly impressive, yet also comically inept. “Play Woke Up New by the Mountain Goats,” I yell, before she starts blasting out Woke Up in a New Bugatti by Ace Hood, featuring Rick Ross. I spend 20 minutes convincing her “marmoreal” and “memorial” are different words (don’t ask how she did with “formication”). “Alexa, what year was Alphabet Street by Prince released?” I ask. “Here is Elmo’s Rap Alphabet,” she replies, inexplicably pleased with herself.Training machines to communicate meaningfully with us is a long way off. They first have to develop what philosophers call a theory of mind, involving contextual interpretation, sensitivity to emotional and social cues and self-consciousness. None of the smart assistants on the market would pass the Turing test, and convince an observer they were having an intelligent conversation. Although, depending on the time of day, I’m not sure I would either. Right, guys, I need that coffee! Don’t talk to me in the morning! Or the afternoon!I can report a horrific twist. Over the past few weeks I’ve started communicating differently. At a recent gathering, where a few people were talking at once, I slightly raised my voice, and immediately a familiar cadence entered it. “KATE,” I said to my friend Kate. “BRING ME SOME MALTESERS. MALTESERS.” I’d got used to barking blunt requests, as if perpetually on speakerphone with an automated cinema-booking system, or ordering a beer in France. It wasn’t the best way to talk to her, Kate replied, in her own words, using a bit of volume herself.Still, things will get better. An Amazon executive recently noted, in glowing terms, that since far-field microphones had been introduced to Fire TV, users were starting to speak in entire sentences, and asking her different questions. “They are starting to express a lot more intent.” He’s not talking about the machine, he’s talking about you. That’s where the current wave of AI is leading us. We’re not training Alexa. She is training us.Saw some interesting news recently – OK, I’m lying. I saw some news. It was this: “Kodak company shares soaring after jumping on crypto currency craze.” First, that’s not news. At best, it’s a mediocre tongue-twister. It’s also a sequence of words that couldn’t be more mysterious to me if they’d been scrawled in Aramaic and stuffed in a buried chest.I assume it means Kodak have decided to make their own money; understandable, as they’ve been losing it for years. But I didn’t know companies could just reinvent themselves like Madonna. It’s a disorienting world, where Microsoft might suddenly focus on selling secondhand cellos, or Bonne Maman start manufacturing arms.What about the cryptocurrencies bit? That’s easier: cryptocurrencies are decentralised digital assets, built from blocks, which are released acyclically, from block-lattice nodes. These can be mined by investors, who digitally shrink themselves and enter the internet, to harvest them in special caps, while avoiding anyone in a suit played by the actor Hugo Weaving.The Kodak story isn’t just an absolute porcupine to get your head around, it’s probably also important, being news of the tectonic, economy-shifting kind that explains why in 15 months we’ll be fighting foxes for chicken wings and drinking from puddles. But it’s also boring. Civilisation will be dust before I understand cryptocurrency. It turns out what I actually like are simple, arguably banal ideas. Like Kodak, a company that makes camera film. Or used to.I should say that I am horrified by this attitude. For years, I’ve been on the lookout for a tell-tale sign I’ve suddenly grown old: a decisive physical falter, clusters of Werther’s Originals sprouting in my pockets. But the more I think about it, the more I realise this is it: I’ve reached a point where not only do I not understand the news, I don’t even want to. Is this what they call a Kodak moment? I know that’s not what it used to mean, but maybe it’s time the phrase was reinvented.Speaking of reinvention: I found the most depressing website in the world recently, and it’s not what you think. At supbowie.com you can type in your age, and it tells you what David Bowie was doing at the equivalent point in his life. Unless you released Space Oddity at 22, invented a new language at 30, or turned down a knighthood at 56, can you say you’ve lived? Has Lou Reed punched you in the face after dinner in Hammersmith? Have you played a character called Lord Royal Highness in SpongeBob SquarePants? What have you done, exactly? Topics Technology What's the matter with Rhik Samadder? features

In what may indicate a new level of donor confidence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s management, one of its trustees is giving more than $80 million to the museum, the Met announced on Thursday.The contribution, from the trustee, Florence Irving, and the estate of her husband, Herbert Irving, a co-founder of the food services giant Sysco Corporation who died last year, comes at a time when the Met has made a concerted effort to come back from a period of internal turmoil and financial crisis.The museum’s latest annual report, also released Thursday, suggests that the Met is making progress. Where a shortfall of $15 million had been projected for the fiscal year 2017, which ended in June, that figure was contained to $10.1 million, according to the report, and the Met said it is on track to eliminate its deficit by 2020.In addition, the museum’s endowments increased by almost $300 million, to a total of $2.9 billion; and the Met said it raised $232 million in philanthropic gifts, membership dues and government support.The Irving bequest, the largest financial gift to the Met in recent history, will establish an unrestricted art acquisitions endowment fund, as well as several endowment funds for the department of Asian Art. These funds will support acquisitions, exhibitions and publications of the arts of China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Himalayas, with a preference for Chinese decorative arts and Indian and Southeast Asian art, the Irvings’ collecting fields.Image“We’ve made really good progress,” Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive, said, adding that the museum had stabilized over the last nine months.CreditJoshua Bright for The New York TimesAn endowment will also support the Florence and Herbert Irving Galleries for South and Southeast Asian Art, named by the Irvings in 1994. In 2004, the museum designated the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing.The Irvings on Thursday also extended their largess to Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian, giving $600 million to the two institutions to advance their research and clinical programs for cancer treatment.In an interview in his office, Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive, said the museum was turning a corner. “We’ve made really good progress,” he said, adding that the museum had stabilized over the last nine months and that “the community is in a much better place.”Mr. Weiss said that the Met has committed to increasing transparency; to providing more detailed information to the board to ensure better financial oversight; and to improving communication between the administration and the staff.Over the past year, the Met has been able to increase revenue and reduce costs, Mr. Weiss said. Its once money-losing retail operations, for example, are now breaking even.The museum has cut back its special exhibitions to about 45 from about 60 and reduced its staff through buyouts and layoffs. “We were doing too many things,” Mr. Weiss said. “We’re a smaller organization than we were a year ago.”At the same time, Mr. Weiss added, “We still have the most ambitious scholarly special-exhibition program in the world.”ImageSheena Wagstaff, the Met’s chairwoman for modern and contemporary art.CreditRebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesThe Met is in the process of refining a proposal to charge admissions to non-New Yorkers. And a search is underway for a new director to replace Thomas P. Campbell, who resigned under pressure in February. Mr. Weiss, to whom any new director would report under a recent management reorganization, said it was too early to discuss possible candidates or a timetable for the selection.While the Met’s renovation of its modern and contemporary wing is on the back burner, it continues to study how best to use the Breuer building. The museum has yet to determine whether it will continue to use that satellite location after its eight-year lease is up.While “the Breuer has made a meaningful contribution” and attendance there has been consistent with that of the Whitney Museum of Art’s best years there, Mr. Weiss said, “it’s a bigger commitment to make it run than we’d thought.”“If we continue beyond eight years, we want to have a sustainable operating model and we haven’t done that yet,” he added. “We’re now looking at how to do that more efficiently. There is a significant amount of fund-raising involved.”Mr. Weiss said the museum is planning to modify the Breuer exhibition program, keeping a modern and contemporary emphasis but with “a little bit more presence of the permanent collection.”Sheena Wagstaff, the Met’s chairwoman for modern and contemporary art, said this was always part of the plan for the Breuer, which next fall will devote a floor to Abstract Expressionism and related work.“We always intended to put the collection at Breuer at some point,” Ms. Wagstaff said. “We’ve been open now for 18 months, so we do have plans to integrate more of our collection into the Breuer program as of next year.”

