 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Reed Fischler, Larry Bailey, and Michelle Serju. Coming up on DTNS, Meta announces the MetaQuest Pro VR headset, and it wants you to use it for work. Annaly Nuits is here to tell us about the blue economy, which does not mean being sad about inflation in this case, but being excited about wave power. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, October 11th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Sarah Lane, taking a little early birthday day off, but Annaly Nuits, author of Four Lost Cities and the upcoming novel The Terraformers, and of course, the star host, co-host of Our Opinions Are Correct. Welcome to the show, Annaly. Hey, thanks for having me back. It's good to have you. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The quick hits. The reviews of the Nvidia RTX 4090 came out today and seem quite positive. We're going to talk with Will Smith and Scott Johnson about it tomorrow. But for now, here's the upshot. Everyone talks about how huge it is. Ars Technica Sam Bacovic noted, it is the size of an Xbox Series S, like the actual console, just the video card is. Uses a lot of energy, 450 watts, and usually even handed Tom Warren over at the Verge said, I had to triple check my benchmarks over and over during this review because I couldn't quite believe my eyes, and he meant that in a good way. They were good benchmarks. Overall, everybody marveling at the 4K performance, how well DLSS3 boosts the frame rates. And as you might have guessed, 24 gigabytes of VRAM turns out to be good. That's a good thing. Besides the power draw and the size, the only other common negative I saw was the dongle adapter. And of course, at $1,599, everybody agrees it's expensive. But I saw some folks saying, you know what, if you can afford it, you actually get your money's worth out of it. So I don't know, Annalie, if you're going to run out and buy $15.99 worth of video card. But I mean, maybe wait a little bit, you know. Yeah, yeah, wait for the price to come down and the size, the size is not coming down. Yeah, it's, you know, but it's exciting. Axios notes that TikTok has posted more than a dozen job listings on LinkedIn over the past couple of weeks related to warehousing and fulfillment centers in the United States. TikTok says in the listings that it wants to build an international e-commerce fulfillment system. So not the trucks and the planes, but the part that gets it on the trucks and the planes and gets it to your house. So that includes supply chain logistics, cross border efforts, customs management. One listing even implies a system for free returns. So that's how TikTok's going to try to make its money. General Motors announced a new business unit called GM Energy, which includes Altium Home and Altium Commercial Ecosystems. Altium Home focuses on residential energy and taking advantage of large batteries in your EV through vehicle to home technology. So you can send the power back in your house. As an example, V2H compatible EV car batteries could provide electricity to a home during a power outage or during peak electricity time. So you're not pulling out of the grid when the grids get constrained. Altium Commercial works on pretty much the same principles, but on a larger scale for things like businesses and fleets of trucks and stuff. In related news, the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit has selected GM Defense to develop a battery pack for its electric military vehicles. And what I consider to be one of the googly-est of moves, a couple of weeks after announcing its consumer-facing Stadia program will end next January, a different part of Google announced three new Chromebooks focused on cloud gaming. But you can use it with other stuff. These laptops are from Acer, Asus and Lenovo. They all run Chrome OS and support refresh rates up to 144 Hertz have optimizations on the chipset and in Chrome OS that are tuned to play well with Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna and Xbox cloud gaming. They'll be the first Chromebooks with a game launcher search and anti-ghosting so that multiple key presses can register simultaneously. This all fits in with the idea that Google intends to be more of an infrastructure provider for cloud gaming rather than a consumer facing service provider. Emily, does it shock you that Google? Not at all. I mean, the Stadia news was hilarious and I mean, you know, in a sad way. But yeah, I mean, this also to me is kind of news about Chrome OS too. Like Chrome OS is like going to be continuing to go strong. Now we're going to kind of see it in these game books, so these game Chromebooks. So yeah, I think it's interesting. I'm glad that I'm glad that Chrome OS is not going to fade away. Yeah, so far, Chrome OS seems to be something that won't fade away from Google. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, Delta Airlines is going to invest $60 million into electric air taxi startup, Joby Aviation to create a home to airport service using five seat electric vertical takeoff and landing or EV tall aircraft. Delta intends to launch the service in New York and Los Angeles with other cities following after that and would be mutually exclusive. So Joby wouldn't do it for any other airline. Delta wouldn't use anybody but Joby for five years in the US and UK with the option to extend that. I, someone who lives in Los Angeles, love in theory, the idea of getting to the airport in 10 minutes. If there's a helipad near me that can support this, would you take this, Annaly? I totally would take this. When I saw this news, I was like, when do we get it in San Francisco and why don't we have it in San Francisco? We have plenty of people that need to go to the airport. