 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Tony Glass, Philip Less, and Daniel Dorado. Coming up on DTNS, Amazon's adding voice control to video games, but do any of you want that? Plus, cameras literally built to protect privacy, and what do we actually need fitness trackers for? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 24th, 2022 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And in Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jen. Oh, my friends, I'm very excited about the stories we have for you today, including that one about the camera. It's really interesting, but let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple sent out invites for an event on Wednesday, September 7th at 1 p.m. eastern at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. The invite shows the Apple logo as a star field with the words, far out. What could it mean? Usually mean something. The company didn't mention the iPhone, but it's that time of year when it usually announces new iPhones. So why don't we just go ahead and expect new iPhones, maybe in space? Apple also confirmed it won't release a public build of iPadOS at the same time as iOS for the iPhone. Apple is expected to release iOS 16 soon after its September iPhone event, but says iPadOS will arrive sometime later this autumn with the release of iPadOS 16.1. So they're just skipping to .1. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported earlier this month delays in iPadOS 16 were to resolve issues with the new stage manager feature. The Ethereum Foundation confirmed that it will begin the switch to proof of stake over proof of work on September 6th. Now, proof of work is criticized for the amount of energy that it consumes as it requires computers to solve difficult math problems in order to help operate the network. Proof of stake is based on holdings and uses less energy. The merge will be split into two upgrades called Bellatrix and Paris. Bellatrix is time to occur at 11.34 am UTC on September 6th, and Paris will be triggered sometime between September 10th and September 20th. And sadly to clarify for Stoic Squirrel in the chat room, stake is spelled S-T-A-K-E, not S-T-E-A-K. But you can eat a steak while staking. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a perfect way to celebrate. Yeah, you just kind of get creative. Stability AI publicly released its text to image engine stable diffusion available to all users through its Dream Studio interface. CEO Amod Mostak said a public API for stable diffusion will be available shortly. Users get 200 credits for free and you can get an additional 100 credits for one pound sterling. Acer expanded its eco-conscious Vero line with the 14-inch Chromebook Vero 514. Comes with a 99% recyclable chassis, uses a trackpad made of ocean-bound plastics, with keycaps made of 50% post-consumer plastic. It also uses standard screws for easier upgrades. Inside are 12th gen Intel processors with a 1080p screen and a 1080p webcam. Starts at $499.99 available in mid-October. I mean, I guess it's not ocean-bound anymore, right? Yeah, it's ocean. Now they're in this free post-ocean. Let's the laptop down some of the ocean, which I hope it doesn't. Alright, let's talk about that voice control stuff. Scott? Whoops, my microphone got muted. Amazon announced Alexa Game Control. Oh, sorry, I set everybody's thing off, including mine. Which lets gamers use voice commands to perform in-game actions in participating with games? You'll need an Amazon account, so that's number one. But not a prime membership, so that's good. It's basically free for you to use. You also need to say the wake word, so some gamers may want to use push-to-talk, especially if you're in a room with a bunch of people talking. You'll be able to perform some in-game actions, though, without having to use that wake word, like talking to a non-player character in NPC. You could just say, where is the nearest workbench? Or give me the quest. You could swap weapons. Just say, select my most powerful weapon and not have to search around and find it. You can even, they said, manipulate zombies by saying, hey zombie, which I just like the idea of, you know, instead of hey Google. Hey zombie. Hey zombie. Act right. Run that way. It can also do everything else on Amazon Echo can do, like control your smart home devices, set mood lighting, order from DoorDash, or whatever you got it set up to do. It'll launch on Dead Island 2, the video game, February 3rd. That's when the video game launches on Xbox and PC in English in North America. More games, platforms, languages, and regions are planned to come down the line, but that's where we're starting, Scott. Yeah, and Dead Island 2 seems as good a place to start as any. This is actually a game that was forever delayed and we finally got a release date. So I was excited on that front. I love the first game. Since we talked about this earlier on the morning stream, I've been thinking a lot about implementation. Like how can this be used in a way that won't either be seen as just too gimmicky by gamers or will really take advantage of the technology and make it so we have an expanded game experience, an