当地时间 10 月 9 日，Magic Leap 在洛杉矶举办为期两天的首届开发者大会（L.E.A.P. Conference）。在这场面向开发者的小聚会上，Magic Leap 内容、渠道上的合作伙伴和开发者们齐聚一堂，彼此展示作品，分享经验，讨论着这家争议十足又前途未卜的公司会为他们的未来带来哪些可能。L.E.A.P. 展开来是 Learn、Engage、Accelerate、Program。对 Magic Leap 而言，这场「开发者大会」至关重要。在过去数年中，它始终甩不掉身边「只见融资却不见产品」的争议，即使在今年 8 月发布了首款产品 Magic Leap One 之后，这样的情况也没有出现怎样喜人的转变。Magic Leap 不乏一些信众，无论是消费者、合作伙伴还是一直报有期待的投资商们，都希望能尽快看到一个「厚积」之后「勃发」的 Magic Leap。L.E.A.P. 大会就是 Magic Leap 证明自己最好的舞台。一向神秘的 Magic Leap 在这次开发者大会上，第一次全方位把自家产品和理念展示给外界，勾画出了「空间计算」的蓝图。L.E.A.P. 大会的第一天，Magic Leap 与合作伙伴一起发布了多款游戏和应用。卢克斯影业旗下的 ILMxLab 打造了《星球大战》AR 体验产品，和 Magic Leap 长达 6 年合作的 Weta Workshop 开发了 AR 射击游戏「Dr. Grordbort's Invaders」，「愤怒的小鸟」这个大 IP 也推出了第一人称射击版本等等。有媒体称，这款视效惊人的射击游戏最可能成为 Magic Leap 内容平台上的杀手级游戏。除了备受关注的游戏，Magic Leap 此次还在医疗、零售、创作等领域推出了「范例」作品。比如与医疗科技公司 Brainlab 合作的医学可视化应用，和美国最大家居电商品牌之一的 Wayfair 合作发布的家装可视化应用，以及 3D 建模应用「Onshape 3D CAD」等等。Magic Leap 把最受关注的主题演讲环节放在了最后一天。公司 CEO Rony Abovitz、高管以及合作伙伴纷纷上台，从生态概念，讲到系统建设，最后到具体应用。在大会 3 个多小时的主题演讲中，Magic Leap 所展示的，都离不开一个主题：「空间计算」。什么是「空间计算」？空间计算（spatial computing）指的是无缝地混合数字世界和现实世界，让两个世界可以相互感知、理解和交互。Rony Abovitz 在本次大会提出了「Magicverse」的概念，即 Magic Leap 空间计算平台上所有应用和游戏内容共同组成的「连接物理世界和数字世界的系统」。而构建 Magicverse 需要空间计算这项核心技术来支持。现场的概念图描绘了 Mapic Leap 设想中的未来世界——由多重数字影像组成的 Magicverse 叠加于现实之上。Magicverse 生态不是只有购买 Magic Leap 设备的用户才会体验，它将是开放的。Rony Abovitz 说到，这会是一个能与手机、平板甚至 VR 头显等其他设备互动的系统。为了鼓励生态开放，在内容开发方面，Magic Leap 公布了两项政策：允许竞争对手的硬件使用 Magic Leap 的内容；也鼓励内容开发者将为其他平台开发的内容带入 Magic Leap One 的头显。接着，专为空间计算设计的交互系统 LuminOS 登场。LuminOS 可以将用户的房间变为他们的桌面，把交互内容铺在空间里。LuminSDK 支持多个应用同时运行。Magic Leap 公布了 LuminOS 的软件更新路线图，路线图涉及替身 Avatar 相关工具、双控制器支持、视图模式等多个细节。在明年第一季度后还将加入物体识别框架和针对企业用户的功能，也将为操作系统带来 Javascript 兼容支持。为了让 Web 开发者更轻松地开发应用，Magic Leap 设计了 Helio 浏览器。除了常规的网页浏览和 YouTube 播放功能，Helio 现在也可以让 Web 开发者轻松地将之前的 2D 开发转变为 3D 开发。Magic Leap 还发布了一个形象极其逼真的虚拟 AI 人物 Mica。打开 Magic Leap 头显，你就可以看到这位短头发的女士。当你想不清你在去年一个演唱会上最喜欢哪段演出时，好记性的 Mica 会随口而出。Mica 也能洞察并记住你的情绪，你和朋友相谈甚欢的经历，都会被储存在 Mica 的记忆里。这家公司也声称自己将会往「社交」方向上努力。虚拟替身聊天 Avatar Chat 的进展将很快提上日程，Avatar Chat 目前支持一对一的聊天，多人聊天支持计划在年底之前上线。Avatar Chat 还支持 Helio 浏览器投影，让你和朋友可以共同浏览同一个网站，使信息分享更加方便。在今年秋季，Magic Leap 还将提供开发者创建多用户游戏与应用程序所需的 API。以上这些，都是围绕着 Magic Leap One 这台个人空间计算机而打造的。即便被曝几年前的「体育馆中的鲸鱼」并非真实演示而是由视效公司合成，这种演示宣传和后续放出的真实体验 demo 的不匹配，致使 Magic Leap 被很多人戏谑。但这一切并没有影响这家公司继续受到投资商们的青睐。今年 3 月，Magic Leap 宣布获得 4.61 亿美元融资，由沙特阿拉伯财富基金领投。自 2011 年成立以来，Magic Leap 先后获得来自高通资本、淡马锡、环球集团、阿里巴巴等公司的巨额投资，融资总规模已经达到了 23 亿美元，估值高达 60 亿。The Verge 在一篇报道里分析了「为什么投资商们总给 Magic Leap 送钱」：像谷歌这种「玩心很大」的公司往往容易倾心一些实验性项目，投资 Magic Leap 算是打一个小赌，而且 Magic Leap 简直是一家聚合了一大批古怪聪明人的 nerd-culture supergroup，谷歌惺惺相惜。当然，还有一个让投资商们更放心的前提：这家公司的创始人 Rony Abovitz 先前成功创立医疗设备公司 Mako Surgical，这家公司于 2008 年在纳斯达克上市，随后在 2013 年以 16.5 亿美元卖出。《纽约客》曾评价 Rony Abvoitz ：「如果你制造机器手，帮助医生用手术刀切割人体，你必须要遵从物理定律，生物定律，以及人的意识和头脑。Abovitz 在这三个领域都是天才。」更关键的是，业内人士称，Magic Leap 在产品技术上取得了一定成绩：一是提升了传感器参数校准的速度，所有的传感器参数只需要校准一遍，就可以达到满意的精度。二是其表面跟踪技术已经有相应的可用 demo，实现效果不错。第三，Magic Leap 的光纤扫描技术能够进行高频率的扫描能够获得较高的分辨率，相比较于微软 HoloLens 从侧面进行的 DLP（数字光处理，影像信号经过数字处理，然后再把光投影出来）投影，设备可以做得更小。另外，Magic Leap One 数字光场技术解决了长期观看虚拟影像时会产生的眩晕感，让你像观看真实世界景物一样的，可以长时间沉浸在虚拟与现实混合的世界中。与 HoloLens 一代现在的光波导技术比，Magic Leap One 有较大的视觉效果提升，包括视场角能超过 50 度、色彩还原得到增强等等。曾经有媒体问 Rony Abovitz 除去第一代头显的研发，剩下的大量资金要怎么用。Rony Abovitz 的回复是「我们筹集资金不仅是为了推出 Magic Leap One。我们还构建了一套完整的开发体系和生产工厂来构建空间计算系统。未来还会有第二代、第三代……近期我们还宣布了与 AT&T 的合作，所有用户都将在我们下一个系统中看到 5G 集成。」在此次开发者大会前夕，Rony Abovitz 在接受虚拟现实垂直媒体 UploadVR 采访时还说到了 Magic Leap 所要坚持的原则和方向。记者问起 Facebook 对 Oculus 的收购，「Facebook 收购了 Oculus，人们本应对 VR 的未来更加乐观，但现在又害怕自己会被 Facebook 控制」。对于这个说法，Rony Abovitz 表示不想谈论任何特定的公司，他强调，「我们的目标是走上一条与大公司完全不同的私人公司的道路，我们没有大公司那样的资金支持。」他还称「如果我们能够得到开发者的支持，我们就可能成功上市，自给自足，不必被收购。」Rony Abovitz 认为这对「创意者社区」是最好的。不会像被收购公司那样，被冠以其他理念和商业模式，而且，「单干」反而比大公司效率更高。Rony Abovitz 在访谈中还说到，虽然 Magic Leap 筹到的钱只相当于某些大公司投入的十分之一，「但我们一直在孵化并做我们要做的事情，我认为人们不应该仅仅将 Magic Leap 看作是一项技术，它是我们试图与开发者共同创造的文化，是我们公司独有的哲学。」但他认为开发者至今还没有真正理解 Magic Leap 是一家什么样的公司，他在努力让这家公司成为有数十年企业历史的同时，公司人问心无愧，用户也能为之持续激动的独立公司 ... Rony Abovitz为了传达以上一点，他将走出车库，到首次举办的开发者大会上说服人们和 Magic Leap 共建 Magicverse 生态。在这尚显年轻甚至有些仓促的开发者聚会上，或许一晃眼，你就能看到《银翼杀手》里那种虚实交融的未来。参考：L.E.A.P. Conference Why do people keep giving Magic Leap money?Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz: ‘If We Get The Support Of Developers We Can Be A Public Company’Magic Leap CEO interview: For $2,295, start living 10 years ahead of everyone else责任编辑：宋德胜题图来源：Magic Leap

Updated July 19, 9:15amUS president Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks on Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar culminated in a chilling moment July 17 at his “Make America Great Again” re-election rally in North Carolina.When Trump falsely claimed Omar had a history of “launching vicious anti-Semitic attacks,” thousands in the crowd responded by chanting “Send her back! Send her back!”The chant was reminiscent of the “Lock her up” refrain rally-goers used to shout about Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign. It is, however, far more disturbing.“We are facing an emergency,” Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley tweeted after the rally. Stanley is the author of “How Fascism Works.” “This is the face of evil.” Trump briefly tried to distance himself from the chant on July 18, saying he “wasn’t happy” with it, and had tried to start “speaking very quickly to drown it out.” But video of the event clearly shows him pausing for more than 10 seconds as the chant builds around him.The rally chants came just days after Trump tweeted a series of racist attacks on Omar and her Congressional colleagues Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, all women of color. In one tweet, Trump suggested the four women go back to where they came from. All but Omar were born in the US. Omar immigrated to the US as a child and became a US citizen at 17. The attacks are being criticized at home, and in Europe and the United Kingdom, including by some unlikely figures.Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called Trump’s remarks “completely unacceptable” on July 19.German chancellor Angela Merkel, asked about the comments at a press conference, said she stood in solidarity with the four Congresswomen, and that Trump’s remark “thwarts America’s strength.” The United States is strong, she said, because “people of very different nationalities have contributed to the strength of this people.”Trump’s “blatant, unashamed racism has appalled people around the world,” British politicians, including Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn and two dozen members of Parliament, wrote in a letter to Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley.“Love and solidarity will always trump hate,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan wrote on Facebook. “These progressive congresswomen…represent hope for the future. Their home is America, but their message crosses borders.”For democracy to succeed, it is essential that elected representatives can do their work “freely and safely,” the Dutch European Union representative Sophie in ‘t Veld told the European Parliament in response to Trump’s racist attacks.“This is chilling,” tweeted Irish deputy prime minister Simon Coveney. “Targeting individuals, fueling hatred based on race is not acceptable in political discourse,” he said. “History tells us where this leads.”Author Teuta Skenderi, who was born in Kosovo, said the moment reminded her of a 1989 speech by former Serbian president and convicted war criminal Slobodan Milošević, when a crowd chanted for his political opponent to be jailed. (Ultimately, he was.)Ben Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, a right wing website, said Omar is “an American citizen and chanting for her deportation based on her exercise of the First Amendment is disgusting.”Piers Morgan, the British far-right commentator who has been a frequent Trump apologist, called the rally “racist-fueled demagoguery” that “bordered on fascism.”Wisconsin Republican state rep Jim Steineke was among the members of the party to forcefully criticize Trump after the rally.He was joined by House minority leader Kevin McCarthy of Texas, who said “”Those chants have no place in our party and no place in our country, it’s as simple as that.” McCarthy added he didn’t think Trump was egging the crowd on.But other Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, said the chant was not racist, because Trump was only targeting people who disagreed with him: Demonstrating just how alarming the discourse has become, top searches after the rally on dictionary site Merriam-Webster were “racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia, and bigot.”For Omar, she responded with a quote from Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I rise:”