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I was like, all right, bring it to me. I've never been in one of these kinds of vehicles before. So it just, it sounds like a, kind of, it sounds like a thrill ride. I'm assuming it's going to be pricey. But Delta was saying all the right things about saying we don't want it to be out of the range of people. This is not going to be a luxury service. So, you know, fingers crossed, we still don't know how much it's going to cost. It's going to be a luxury service. You're right. All right. Unless we have helipads on every building, which is another exciting idea. The big message from Meta in the Connect opening video was that social apps are popular in the quest store because, you know, we're our social media company still. So interesting emphasis for a company pivoting from social media to VR as its main thrust. But we got announcements around VR software across the quest line. And Project Cambria is officially launched now and has a name. It is called, as people expected, the MetaQuest Pro. So let's start off with some of the cross-platform stuff. This will work on the Quest 2 and some of it will work on the old Quest, I imagine, as well as the Quest Pro. Horizon World's chat platform is actually going to work on the web. So you don't even need a quest if you want to get into Horizon Worlds. They're going to build up usage among people who don't have a headset. Also, you'll be able to share from Horizon Worlds to Instagram Reels, because so many of you were asking for that. Horizon Workrooms for Meetings will integrate Zoom starting in early 2023. So again, folks without a headset can still join a meeting and vice versa. Microsoft Teams is going to be doing the same thing at some point next year. Microsoft 365 also come into Quest headsets. So you can do kind of a slightly fuzzy version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in VR using the virtual huge monitors that VR can provide. And Xbox Cloud Gaming coming to the Quest Store. For now, it's just 2D games on one of those virtually huge screens. But Microsoft CEO Sachin Adela hinted that they are open to bringing VR to Xbox Cloud Gaming. So I guess they're just waiting to see how it goes. Before we get into the big headset, Annaly, any of this stuff strike you as interesting? You know, I'm really interested in the idea of integrating with other services because I feel like one of the things that Meta, aka Facebook has done in the past, is offer these kinds of integrations and then roll them back once they have enough uptake. Right. And so I'm really going to be curious to know if in like two, if this stuff takes off, you know, in two years, are you going to be able to use Zoom, you know, with your Quest? Or is this like kind of a way of sucking people into the Horizon platform, basically? Are we calling it a platform? Are we calling it Horizon Worlds? What are we calling it? Horizon Worlds is the name of the platform, is how I think about it. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I kind of wonder is if at some point none of this integration will actually remain in place. Yeah, it's for sure a smart thing to do now because not enough people have headsets to really gain traction. So if you can say like, hey, you don't have to have a headset. You still have your meeting in Horizon Worlds. Just come in through Zoom or Teams. That makes sense. It's good thinking ahead to be like, and at what point do they say enough people have headsets by Zoom, by Teams? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I feel like and we'll hear some of these other Microsoft integrations. They might be less likely to cut off Teams than Zoom, which would be an interesting thing if suddenly that became a way to shove people over to another platform. Yeah. Also, if you're wondering where the Quest 2 active pack that they announced at last year's Connect went, it's here. It's coming out October 25th. This is the pack that gives you a sweat-resistant face mask, some controller straps that are better for exercise. They still didn't announce a price, even though it's coming out October 25th. So I'm curious how much that's going to cost. A lot of people who do workouts with quests have been waiting for this because they get all sweaty. So there you go. How nice. How nice for them. Let's get to the start of the show. The MetaQuest Pro's big advantage is comfort. It has a curved battery at the back instead of in the headset, instead of in the front and a comfy strap. So everybody who's tried it has said it's got really good balance, even though it weighs a couple of hundred more grams than the Quest 2. It's 722 grams, but the balance is really good. It feels good on your head. That's important if you want people to be working with this thing. The other big feature is full color video pass through so that you can see the world around you and do some fun mixed reality stuff. They showed like a virtual skateboard on a table and everybody was standing around designing on it. You can, of course, also block out light for an immersive VR experience. You don't have to see the world around you. The lenses are 40 percent thinner, can slide to adjust to the width between your eyes. The way the old Oculus Rift did has 1800 by 1920 per eye LCD displays with 90 Hertz refresh rate, so good specs. Runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Plus chip. That's a specifically designed chip for VR, 12 gigabytes of memory, 256 gigabytes of storage and two new controllers that have sensors built into the controller and a chip on the controller so it can track your hand position without needing the headset to do it. If your hand strays out of where the headset can see, it'll still know where your hand is. It can still just track your hands without the controller if you want as well. You can also pop an optional stylus tip on the end of the