 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Reid Fishler. Coming up on DTNS, Jerry Ellsworth tells us about Tilt 5 and why focusing augmented reality makes it fun. Plus, matter is here. How good is it? And do you want to record everything you do on your laptop? Don't say no. Maybe you do. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, November 3rd, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Rebel, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm from Los Angeles. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Jerry Ellsworth is going to join us in a little bit to talk about Tilt 5. But let's start with the quick hits. Netflix's ad supported basic with tier ads. Tier went live in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the US. That would be South Korea. Netflix's support page notes that the tier isn't available on Apple TV at launch, although it says support is coming soon. Chromecasts prior to Google TV and the PlayStation 3 aren't supported. And Netflix doesn't list Roku or Xbox consoles as being specifically supported. They're just not listed on the support page. Yeah, not available in North Korea. Very, very important to point out. Without a VPN anyway. Meta's Big 3 platforms receive some key updates. WhatsApp launched Communities, which supports up to 1,024 users, a very geeky number, offers admin controls, subgroups, large file sharing and 32 person video chats. Communities are invite only and will not be viewable in search or discovery features. So they're semi private Instagram announced it began testing, letting users create their own NFTs on the platform, which can then be sold on Instagram using standard in app transactions. And Facebook expanded its professional mode profile setting to all users, which provides access to things like analytics, monetization tools on a user's profile previously only available on pages. This includes access to subscription only content, monetizing in stream ads, in reels and stories, and stars tipping. TikTok updated its European privacy policy to say that its staff in the U.S., in Brazil, in Canada, in Israel, in Singapore and in China can access European user data. Now you might say, oh, this is TikTok. What does this all mean? That data remains stored in Singapore. According to its head of privacy in Europe, Elaine Fox, data will be subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols with methods recognized under GDPR. The new policy goes into effect December 2. Twitter announced it canceled the CHERP developer conference previously scheduled for my mother's birthday, November 16. The conference doesn't exactly have a grand tradition with the company. It's only ever held two of them. And the last one was in 2011. I don't feel like it's a cursed conference. Companies kind of busy with other things right now, although it's still awarded prizes for developer contests that it previously announced. So you still got your prize. Enjoy. I hope your mom is okay with this, Tom. She wanted the data herself anyway. It's a pretty big party in her honor. If you're wondering whether people are actually leaving Twitter or getting punished for bad behavior or some combination of the two, we have some numbers. Bot Sentinel estimates that between October 27 and November 1st, around 877,000 Twitter accounts were deactivated and 497,000 were suspended. Twitter last reported 237.8 million monthly active users. Relatively small numbers, if you think of all the active users that supposedly are still using Twitter. Over the weekend, Mastodon announced a record number of downloads. Mastodon is a Twitter competitor that's gotten some attention as of late. Since then, it announced that it saw over 230,000 people joining Mastodon in the last seven days, growing its active users 54% to 655,000. And that's the highest number it's seen to date. All right, let's talk a little more about Matter. The long wait is over. It's all official after months of hearing about Matter-compatible devices. The actual Matter standard is at hand. The Connected Standards Alliance formally launched the Matter Smart Home Standard with 190 products certified or close to certification across categories like smart lighting, plugs, thermostats, light shades, sensors, and locks. One of the big names on board at launch is the Phillips Hue Bridge. I'm an owner of one. Some of you are as well, which is now Matter-certified, a form where upgrade will arrive in Q1 2023 to make all existing and new Hue lights and accessories automatically Matter-enabled. Developers can also access beta firmware with support right now. Yeah, that's good stuff. Amazon also a founding Matter member, as our Apple Google everybody is. It's on board with a more graduated rollout. It will add Matter over Wi-Fi support on 17 Echo devices in December. This means that updates won't support thread radios, so it'll only be compatible with Android devices and usable by smart plugs, bulbs, and switches at least at first. iOS and thread radio support is going to arrive, but just not till early next year, with plans to add more Matter support to other Amazon hardware as well. Amazon also demonstrated interoperability with Samsung's SmartThings, letting you add devices from both platforms at once on your phone's OS without needing to get the apps from either platform involved. Matter device makers will need to go through Amazon's Works with Alexa program if they want to get a Works with Alexa WWE badge on product pages, but that will be done in tandem with Matter certification. So it's just for marketing and you'll get it all done at once. Apple did a similar thing earlier this year, modifying Works with Apple HomeKit to say Works with Apple Home and incorporating Matter support at the same time. And the Matter standard isn't standing still, as Tom mentioned. I mean, there's more rollouts to be done. CSA President Tobin Richardson told The Verge that the company expects the spec with new features and device types roughly every six months. The next update should come in March, and it's already confirmed it will add four new device categories next. Cameras, home appliances, robot vacuums, and energy management systems, and announced today it will also add garage door controllers and electronic gates. Environmental quality sensors and controls like an air quality monitor maybe you might have in your home and air purifier, that sort of thing. Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and ambient motion and presence sensing. So that kind of gives you a better sense of, oh, all right, here are all the potentially smart devices I might have in my home going forward. Yeah, Matter eventually will be the thing that makes it easy to just buy a smart home product and it won't matter who it's from. You can just pick the one that you like the best and know it's going to work because everything else is in the Matter universe as well. All you'll do is look for that Matter certification. It's not there today. Today is the day we get the first round of products. And it reminds me of all the standards I've lived through in my life covering technology. Bluetooth, I remember covering in 1999 and everyone complaining like, Bluetooth, nobody supports it. It's not very long range. Doesn't do this. It doesn't do that. Today, Bluetooth still is at 100% there. It is. I still have the same complaints, but it's pretty ubiquitous. But you can use it with so many more things and it works so much better than it used to. It takes time. It takes time for these standards to work their way through and Matter will be no different. It will hopefully won't turn too many people off of it as it continues to expand and include more things to the point where at some point down the line, you won't have to think about it anymore. Honestly, it's only a pain for those of us already in the market, right? Of those of us who've already started to put smart home stuff in our house. For the vast majority of people who haven't done this at all, now's the time, right? It's just going to get easier from here on in. Because that's the thing about Bluetooth, is that it largely was not only inventing its own range of products, specifically wireless speakers and various different versions of earbuds, but it was even as built up as the telecommunications industry and the phone industry and the smartphone industry and everything, the tablets were at the time. It's nowhere near the UN level negotiations that happened between the gigantic conglomerates, the biggest companies in the world that need to come to a peace because they have understood that the balkanization of IoT devices, which have been successful for them, would be benefited if they were interoperable. If anybody's frustrated that Matter right now is not moving as fast as they want, if it moves at the same linear speed as Bluetooth, understand it's going seven times faster because the money involved is so much greater. Yeah, I struggle a little bit just because I'm not really in the market for any new smart home, anything right now, but I have quite a bit of it already going on in my house. Everything's running through Amazon's Assistant. I've got the app. I talk to her all day. It works pretty seamlessly. However, there are certain product categories that I just, I haven't, I either don't need or I haven't bought yet. And a lot of these companies aren't going to necessarily be able to go through this. And that's why a company like Amazon's going to be like, we all benefit. We all benefit from these, the smart home devices talking to each other in an easier way. And that has been the promise of Matter for so long at the same time. And I know, especially a few folks who think that I am sort of a smart home weirdo and say, well, so what, how is this going to help me if I already have like a smart light bulb that I can turn on and off with my voice type thing? Well, it won't really. But if you want to get a little bit more daisy chain robust, then it will, because you can have lots of manufacturers that now can work together. Yeah, you won't have to be like, Oh, does this work with my thing? Because it just will. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to worry about this, this, you know, like, Oh, well, I'm in clan hue. And so I must only buy hue devices. Right. I'm only buy things that are made by Google or made by Amazon. Now everything's going to work together. Eventually, I would say, don't walk into Home Depot right now and be like, where are all the matters section? You want to know what if you are in the world of Internet of Things and you're demanding things to go faster and work easier together. Pump your brakes. You are being very unrealistic considering the trajectory of this technology from the very beginning. Relax. Relax. Also, something that could help us relax is searching on desktop PCs. Right. It's always, it's always a fun time. It's pretty robust kind of works both Windows and Mac OS give back speedy responses. Unless you have a computer like mine this morning to searches for files. Increasingly, we're seeing the use of machine learning that lets you search contextually for even better results. But as good as that is, it doesn't really capture everything you're doing on your device. Oh, no, it doesn't. And remember, where there's a perceivable gap in consumer expectations, there's a way for a startup to make a product. At least that's what Rewind AI is hoping. It's offering a self titled software product for Apple Silicon Macs claiming to keep a searchable record of everything you do locally on your machine. And they mean everything you have quote, seen, said or heard, all save locally on your machine index with OCR and speech recognition. It only slightly, it's only slightly as ambitious