Will Bucklin always had “a pretty good vision of armageddon”. The owner of Old Hill Ranch in Sonoma valley – one of the oldest vineyards in the region – had imagined and prepared for a day when there would be a wildfire. The fire department would arrive, and they would battle to save the property and its 40 acres of 100-year-old grape vines.“I should have been more creative with my imagination,” Bucklin said this week, under a choking haze of smoke that blotted out the surrounding mountains. Smoke and flames continued to rise from pockets of his land and several buildings lay ruined. “I didn’t envision being out here on my own,” he said.Like so many survivors of the wildfires that have consumed at least 150,000 acres and more than 5,000 structures in Napa and Sonoma counties, Bucklin received no warning, nor any assistance. After awakening to a “dramatic glow” around 1.30am on Monday, he stayed on his property for nearly six hours, attempting to battle the flames even after the electricity failed – and with it his running water. Compared with many, Bucklin was lucky. Though he lost several structures and about a dozen vines, the houses where he and his employee live remain standing. As fires continue to ravage California’s premiere wine country – Napa and Sonoma, both about 50 miles north of San Francisco – they threaten 100,000 acres of vineyards. The industry employs more than 100,000 workers and many of the vineyards are small, family-run businesses. The harvest season has come to a screeching halt. About 90% of the grapes in Sonoma county had been picked, according to Karissa Kruse, president of Sonoma County Winegrowers, but the remainder represented wages for an agricultural workforce largely made up of immigrants.“We still have to pay this by tomorrow,” said Rene Reyes, as he stood in the parking lot of Elsie Allen high school in Santa Rosa, clutching a phone bill. Reyes, his wife and their three-year-old daughter had been sleeping at the school for three nights. Were it not for the fires, he probably would have spent the week harvesting grapes. The day labor center had called to say there was no work. He wasn’t sure how he was going to keep his phone in service. “It’s a big problem,” Reyes said. “We still have to pay the bills, the rent.” The predominantly Spanish-speaking workforce has also grappled with confusion and fear, especially for those without documents. “The national guard got called in this week to help,” said Alicia Sanchez, president of a bilingual radio station that tailors its broadcasts to farm workers and has been fielding calls from terrified listeners. “They are standing in front of the shelters in green uniforms and they have rifles. The Mexican people started calling us and saying, ‘Migration is here,’ and we say, ‘No, no, no.’”Sanchez said the station was encouraging listeners to make use of shelters but its headquarters had also turned into a gathering place. “They feel safe here,” she said.Bucklin said he would like to harvest the 15% to 20% of his grapes that remain on the vine, but he was not going to make demands of the harvest crew amid the emergency. Even if people wanted to get to work, road closures, evacuation orders and the fires that continue make accessing the fields impossible for most. Wine connoisseurs warn that grapes that remain on the vine will suffer from “smoke taint”, an ashy taste. But Bucklin is something of an iconoclast. He doesn’t irrigate his plants, and said he “liked the idea of a little smoke taint” as a sort of memorial to this year.“We’re going to remember this vintage for a long time,” he said.Rene Byck, co-owner of the Paradise Ridge Winery that lost its tasting room, most of its facilities and about 11,000 cases of wine, said he believed farm workers would be able to find work relatively easily once the recovery gets under way. More concerning was the housing farm workers rely on. The city of Santa Rosa, where entire neighborhoods were leveled, lost about 5%. Homeowners will have the backing of insurance companies to rebuild. Renters and poor people will not. “Our event coordinator lost her house and we’re not going to be doing events at the winery for some time,” Byck said. Insurance would cover some employees’ costs, he said, “but I don’t know for how long.” On Thursday morning, Pierre and Nathalie Birebent caught rides with reporters up to Signorello Estate, a family owned winery in Napa where Pierre is winemaker and vineyard manager and Nathalie works in the tasting room. Pierre, a sixth-generation winemaker from Corsica, battled the flames last Sunday night alongside two employees, but the winery’s main structure fell. As the wreckage of her workplace came into view, Nathalie cried. “It is one thing to see the pictures …” she said, trailing off into silence. Pierre, who a few weeks ago celebrated his 20th harvest with Signorello, was confident the estate would recover. Owner Ray Signorello had committed to rebuilding and was in the process of renting a temporary office in Napa. The skies were blue and the air seemed almost clear for the first time all week. The tasting room was leveled but the wicker furniture on its patio was untouched. Trees on the hillside were scorched but a shrine to the Virgin Mary erected by Catholic workers had been spared. A few hours later, the winds began to shift and the plume of smoke over the mountains dividing Napa from Sonoma began to darken and grow. Helicopters and planes could be seen flying low over the peaks. The haze thickened and the view was gone. “It doesn’t stop, it’s not going to end,” said Nathalie Birebent. “An earthquake is better. It’s bad, but then it’s over.” • This article was amended on 16 October 2017. An earlier version referred to Santa Clara when Santa Rosa was meant. Topics Wildfires Wine Natural disasters and extreme weather features

“There are several investigations underway, and if they show that President Nikias knew what was happening and failed to act, that will be when he should resign. However, if the investigations show that the failures occurred at levels lower than the office of the president, then those responsible should be held liable. I believe it is premature to ask Max Nikias to resign.”— Mari Carlos, department of preventive medicine“As an alumna of U.S.C. and one of three generations of Trojans, I think Mr. Nikias should resign. Whether or not he was personally responsible for the inaction concerning Dr. Tyndall, the buck stops with him as the leader and face of the university, and he is ultimately the person who needs to be held accountable.”— Trish Moxon, San Jose, class of 1982“I definitely think that Mr. Nikias should resign. I think they should hire a person who is more forthright and willing to do the right things even when it hurts. There should not be any more of the “back room dealing” that has occurred previously. This incident has definitely betrayed the trust of the students to the university.”— Bik Tang, Elk Grove, class of 1992California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: [email protected] Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

A county in Britain is asking the government for special permission to circumvent broad immigration laws because of a drain on labor.Crops in Cornwall are literally “rotting in the fields” because since the Brexit vote there aren’t enough migrant workers to reap the harvests, according to media reports. Based on research prepared by the local council in Cornwall, farm staff levels have plummeted to just 65% of what would typically be needed to complete the necessary agricultural work.“Changes to migration laws after Brexit could lead to multi-million pound losses to the Cornish economy if the horticultural industry can’t access the skills and workforce it needs,” according to the research.The county is hoping the government will implement a so-called location-based approach for managing the migrant workforce. That request comes after 56% of voters in Cornwall approved in June 2016 the UK’s plan to leave the European Union.The referendum’s result put added pressure on the UK agricultural sector. The country imports more than a quarter of its food from the EU. In 2015, the UK exported £18 billion (at the time about $26 billion) worth of a food and drink, a number that’s dwarfed by the £38.5 billion it spent to import food and drink that same year.Riviera Produce, one of the biggest agricultural producers in Cornwall, sent a stark message to the government about the importance of installing flexible immigration laws. “If we put strict limits on Eastern European migrant labour or devise alternative immigration policies that limit so-called ‘low-skilled’ labour, the Cornish horticultural industry is finished,” said David Simmons, a managing director of the company.