enhanced one, if you will. And I thought of a few things, but the main one is that the stuff that's quicker to do with your voice, they should lean into that. And I'm not exactly sure what all those things are yet. Certainly not in this game, because I don't know what the mechanics are yet. But the things that are easier to do that way, I want to see how those work. And the things that are easier to do with one or two button presses on a controller, which is where most people are going to be on their Xbox, for example, or their PC even. I would like those to be, you know, leave those where they're best suited already. For example, let's say you got to reload a gun. Me yelling reload is actually more effort and uses more of my bodily systems than if I just hit the X button on the controller as an example. But me saying, where's the next quest to an NPC standing nearest? That is faster than going and clicking on him, going through a list of things that I can ask him, then having to exit, skip through dialogue, all of those things. Let me just say, point me to the nearest quest. And if this thing can say, if the NPC can say, oh, well, that's this direction points around the hill and says off you go. I think there's something to this and could be really, really cool. The nice thing is it'll be free for everybody to use. It won't be required. So if you're looking forward to playing Dead Island 2 or any game that will support this for the time being anyway, you're not going to be required to use it. So I think that's good and important. And the nice thing about this being sort of a strange little add on, it's not coming in the form of some special accessory you have to buy after the fact. For example, when people had to buy the Kinect with the 360 or the move controllers with the PlayStation or the enhanced Wii controllers, if you had a Wii and they had those better ones down the road, those kind of accessories, PS4 VR being maybe one of the exceptions, don't sell very well because they're not one-to-one with the hardware. This isn't one of those. This is a new functional thing that just is there in the air. And if you've already got an Echo or are in that ecosystem, you're set. You're done. You don't need to go buy one. So I think there's advantages to that versus other tech that gets inserted mid-generation. And I really want to see how it works out. You mentioned how if you wanted to trigger some sort of an action that this would be slightly less, I don't know, seamless than just doing it the way that gamers have already known to do this. But I also feel like it's not unlike me telling on my lights upstairs or my TV to turn on and off all the time. Some people are just like, oh, I don't like that. I don't want to do that. I'm not particularly the Amazon ecosystem. I'm just not into talking to the air to have that possibly recorded and come back to me. That's one thing. But I've also had friends just be like, how is this easier for you, Sarah? Is it really easier? I'm like, it's just fun. It's good to have options. Some of it is fun. That's what I see this as. Yeah. And that's what I'm maybe most excited about. I didn't actually mention this. I'm glad you brought it up. I don't know that this is going to be the showcase for it on Dead Island 2 in particular. It's reactionary and very bloody and horror movie and all that. But what games come after that is what's interesting to me. Well, somebody make one that, for example, can be played traditionally with buttons and navigation and everything else. But maybe they'll come out with something that will really take advantage of this. But the conversation with the echo is everything to the experience or a lot of the experience. And what that is and how that flushes out, I don't know. But that's all a possibility as well. Really, the real trick is for you and I to tell our echo ecosystem to turn the lights on on the deck as an example like we do, that is saving me trouble. I don't have to get up. I don't have to walk to a switch. I don't have to flip it. I just say a thing and it happens. So whatever those equivalent things are in game worlds, and make that world more either more convenient or more responsive or whatever, that that is cool. And I hope that they figure out what that is. But we're going to have a little test period. I don't think Dead Island is the end of the story at all. I don't think it's meant to be. Yeah. No, it's not meant to be. Just where they're starting because Dead Island was willing to implement it. And just like with the original Amazon Echo, when it first came out, people will figure out like, oh, it's really handy to do this by voice in the game. That one we thought might have been good. But it turns out nobody uses it. So we'll focus elsewhere. It was funny. On the morning stream, the chat room reacted as if they had been insulted by Amazon introducing this. I was like, look, they're not charging you for it. You don't have to do anything. You don't even have to use it if you don't want to. It's just something that they're trying out. And it was as if the idea of voice control was a horrible idea. When I'm like, man, I grew up wondering like, I want to be able to just