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Tech News Weekly 365: Android XR Is Google's Spatial Computing OS
01:07:32
OpenAI Sora, Automattic, Image Playground
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- [00:00]
Micah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Amanda Silberling is here and we kick things off by Talking about how OpenAI may may have trained its video generation tool Sora on video games with honestly some compelling evidence. Then I have my story of the week. It's a follow up on where things stand on the WordPress versus WP engine drama. After that, Jason Howell stops by to give us whole bunch of interesting information about the brand new just announced Android XR and his time with the system. Very, very cool as he was one of very few people to get to try this out before Google announced it. Then I round things out by showing you where things stand with Apple Intelligence's latest features, Image Playground and Genmoji. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Tech News Weekly, episode 365 with Amanda Silberling and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, December 12, 2024. Android XR is Google's spatial computing OS. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech. I am your festive host, Micah Sargent and I am pleased to say that today, on this Thursday, December 12, I am joined by the wonderful, the inimitable Amanda Silberling. Welcome back to the show, Amanda.
- [01:50]
Amanda Silberling
Hello. I wish I had a fun hat, but you'll just have to imagine that there's like a. My hat is so cool that it's invisible.
- [01:58]
Micah Sargent
It is. That's the coolest hat that you've ever seen. And unless you have the special contact lenses that Amanda sent me in the mail, you can't see it. So I'm sorry to all of you, but it is magnificent.
- [02:08]
Amanda Silberling
I should have sent it to everyone. It was really selfish of me.
- [02:13]
Micah Sargent
Well, we will, we will forgive you for your selfishness if you make up for it by telling us about your story of the week.
- [02:22]
Amanda Silberling
Yeah. So my story of the week is a story from my colleague Kyle Wiggers, who is an amazing AI writer. Writer about AI, not an. An AI writer, if you will. We have to. We have to specify that.
- [02:38]
Jason Howell
Specify.
- [02:39]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:40]
Amanda Silberling
And since Sora, which is OpenAI's video generator, came out recently, he was looking into, like, what we can glean about the training data for Sora based on what it's outputting. And he found that it certainly seems as though SORA is training on video games and Twitch streams and things in the video game Orbit, which we can't say for sure because we don't know what the training data is, but you can type in things like Italian plumber game and get Super Mario.
- [03:24]
Micah Sargent
Wow, that sure looks like Mario.
- [03:27]
Amanda Silberling
Yeah, that's Mario, right? You can reproduce games that look like first person shooters. We got the Ninja Turtles here. Great GIFs in this article, great gift work. And then I think one of the examples in here that's particularly troubling to me is you see this Twitch streamer who this seems to be like based off of a real streamer. Like this guy has those tattoos and even honestly, the detail is kind of wild. Like if you zoom in, it's like Twitch but with the YouTube logo which is like close enough. You can see in the URL it's a little bit like it looks like twibble.com which AI doesn't know how to spell. I've like written about that kind of extensively because I find it fascinating how like what AI knows and doesn't know how to do based on like how these things, how the architecture exists behind them. But even we have dono nations. I'm just reading the picture here, but if you go to the article and look at the details, it's kind of crazy, but yeah. So of course this brings up what are the legal implications of this. How can we prove this for sure? Obviously like this is all IP and copyright law has not caught up to AI. Like copyright law hasn't caught up to like the Internet, really. So to expect it to catch up to AI is like wild. But for all intents and purposes, you would think that it is illegal to use copyrighted material to augment your own product. But I don't know. We could get into a whole fair use article about a fair use argument about this. I'm sure someone will at some point and that'll be a quite the time. But another interesting thing that Kyle pointed out in this article is that the former CTO in a Wall Street Journal interview didn't deny that there were video games in the training data, which is a little concerning. And I think this is sort of just part of the ongoing issue of these new generative AI products that we don't know what is in the training data. And it could very well be training on people's artwork. And whether that is like a mass market game like Call of Duty or if it's like somebody on Etsy who is making some crocheted sweaters and I don't know, like we are continuously seeing over and over that in order for these platforms to get good and have big enough training Data sets, they sort of do the thing of, well, if it's on the Internet, then it's free. And that's not really how copyright works.