Interested in The Note? Add The Note as an interest to stay up to date on the latest The Note news, video, and analysis from ABC News. The Note Add Interest So President Donald Trump calls Vladimir Putin. And, according to the White House, Trump congratulates Putin and says he wants to get together soon ... but doesn’t mention election meddling or the poison attack in the United Kingdom. “We don't get to dictate how other countries operate,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, when asked if the US government believes Putin’s election was “free and fair.” This is unusual White House behavior, by any modern standard. (It was all going on at the same moment that the bipartisan members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were outlining ways to block Russia’s future meddling in midterm elections that have already begun.) This is not just a matter of Trump refusing to criticize Putin. The now freshly re-elected Russian president gets to use Trump’s public kindnesses to further his agenda – an agenda that has been demonstrated to include doing further harm to the American political system. Maybe there’s a Trumpian method behind the buddy-buddy act. But these are some off public maneuvers taking place even as Americans are beginning to vote in 2018. If the outskirts of Chicago are any indication, change may be slow to come to the Democratic Party. Or at least a lot slower than expected given the energy and enthusiasm on the left. Despite a well-funded and well-orchestrated primary challenge to a very conservative sitting Democrat, progressives, who arguably had their best shot at taking down incumbent centrist Democrat this year, fell short. Marie Newman, the progressive running against the longtime incumbent Rep Dan Lipinski, was unable to secure her party's nomination in Illinois' 3rd Congressional District, despite backing from a number of major Democratic and women's organizations and Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vermont. Grassroots groups tried to chin up and remind supporters and reporters that taking on the Democratic Party machine in Illinois and Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi who stayed with her man, Lipinski, is really, really hard. But still, the fact that this pro-life Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act was able to keep his seat in the era of Trump, when the far left feels so motivated and itching for a fight, may leave some strategists and organizers rethinking their game plan going into next year. Many progressives believe that going too far left isn't a real issue, that voters want something to come out to support. Maybe perhaps some of those Democratic voters aren't ready to go full-resistance. In fact, maybe in some areas, the more measured, moderate and familiar option is preferable. Similarly in the race for the statehouse, Democratic voters elected to give a billionaire and establishment politician, with some baggage in the state, to the chance to take on the sitting Republican governor. Sensible or risky? Time will tell. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is reportedly working on a new policy that could potentially limit what science can be used to make policy decisions. E&E News first reported that Pruitt told the Heritage Foundation last week he'll will likely propose a new policy similar to a bill backed by House Science Committee Republicans last year that proposed green lighting the crafting of rules based in scientific studies as long as the study makes its raw data public. Critics worry the move is a way to go after the endangerment findings that forms the basis of many of the Obama administration's climate policies. The 2009 finding says that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and thus created the legal justification to regulate emissions. Representatives of science advocacy groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists were vocal about the possible change on Tuesday. The EPA stands by the move. “Administrator Pruitt believes that Americans deserve transparency, with regard to the science and data that’s underpinning regulatory decisions being made by this Agency,” EPA spokesperson Liz Bowman told ABC News in a statement WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY QUOTE OF THE DAY “You know, Madam Secretary, I think we understand where your priorities are. They are not with the young people of this country.” - Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said Tuesday after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told lawmakers she didn’t know if she would have time to meet with survivors of the Parkland High School shooting Friday in Washington D.C. for the March for Our Lives rally. NEED TO READ Incumbents, money triumph in several contentious Illinois primaries. Money was the big winner in a marque Illinois primary race Tuesday night as two multi-millionaires faced off in the governor's race. (Emily Goodin, John Verhovek and Molly Nagle) http://abcn.ws/2GQirlC Judge denies Trump bid to get sexual accuser Summer Zervos’ defamation suit tosses: ‘No one is above the law.' A Manhattan Supreme Court judge Tuesday denied President Trump’s attempt to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed by a former reality show contestant who accused him of sexual misconduct.(Aaron Katersky) http://abcn.ws/2udtq6n Senate Intel releases election security recommendations. As President Donald Trump Tuesday was congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on his election victory, on Capitol Hill lawmakers were sounding the alarm about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and the need to take urgent action to prevent it from happening again. (Mary Bruce and Trish Turner) http://abcn.ws/2GMKSkp Trump says he congratulated Putin in call. President Trump said Tuesday that he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his recent election victory and said that the two would likely get together in the not too distant future to discuss what he called "the arms race," Ukraine, Syria, and North Korea. (Jordyn Phelps) http://abcn.ws/2G75shB Congress heading toward government shutdown as spending talks drag on. With Congress heading toward another government shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan says he is “hoping today” that negotiators will finalize an agreement Tuesday, and said congressional leaders are not yet discussing a continuing resolution as a backup plan. (John Parkinson) http://abcn.ws/2FOx8si Cambridge Analytica ex-employee agrees to interview with House Democrats. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee will soon have the opportunity to question the former employee who helped reveal that a political data firm with ties to Donald Trump’s campaign used data collected from millions of Facebook profiles without permission to help its political messaging efforts during the 2016 presidential election. (Benjamin Siegel) http://abcn.ws/2pulAjC Congressman believes his school security bill could have prevented Maryland high school shooting. Texas Republican Rep. Roger Williams believes his new school security bill could have prevented Tuesday’s high school shooting in Great Mills, Maryland. (John Parkinson) http://abcn.ws/2prHO54 Primary contests abound in key Pennsylvania House races. A plethora of candidates filed to run for House seats in Pennsylvania, setting up intra-party contests in some key races that could help determine control of the lower chamber of Congress — including primary challenges for Democrat Conor Lamb and Republican Rick Saccone. (Emily Goodin) http://abcn.ws/2DHPCoC School safety commission to meet ‘very soon,’ DeVos says. President Donald Trump's newly-announced federal commission on school safety will meet "very soon," within the "next few weeks," Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Tuesday. (Erin Dooley) http://abcn.ws/2FY06SH Carson contends he and his wife complained about $31,000 furniture cost. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson spoke publicly for the first time Tuesday about the controversy over his agency's decision to order a $31,000 dining set for his office, contending he and his wife complained to staff about the price. (Stephanie Ebbs) http://abcn.ws/2u35nqE The Washington Post reports Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s collection of Facebook data, according to former employee. http://wapo.st/2pun6lg The Note is a daily ABC News feature that highlights the key political moments of the day ahead. Please check back tomorrow for the latest.

