 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you, including Michelle Sergio, Kirk Stephenson, Miranda Janell, and new patrons, Poststroke, Bernardo and Michael. Welcome everybody. Everybody say hello to the patrons. On this episode of DTNS Mixed Reality Headsets move into the OR and it's not just the Apple Vision Pro. MetaSmart glasses can recognize landmarks and a company to help you deal with the complex legalities around death. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 12th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House. And a big happy birthday to my mother today. I'm Sarah Lee. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Happy birthday, Sarah's mom. Happy birthday. All right, let's start with the quick hits there. Now I'm supposed to play. Apple announced that starting later this spring, some developers will be able to distribute apps directly from a website in the EU. The new feature will be part of a software update that gives developers a way to distribute iOS apps without needing a separate app store as long as they follow Apple's rules and developer guidelines. The company says apps offered through web distribution must meet a notarization requirements to protect platform into integrity like all iOS apps and can only be installed from a website domain that the developer has registered in App Store Connect. Google, Apple, and Mozilla's browser engines along with Microsoft have collaborated for years on a joint browser benchmark called Speedometer. But since it's not dramatic and doesn't involve infighting or hating tech companies, you probably haven't heard of it. The group just released Speedometer 3.0, which adds a wider variety of workloads and improves calculations and results for these browser benchmarks. Simulated workloads now include a to-do app, complex web page, news sites, charts, apps and dashboards, as well as code editors. The new all electric Porsche Taycon Turbo GT has over 1000 horsepower and can go zero to 60 miles per hour in 2.1 seconds. That makes it the fastest road legal Porsche of all time. The company revealed it Monday, noting that a pre-series model driven by Lars Kern beat Tesla's Model S Plaid Record Lap by 18 seconds. The Tesla Plaid S can still go zero to 60 faster at 1.99 seconds, though. Tesla and Porsche have been in a bit of a back and forth for title of fastest EV since back in 2019. A lot of non-game developers use the Unreal Engine for things like movies, TV shows, even car information systems. So Epic is changing the licensing model for Unreal Engine for non-game users. If you're a game developer, it's staying the way it was. If you're not using it for a game, you pay a per seat model license of $1850 per year. Students, educators, hobbyists and companies that make less than a million dollars are exempt from that fee. Apple has started testing a new AI powered ad product with a small group of advertisers that automatically decides where to place ads within its app store. Business Insider sources say that the new product is similar to Google's Performance Max and Meta's Advantage Plus and Apple has told advertisers it is conducting the test in an effort to learn how it can improve the performance of its Apple search ads. Apple's new tool appears to be limited to placements within the app store, but advertising experts say it could logically follow that Apple would eventually expand it to other properties. Yeah, logic can go lots places. Who knows what they'll do. Meta's CTO, Brian Bosworth wrote on threads that the beta update to software for Ray Bands Meta glasses has updated the visual search feature to be able to recognize landmarks and explain them. His examples include the Golden Gate Bridge and Coat Tower in San Francisco. In those cases, in addition to telling you what it is, they could include some extra information like here's why the Golden Gate Bridge is international orange or this is why Coat Tower was built. On Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg posted a video of himself asking the glasses questions about landmarks in Montana and one where he asked it to explain how snow is made and whether horses feel cold in the snow. This is similar to Google Lens and the fact that Zuckerberg keeps starting with Look and tell me what that landmark is indicates you probably need to learn a formula, not just speak in natural language, but still cool demo. Is it really useful though, Sarah? Well, I mean, having a wake word of sorts, I don't I don't think it's that weird. But that I don't know. I don't know how I'll just not just that part of it. I mean, the whole thing like, okay, I can I can put on here. I have my first gen Ray Band. They look pretty normal, right? And I can say like, Yeah, yeah. Oh, Golden Gate Bridge. What what is that bridge over there? Tell me about it. And it tells me about it. That's a thing that I feel like I could go out and do on purpose because these glasses do it. But how often have you been walking around and saying, gosh, really wish I had something that could tell me what that landmark is? Yeah, I mean, if the glasses were marketed as like, this is, you know, your new vacation helper, then that would be one thing because people go, Oh, yeah, so when I'm on vacation, I can look at a bridge or, you know, a church or whatever, and get a little bit more information about that. That's fun. You know, that's kind of museum tour stuff. And you have other options for things like that. But in an everyday use case, I don't know. I don't know how often I need context. And you know, maybe because I'm not wearing the glasses, I'm not thinking about it as much. But it's like, I've got Apple's assistant, you know, that's either, you know, accessible from my earbuds or certainly my phone or my watch. And that's something that I use occasionally, occasionally. But this feels like that. This feels like, okay, yeah, sure. That's that's that's something that you would need every so often. Nice to have in your back pocket or on your eyes in this case. But otherwise, I think it just they're just sunglasses most of the time. I or not even sunglasses or just glasses. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I think I'm being a little unfair. If I say like, Okay, but how often do I really need to look at a landmark? Yes, if I'm going on vacation, maybe I'll remember to take these glasses and have it tell me what's around me, maybe like, but but how compelling is that? And I'm being unfair because yeah, the glasses do other things, they can play music, they can take pictures, they can record video. So this new feature is just a new feature. It's not what the entire marketing plan of glasses is. It's not what they're totally useful for. But I do feel like they're making a bigger deal out of this because it's impressive that it can do it. But it's something that like the average wearer of these glasses, this the utility of it is very small. Like it's not worthless, but it's it's very small. And and and and so I'm like, Okay, so it can do that. That's cool. What else can it recognize? Like the one where he asked about snow, it's not like he needed to be looking at snow to ask it how snow is formed, right? He could have been looking at anything. So that's a bit of a cheat. Well, also, let me ask you this, Tom. So you've had these these glasses, these the gen one Ray Vans for a couple years now. And you don't wear them on a daily basis. Why aren't why aren't they your primary just I wear? I sort of forget that I have them. But that just you know, that brings up the question, well, why do you forget that you have them? When when I pick up my glasses, I just put the glasses on, right? And now I can see and I can read and all of that. I see that. But you know what I mean, these I put them on and I think, Okay, they're charged. Are they charged? I need to did they connect to my phone? Okay, and now I have to remember like, How do I tap? And I guess if I got in the habit, that wouldn't be that big of a deal. But it's more of a cognitive burden to put them on, right? And I, I would get in the habit where that wouldn't be as much of a cognitive burden. If I had a use that I relied on them for. And I thought, Oh, well, I don't I don't want to live without that. So you know, I'll get in the habit that that has happened with my phone has happened with my watch. Those are more of a cognitive burden to remember to charge and all that. But they're just I haven't quite got the use case that makes me go Yeah, I must always grab these in the morning because I'm going to want to use them throughout the day. And I guess that's why I'm having this reaction to the landmarks, right? It's like, how many times during a normal day, I'm going to be like, Oh, tell me about that building over there. And then how often is it going to know? Because no, every single building. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to be overly cynical about this either, because it's like, if it's cool, it's cool. You know, sure, you're not doing it four times a day, necessarily, but you can do it when you need to. That's cool. But here we are being like, well, hold on, how many landmarks are we even looking at on a regular basis? Well, I mean, nobody's looking at that many probably, or, you know, it tells you what it is once and then you know, you go on with your life. But but the the description you gave about the glasses just being, it's just a little bit more complicated to, you know, fumble, find the glasses in the morning. Okay, now I can see, let's make some coffee. It's like these glasses, they need, they need a little bit more help. But you could also say that about, you know, a lot of earbuds, like my my AirPods, do all sorts of things besides just play audio. But if I don't treat them well, and make sure that they're charged, you know, and have everything in the right place, they're worthless to me. Whereas, you know, old earbuds that just plugged on into my phone, all I had to worry about was my phone being charged. But you adapt. So I still think I think the glasses stuff, I don't know, besides you, and I know part of this is because you're interested in part of it is, you know, just for the purposes of reviewing technology, I don't know anybody who's wearing these on a regular basis. I think they look pretty good. If you and I went out to lunch, I don't even know that I would, I mean, I would know because I know you but I don't I don't think it would raise any flags like Oh, are those like special AR glasses? They look normal. Yeah, they do look normal. And to be honest, I think there's something to this product, whether it's from Metta or Luxotica or somebody else. I think there's something there. I just don't think it's there yet. And I think my reaction to this story is that I saw it very prominent on a lot of my my signals out there was high up on Google News, high up on tech meme. And I'm like, I don't know, this doesn't seem like it's worth that much attention. Like yeah, the glasses are great. This isn't the thing that's making them great. That's yeah, it's a perk. It's a perk. Well, a startup called Empathy says it now has 40 million people using its platform, which has a mission to redefine bereavement care. Empathy's platform uses both AI and human guides to help people who are navigating the death of a loved one, a friend, a family member from counseling services to writing an obituary to services that help automate shutting down cloud and subscription services that the person may have had multiple subscriptions to, as well as helping with settling more complex financial affairs, if that also applies. Empathy was founded in Israel, launched in the US market in 2021, which