controller for doing writing and sketching just on the table in front of you. The controllers now have rechargeable batteries and there's a flat charging dock that will charge both the controllers and the headset so you don't forget this is a pro device. It's going to be right there in front of you on the desk. Meta made sure to promote the fact that Autodesk and Adobe are working on apps for the Quest Pro platform and Microsoft is going to include the Quest Pro in Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intone. So if you're in an enterprise managing things, you'll be able to manage these devices. Meta also brought on the CEO of Accenture to talk about how they're planning to use the Quest Pro. I was talking with Joe, our video producer before this and we looked it up. Accenture has 720,000 employees. So I'm going to bet they're going to buy a few of these. Here's the bad news. Meta is saying it has a one to two hour battery life. So you can plug it in by USBC. And I guess if you're using it as a big monitor replacement and you're just sitting, you can keep it plugged in. But you're not going to be walking around all day with this thing on. You can preorder it now for a thousand four hundred ninety nine dollars, a very enterprise level price shipping October 25th. And if you want, you can buy the controller separately because you can use them with the Quest 2. So if you don't want to spring for the 15 ninety nine or the fifteen hundred dollar headset, you can get the new controllers for three hundred bucks and just use them with the Quest 2. Where does all this sit with you, Annaly? I was curious, can you use the controllers without the headset? So could I have could I be using it with the web or no? I have to have some headset. I think they are designed to be used with a Quest headset. I'm sure you could you could figure a way around that. I was like, are we going back to the Wii? Can I finally have my Wii again? Just have my hand controllers with no headset. All right. So we have solved that question. I'm excited about this, actually. Like I I've been waiting for some kind of AR VR rig that actually feels comfortable on my face. And I love the idea of the hand controllers being a lot less wonky than previous generations. So I could imagine myself getting this maybe in two more generations when it's a little smaller because I don't have any immediate need for this. Like I have no employer who's like, you must be in virtual reality in order to talk to your colleagues. So I really think this is like we're like finally now really on the cusp of widespread adoption. But still it's still cusp-y, I feel like. Yeah, yeah, and everybody's queuing up the like, oh, Apple's probably going to announce their headset after the first of the year, which they may. And I look at this as as Meta saying, we're not in that game. We're not in the consumer facing game. We want consumers to be impressed by our technology. So we talked very consumer-y about this, but they were talking to CEOs. They had Sachin Adele from Microsoft on. They had the CEO of Accenture, Julie Sweet. They were bringing in the big guns to say, hey, serious business people, this is for you. And those are the people willing to pay that price willing to settle for some of those limitations because it does the thing they need. And and and so you're right. I think in a couple of generations, this will be a more appealing to the rest of us. Yeah. Meta also spent some time talking about their roadmap, which they always do. In this case, they were talking about neural interface hardware that uses electromyography. So it reads the muscles in your wrists, even very small movements to control software. And Meta is using some machine learning to adapt control to each user's movements. They showed it being trained where you're like almost just thinking about moving your hand, not even moving it much. And it could still learn to control objects on a screen that way. They also showed off using neural radiance fields to scan physical objects and turn them into finely detailed virtual objects. They did a stuffed animal. So and you could see the hairs. It was it was impressive. Inverse rendering can make an object that responds dynamically to lighting and motion. So not as detailed looking as the neural radiance. But if you drop it, it'll act like the object that was scanned. And finally, they mentioned realistic human avatars in the lab. They can do photorealistic 3D head and shoulder avatars with a scan from a phone. That's not available for the rest of us yet because of the processing time involved. But they can do it. They could pull it off. We are going to get more expressions and things in messenger and WhatsApp avatars, but that's more along the lines of what Apple's doing in FaceTime. So that's table stakes at this point. Any of this stuff, light your hair on fire? I hope not. Not really. I mean, I'm intrigued by all of it. The neural radiance fields are really exciting for me. I like the idea of being able to scan an object and bring it into virtual reality. Although there is the dark side of, are you scanning the interior of your home and sending it up to the MetaCloud? And so who knows, who has access to that information about all of the objects in your personal life that you're scanning? So I'll be interested to see how it unfolds. Yeah, yeah, neural interface hardware, great. Love the detail. Sure. Service that uses neural interface hardware can't wait to find out more about your privacy policy. Exactly. What is the click-through agreement going to be? Exactly, yeah. All right, folks, if you have a thought about this or anything we talk about on the show, our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Please send us an email. Scientists at MIT developed an underwater camera that can take color photos