Silicon Valley lends itself to political stereotypes–called overly progressive by conservatives and overly conservative by progressives. A new survey of 1,924 tech workers around the U.S. indicates that neither view is quite right but why both are so prominent.In the poll of workers across the tech industry, conducted by survey company Morning Consult and commissioned by the conservative-leaning nonprofit Lincoln Network, about a quarter of respondents identified as having very strong views (14% left, 11% right). A third called themselves moderate, and equal shares (18% each) identified as mainstream liberal or conservative. Just 3% identified as libertarian, challenging a stereotype of tech bro culture.Among those surveyed, 45% say that their company promotes a political agenda. That leaning tends to be toward the left, with 48% of respondents saying their company has a clear liberal agenda, as opposed to the 38% who reported a conservative agenda.[Image: courtesy of Lincoln Network]Whether they agree or disagree with their company’s politics, fear about ideological conflicts with colleagues runs across all political groups: very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, and libertarian.Nearly half of employees at companies with political agendas said their ideological views impacted their ability to work. At companies perceived to have a political agenda, 63% of workers said that ridicule in the workplace is commonplace if you disagree with a colleague, while only 21% said that happens at their apolitical companies.Two thirds of participants worked at privately held tech companies, and a third at publicly traded ones. Among the biggest companies were Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Dell, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Salesforce, Samsung, and Twitter. Among those who took part, 84% worked in a technical role, 75% identified as male, and 49% were between 30 and 44 years old.[Image: courtesy of Lincoln Network]Lincoln leans conservative: Its leaders have been active in Republican politics, and they launched the survey effort in 2017 “to collect data on potential anti-conservative bias in Silicon Valley.” Still, it claims to have no influence on the data itself. “Morning Consult, as an independent party, collected all of the quantitative data,” says Lincoln cofounder Garrett Johnson, who worked for Florida governor Jeb Bush and Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana.Related: How tech workers became activists, leading a resistance movement that is shaking up Silicon ValleyLincoln also conducted an online survey of a few dozen tech workers to solicit opinions and anecdotes, similar to its contentious survey from 2017-2018. Some of those quotes pepper Lincoln’s report on the Morning Consult survey. “I am happy, with the exception of my time at work where I feel like the choices I have made in my beliefs label me as stupid, a bigot, deplored, and more . . . ” one anonymous tech worker wrote. “I am coming to the conclusion that we cannot live or work together any longer.”In an op-ed for Fox News on Thursday, Johnson echoed his previous complaints about bias against conservatives in tech, saying the new data “confirm a stunning level of viewpoint intolerance in the tech community,” and “reveal an epidemic of polarization and intolerance in Silicon Valley and the broader tech community [that] presents an important opportunity for tech leadership to cultivate a culture of viewpoint inclusion.”But I’ve also interviewed a handful or workers from major tech companies–on and off the record–over the past year, who have provided some insight on the results that are more nuanced than Johnson’s focus on bias. And when I spoke with a few survey respondents who agreed to an interview, I found their stories of discrimination less severe than appeared in the short comments gathered by Lincoln Network. Still, they do see their workplaces as much more friendly to colleagues who are openly left than even a bit conservative. (Workers spoke on condition of anonymity due to concern about backlash from colleagues.)[Image: courtesy of Lincoln Network]“Most people will make choices about how they’re going to talk about politics based on the culture and based on their management,” says a Microsoft engineer who identifies as libertarian. “Some people make the choice that they don’t care at all, and they think their management won’t care, and they’re very open about it. Other people look at it in terms of risk and reward and pick various levels of engagement based on that.”Perhaps no big company has a more contentious environment than Google, which brims with online forums for discussion and debate, including an internal social network and a meme generator. There is also a profusion of lightly moderated or un-moderated discussion lists where a few enthusiastic members post prodigiously, such as “politics,” “industryinfo,” and “eng-misc” (nicknamed “cringe-misc” by some).James Damore, the erstwhile Google engineer who authored the highly controversial “Ideological Echo Chamber” memo that many saw as questioning the innate ability of women to be engineers, created a list called pc-harmful-discuss. The discussion group lived on after he was fired in August 2017, with no one in control, says a former Googler.This dovetails with one fascinating finding in the survey. Overwhelming majorities of all political orientations–between 87% (very conservative) and 95% (libertarian) agreed that “companies in general should foster a diversity of viewpoints.” But groups with the strongest viewpoints also agreed most with the statement, “companies should terminate employees when they express offensive views outside the workplace.” (Emphasis added.) That was true for 52% of very conservative employees and 62% of very liberal employees in the survey.[Image: courtesy of Lincoln Network]Absent in these theoretical questions are the details of how dirty some debates inside companies can get–at least at Google, where internal discussions were leaked to radical media and trolls in 2017.“I and seven other Google employees were publicly blamed by individuals, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, for James Damore’s firing, and that resulted in death threats,” says Liz Fong-Jones, an 11-year Google employee who recently left the company. Fong-Jones is transgender, and was already a target of the anonymous online community Kiwi Farms, which specializes in trolling and defaming members of the trans community.“That’s obviously very bad,” says a right-leaning Google engineer who opposed Damore’s firing, but agrees with Google’s progressives on some other issues. “[I am] appalled at the $90 million payout for Andy Rubin and all the sexual harassment going on with Google,” he says. Rubin received the payout when terminated for charges of sexual misconduct, part of a larger pattern among Google execs revealed in a 2018 New York Times exposé.In addition, the engineer was against Project Dragonfly, a censored and monitored search product for the Chinese market, but not Project Maven, an AI contract with the U.S. military–also opposed by Google progressives. That left him with a dilemma: Opposition to Maven was mentioned in an employee petition against Dragonfly. “I really wanted to sign this petition, but Project Maven is why I didn’t,” he says.Fears vs. repercussionsThere are prominent cases of employees on the progressive side, such as Liz Fong-Jones, facing repercussions for their political or ideological speech–from fellow employees, and from management, based on voluminous reporting in Wired, Gizmodo, The Intercept, and others.On the other side, I’ve spoken with many conservatives over the past year who fear retaliation from their progressive-leaning coworkers and management–be it firings, negative performance reviews, or other measures. But I’ve not found clear-cut cases to back up these fears. Often people say only that they know someone who is affected.Secondhand accounts show up in the Lincoln Network/Morning Consult survey, too. At agenda-driven companies, very conservative people were most likely (48%) to agree with the statement: “I know someone who did not pursue or left a career in tech because of perceived ideological conflicts with their company.” (Very liberal was the second-highest group of employees who agreed, at 39%.)Some participants in Lincoln’s Survey Monkey poll reported instances of people being fired or hired solely based on politics, but none were available or willing to speak with me. One who did talk told the story of a Microsoft employee who was harassed at work over her husband’s politics. When we discussed it, he explained, “I think it was more of an individual thing. I think there was one particularly rowdy person in general.”That doesn’t mean there isn’t discrimination against conservatives in tech, but neither the survey nor my conversations have been able to pinpoint it. A question I’d love to see in a future survey is whether participants feel they have personally suffered repercussions for their views.Management sets the toneAnother key divide is between those companies whose leadership jumps into the political and ideological fray and those that at least try to stay out. According to the Lincoln Network/Morning Consult survey, 91% of employees at companies that workers describe as nonpolitical feel they can work in peace. Whereas at companies that employees describe as promoting a political agenda, 49% of employees feel that their ideological views affect their ability to do their jobs.[Image: courtesy of Lincoln Network]It’s hard for tech companies to stay out of politics completely, especially as they work on controversial government contracts. Google has learned this the hard way, as has Microsoft. Last summer, the software giant faced an employee petition against its cloud computing contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Now it faces a likely bigger employee backlash over a contract to sell its HoloLens augmented reality headsets to the U.S. military. Opponents, known as Microsoft Workers 4 Good, report collecting hundreds of signatures in an open letter demanding the company cancel the contract and cease developing weapons technologies, among other measures.It seems that conflicts like these will keep happening, but they may not tear a company apart. “I don’t think most people are looking to pick a fight at the professional level, in ways that would affect people’s careers over politics at Microsoft,” says the libertarian engineer. Leadership, he says, tries to stay out of employee debates, unless they blow up and “go viral.” Of course, sometimes they do.Related: Meet the Silicon Valley socialists who are pushing a tech worker uprisingEven companies with strong political agendas at the top might be able to minimize conflict, however. Salesforce and its iconic cofounder and co-CEO Marc Benioff are undeniably political. Between them, Benioff and Salesforce contributed more than $7 million to a San Francisco ballot initiative, Proposition C, that aims to raise about $300 million per year through a new tax on large businesses in the company’s hometown. Benioff went to social media war with fellow billionaires who opposed the proposition, notably Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. That’s merely one example.“We had a lot of pictures of Hillary Clinton on the walls,” says a Salesforce engineer who also identifies as libertarian. (That said, Salesforce also angered progressives by refusing to cancel a cloud-services contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.)“Everybody knows what I’m into. I’m very outspoken on Facebook, but I try not to bring it to work,” he says.Despite his philosophical differences with management, the engineer says he hasn’t felt any repercussions at work for his views. And he concedes that Salesforce leadership is trying to appear more welcoming to people with different political views and ideologies, especially as it has expanded in more conservative cities like Indianapolis. “I’ll give them a B-minus,” he says of the company’s effort.Contact me confidentially with any news tips at [email protected] or Twitter DM @seancaptain. We can also set up a Signal call.