than the momento, a life logging camera back in 2012 that aimed to capture every moment of your life. Oh, terrifying. Okay, so what would you do with all the data that's being promised with this new service? According to the demos, you start by pressing command shift space again, because this is Mac OS on Silicon Mac. So this is something I could try on my laptop upstairs to bring up a search bar where you could search for anything you've seen, said or heard, as well as a timeline of actions and apps also pulls results from any transcribed audio or text that could be a zoom call or an email or a Slack conversation. It seems like it would take up all of your storage like what is that even if you wanted all of this data, how could you possibly store it all Rewind claims it can compress data up to 3,750 times without a major loss of quality resulting in something around 10 gigabytes of data compressed to less than 3 megabytes of storage that could keep years of recordings. If you were serious about this, and this is something that you wanted and the data that is promised is true. Kind of cool, I guess the demo only shows text results doesn't show replays of video. So that might be part of the compression, but we'll see. We will and Rewind founder Dan Sorkiner says our mission is to give humans perfect memory and compared Rewind to a memory augmentation similar to a hearing aid for well, hearing as for privacy concerns Rewind says that all recordings are done locally and can be paused and deleted at any time. Of course they would say that not that they're lying. No, yeah, have to. I think the privacy concern here is pretty easy. If you're if you're worried about re keeping any data of your own falling into the wrong hands, you might not want to record it in the first place. But let's assume for the sake of the argument here that this is all going to be encrypted locally under your control and nobody else is going to get it because that's pretty easy to audit and make sure is happening. It would be silly for Rewind to go back on that that they would crash and burn not saying it's impossible, but it seems unlikely. So then it's a matter of do you want to do this? Is there a worth in risking that it could fall in the wrong hands someday to you recording all of this? I'm a little I'm a little curious about that compression. I would like more details. They're very, very sparse on the details. But let's say that works too. I've seen so many of these things you mentioned the memento Justin, but there've been others where they're like, we're just going to record everything and then you'll have access to it. And people have generally said, wow, that's cool and not adopted it. If I if I might, let me let me take you guys back into history. When he was a senator from this, the great state of Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson recorded every conversation that he had on the phone and in his office, he did this with seraptiously placed microphones and wiretaps. It's a thing that he eventually moved to the White House when he went there. It wound up getting Richard Nixon into some hot water. That's a different story. The point is he did it when he was a senator because he never wanted to be hoodwinked by somebody who was negotiating with him on what they promised him. If they promised him something, he wanted to know it and not have them show up two weeks later and say, well, as we agreed something other than what they agreed, he would always have a record. Here's the key. He didn't just have a bunch of raw tape. He didn't certainly go back and listen to it. He had his secretary every single night type up minutes of exactly what happened as if she were there in the room taking them at the time. Obviously, she had perfect recall because she was able to listen back to the recordings before they were eventually saved. All of the recordings are not remarkable. If you have the right secretary who is organizing things in ways that make your life better, then this is important. This is something that we will benefit from. Right now, the recording is unremarkable. Their ability to find a way to make it useful, I think, will make it a product. Yeah, I think that the example that you just gave is pretty good. When you're the president, you might want to have a record of things that are said. Well, it depends on who the president is. But if you're me, it's like, is the sign of, well, maybe these things aren't great after all. Right. I feel like, wow, gosh, if I was in a profession, if I was, I don't know, on some legal team where a lot of this stuff really did matter, a little snippet here and there of something that otherwise wouldn't be all that important to the general public, I could see where a company or even just a freelancer would say, no, no, no, this is actually really helpful for me because I can just record everything and then go back and use what I need later because it's an official record. I don't want this, necessarily. I mean, I kind of feel like I have a terrible memory and I, you know, close tabs once in a while where I'm like, I'm just never going to get that one back. It is now in the ether somewhere. So yeah, it could be helpful, but I think it really depends on what kind of person you are and how much record you like to keep. Well, and the overhead, right? Does this really compress, does this not get in the way, it doesn't slow down my system and is it useful? Can I actually find what I'm looking for in it when I need it? Is it as good as LBJ's secretary? If it is, then all right. You might win me on board. You might win me over, but up until now, none of these things has worked as well as they have promised. Maybe this is the exception. We'll see. Yeah. Well, folks, it is November 3rd and it's time to get our holiday gift card list in order. This is a really fun thing we like to do every year. Each year, we