Technology

In our recent look at the state of OLED televisions, we focused on the present—but what about the future?

With OLED (short for “organic light-emitting diodes”), there’s good reason to believe we’ll see far more of the tech in years to come, given its extreme contrast ratios and super-thin screens. To understand just where OLED might be going—and why companies are embracing the tech in different ways—it first helps to understand where OLED came from and how a $100 million deal with Kodak paved the way for our current reality.

Ever since the HDTV standard emerged in the mid-'00s, screen producers have struggled to come up with new standards that feel anywhere as impressive. That's been a tough sell, as no baseline image standard has yet surpassed the quality jump from CRT sets to clearer panels with 1080p resolution support.

Yesterday Qualcomm announced its newest flagship processor, the Snapdragon 835, to be built on the 10nm scale and expected to launch in the first half of 2017. But the new chip also comes along with Quick Charge 4.0, Qualcomm’s fast charging technology. The new version promises “five minutes of charging for five hours of battery life”.

Let’s face it: artificial intelligence is scary. After decades of dystopian science fiction novels and movies where sentient machines end up turning on humanity, we can’t help but worry as real world AI continues to improve at such a rapid rate. Sure, that danger is probably decades away if it’s even a real danger at all. But there are many more immediate concerns. Will automated robots cost us jobs? Will online face recognition destroy our privacy? Will self-driving cars mess with moral decision making?

On Friday evening, inside a small castle on the southwest coast of England, a Welsh mezzo-soprano performed a duet with a quantum computer.

The quantum computer wasn’t actually there. It was 5,300 miles away in a lab on the outskirts of Los Angeles. But this is the modern age. We don’t just have quantum computers. They can perform over the Internet.

The ornate, pinecone-shaped towers of Angkor Wat in Cambodia float above a vast temple complex of shrines, pools, houses, and a perfectly square moat. Today, only a small number of monks remain within the temple walls. The remaining structures have been reclaimed by trees whose roots wind around the stone like cellulose tentacles. Archaeologists have long wondered what life was like here when Angkor was the cosmopolitan heart of the Khmer Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries. Why did so many people abandon this place in the 15th century, never to return?

The biggest problem with smartwatches, beyond the fact no one really knows what to do with them, is their small screens. Scrolling through text or swiping a notification is particularly frustrating when your finger obscures whatever it is you’re trying to see. This is why you can’t tap out a text message, let alone play games.

Microsoft is releasing Hololens to developers in March and they should have their devices by month end.  As part of the announcement they showcased some of the initial tools and games and this got me to thinking about the unusual things this device could enable.   Games we’ve never thought to play before and uses that could be truly amazing.   Let’s talk about some of these.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed a new headlight technology that automatically and intelligently adapt to the current traffic conditions.

Nine years ago, when the first iPhone was about to debut, not many people envisioned a revolution that would fundamentally change the shape of the game industry (for good or for ill). Today, as we await the impending release of high-end consumer virtual reality headsets from the likes of Oculus, Valve, and Sony, it feels like we're at a similar crossroads.