In 1988 – the same year Nasa’s James Hansen warned Congress about the threats posed by human-caused global warming – water expert Peter Gleick wrote about the wet and dry extremes that it would create for California: California will get the worst of all possible worlds – more flooding in the winter, less available water in the summer. A study published last month in Nature Climate Change found that these wet and dry extremes will only worsen in California as temperatures continue to rise. As lead author Daniel Swain wrote: most of California will likely experience a 100 – 200% increase in the frequency of very wet November-March “rainy seasons” … California will likely experience an increase of anywhere from 50% to 150% (highest in the south) in the frequency of very dry November-March periods … Since California is so dependent on precipitation during its relatively brief winter rainy season, even a single dry winter can quickly lead to adverse drought impacts upon agriculture and the environment. Last week, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment also published a report detailing the indicators and impacts of climate change on California. The most dramatic impacts include wildfires that are larger and more frequent, and the most severe drought since recordkeeping began. Underlying these events is a long-term warming trend that has accelerated since the mid-1970s. In addition, spring snowmelt runoff is decreasing, sea levels are rising, glaciers are shrinking, lakes and ocean waters are warming, and plants and animals are migrating. In short, climate change will continue to have severe consequences for California, whose economy recently surpassed that of the UK to become the fifth-largest in the world. But the state has also become a leader in trying to minimize those climate damages.In 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the Global Warming Solutions Act into law, whose most significant component was a carbon cap and trade system. The bill required California to reduce its greenhouse gas pollution to 1990 levels by 2020, and the state is on track to meet that goal despite a growing population and thriving economy with an $8.8bn surplus. California has proved that an economy can thrive with a price on carbon pollution in place.In 2016, California passed an update to the California Global Warming Solutions Act requiring a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas pollution by 2030 on the way to the target 80% reduction below 1990 levels by 2050. California’s annual per capita emissions (11.5 tonnes of CO2-equivalent per person) are currently on par with those of Germany and Japan, and 40% lower than the US average.California has become a leader both in experiencing climate change impacts and taking action to mitigate them. The state has provided a perfect example that contrary to current Republican Party beliefs, climate change has serious economic and human costs, whereas economies can thrive after putting a price on carbon pollution. America needs leaders with the foresight of California’s. Topics Climate change Climate Consensus - the 97% Drought Wildfires Water Greenhouse gas emissions Carbon tax Carbon capture and storage (CCS)

Vomiting rainbows is so 2015. Since Snapchat first introduced its augmented reality lenses, the filters that allow us to vomit rainbows in photos, it has released new ones frequently enough to keep its users hooked. But so far, these AR filters mostly focus on distorting selfies. They allow you to turn yourself into a bug-eyed bunny rabbit or a big-cheeked flower child, or paper something funny—a Jeff Koons statue, a dancing hot dog—atop the physical world.Now, the company has used those tools to build a deceptively simple product: Today Snapchat introduces games. The first set of these lenses, called Snappables, lets users do things like add friends to a rock band, challenge those friends to an emoji dance-off, or play basketball. Users can interact with the AR games through touch, motion and facial expression. In one completely weird game that I played when I visited the company’s New York office last week, a filter transformed my eyebrows into barbells. I lifted my real eyebrows to raise the barbells. I competed against Eitan Pilipski, who runs Snap’s camera platform and whose eyebrows are gray wisps covering fast-moving practiced muscle, to see who could lift the most. (He won.)Snapchat has long been the kind of company that’s easy to underestimate. Its users have mostly been adolescents, and kids are fickle. Sure, right now 187 million people use the app every day, according to Snap, but even if they love it now, it’s easy to assume their attention is fleeting. Facebook tends to copy Snap’s most significant advances.And not everything the company tries works. After Snap rolled out a major revamp to the app earlier this year, designed to make it easier for new users, more than 1.2 million people signed a Change.org petition asking the company to change it back. Despite this, more than a year after founder and CEO Evan Spiegel took the company public, Snap continues to give its users reason to stick around. Those daily users visit Snapchat 25 times a day on average, according to Snap, spending roughly half an hour on the service.This has appealed to advertisers: over the last quarter of 2017 sales jumped to $286 million, a 72 percent increase over the year earlier. (The company is nowhere near profitable, however, as it’s still investing far more money than it’s making. Spiegel endeavors to keep users engaged by giving them fresh things to play with constantly.)The new feature is a tiny change to the company’s product, but it’s instructive in discerning Spiegel’s endgame. Later this week, the company will announce an updated spectacles product. While companies like Magic Leap and Microsoft are trying to build the next computing platform in one mind-blowing package—with a headset and software and content that will obliterate their competitor—Snapchat is attempting to piece together that next computing platform independently, from the bottom up by creating hardware and software separately. “We decouple them so that they’re all allowed to develop on their own until they come together,” Spiegel said. “Over the next decade or so, the way that these pieces fit together will probably be what defines our company.”Snappables aren't just games, they're expanding the way we communicateAs Spiegel sees it, hardware has been holding augmented reality back. There are tough technical problems that no company has cracked completely. Among other things, existing headsets have narrow fields of view, and the batteries, which bulk them up, don’t hold their charge for very long. We still don’t know how these devices will evolve, and whether most people will ever want to wear them. By developing Spectacles separately, says Spiegel, “we can still move forward at a really fast pace empowering very advanced augmented reality products within Snapchat.”Gartner analyst Brian Blau, who covers augmented reality, believes that Snap’s strategy to evolve its AR filters through small changes is smart. “The incremental approach is exactly right,” says Blau, who emphasizes that it allows a company to learn as it goes. “That experience is hard to replace, especially when you’re talking about new technology.”Which brings us to Snappables. To understand Snapchat’s new games, you need to see them as Spiegel sees them—as yet another opportunity for people to communicate with each other. Spiegel’s vision for Snap begins with the assumption that most pictures aren’t intended to be saved. Rather, images are evolving into a new language, and as the tools to capture and manipulate them become more ubiquitous, we are able to express ourselves more frequently and fully. The important thing about Snap isn’t the feed that shows what your friends have posted, it’s set of tools that lets users create those posts. That’s why the app opens directly to the camera, and that’s why Spiegel calls Snap a “camera” company. Like phone calls, Snaps aren’t intended to be stored so much as they’re meant to be absorbed, decoded, and released.Written and spoken language have never been static. They evolve as we use them, throwing new words like “basic” and “lol” into our lexicon. Similarly, visual communication is exploding right now as we gain new tools to help us evolve our image-making. (Instagram’s original filters are the equivalent of hieroglyphics at this point.) Nowhere is this more obvious than on Snapchat, where the company says users spend an average three minutes every day playing with filters.Pilipski, the guy who bested my brow reflexes, is charged with pairing computer vision with creative design to evolve the company’s augmented reality tools and help developers make the most of them. In addition to his strapping eyebrows, he brings nearly a decade of experience working in AR, joining Snap in 2016 from the AR startup Vuforia.The technology in Pilipski’s field has finally evolved to the point where AR can deliver on many of its early promises. For one, cameras have gotten better. Just check out the exclusive face mask filters Snap created for Apple’s iPhone X; the TrueDepth camera and visual facial mapping data allow the masks to adhere closely to your face, no matter how much you move around. Pilipski says Snap is working to emulate these effects on any contemporary phone through software development.In the past year, Snap has rolled out a stream of new features and filters, starting with World Lenses, which lets users insert and move objects in photos. These popular filters produced the first-ever augmented reality celebrity—the dancing hot dog, with its green headphones and rhythmic dance moves, which has popped up more than 1.5 billion times on Snapchat. In December, Snap let outside developers begin making their own filters. Spiegel said