 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Reid Fischler. Coming up on DTNS, should you take your e-commerce problems to Crab Court? Plus Meta's prototype VR headsets of the future and a big advancements in tech for 6G cell service. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, June 21st, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Studio Colorado, I'm Shannon Morse. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to talk about Crab Court. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Google dropped its appeal on a French $592 million antitrust fine. France's competition regulator issued the fine in July of 2021 for Google's abusive negotiation practices with publishers on payments for content reuse. As part of the settlement, for at least the next five years, Google agreed to good faith negotiating with news publishers on content reuse payments, like offering a compensation proposal within three months of negotiations and agreeing for an arbitration tribunal to settle disputes. The terms also mean that publishers aren't bound by previous deals inked with Google and are free to negotiate under this new framework. The US imposed sanctions on Chinese tech companies over the last few years, most prominently probably heard about the ones on Huawei. It involved restricting the kinds of chips that could be imported for Huawei and other companies to use. That has spurred China to invest in its domestic chip manufacturing. And Bloomberg results that 19 of the 20 fastest growing chip industry firms over the past year are now in China. A year ago, that number was eight out of 20. Revenue for those fast growing Chinese chip companies is also growing faster than companies like ASML or TSMC. With total sales from Chinese chip makers rising 18% in 2021 and even established companies like SMIC in China, because you might think, well, the new companies, of course, their percentage rises are huge. They're coming from nothing. SMIC reported a 67% surge in quarterly sales and it definitely was not coming from nothing. The Chinese government is investing billions of dollars into its domestic chip companies and the products are decent. Apple apparently considered using Yangtze memory technologies flash memory on the iPhone. Speaking of Apple, the company shared technical details on a feature in both iOS and iPad OS 16 called automatic verification. When enabled, this would automatically and privately verify a device and Apple ID through iCloud, presenting a private access token to a site rather than using a CAPTCHA. So CAPTCHA haters rejoice or potentially. Cloudflare and Fastly announced support for private access tokens already. And Apple also said that Mac OS Ventura supports the feature as well. Microsoft hasn't suffered the same number of Xbox shortages that Sony has for PS5, but Microsoft has confirmed there is now a shortage of Xbox controllers. Microsoft says it's working as fast as possible to improve the supply. Meanwhile, Microsoft also is pulling public access to several of its Azure face facial analysis tools. That includes one that attempts to read emotions. Microsoft will also retire Azure faces attempts to identify attributes such as gender, age, smile, facial hair, hair and makeup. New customers will lose access right away and existing customers lose access June 30th. Microsoft will continue to use the technology in its own seeing AI machine vision aid. Well, whatever this metaverse ends up being, and we still don't really know. Many hope it will be an open place where companies products can interoperate with each other rather than a series of sold lands tied to certain manufacturers hardware. So to further the end of openness, several companies have joined up to form the metaverse standards form. Amonging the founding members are NVIDIA, Microsoft, Wayfair, Ikea, Adobe, Alibaba, Epic Games, Huawei, Qualcomm, Sony and Meta to name a few. The organization is open to any member at no cost. So Apple and Google can speak seriously and I wonder if they knew about this. Oh, I bet they knew. I'm curious when Google usually joins these standards organizations. I'm curious why they did not in this case or if they will shortly. Maybe they're just trying to get around to it. Apple doesn't surprise me at all. They're often late to these standards organizations, but maybe they'll eventually join in. And I hope they do because we are starting to get more little things from that metaist of all metaverse wannabe companies, Meta. Yeah, we really, we really are. So the idea of the metaverse, you know, you can't can't really go any farther than the company that renamed itself meta. That is a company that really cares about it. Hence the name continues to sign up big brands to open up virtual spaces in horizon worlds, joining retail company coach, you know, coach handbags, make a lot of shoes, you know, that high end brand. Metaverse is Fender musical instruments with a guitar shaped island called the Fender Strativerse and the BMW group with its mini Cooper oriented mini verse. So yes, brands are in the metaverse. They are alive and well. The new horizon worlds apps were announced at can lions event and are available to all US and Canada meta quest to users, but Meta also wants you to focus on the hardware that will access the metaverse in the future. At around table last week, virtual roundtable meta showed off several VR headset prototypes and talked about the company's goal of developing one that will pass a visual Turing test. That's one where the virtual display is indistinguishable from the real world. Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, this roundtable is was was for particular reporters. And and they all seem to get the same presentation at the same time Meta gave four basic com concepts to achieve their goals they want high resolution. So you should be able to experience 2020 vision without your glasses. Variable focal depth and eye tracking, so that as your eyes focus on far away objects they come into focus naturally the eye tracking can tell what your eye is doing and change the focus of the screen to adapt. That is something that's shown off before in its half dome prototypes. Number three fix optical distortions caused by lenses and number four implement HDR, which will give you realistic brightness shadows and color depth. So let's run through the prototypes. There's four prototypes here I think the first is a way to achieve these goals with hollow cake to. I know you're like I barely even knew hollow cake one well welcome to hollow cake to it's the thinnest VR headset meta has made. And uses thin holographic lenses. The holographic lenses use optical folding to polarize the light so that a nearly flat panel can be used instead of a thick lens which has to focus the light through the thick lens. If Meta can develop a self contained laser light source, it could make hollow cakes as flat as a pair of sunglasses. Shannon, does that sound good to you? Oh, absolutely it does Tom. See, the biggest thing for me when it comes to VR and I was an early adopter way back in the day when like Google came out with cardboard and we have Google Glass for AR. And then I currently have the very old Lenovo Mirage, I think it's called. So, but I haven't really gotten into it lately because they've been kind of uncomfortable. They're too big and bulky and I find myself not wanting to put them on my face just because if I'm going to use it for a long period of time like if I'm playing the Star Trek game for example, I don't want to because it's uncomfortable. So the fact that they're trying to make something that is a little bit more self contained a little bit thinner, hopefully, like sunglasses that is very intriguing to me because as a current glasses wearer. I feel like I would be adapted to that much more comfortably. Yeah, I mean, as a, as a, I'm a quest to user, formerly a original quest user. And one of the things that has has been, I mean, it doesn't really preclude me from playing anything and enjoying it but the way that the headset sort of falls, you know, comfortably onto my face no matter how I, how I, you know, put it on my face because it's heavy. It always ends up being like, ooh, my eyes can't quite see this. But you know, it has to be like, if it was just slightly different angle which the headset can't really do, then I could, I could see everything a lot more clearly. Obviously the lighter the headsets get, the better this is, you know, for, for, for the just the general being able to see what you're supposed to see in VR. But I also, I have found that the quest to is a little harder to secure on my head than the quest one and I think it's because it's lighter. So it bounces around a little bit more. Granted, I play a lot of, you know, exercise games. I'm jumping around. You're not necessarily always doing that in VR. You know, sometimes you're sitting quietly, you know, just kind of having some fun with your controllers. But, but this is, you know, these are all really interesting factors to, you know, to kind of see where this is going next. Yeah, it's interesting what you say about the quest two. It's too heavy to just sit on your face like a pair of sunglasses, but it's lighter than the quest one. So it doesn't benefit from its own momentum, which is sound like what you were getting with the quest one. Yeah, at least, at least with me. Yeah, that's definitely benefactor. It feels like holocake two would fix that because it would it wants to be super thin. Now these these actually look more like a headset than the holocake one holocake one really did look like a pair of glasses. But what you really want out of VR besides weight is resolution butterscotch is the next prototype will look at it cuts the field of view roughly in half from 110 degrees down to about 55 or so. So this is a prototype that's obviously not an acceptable field of view for shipping product but in order to do the reason it does that is to achieve retinal resolution at 1832 by 1920 pixels per eye. That puts it at 55 pixels per field of view degree and meta itself defines retina as 60 so it's close to that. Varjo is a company that ships retina screens in its headsets there several thousand dollars. It has 64 pixels per eye in the pixels per field of view degree still butterscotch has enough to let the user read the bottom line of an eye test in VR. Which I can't even do right now with my current prescription glasses so if they can make that happen and I don't have to wear my glasses that I'm down. Yeah I've had a strange VR experience where I need to wear glasses I mean I wear contact lenses day to day but you know if I wasn't wearing these I would need to wear glasses. Glasses are usable in VR