talk to the video game, right? Just like I talked to people in real life. So yeah, it might not work perfectly the very first instance. It's going to be a little on rails and all of that. But I think it's got potential. Somebody was mentioned in our chat room just now that Skyrim has some voice control stuff. It does, yeah. It's true. It's their own voice control, not Amazon. So I wonder if the fact that it's Amazon doing it gets people's back up a little bit. Maybe that's part of it. I mean, in their defense, not that they need defending, but I think part of this comes from a little bit of a jadedness we get from years of accessories that we were told we're going to change the world and end up being flops. And they just are. I just think they're more in the mode of like, OK, I'll believe it when I see it. They don't want to be too excited on the front end. And I think that's all you were seeing. And that's why I thought this was well done is like, don't need, don't need to pay for it. Don't need to use it. We made it so you don't even have to use a wake word. So it's seamless. You can do push to talk so that your friends can't troll you. Yeah, there's there's lots of good things that I think this will be useful for if not the little maybe the one that's most useful is when you're playing the game and the lights are on and it's got too much glare. You can just say turn off the lights to your game and your lights will go off like that kind of integration might be all you need or up the gamma or whatever it is. That's an interesting thing. Turn up the volume, turn down the volume. Pump up the volume. Dance could be something you want the zombies to do. Cameras do a lot of cool stuff. Dancing isn't really one of them. But if you pair them with an algorithm, a camera can tell you all kinds of things. For example, let's say you have an apple orchard. The camera could tell you when the apples are ripe and ready to harvest. It can scan license plates. There's a mall I go to where it just scans my license plate when I enter the parking garage. I don't need to take a ticket. But the increasing use of this kind of imaging raises privacy concerns. Is it worth recording the image of every worker and visitor to an orchard just to see if the apples are ripe? Does the license plate scanner also need to record me and the dumb coffee I'm spilling over myself as I drive in and the kind of car I drive? Solutions to this usually involve blurring out items after the image has been captured to preserve privacy or encrypting the images so only a certain kind of person can access them. But even in those cases, the underlying image has still been captured, leaving a maybe small but existent privacy risk. What if you could actually stop the camera from capturing anything but exactly what you want? What if the orchard camera could only see apples? What if the parking garage camera could only see license plate numbers? I love this. I know. I know the possibilities are endless. A paper published in the journal E-Lite presents a smart camera design from scientists at UCLA that only images desired objects instantly erasing other objects. So in the apple orchard example that Tom described everybody would be kind of out of there except those ripe apples that are ready to be picked all without any digital processing which is important. It's done in the structure of the camera itself. The scientists have built cameras with multiple transmissive surfaces, each with tens of thousands of features that diffract light at wavelength scale. So as it reflects light along through the lens it also changes the wavelengths. Some are past as is, some are altered. The structure of the surface is designed by a deep learning algorithm to modulate the phases of light so that only desired objects are the ones that get imaged. If you're having a hard time wrapping your head around this let's put it this way. You use the algorithm, the deep learning algorithm to figure out what structure will work to only capture the thing you want to capture. Let's say it's an apple. The algorithm then gets trained to know what an apple looks like. That's pretty easy stuff for an algorithm to do these days. We see plenty of examples of that. And then the algorithm can design the layers of the camera so that only wavelengths associated with what an apple looks like get passed through unaltered. Everything else gets diffused, diffracted, modified so that it's noise. You make those layers with a 3D printer put them together into a camera and then when you use that camera only apples are going to show up clearly in any kind of quality. Other objects are just going to be noise. Now you might say, okay, well in theory this sounds great. It's not just theoretical. The UCLA team trained an algorithm to recognize a handwritten number two. Number two. Written by anybody. Doesn't matter. That's the number. Then they 3D printed diffractive layers based on the algorithm. The camera would not show any other digits. Just two. So if you wrote 22.01 the image would just show 22 because it only knows that two and then that other two. For their next trick they created a lens that only showed pairs of pants. Like pantalones. Possible