developers submitted 30,000 lenses to Snap during its first two months.Snap's filters allow users to manipulate its software with tiny movementsWith Snappables, the company will try to evolve AR into an even more social experience, encouraging people to use their cameras less as mirrors, than as sophisticated sensors capable of an expanding range of tasks. In the promotional video, users blink, raise their brows and smack their lips, not to create images, but to control and interact with Snap’s software.But as smart as Snap has become at developing filters its users want to play with, the technology is in early days. In the last six months, Apple, Google and Facebook each began rolling out their own developer tools for augmented reality. New features and apps that harness these tools are just coming to life now. For now, these apps are clunky, and they don’t come with the built-in benefit of an audience in the form of your friends on Snapchat. It’s more difficult to create a fun experience in an app and then transport it over to a social media service like Instagram. But it’s clear developers—and Snap’s competitors—will be able to continue to copy what works on Snap, and it’s likely they’ll continue to improve.Spiegel has a chance at unlocking the AR future, and using it to build the next significant computing platform. But for that to be possible, Snap must stay ahead of its competitors as they try to woo users with many of the AR designs it first introduced. Snappables won’t feel new for long.Augmented Reality is already transforming the world around us, starting with museumsWhy we need to start thinking of Snapchat as a camera company—not a social networkEvan Spiegel opens up about his plans for Snapchat's future

Rony Abovitz has never been one for direct information. Over the past few years, the Magic Leap founder has confounded people with not-exactly-updates about his company’s not-exactly-vaporware mixed-reality system—especially on Twitter, where he’s been given to statements like “We are not chasing perfection - we are chasing 'feels good, feels right'. Tuning for everyday magic.” So last week, when he dropped this teaser, many assumed it would lead to just another YouTube video of frustrating breadcrumbs.Not this time.On Wednesday, the obsessively secretive company finally revealed the first solid step on its journey to spatial computing. Or at least pictures of the hardware that will enable it, along with some scant details.The Magic Leap One system comprises a head-mounted display (which the company calls Lightwear), a wearable processing unit that connects to it (Lightpack), and a handheld controller (Lighthand—kidding! It’s called Control). There’s no announced cost, no specs, no release date, just moonshot language and accompanying hero shots of what looks like a set of space-age steampunk goggles.But that raises a thorny question: Given that low-profile form factor, and the bulky, bench-mounted prototypes from whence it sprung, how close will this first generation come to realizing Magic Leap’s many promises?There’s no announced cost, no specs, no release date, just moonshot language and accompanying hero shots.Benedict Evans, a partner at Andreeseen Horowitz—one of many investors that have ponied up a grand total of nearly $2 billion to fund Magic Leap's endeavors—today put the magnitude of the company's challenge into lay-friendly perspective. "Mixed reality is a display problem, a sensor problem and a decision problem," he tweeted. "Show an image that looks real, work out what’s in the world and where to put that image, and work out what image you should show."In this case, the second part comes first. AR and MR—and, in forthcoming generations, VR as well—depend on mapping a user’s physical environment in order to place virtual objects properly within it. That's why Magic Leap One's headset is studded with an array of embedded outward-facing sensors; while we don't know exactly what they all are, it's safe to assume a combination of RGB and infrared cameras, along with depth sensors. (AR headsets like the Meta 2, and even AR-capable phones like the iPhone X, have such a suite.)Next comes Evans' "display problem." Magic Leap has long attributed its titular magic to a “dynamic digital light field signal.” Generally speaking, that means it captures all the data (location and direction) of light rays in a room, and then uses that to dictate how virtual objects appear and behave in a given space. That has huge repercussions for being able to render live-action VR content in navigable 3-D, the way Lytro does. But perhaps more importantly, it allows a headset to present virtual objects as though they're close to the viewer, reducing eyestrain.However, Magic Leap has also refused to elaborate beyond that phrase to discuss how it generates that signal; it simply calls its lenses “photonic wafers,” leaving even experts to speculate about how they can accomplish such an optically challenging process in such a small device compared to the bulkier headsets like the HoloLens and Meta 2.“Their lightfield technology—that’s what no one really knows about,” says David Nelson, creative director of the mixed-reality lab at USC Institute for Creative Technologies. “Looking at that form factor, I’m a little dubious. There have been different approaches with multiple displays, layered displays that are essentially projecting toward your eye. They might be doing something like what the HoloLens does where they're projecting onto a piece of glass that then reflects back to your eye, but the form factor for that is even hard to imagine.”Not so, says Abovitz. “We’re not bouncing a cellphone screen through a half-silvered mirror,” he says, referring to the HoloLens’ method of splitting a light beam to project an image. “I generally don’t like to comment about other companies, but I will focus on a couple of things where we think we’re the only people in the world doing them.”'We maxed out what was possible in this day and age.'Rony Abovitz, Magic LeapThere are other methods of displaying virtual objects to the user; for instance, rays of light can be beamed directly into the eye. However, these tend to mean a reduction in field of view, the amount of visible space in which digital creations can appear. (The Rift and the HTC Vive, both VR headsets, possess a 110-degree FOV, while the HoloLens' FOV is only 35 degrees, with plans to double that in the next version.)In my own experience with Magic Leap—all the way back in the relative Stone Age of May 2016—I found the FOV to be somewhat limited, though Rolling Stone reports that the Magic Leap One manages something a bit more impressive, something "about the size of a VHS tape held in front of you with your arms half extended". That's roughly comparable to how I'd describe Meta 2's FOV, making Magic Leap's technology potentially even more impressive.Another unresolved issue is whether Magic Leap’s technology will allow users’ eyes to focus on virtual objects at different depths. This multifocal ability is at once the greatest promise of lightfield technology, and its greatest challenge. If you're able to focus naturally on objects being presented in various parts of the room, that turns AR/VR/MR from a dip-in technology to a persistent, all-day proposition—a game-changer for industries like design and healthcare that are uniquely suited to the technology. Previous Magic Leap videos seemed to imply that it used multifocal lightfield; however, whether the effect was a result of the technology itself or the camera filming it remains unclear.On one hand, Abovitz seems to imply that Magic Leap One can do this. “It’s a virtual lightfield output,” he tells me, “not a single plane.” But on the other, Rolling Stone was unable to confirm whether the system can support it. (I don’t recall multiple focal depths in my time with Magic Leap's technology; it certainly wasn’t explicitly called out of any of the demos.)"Is it multifocal lightfield? That's probably the very first question I'd ask," says Edward Tang, CTO of Avegant, another company developing lightfield-based mixed reality technology. "That could really affect the type of experience you can create. If it's just a fixed-focus display, I think it'll probably raise some eyebrows: 'What's so interesting about it?'" (Avegant's own prototypes, as well as its currently shipping devkit, deliver a multifocal lightfield display; again in my own experiences, it allowed me to shift focus to multiple objects in a given demo, as well as hold virtual objects in each hand and move them both around freely.)Display aside, there are more prosaic concerns with any device like this. “Until a major breakthrough in battery technology, a lightweight pair of AR smartglasses doing heavy duty AR is hard to power all day without a battery pack or hot swappable batteries,” says Tim Merel, managing director of AR/VR advisors Digi-Capital. “This is a non-trivial problem, which Magic Leap appears to have approached by splitting processing and power management between Lightwear and Lightpack."Power management also invites potential tradeoffs, as Tang points out: "How bright do you want the display to be? What resolution?" How Magic Leap will handle those also remains unknown.So in many ways, Magic Leap's big hardware reveal leaves us with more questions than answers—not to mention the still outstanding issues of price and specs. And don't expect the company to fill in those blanks at CES in January; it won’t be there. This is Magic Leap, after all.“As we get close to launch date we’ll be very open with performance specifications,” Abovitz says. “You gotta give us some bits to keep going. We maxed out what was possible in this day and age, and that’ll be an indicator of what we plan to keep doing.” Until the system ships to early adopters sometime in 2018, what “maxed-out” actually looks like—and feels like—remains to be seen.