but you know there's a bulkiness it's a thing. So the idea that if you needed to have the highest resolution possible not everything is going to benefit from from the the smaller field of view certainly but I don't know if you're watching a movie or something like that. I mean then you kind of get into other situations where I can see myself you know walking onto a plane let's say I'm late everybody else is you know already seated and everybody's wearing their VR headsets because they're watching their movies. Well let's get brightness then because you you definitely need to not have like super dark even if you have high resolution the starburst HDR prototype that's the one that's going to make it look good. Not just high res but make it actually look good that's what HDR does can produce up to 20,000 nits of brightness compare that to your quest to 100 nits right now dang it almost hurts my eyes to think about that. Right now the amount of fans and wires it needs to operate means you can't actually wear the prototype you could just sort of hold it up to your eye with handles but it works so. Obviously not usable since you have to hold it up the entire time. It almost looks like a robot it's so cute. Yeah yeah and then I sorry go ahead Sarah. Well I was just going to say I'm like do we need 20,000 nits of brightness everything seems so nice. We need the capability for it so that we never feel like we were. That's what we said about standard deaf right like come on who really needs HD who cares about 4k it's like once you get it. Then some people did once you get it then you realize oh yeah okay I'm not gonna go back. And then they tie all these into a concept which they haven't built yet called mirror lake. So it gets the holographic lenses that are flat the HDR the mechanical verifocal lens and eye tracking and creepily it would use high res LCD displays with laser back lights. No that that's not the creepy part that's a good part high res LCD displays with laser back lights means flat but they're toying with the idea of external displays to show your eyes and facial expressions. That sounds weird but if I could customize it so that I could have like anime eyes. I would love that. It's not the first time they've toyed around with that concept so hopefully it gets better. Would the external display be for I don't know someone else who's observing you. Yeah to make you make you look natural as you as you're wearing these around. So you could wear them to the grocery store. I'm sure you'll look real natural someday. I kind of do love the idea of that it's like I mean how many players of sunglasses have I bought and lost. So here we go. This is the future. Just make a part of your your face. Finally Meta Reality Labs Chief Scientist Michael Abrash says the key to all this is making the tech thin and flat when you're talking about the holographic lenses and the polarization that lets you pack in more functions without adding weight and thickness. Meanwhile if you're wondering what they're actually going to ship Project Cambria is still on schedule they say to ship by the end of the year will offer eye tracking high resolution pass through cameras for VR and AR. And after Cambria comes out meta plans to develop two lines of headsets one that stays affordable like the quest and a high end professional grade line that they'll be shipping to enterprises and prosumers and companies and stuff like that. All right let's talk let's talk about G's Shannon. Okay let's talk about some G's. Now I know that 5G hasn't even rolled out very far enough to fulfill its ultimate low latency high capacity promise but the folks who make standards are already working on 6G as in golf. The goals are pretty predictable so there's it's going to be faster of course almost zero latency and 52 100 times the capacity of 5G. So to achieve the aims of 6G frequency bands those must pass 100 gigahertz a.k.a. Terahertz well above the current few gigahertz that 5G services use but the equipment used in telecommunications now can only resonate and absorb microwaves up to approximately 70 gigahertz so there's a slight problem there. So a new technology needs to be developed that can achieve the higher frequency resonance and we do have a promising development for that. Yeah scientists at Osaka Metropolitan University published a study in physical review letters about something called chiral spin solution lattice. You can just remember it by the abbreviation CSL that's that's how they tend to abbreviate. I know there's two S's there they just called CSL. The theory for using it to achieve broader frequency ranges than your typical ferromagnetic material your typical iron magnets has been around for a while. The theory has been there but it has not been observed in experiments till now. The scientists created a crystal of a material made of chromium niobium and sulfur. If you're into your chemical symbols it's CRNB3S6 the observed resonance in three models but two of them weren't that great. The Kittle mod or three modes the Kittle mode is similar to what you get in an iron magnet. It would require an impractically strong magnetic field to achieve higher bandwidth in CSL so that one's out. The second mode asymmetric mode didn't produce the desired effect either but the third the third called multiple resonance mode increased frequency when the magnetic field decreased that is a win. It means a weak magnetic field could boost frequencies above 100 gigahertz. It means a weak magnetic field. In other words you don't need as much power for this. First author on the paper Dr. Shimamoto noted that the resonance frequency can be controlled over a wide band up to the subterrahertz band. So if anyone asked you about 6G you can say well CSL seems to have solved the increased frequency band problem and then refer them to fizz.org or the paper itself for more details. 