send every patron who wants one, a holiday gift card with exclusive art from our very own Len Peralta. And we've got a really, really beautiful one this year. We've seen mock-ups. The team has seen it. We're very excited for you to see it as well. If you would like the card, make sure that you're a patron and check patreon.com slash pledges to make sure that we have your proper mailing address. Do that by November 15th, please to get the exclusive DTNS holiday card mailed from us to you. Thank you in advance. When talking about augmented reality, the MetaQuest Pro might come up or HoloLens or maybe Apple's rumored headset. Those often are the center of conversation, but they're not the only ones developing the technology and their broad-based approach may not even be the best way. Tilt5 has integrated AR into a tabletop gaming experience. Jerry Ellsworth has joined us to talk about it. Jerry, how did this project come about? Thanks for having me on. This actually started back when I worked at Valve Software. I invented the optical technique for this, which is radically different than anybody else back then. Valve wasn't interested at the time doing it, so I just purchased the technology and started productizing it. That's amazing. So I like the focus that Tilt5 has, which you first noticed in the equipment because it's got a different set of equipment than people might be expecting. What do you get with Tilt5? Well, with the Tilt5 system, you get the glasses, which are super lightweight. They have the widest field of view for an AR system out there. We solve the Virgin's Accommodation issue that a lot of people have with VR, where it kind of strains your eyes. And then also with the system, we have the Magic Wand, which ironically looks a bit like a barbecue lighter, but that's not a mistake. This is your six degrees of freedom input to the system. You can poke things, you can pick things up, but you can also hold it sideways like a game controller for more traditional games. And then part of our optical system is this board that you just fold out on the table. It's completely passive, but that reflects the light back into your eyes to this special material called Retroflector, and that's how we generate the light field that's so comfortable to look at. So you're playing board games with this. How do game pieces and cards fit in with the augmented reality part of it? Well, our system's more than just board games. A lot of people naturally gravitate to that because there's a board piece of it. So in fact, about 80% of the games that we brought to the system are pure video games, so action games and puzzle games and racing games, things like that. But however, we do do really awesome things with board games. So we have some platforms like Table Topia that has hundreds of board games that you can play completely digital. But then we have some other platforms on there like Battle Map Studio, where you can build up these, say, D&D scenarios, you can build your dungeons, and you can actually put physical pieces down as your miniatures down and move them through the dungeon and the map can scroll by, and it really adds to the experience. Also on that particular platform, there's some really cool stuff that you can do per player because you each get your own view into this holograms on your table. You can have things like perception that's different between each player. So one player might see the toxic smoke and the other people can't, and the DM, of course, gets to see it all. And that's the power of augmented reality. And does everybody have to be in the same room to play this? No, not at all. So we have a local multiplayer, which is really interesting. All games, even single player games, can be spectated and you can pass controls around digitally. But we can also connect game boards all across the world with almost any number of players coming in. So if your friends can't come over for game night, you just link up game boards and with the built-in speaker and microphone, you can just talk with each other. And we're about ready to introduce some hand tracking. That's exciting. So you'll be able to point to things and you'll have avatars, you can have your hands be telepresence. And so that'll add to this kind of intimate connection you have with your friends around the world. So like you said, it's not just board games, but it's like a game space kind of. Yeah, it's this big volume of space where the magic happens. Things are just spilling out across your table. That's part of how we optimize the system. You mentioned Oculus Quest Pro, you know, they had to make a lot of trade-offs with that. It has a lot of utility, but the AR aspect of it is really diminished. Like you kind of feel like you're outside your body. Our system's different. So there's light fields in front of you. We're not messing with what the world looks like in front of you. It's not like downgrading your world experience. It's just adding this magic to it. All right. So if people want to get a hold of one, what's the process? When is it going to ship? Do you have a price? What are the details? Oh my god, we've been shipping for like three months. So we did a Kickstarter a couple years ago. So the majority of those are already out unless you haven't sent us your address. Please do that if you're one of our backers. We're trying to get you your kit. We've been starting to transact new orders and send out kits and our systems to new customers. We're a little back ordered right now. So if you go to our website, you can put $5 down and we're about a two month lead time on those right now. The price for one kid is $359 but they get closer to $300 if you start buying our group packs. And our system is really focused on group play. So highly recommend getting two or three units so you can sit around the table and share things together. Yeah, that makes sense. It