The last time I visited Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz at the company’s secretive Florida offices, he told me about the time he met Beaker, the meeping beeping scientist on the Muppet Show. Not the character Beaker, but the real Beaker. The guy was a film director at creator Jim Henson’s studio, Abovitz explained enthusiastically. “He’s tall, he looks just like Beaker and he acts like Beaker! You’re like, ‘How do I know him?’ And then you find out he was the influence behind Beaker, and it all sort of makes sense,” he said. Of the many celebrities Abovitz has met, Beaker was clearly a highlight.“By the way,” he said. “The Muppet Show plus Star Wars equals Magic Leap in my head.”In the absence of a product or even a prototype, this is the kind of wacky description we’ve had to work with in our efforts to understand Magic Leap over the last few years. The heavy dose of whimsy makes it almost too easy to write off the startup’s boastful promise to be a leading contender in the race to dominate augmented reality. After all, Microsoft began shipping its HoloLens headset to developers nearly two years ago, in March of 2016. By this point, tech’s big five all have their own version of an augmented reality Manhattan Project on the hunch that the next big computing platform will emerge from the fusion of physical and digital assets through a set of goggles. Why bet on this Florida startup with its quixotic founder when Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and their peers are pouring resources into figuring it out?The answer becomes apparent in this week’s announcement that, at long last, Magic Leap has unveiled a prototype and will make its headset available with developer tools in 2018. The goggles, dubbed the Magic Leap One, come with a controller and battery pack the size of my palm, and have a steampunk vibe. They’re sleek, with bug-eyed lenses, and a Rolling Stone preview suggests they’ll be expensive. Truthfully, there’s not much more information available. Developers haven’t tried them, so it’s impossible to compare them directly to other available prototypes. But what’s distinctive about these glasses is that they exist at all—that Magic Leap has finally come forth with evidence that its technology, which until now has only been seen by those of us who have signed lengthy and complicated nondisclosure agreements, will have form.Right now, this is enough. As important as this next computing platform will be—former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe has even called artificial reality the final platform—to the way we conduct business, entertain ourselves, and generally communicate, it is many years out. Today’s version of augmented reality is restricted to Snap lenses and Pokemon Go or factory workers reading manuals through Google Glass. For AR goggles to take off, computing power must advance, batteries must shrink, and we must design the new applications that will give us reason to want to purchase a pair for ourselves. Only then will we have a market—or more likely, many types of markets—for this technology.Magic Leap is among a small group of companies that have the resources and backing to develop products for this future. It has raised $1.9 billion so far, having closed its most recent round earlier this fall. Board members include Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Alibaba executive chairman Joe Tsai. The company has strong ties to Hollywood, and Steven Spielberg is reportedly an investor. It has inked entertainment-focused partnerships like one with Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB (Magic Leap hired ILM cofounder John Gaeta in October). At the company’s helm is a proven entrepreneur; Abovitz sold a medical robotics company in 2013 for $1.65 billion.Related StoriesJessi HempelMagic Leap Could Be Looking at an $8 Billion ValuationKevin KellyThe Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World's Most Secretive StartupPeter RubinMagic Leap's Next Move? Bringing C-3PO to Your HouseWhich brings us back to Abovitz’s office. In addition to a sculpture of Beaker, the room is cluttered with all sorts of toys and games and prizes, like the unicorn head propped atop a punching bag or the many lanyards from past Star Trek conventions. Each memento has a story, which Abovitz tends to recount in Star Wars metaphors and with regular references to Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket. Abovitz is a very different type of leader than the set of California CEOs rushing headlong toward tech’s future. He is gentle—a life-long vegetarian who showed me photos of one of his dogs the first time I met him, and who can always make room for a discarded pet in need of a home. His friends and colleagues describe him as a person with a heart that is big and soft and full. (Sometimes, too much so. As a manager, he shies away from conflict.) The science fiction he’s always spinning has happy endings.Abovitz pairs this empathy with a grand vision for Magic Leap that extends well beyond the gaming device we saw this week. This prototype is a mere step on the road to an even more powerful computing breakthrough. “As I learn more about how the brain works, it’s just hundreds of thousands of tiny neural connections and each neuron is filled with tiny substructures, and those all might be incredibly powerful quantum computers themselves,” Abovitz told me last year. “Magic Leap is just functioning as training wheels to begin to unlock that.” Someday, he explained, we won’t need goggles to map digital assets to reality; we’ll be able to program our brains directly.It’s possible that augmented reality will be the most important computing shift of our lifetime. Magic Leap’s position as the kooky outsider ensures that the first iterations of this technology won’t only reflect the limited perspective of already-anointed West Coast oligarchs. Yes, the company’s a little weird. Sure, it’s following an unconventional path. But given what’s at stake—the future of how we interact with our environments and each other—infusing a little Florida and stirring in a dose of Hollywood means we'll get a technology that stretches beyond the prevailing tech groupthink. With this week’s prototype, it’s clear the company is on track to be a serious contender, en route to one possible version of the future: a Muppets-plus-Star Wars version that sounds damn appealing.

How do you get people excited about wearing AR goggles on their faces when our flat-screened, 2D media world has some pretty compelling entertainment to offer? That’s one of the challenges that Magic Leap marketing head Brenda Freeman faces as the company tries to justify its years-in-the-making AR product and the billions of dollars it has raised so far. Magic Leap currently sells a developer kit and has shown off interesting demos around sports, entertainment, and fashion, but hasn’t yet made the leap to mainstream. WIRED had the chance to chat with Freeman at Web Summit in Lisbon a couple weeks ago; that interview is a part of this week’s podcast. Also on the show: The Gadget Lab team discusses the latest Facebook news, Amazon’s HQ2 decision, and Microsoft’s newest hardware. Podcast RSS iTunes Download Show notes: California is facing some of the worst wildfires in US history, which we mention early in the show, so we’re pointing you to a New York Times article on how to help the victims of the fires. WIRED has also done some reporting on how California needs to adapt to climate change and population growth if it’s going to survive future fires. Recommendations this week: Arielle recommends reading Infinite Resignation by Eugene Thacker; Lauren recommends checking out Code.org’s partnership with popular musicians, which lets you code to their tunes; Mike recommends the Vegan Thanksgiving editors collection at NYT Cooking. Send the Gadget Lab hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds. Arielle Pardes can be found at @pardesoteric. Lauren Goode is @laurengoode. Michael Calore can be found at @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. Our theme song is by Solar Keys.You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Play Music app just by tapping here. You can also download an app like Pocket Casts or Radio Public, and search for Gadget Lab. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.We’re also on Soundcloud, and every episode gets posted to wired.com as soon as it’s released. If you still can’t figure it out, or there’s another platform you use that we’re not on, let us know.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.Gadget Lab PodcastsgearMagic Leappodcaststechnology

PingWest品玩3月26日讯，据Engadget消息，NBA推出了一款适用于Magic Leap头戴设备的混合现实（mixed-reality）App，可提供沉浸式的NBA赛场观看效果。使用该头戴设备的NBA粉丝现在可以在多个虚拟“屏幕”上观看实时NBA赛事、赛事回放及比赛亮点。该应用程序允许用户将屏幕缩放到任何大小或移动它们的位置。现场直播只能在NBA League Pass和NBA Single-Game订阅用户的App观看。但是NBA应用程序上提供了一个额外的点播内容目录，供那些非订阅用户使用。NBA去年在Recode Code Media大会上宣布将与Magic Leap合作，此举是为了吸引更多的年轻人观看NBA。