6G rollout isn't coming anytime soon it's currently targeted for 2030 but this was one of the obstacles to getting there and it looks like we have a great solution to it. I love it because it sounds like this would be more environmentally friendly than what we currently have because it's supposed to be using less energy. So in that fact alone I'm very intrigued to see how this would work in like actual real life scenarios. Yeah there's a lot of other advancements being done and Samsung and several Chinese companies have shown the ability to do you know super fast transmissions and all of that. But this was one element of the practicality of being able to roll out that they needed to solve and it looks like they have solved it. Now it still needs to go out in the field and be field tested but it works so and it looks promising and saving us some money which is good too. Shout out to the physicists. We're like hey the Kittle mode needs a strong magnetic field but it just is impractical but hey the multiple resonance mode actually requires the weakest magnetic field so yay we're on one here. Sometimes you just do yeah we totally are. Sometimes you just do something and it works out even better than you expected so hopefully this will pan out. If you have a thought about this or anything send us an email feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. We love your emails. The Wall Street Journal reports on an online court used by Chinese e-commerce shoppers to get judgments on bad shopping experiences. Problems resolved in these court cases include a self-changing trash can that actually only self-sealed. Oh no a takeout dish of garlic oysters that had no garlic. I know how dare they. Pulpy watermelon juice that also had seeds. No good. Yep one star. The journal describes the process used by Idea Fish which is the Chinese online marketplace full of independent sellers. It calls its court the idle fish jury but everyone else calls it crab court because it's presided over by a crab that has a unibrow. Powdered wig and a gavel and I think we need to know more about this. Yeah no kidding Shannon yes we do. So presiding over may be a strong word it is a crab by the way. Judgments are actually carried out by a panel of anonymous fellow customers. So that's what's going on behind the scenes hence the word of the word jury in the official name. But the system apparently is working more than 95% of all disputes brought to idle fish jury are resolved there in less than 90 minutes. 90 minutes not 90 days not 90 months 90 minutes. But the system handles about half of idle fish's customer disputes and idle fish isn't the only one or even the first. I kind of love it to be honest I think it's really cool and that is correct. So Maituan has a customer court that used to be called the kangaroo jury because Maituan's mascot is a kangaroo. But is now called Little May's panel of judges and Alibaba had its own version called public jury though that one strangely enough was discontinued in 2018. I am fascinated and confused by this I have so many questions. I respect the numbers it apparently is working 95% of the disputes are handled that way and I get it where you have a seller and a customer who disagree right. The seller says I ordered a large you sent me an extra large or the customer says that and the seller says too bad that's still a shirt. That's what you ordered and the jury weighs in and goes no you can't say that seller like it seems unreasonable but sometimes you need somebody else to step in and resolve those things. But I also like wonder if this would work anywhere else like is this just unique to the culture of e-commerce in China. Or would it wouldn't this just descend into you know gamesmanship in other markets including the United States. Yeah that was my question is like you would think that if for whatever reason I don't know you know Shannon's a seller. I'm a buyer I buy something from her store for some reason you know people want to side with her rather than me. I mean you know what's what's how is the court you know a impartial jury so to speak I don't know that it is and maybe maybe the people involved don't care maybe it's just kind of fun to be a part of this. They're random and anonymous right so the chances of you picking someone randomly that was on the side of any individual seller or would be low I guess the sellers could try to pack the pool with people by paying them to go in there but that seems like. It's yeah I can't imagine I mean unless you were I don't know a seller that you know has lots of money to burn that you would even bother yeah it's kind of like small claims court right. Well hopefully given that this is a bunch of independent sellers hopefully it holds some accountability to the marketplace the sellers that are on these marketplaces to actually. You know be giving or