is sort of impossible to note without also noting that that was still peak COVID time. A lot of people were thinking about things like this, perhaps more than they were in the past. Empathy primarily sells services in partnership with insurance companies and employers, which makes sense. And the AI aspect includes some practical things like being able to shut down a bank account, writing a eulogy, or at least getting you started on that path. Yeah, my mom died in May, and we had to do a lot of this stuff on our own. You know, I I wrote the obituary and found the picture on my phone. My my sister did all of the insurance company stuff. And let me tell you, I was happy to let her do it. I'm thankful that she was willing to do it because it was a mess. It was like trying to find my mom's paperwork and then trying to identify whether she had kept up the premium. And if she hadn't kept up the premium, which was the case in a couple of places, could we still get a payment? And then who had to sign what? It was me and my brother and my sister. And yeah, it was it was complex, wasn't undoable. But it was complex. And it's something that you're trying to do at a time when you're very sad. Yes. So I love the concept here of a tool that tries to ease that. I am a little nervous about this being provided in partnership with an insurance company, because you know, part of the deal is like making sure that everything is is done independently of the insurance company's interests. But okay, like maybe maybe it's a third party provided tool, etc. Having having the grieving therapy process part of this, if anyone hasn't had a loved one die recently, that's at least in the United States more and more common that you know, the funeral home will even hand you a thing and say, Hey, we provide therapy. So including that seems perfectly, perfectly legitimate and perfectly normal here. And it's kind of what I thought empathy did when I first read about this today. So I am curious how reliable it is. Because it's not out of the concept that a machine would be able to handle all the intricacies of this. In fact, these these generative models are very good at that sort of complex problem. But they're also not 100%. And this is something you need to work 100%, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When my dad died, which is 2004. So quite a while ago now. I remember sitting with my mom at the funeral home. And, you know, the very nice person sitting across the table from us was like, Okay, and you're going to put something in the local paper, like a little bit. And we were like, Oh, yeah, yeah, we want to do that. And she's like, What do you want it to say? Like, in like the next five minutes, we were like, Okay, should we say that? Okay, should we say that? Oh, no, don't forget the aunt and uncle, you know, it was like, it was, it was, should we mention this? Should we not mention that? It was just, we had never considered that, even though this was something that we were, you know, gearing up for for years really, you know, before we before that moment. And yet there were lots of little details in and of themselves, small details, but collectively, were a huge burden, particularly on my mother, who, you know, had had to just figure out all sorts of stuff, life insurance, big part of it. And, you know, I think your mileage is going to vary because everyone's situation is different, family dynamics, all of that stuff. I don't personally know any anyone who has used empathy. It's kind of one of those tools that you never want to need. But if it works well, you know, it's it would, I liken this to if you, if you have someone close to you who has, who has passed away and there are a lot of details, you almost want to just hire somebody for a month, like, I need to get some affairs in order. And this feels like if that is comparable to something like that to help get the folks who are still around feel less overwhelmed, pretty cool. And I think the AI part of it, especially when it comes to shutting down cloud services, stuff like that, that those are the sorts of details that you're never going to remember all that stuff. Or maybe you just didn't even know about it ahead of time. You know, do you want the credit card bill to keep charging, you know, whoever has to take that over? Of course not. So, yeah, it's it's a lot of little detail stuff that I think is, I think is interesting. In my experience, when my father in law died two years ago, the biggest issue was financial and not just paying for stuff. We covered that but rather what Sarah was alluding to its credit card debt, any outstanding debts that he had claims on his account, his bank account, and making sure that that his his retirement account passed on to pass on his wife and my and her sister in law in accordance with the beneficiary form. But there are all sorts of things in between there. It was getting a power of attorney form while he was still alive. And then making sure we had some way of managing his finances, whether say, OK, we're going to pay this while he was still alive, but incapable of responding on his own, right? So he had not yet passed, but he was not in the condition to say, you know, pay this. Yes or no. Move that. Yes or no to any of that. So we needed to take that upon ourselves. Probate if you don't have a trust, even if you have a will, you have to go through probate. That is a multi year process. And it's something that you will need guidance with unless you find a really amazing lawyer to help you through this process. I'm curious to know if if empathy is a very long, like, is it a year or two years? Because oftentimes things crop up that you are not aware of, whether it's like, I still can't even close his his old bank account on the East Coast, because they want someone to physically walk in there with a death