useful for a clothing store inventory system that wanted to protect privacy of workers. Definitely shoppers. Now both cameras worked even when they changed up the lighting which is important, you know, because you're going to have lots of different situations where this might be used indoor, outdoor, you know, otherwise. And finally they built encryption into the structure and so no processing was needed to then deliver an encrypted image. That's the one that blew my mind. Where it's like, oh, the encryption happens in the reflection of the light waves. Yeah. Now you can't change that encryption because it's built in physically, but it's interesting. One of the biggest advantages of this camera is power efficiency because the camera itself is passive. It doesn't require energy to perform those computations. They are physically built into the structure of the camera. And because it's just reflecting light really works at the speed of light. The only power you need is for lighting and then whatever device you're using to record the images it sends. The scientists in the study used monochrome cameras for the proof of concept, but they believe the diffraction design could be scaled down enough to handle visual spectrum as well. So this could be put into practice and I don't know. I think this is a great single-purpose right? It's not a multi-purpose camera, so it's not going to be cost-efficient for everybody. And maybe in Orchard, it's a bad example, right? Orchard's not going to want to spend the money on that. But maybe the license plate scanner, maybe that is worth it because really all you need it to ever do is the license plate. That might be worth it to protect privacy. When you mentioned the license plate example, anybody who crosses bridges that have tools and maybe you live in the Bay Area otherwise. So in the Bay Area, there's a little fast-track thing that you can have in your car and you load up your account ahead of time, you have your little fast-track thing, beep, beep, you know, and you go through and it's all pretty seamless. You don't have to have six to eight dollars in your pocket in cash to give to somebody who's working the gate. But in those cases, which I actually went through this recently because I realized my little scanner thing was the battery's dead, but they're going to scan my license plate. They're going to look me up and they're going to see, oh, she has an account and we'll just draw that, you know, whatever she owes out of the account. In those cases, if I were to be evading the tool, you would kind of want more information about me, right? So this wouldn't be a good example of that. This is more of that parking garage thing that you were explaining to Tom where no one's really trying to catch you doing anything. It's just a seamless way to get in and out. Although with FastPass, if they have your license plate info, they have your info, because your license plate info is linked to your address and all that. So theoretically, it could be good for that too and just be like, you know what? You just need to track my license plate. You don't need to track my type of car, et cetera. Maybe they want to. What I was wearing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. My look of dismay when I realized my little thing isn't working. The Ray-86 wondered if you could train it to ignore you and just show everything else. You could, I assume, it's a little complicated for a deep learning algorithm to do a particular person. I don't know if it could totally do that or not, but let's say you could. You'd have to build a bunch of cameras that do that and then get people to use them. I don't know how practical that it would be to be able to escape detection. Because it's not a software thing, right? You have to build the camera and then the camera does whatever you built it to do. It's a physical device. That'd be a really interesting version of some, you know, ring security camera type thing. The whole point of security cameras is to, you know, see what's going on, right? Something weird happens outside. You have as much information as possible. You're not actually trying to blur the lines. But would there be situations where just in kind of daily life, this would just be a better privacy solution for everybody? Yeah, again, only in cases where you just need to detect a single thing and be able to tell what that is. It's not going to be good for security because in security you want to detect all the things. You know, like what happened, right? This is more for like, I have a legitimate use for a sensor to do something non-controversial, but it might capture other stuff and then Nair Duels might get at that data and use it for bad things. So I want to make sure it's only getting the apples. I don't care about anybody else. Or clothing inventory, like you said, with the clothing. Like it's only telling me how many pants are on the shelf. Not counting how many shoppers went there and what they're wearing and who they are. It's not doing any, can't do any facial recognition because it can only see pants. Yeah. I mean, in theory, if you've got a government that's super into closed caption, or not