and send images wirelessly through the water without needing a battery. Doesn't use a battery. Instead, it uses piezoelectric transducers that convert sound waves that travel through the water. So it could be a passing boat, could be a passing fish, into electricity. A receiver then sends sound to the camera up to 40 meters away, and the camera either reflects the sound back or does not to encode the images as ones or zeros. So the transmission is done by sound wave as well. This is a very small example of using the ocean's vast amount of water to enable energy efficiency and climate monitoring. But as you might already be thinking, there are big ways to do this, too. Like waves, like huge waves in the ocean and wave energy conversion. We've talked about that a couple of times on the show. That's all part of what the US Department of Energy's Water Power Technology Office is calling the blue economy. So let's start there, Annalee, because I know you've been talking to folks about this and covering this. What is the blue economy? Yeah, so I got really interested in this last summer because Atlas Obscura sent me up to Oregon State in Corvallis to look at the wave research lab there, which is a fantastic facility where a lot of people are doing this research. And the blue economy kind of is a stepchild of the Green New Deal. It has some of the same ideas. It's the notion is to take a form of renewable energy and make it economically realistic. Like how do we use this wonderful form of free energy, carbon neutral, carbon negative, and turn it into money and into jobs? So the blue economy describes a lot of stuff, like the camera that you were just talking about, would totally fit into it. It's a whole ecosystem of technologies and jobs. But understandably, a huge amount of the money that's being allocated is looking specifically at wave energy converters or WACS. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy gave $25 million for wave energy research. There's a really exciting facility that's being built in Oregon in concert with Oregon State that's called the Pacific Marine Energy Center Test Site. I just have to mention this because I'm so excited about it. It's literally the first real test site for wave energy converters where you and your research team, whether it's privately funded or government funded, can bring your wave energy converter out there, plug it into their system. And they've got several bays set up where you can send that energy back to shore and see the whole system at work. So you don't have to build everything the way that everybody has had to up to now. You can just take your time. Oh, that's so cool. I love it. Yeah. So it's literally a giant lab off the coast of Oregon, off the coast of Newport, Oregon. So I hope once they set it up there in the process that I'll be able to go out there and visit because it just sounds fantastic. So all of this stuff is very kind of mid-stage development. There's a lot of devices. But the testing so far has been difficult to do. It's been really piecemeal. And the hope is that in the next 20 years, we can start to really bring it online. Now, I know there's a lot of different ways this can work. But in general, how does wave energy conversion happen? What does that do for us? Yeah, so it's kind of like windmill or any number of other types of energy that convert motion into energy. And in the case of waves, there are many different motions. I'm going to sound silly. But the motion of the ocean is variable. And waves in different areas behave in different ways. They move up and down. They go side to side. They're oscillating. So you're taking the energy from that oscillation. And there's a number of different models for how the device will look that captures that energy. So some look kind of like a pump. And they kind of ride up and down on the surface of the water. I'm sorry. I'm going to make this hand motion. But they have a weight on the bottom. And they're creating basically hydraulic energy through bouncing up and down. Other types of wave energy converters look kind of like a snake on the surface of the water. And they're kind of flowing back and forth. And they're converting that into energy. There's a few that look like big paddles that are connected to kind of dams so that they're kind of bouncing on top of the water and going back and forth. And the idea is that it's not like the Betamax versus VCR wars where you are going to zoom in on one type, right? And everybody will throw away their Betamax versions. It's the HDDVD of wave energy. Or like Laserdisc versus DVD or whatever. So we have to have all those different types of WEX because there's so many different types of waves and so many different places where we want to deploy these. So the hope is that eventually 10% to 20% of the US energy grid will be powered by these different kinds of devices. Some of them can power a city. Some might be small enough to just power a small town. One of the researchers I talked to, John Nguyen, he grew up in Vietnam and he got the idea to do what he calls his twin power WEX to power small coastal communities in countries that just don't have a reliable energy grid. So you could power your fishing village with one of these small, easy to build, cheap WEX. So there's the promise of bringing power very, very cheaply to lots of places that right now maybe only get electricity a couple of days a week. Yeah, I feel like the good old fashioned water wheel was sort of the original version of this. It required a certain motion of water to work and now we're figuring out how to harness different motions out there, different movements. It's not just linear, it's oscillation as a lot of the scientists will say. And so it is, as I said, it's in its nascent stages and there's a lot of limitations that we have to