certificate and then answer all their questions physically there, which is, you know, very it's asking a lot when you live on the other side of the country. Exactly. And so there are all these things that are that need to be taken care of. If they can help you navigate and in some cases be your stand in to do some of that, your advocate, that would be amazing. Yeah, it does feel like this is this is more of a navigation than a stand in in most of the cases. But, you know, even things like probate, I mean, I didn't know the first thing about probate other than you had to go through it. What's involved? You have to go to court. How often do I have to go to court? Turns out, at least for me, the lawyer can just send it in and then show up one day, talk about it and then wait for the next court hearing. Very long process, very long. Well, that's one of the things they have up on the website. Navigating probate, understand it and if you can avoid it. So yeah, if they can, they can help you avoid that process in some cases. And it does look like that's what this tool does is it's a it's a fancy checklist basically of like, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Oh, you have this. Let me ask you some questions and get things prepared. I don't think it's doing things for you in a lot of cases. You're probably still going to need a lawyer for a lot of the things Roger's talking about. But it is going to smooth it along at a time when when the last thing you want to think about is like, what are all the things I have to think about? And I think that that in and of itself is is a pretty useful service. It kind of reminds me like of a tax tool, like a turbo tax, you know, where it's sort of like, hey, are we all tax experts? No. And you know, I want to do everything right. But sometimes I need my hand, you know, a little hand holding, I might get into a situation where it's like, yeah, I actually need to, you know, I need more of like a human who has a really good track record here, which of course is still an option. But this this feels like, yes, a bit of a checklist, but something that can help you navigate through things or even just know about them, you know, I think a lot of people out there is like, well, what's probate? I mean, I mean, they offer sorry. I was just pointing Ernesto is saying, do you have to give empathy access to your accounts for it to close them? Like that, that those are important things, because I think it can help you know what to do. But whether it actually goes and does them, then you have to be more comfortable like, okay, I'm going to give access to a passwords and things like that, which you may not even have, right? Yeah. And they do offer a living breathing person to help you guide you through the process. So it's not all you go through the website and and it's just an AI telling you what to do. Yeah. Well, folks, we're not recommending empathy, we're just pointing out that there's a service like this that that exists and kind of, you know, looking at the idea of it, because it's something a little bit new, not new that someone would help you with this sort of thing, but new as a use of technology and AI and things like that. What else do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot Reddit dot com. An article at the Metro in UK talks about a nurse using an Apple Vision Pro during spinal surgery to identify instruments and processes as a double check on accuracy among the scrub nurses job is to prepare, provide and keep track of surgical instruments and equipment. So that's who was wearing it. One of the scrub nurses whose job is to look at needles and swabs and microscopes and lasers, etc. They were wearing this so that they could see the surgical plan. They took advantage of virtual screens during the surgery at Cromwell Hospital in London. The surgeon, Dr. Syed Aftab had never worked with that particular scrub nurse before, but said the access that they had to information made it feel like he had worked with that nurse for 10 years. A month ago, Dr. Robert Masson, who is a neurosurgeon here in the US, brought an Apple Vision Pro into his operating room with similar effect and similar praise. Both these surgeons were performing spinal surgeries and both used software from a company called XX that is spelled E X E X. On Monday, Apple highlighted a bunch of other medical apps for the Vision Pro for multiple developers. Surgeons using something called Strikers Mako Smart Robotics to assist in a knee surgery were using Strikers app built for the Apple Vision Pro now and that let surgeons visualize and review the surgery before they performed it so they could better prepare for what was going to happen. Apparently Boston Children's Hospital is using it to train nurses on new medical equipment with some software from a company called Serino Health. This isn't new with the Apple Vision Pro. I'd forgive you for believing that when you see all these headlines coming out. Microsoft's HoloLens and Meta's Quest Pro have had similar demonstrations assisting surgeries and they got their headlines when those happened. But it hasn't become commonplace. It's not like now all the doctors use the MetaQuest Pro. So again, it's a similar question what we were talking about with the with the Meta smart glasses earlier. Is this just an impressive demo? Even with the Apple Vision Pro like or or are we finally seeing the Apple Halo effect? We're like, OK, yes, now hospitals and medical practices are going to start to make more use of this. I mean, I think in this situation, you explain Tom where the a nurse and a doctor were working together for the first time, but this this bridged some sort of gap that made them both just feel more comfortable. And again, when you're talking about spinal surgery, you want them to feel like a team. I think that's great. That is