closed, closed circuit. I don't know why it's a closed caption. Closed circuit like, you know, monitoring of streets or cities or whatever. It might go a long way if the government could say, by the way, we're employing these cameras that only see your license plate or they only see this or they only see that. Yeah, yeah. That might actually help in that front as well. Yeah. Well, folks, we love getting ideas for stories like this from you as well. One way to let us know about good stories is in our subreddit, submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. Google-owned Fitbit announced new wearables. Yeah, that's right. The $299.95 since two and the 229.95 versus four are both thinner and lighter than their predecessors. And in typical Fitbit fashion, they have some bells and whistles. Some of the other trackers just don't have. Yeah. Fitbit has always been at the forefront of a lot of the technology that even other trackers have caught up with in certain senses, but the sense to includes a continuous electro-dermal activity sensor to continuously track stress. Sounds perfect for me. It can also continuously monitor for something like AFib in your heart, something it could only do in the first sense when you were asleep. The Versa 2 adds a physical button as well, and both double the number of exercise modes. So now around 40. In a few months, they'll both get Google Maps and Google Wallet as well. The $99.95 ascent, Inspire 3, also adds a color OLED display and blood oxygen monitoring during your sleep while retaining a 10-day battery life. Oh, 10 days. That sounds so good. All are available for pre-order now. So Versa 4 gets a physical button. Sense 2 gets a couple other ways to track things over what the original sense did. Inspire 3 gets a blood oxygen monitor without losing any battery life. My color display is nice. Yeah, OLED display. Okay, that's fair. These are very incremental. It certainly shows Fitbit trackers moving more towards being watches, especially getting thinner and lighter and all of that. But I'm wondering, do we even need all of this stuff? I mean, I guess AFib monitoring is important if you're at risk. But yeah, it depends on who you are. And continuous monitoring is great on the Sense 2, which means I don't have to check it. It's just going to tell me, like, hey, we just noticed something is up. You might want to call your doctor. But, you know, that is a subsection. Well, not about the stress. I mean, about the AFib. I mean, I would get stressed if I had AFib for sure. Well, yeah. But yeah, the stress tracker, it's like, usually I know, like I'm not sure. I guess it's because it's telling you, like, hey, here are some meditations and stuff that could be helpful. I'm not seeing the compellingness here. And I'm wondering if our smartwatches and fitness trackers have sort of got to the limit of mass appealability. Like maybe they should be more narrow focused. Maybe they should be focused on, oh, you have Parkinson's. Oh, you have high blood pressure. Oh, you have this particular need. Here is a tracker for you versus trying to just throw all the sensors in the world at everybody all the time. Yeah. You know, this is kind of, and Scott, I know you've been a Fitbit person as well for some years. You know, I was wearing the Versa2 every day for years until I started wearing the Apple Watch for Live With It. But, you know, the Apple Watch is just, it's a real smartwatch. I mean, the Fitbit, my Versa2 now seems like, oh, you know what, it was so great for these very specific fitness or sleep activity things, which I, you know, and food tracking and, you know, calories and all that stuff that the Apple Watch can also do. What was nice about the Versa2, because when I would wear it, it looked so much like an Apple Watch unless you were really looking at the face closely and people would say, oh, you know, how do you like the Apple Watch? I say, oh, no, it's a Fitbit. Oh, what's Fitbit good for? It's more of kind of like a fitness thing, fitness with, you know, with other bells and whistles. And I feel like that's still what everything Fitbit is still very good for. But if you compare them side to side, and again, I'm just comparing with the Apple Watch, because that's just what I've been thinking about a lot lately. You know, there is no real Fitbit that can compete with this unless you like that paired down I kind of just want it to do certain things for me besides tell me the time, you know, and set an alarm here and there. And that's, that's great for some folks. What isn't super great is the fact that, you know, the Sens2 is going to cost you $300. I mean, that's at a high, that's at a higher end. The Versa4 at $2.30. I mean, these aren't, this is not like a, these aren't budget trackers. But the Sens2 is a smartwatch. The Sens2 can do all the things the Apple Watch can do. Yeah, pretty. It does text message notifications and all that stuff. It just works with Android, not iOS. Yeah. The big, I think you actually hit on my major problem, Sarah, with any of them. And it doesn't, you know, I'm brand agnostic with this point. And that is that the prices are just too high. I don't think the mainstream adoption