selling their customers the actual product that they are describing on the website which often times I've found purchasing online is not necessarily the the truth. And don't forget the company is still there to handle a lot of these cases a lot of these cases don't get worked out this way and get appealed to regular customer service which weighs in and does things so it's kind of a filter system like you say like a small claims court right it just filters out the easy to resolve. And then the other one is where any given bystander would go like no no they ordered a large give them a large come on quit trying to be like that. Well PS5 lovers you might like this next one Sony's slim version of the PS5 hasn't happened yet you might say what what are you talking about because this is a thing that has been happening for various iterations of the PlayStation for quite a few years. The YouTuber called DIY perks has already built that slim PS5 he disassembled a PlayStation 5 sub some components with similar parts and his own homemade creations to end up with a device that's 1.9 centimeters thick. That is a thin little box in order to deal with the power supply and cooling system perks built his own in the long slim and external case designed to hide behind a TV or be otherwise hitting in the shadows. Based on the temperatures that he took while playing Horizon Forbidden West his cooling system was more efficient than the standard PS5s itself. Yeah because he water cooled it. So cool though like the cooling system and the power supply makes this look more impressive than it is because when you look at that power supply it's huge and long and you kind of have to set that out of the way but in the end that that slim is very slim. I watched through this video and I love it. I love that he's like cooking his own components in the microwave and like forming them himself like wow that's that's on another level like that's really cool. Yeah if you like good hacker very impressive the DIY perks channel. This is your ASMR heart. It was it was very ASMR for me. My hacker mindset. I almost want to say he sacrificed his PS5 for your entertainment but he didn't it still works. It works in fact it works better now that he put in all that effort so pretty cool. Smaller and more efficient. How about that. All right let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Douglas. This is in response to conversation we had with Rob Dunwood on Friday show about EV cars and performance driving. Doug says from someone in the biz EVs can beat anything in short acceleration such as quarter mile sprints the torque is higher and available immediately. Beyond that pure EVs would lose they're carrying more weight and they have a heat problem the first few times you go to full current and to the motors they're fine. But once they heat up they lose efficiency quickly nothing a day to day driver would ever see but in a road race where you're accelerating and decelerating hard all the time this would become a problem. Doug says performance driving isn't efficient either so range would also be an issue. But like all things EV there's a lot of work going on to address these issues new motors with less heat rejection individual motors at each wheel that can deliver exactly the torque limit on the available traction all the time. And of course improvements in the batteries on top of that the batteries are low which means that the center of gravity for EVs is actually great for performance driving. Yeah man if you get the heat problem down suddenly these things are you know you formula. It's going to be really cool. I mean it is really cool but it's going to it's going to actually surpass if you could get that heat problem down formula E would surpass formula one. Well thanks so much Doug for for their really good Intel and thanks to everybody who he mails us and says hey I've got a little something to say about one of the stories that you talked about or something that you might talk about in the future. And we'd love to hear more from you feedback at daily tech news show dot com is where to send those emails. Also thanks to you Shannon Morris for being with us today. Wonderful work as always. What else has been going on in your world. Thank you so much Sarah and thank you Tom for having me on YouTube dot com slash Shannon Morris is where you can always find me. And most recently I did a comparison between the pixel six and the pixel six a so if you are curious if you should upgrade this year skip the next generation of pixel. Definitely check out that video. Very cool. We also want to extend a special thanks to Andy Beach. Andy Beach is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support Andy. Good to see you around the Internet. Yeah. And folks there's a slot for your name right there. You can either stick around and help us for a long time like Andy has including coming on the show and explaining tough concepts to us. Or you could just become a new patron right now and your names on the show tomorrow like that. Andy Andy I mean make it so how fun. I don't know. I'll do a car wheel or maybe my pinata will. There is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. It's available at patreon dot com slash DTNS. We roll right into it as we finish up here. But just a reminder DTNS is live Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then.