not going to happen all that often. If the if this doctor and this nurse continue to work together, maybe having that augmented layer won't be as necessary anymore, you know, in that specific situation. But it feels like the medical field is is the place for a lot of this stuff. You know, some of some of these companies, you might say, I don't I've never heard of these apps. Well, yeah, because, you know, you don't you're on a surgeon, but they exist. And you know, this is an expensive device. But if it's helping doctors in extremely, extremely important scenarios, you know, life or death, you know, or, you know, just keeping people as healthy as possible. That is a great use case. Now, that's not going to sell 5 million vision pros. There's, you know, that's only a small subset of people who say like, yes, I've got the use case for you. Okay, well, the rest of us aren't, you know, in in doing surgery all the time. So so that doesn't really apply to us. But it does make this feel like, and I don't want to say that the because I'm a huge fan of the MetaQuest, but the MetaQuest to me is like, I had fun, you know, I do like my gaming stuff and my exercise apps. And there are some definitely some use cases where other augmented reality or virtual reality platforms beside the Vision Pro have proved to be extremely helpful in serious situations like this. But the Vision Pro has touted itself as like, this is a serious, this is a serious device, serious hardware, serious, serious software under the hood. And yeah, these stories lend credence to that. I think this is just one example of what Apple needs to do to make the Vision Pro a success. Obviously, they're not going to make all their money selling them to hospitals. And in fact, one of the reasons you haven't seen the Quest Pro, the HoloLens is in a different situation because it's kind of being phased out. But you haven't seen the Quest Pro more often because it's expensive. And granted, this price isn't that big compared to other medical expenses. But you know, if you got to make sure you're going to get your value out of it. So it may be that hospitals look at it and say, yeah, great, I'm glad it sped things up and made it feel like the nurse was more familiar. I don't know where the return is on that yet. However, if they can, and the Boston Children's Hospital using it to train nurses as an example of somebody taking a bet on it, then that's the kind of thing Apple needs to do, right? Like Apple needs this to be seen as an entertainment device by the user at home who might want to pick it up if they have disposable income for it, right? And be like, OK, I'm going to I'm going to watch movies on it. I'm going to maybe do some fun things on it. But then they need the medical practitioners to look at it as a training device. They need other enterprises to look at it as a productivity device, as a business device, as a serious device, like you were talking about, Sarah. So it's it, I feel like this is the strategy or a part of the strategy that Apple needs to have for the the first couple of years. They're they're not going to sell this as a consumer device alone for the first couple of years, but they can sell enough of them into the enterprise with use cases like this. This is just one of those kinds of enterprise use cases. Yeah, agreed. And ironically, I mean, I and I've said on the show before, as a as a consumption device, it's awesome. It's a very expensive one, though. So, you know, it's it's great to have. I mean, I am not a medical professional. So pretty much nothing that we talked about is something that I can try my own. Please do not have me do your back surgery, people, even if I ask you nicely. But but yeah, this is it's it's it is proof of the concept of this being more than a fun novelty. It is. Hey, here, here's a very specific scenario where medical professionals said, yes, this was great. This was helpful. So that's that's a win. And this kind of software is used on other platforms, too. A lot of the software even started on iPhones and is moving to the Vision Pro. Others are cross platform across to Android. And I think some of them even work on the Quest Pro as well. So it's it's the beginning of something possibly and I'm interested to see if it grows. And I'll be I'll be looking for stories of of hospitals using this that kind of fall off the radar because this got pushed by Apple doing a press release, right? And so that that that made it burst onto the scene. The ongoing use of it won't be covered as closely. So I'll try to keep my eye out for stuff like that. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Dan, who says awesome show Monday. Love to see Shannon on the show as well. She's such an upbeat person. Dan says, I do agree with two of her issues with handheld gaming, weight and battery life. Those will get better over time, but I love playing on my switch and it's my choice of portable gaming. Good show as always. You never fail to impress. Oh, that's very nice. Yeah, I'm glad we enjoy having Shannon on as much as possible. I wish I wish she didn't have so many other awesome things going on in some ways because we can never work. But I'm glad that she has so many awesome things going on. Patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet with the news that Tiktok has some code indicating it's making a photo app, little Instagram clone. I have a theory about how the landscape for social media and content creation has changed and YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok and to some extent Snapchat occupy a new place in the tech landscape. I'm going to wrap our brains around that. You can catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow talking about why the best selling pre-order title for the PS5 is an Xbox game with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.