overcome. Partly, there's the limitation of how do you bring that power from the device to the land, which is why we have the Pacific Marine Energy Center helping people to kind of have an infrastructure in place to imagine how they would do that. But also there's the problem of corrosion. You need to have materials that aren't gonna just fall apart after five years or just get so rusted that they're not usable. There's also the question of how does this affect marine life? We already know that shipping has really affected whale populations in a terrible way. Coral reefs are in trouble. We don't wanna add another thing to the ocean that's gonna harm the life that's there. So these are all questions that we need to answer before we can just put hundreds of these off the coast of California or in Boston Harbor or wherever we're gonna put them. The question on this sort of thing is always how soon? How far away are we? Do we have a sense of how long before this would be making a material effect on our everyday lives? Yeah, I mean, the best estimates right now are about 20 years. Before you would see something that was like, as you said, that would affect your life as a consumer. So how is this gonna affect your energy bill, for example? I think we're gonna be seeing a lot of large scale experiments in 10 years. You're gonna start to see cities and towns saying, all right, let's test this out. Let's see if we can bring some of our power in from Wex in the same way that people are now experimenting with wind power. So I think that it'll be up to wind power level pretty soon. And as long as we can start finding materials that work, this could be a huge boon. Yeah, the key when I look at this for myself is, are we actually making progress? Or is it like nuclear fusion? It's just 10 years away. It'll always be 10 years away, right? And it feels like we're actually making progress on this and there's a goal in sight. Even if it's 10 years, doesn't have to be instant as long as we're making progress towards that. We're definitely making progress. When I was at the Wave Research Lab at Oregon State, I saw several different models that were being tested, prototypes and they are all quite different. They all are from very robust research labs that have been honing their designs over years at this point. And yeah, I mean, it's happening. A lot of the barriers are going to be political ones. The technology is pretty much there. It's now, how do we integrate it into our electrical grids and how do we get buy-in from governments and things like that? Yeah, it's always the people part of the equation and then the dongle. You need giant dongles. Yes, the dongle to connect to the shore. Make sure it doesn't get completely corroded in the water and isn't harming seabirds and things like that. So there's a lot of questions that I think we will be answering in the next 10 years as we get more of these test sites coming up. The fact that there's a lab developed in the ocean, that's very encouraging for me. I love that. It's so cool. And like I said, the Wave Research Lab at Oregon State, they have these enormous basins there, cement basins full of water that you can rig up to create every type of wave you might imagine. And so that's why it's such an important testing center because people can say like, well, what if we're getting waves from these two directions? Or what if it's chaotic waves and they have huge paddles that can churn the water in like every different configuration? They can even create tsunamis if you want. Wow. Wow, that looks great, yeah. Super cool. Well, folks, it's always good to have a worthy warning and make you think about something. And if you're thinking about traveling, especially with the holidays coming up, you might want to listen to Chris Christensen who's sharing one more thing to be mindful of when you travel. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. If I told you there was an industry that did most of their booking online was one of the most expensive things that people bought had a lot of turnover and personnel in the last couple years and had notoriously outdated technology. You might suspect that industry was a target for cyber criminals and that is true. According to a recent study, the travel industry has had a rise in digital fraud attempts of 155.9% in the last year. Criminals tend to target the easier targets and sometimes that is smaller hotel chains who don't have great infrastructure. There's not a lot that you can do about it except protect yourself when you're traveling with a VPN but it is another stress on the travel industry these days. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Not a fun one this time, but an important one. Thank you, Chris. And thank you, Annalie Newitz. I know you've got a novel coming out in January. You've got all kinds of cool stuff going on like this wave report. Where should folks go to follow what you do? Well, you can always find me on Twitter. I'm at Annalie N on Twitter and I have a website at Annalie Newitz which annalienewitz.com. So you can find out where I'll be. I'll be on book tour in late January and early February next year. Fantastic, go do it, folks. Also a big thanks to our brand new bosses over the long weekend. We got Christopher, Matthew and Ryan backing us on Patreon. The triumphant trio. Thank you, Christopher, Matthew and Ryan for backing us at patreon.com slash DTNS. And now you too will be able to stick around and find out what else Annalie and I and Roger and Amos talk about on good day internet. So stick around for that. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. More about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow talking about the RTX 4090 and Microsoft Surface Event with Scott Johnson and Will Smith. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.