really happens until all of those kinds of features are in a sub $100 watch. And that may seem impossible, but it feels like 99 bucks is a sweet spot. And at the rate people break their watches, crack them, scrap them, forget that theirs isn't water resistant, whatever their reasons are, it is not really feasible to have a $300, $400 watch on your wrist, break it and then go, well, I guess I'm off to the store to get another one. It's not that kind of purchase. So I think that's the holdup. It's not that these features aren't great because they are, it's going to be who can get the most features into the best functioning and also least expensive purchase. And I don't know who's going to do it, but it needs to be right around 100 bucks. And then these will fly off the shelves. That's the trick. Mark it down on your calendars today. You heard it for your first, everybody. Scott solved the problem for smartwatch. Thank you, Scott. Mark it down. You also, you might be excited to purchase some, some pants. You know, we talked about pants in the show. Let's bring it on back to jeans. So originally, if you're thinking about good old fashioned blue jeans, clothing was dyed blue using indigo molecules from plants, but we started wearing a lot of blue denim and the plants couldn't keep up. So today's blue jeans are colored with synthetic dye made from fossil fuels from aldehyde and other chemicals. To get that blue color, more than 70,000 tons of indigo dye are made each year and the process generates a lot of pollutants. A Berkeley, California startup called HUE, that's H-U-U-E. Get it? Wants to reverse engineer indigo molecules using microbes and also sugar. So the process would use a lot less chemicals. The company is still in the R&D phase. They don't get too excited yet. With the next challenge, trying their creation at scale and even expanding to other kinds of dyes beyond indigo. The Verge spent some time in their lab to see how it all worked. And it's pretty cool. I hadn't, I honestly hadn't thought that much about where the blue and my blue jeans comes from, even though I like it very much. Yeah, I mean, we all work from home and stream from the way steps and none of us wear pants. But for people who do wear pants, this is probably a consideration. Yeah, I guess I always thought blue jeans were naturally blue somehow. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, because they're blue. I don't know why. I don't know why it never occurred to me. Of course they have to dye them. Like, how else are they going to get blue? There's nothing about denim. And you get different kinds of blue. But that blue, you know, Levi kind of blue jean type thing. It is a very specific color. And yeah, it makes sense that over time, because of mass scale, people had to use other avenues to get that color that we want. But sounds like it's kind of crappy for the environment. So I'm all for this. Sure. And by the way, I mean, I assume that if you did a pair of denim jeans without any dyeing, just whatever they come out naturally to look like, it's probably a nightmare, right? It's probably like the worst possible looking. Like what? Would they just look like straw? Yeah, they probably just look kind of brownish beige. Yeah. And they wouldn't be even either. You'd have a lot of discoloration and weird sort of stretchy mitt bits and all that. So it's good that we're finding alternative ways to color our jeans, because nobody wants to wear that. They're kind of whitish, actually. Are they kind of white? Yeah. I mean, they are cotton. So why not? They just look like kind of an off-white cotton. Not as bad as I thought. Well, if you have thoughts on jeans or anything that we talk about on the show, please do send those thoughts our way. We love your feedback. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send that email. Thank you in advance. Also, thank you to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us today. What's new since we saw you last? Well, this story about Amazon controlling or letting you control video games with voice as well as all the craziness of games.com happening in Cologne, Germany right now. We are going to sum that stuff up and do as best we can to help you understand what was announced and what's happening tomorrow night on Core. It's our video game podcast. C-O-R-E. You can find it anywhere that you find your podcast or you can watch it live. All the details are over there at frogpants.com. We also have a brand new boss to thank. And we're so excited to thank you, Derek. Derek. Derek. It's on Patreon. You are welcome, Derek. And we are so glad to have you. You know, you broke the streak of no new patrons for a few days. So yeah, we're back in biz. We made a plea on yesterday's show and Derek stepped up. So be like Derek. We need more Derek's in this world. Yeah, we sure do. We love you patrons. Speaking of patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day. Internet starts right after we wrap up here. But just a reminder, we do DTNS Live. If you'd like to catch the show live, it's Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back again, doing it all again with Justin and Robert Young. Talk to you then.