makes sense that you want to get at least a couple friends, you know, perfect holiday present maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where can folks go to learn more about Tilt 5? Tilt5.com all spelled out. You can follow us on social media as well, Twitter and all the usual places under Tilt 5 and, you know, have fun watching our communications folks cut up all the time and put out terrible cringe worthy gifts. And you can see all the latest games coming out. We have, we have some pretty exciting announcements coming up. We just announced Settlers Catan. So that's in production right now. We've been taking a look at early builds of that in another game. We're adding a lot of features to those that make it more than just the original board game that you remember. It's going to be a dynamic world. You can reach in and poke the sheep and they're going to react and you can taunt your friends by doing things. Yeah, in the virtual space. So there's a lot of stuff you can do between turns. And then we have, you know, in the upcoming months, we're announcing some pure video games that we've licensed that are coming to the system as well as there's over 50 developers creating various games for our system. That's fantastic. Jerry, thank you so much for talking with us about it. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Thank you, Jerry. And thanks to everybody who dreams of trips around the world and gives us fun advice for where we might want to go next. You might say, no, I don't know where I'm going next. Chris Christensen just might have a good answer for you. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. I have a resource for those of you who are intrepid travelers who are planning on doing around the world trip. I've only done one trip where I did around the world, obviously, with stops. And that's the whole point of an around the world trip. But if you're looking to do that kind of trip, there's a site that has been out there for some time and is the expert in that. And that's airtreks.com. They do other tickets that are long tickets, multi-stop tickets as well. But for that complicated round the world ticket where you want to make all these stops and not backtrack because that's the rules for the flights and see a lot of different countries on one ticket. But many stops in many countries, airtreks.com are definitely the experts. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Around the world. You know, I was so pleased when Chris suggested airtreks because I haven't used it in quite some time. But I traveled around the world for a year and I used airtreks. Now, this was a different story back in 2006 when you had to buy plane tickets a little bit differently than you do today. But it's good to know they're still around and thriving. Wow, yeah. They're like heritage web travelers. That's amazing. The most trusted name in round the world. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Well, set the mailbag. We're actually checking out something we sent to you in your mailbag. Indeed. It's a mailbag of sorts. So patrons probably already know this. But if you aren't reading Roger's two cents newsletter, great weekly thought-provoking perk for our supporters, which we like to offer our patrons. That's sort of the fun of being a patron. In fact, this week's post titled which way is gaming going was written by Jen Cutter who thinks a lot about this stuff and has a has a really good one. So do check it out if you haven't already. Yeah, Roger's two cents are three Canadian cents this week from Jen Cutter. Exactly. And it's a really good overview. If you're like, I've been losing track of what is going on with the cloud gaming versus the mobile versus that Jen just really breaks it down in a nice orderly way to say, here's where we're at. Here's what's actually happening. Not what everybody's been complaining about. Stadia, blah, blah, blah. This is what's actually there. It's a good read. Go check it out. Indeed. Thank you to you, Justin, Robert Young for being with us today. Let folks know what you've been doing the last week or so. Oh boy. I have been focused almost entirely on the midterm elections that happened Tuesday, November 8th, reminder to vote if you have not already early voting is available in almost every state. However, if you want to get caught up, we had our midterms for dummies episode last week. I have my final analysis of everything that has happened as well as my predictions on what's going to happen this week on the politics politics politics podcast. And then on Tuesday night, if you go to px3live.com that is letter p letter x number three live dot com. You'll be able to watch the midterms with a big live in studio coverage team consisting of myself, Andrew Heaton, Jen Briney, Brian Brushwood, Brett Weaver, and possibly some special guests. We don't know. Go ahead on over there. That is px3live.com Tuesday, November 8th. We will begin our stream an hour before polls close on the east coast. Put it on your calendars, everybody, not to be missed. Also, we're not missing thanking a very special supporter who's been with us for a long time. Snow Dog is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Snow Dog. Hope you're staying warm. Snow Dog. Snow Dog understands the value that we give and has been giving us value back and we appreciate that. And everyone likes Snow Dog. Be the Snow Dog in your own life patreon.com slash DTNS. We can only all aspire to be Snow Dog in our own lives. Patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We roll right into it live after we finish DTNS. But just a reminder, we are doing the show live. You might listen to us after the fact. Maybe you watch it, but you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back again tomorrow with Rob Dunwood and Len Peralta joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.