- [06:49]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, that's. And I guess that is the question. And what it always boils down to. Anyone who watches this week in Google, that show is very rarely about Google and is often about AI and also about, in particular the conversation of AI fair use and the right to read and all that kind of stuff. And there is an interesting, if arguably compelling, arguably compelling argument that if I can go onto Twitch and watch a bunch of videos and then learn how to be a streamer myself from watching a bunch of videos and then go to a different platform, say, and start. Let's say I go to Twitch and I learn, okay, this is how people do it, and this is what the popular streamers do. And I decide to go to YouTube and start streaming there and start making money there. No one's batting an eye at me, profiting off of me taking the time to learn. And so if an AI system watches a bunch of videos and then uses that to learn how to recreate video, what's. What, what do we, you know, what's the true ruling about that? And you're so right that the law is still struggling to catch up with the Internet in general, and we are using outdated precedent in many way for a lot of the stuff that exists right now, a lot of the laws that exist right now. And every time there comes an opportunity to update those laws or clarify those laws, people seem to really kind of back away and say, oh, we'll just leave it alone. We'll just leave it alone. And I think that every. It used to be, you know, every couple of years it came time to start really thinking about it, and then it was every year. And now it seems like it's getting down to every six months, there's new stuff happening in this space that makes us have to pay close attention to this. I think that's what is fascinating and kind of terrifying to watch because it just moves so fast. And the possible outcomes for how this will work are left, right, center, just coming at you. And I don't know what, what the final ruling is going to be, if we ever will get one. Whenever it comes to this stuff, that's kind of like, yeah, I mean, what, what, what's going to be the answer here? And does an AI system that itself makes money? Not itself, but the. The company that is using it makes money, you know, arguing that, well, the Internet is a free thing and People can go to it, and you and I can all just profit off of it by learning. But is that the case? Is that how it should be? I don't know. I honestly don't know.
- [10:07]
Amanda Silberling
I have excellent news for you.
- [10:09]
Micah Sargent
Okay.
- [10:11]
Amanda Silberling
You are not a product created by a tech company.
- [10:17]
Micah Sargent
Oh, thank goodness.
- [10:19]
Amanda Silberling
What a relief.
- [10:20]
Micah Sargent
Can you, can you prove that?
- [10:23]
Amanda Silberling
I don't know. I mean, I haven't met you in real life life. So you could just be an AI, Like a really, really, really sophisticated AI.
- [10:32]
Micah Sargent
I must be from some secret company that no one has heard of. No, you're right, though. I am not required to answer that question myself. Just ponder that question, right, and see where this goes. So, yeah, I mean, I guess before we move on from this story, what has there been any kind of early reaction about Sora that is like this outside of what TechCrunch has done? I guess because we've seen lots of conversations about how it does a pretty crummy job at most stuff. And you can tell it to show somebody drinking a glass of orange juice and the person like never even touches the glass of orange juice. It just sits on the table. But has there been more conversation, I guess, and reaction about the training set and AI's role in gobbling up the Internet?
- [11:32]
Amanda Silberling
I believe right now there's been bandwidth issues with how many people actually have access to Sora. So it's kind of hard to go on and test it yourself right now. But I think as it becomes more accessible to the public, like what is a better red team than the public? Like, true. I'm sure people will find some crazy stuff in the training data or that they could assume is in the trading data based on the outputs. And I mean, it's kind of the same problem we're having with ChatGPT and other OpenAI product where we don't know what they're training on. They've essentially just trained on the entire Internet. And not everything on the Internet is free.
- [12:24]
Micah Sargent
That's the truth. Speaking of not everything on the Internet being free, we need to take a quick break to pay for this episode of Tech News Weekly. This episode of Tech News Weekly brought to you by our dear friends at ACI Learning, the provider of IT Pro, which provides binge worthy video on demand IT and cybersecurity training. I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day, new friend, and had learned that they were working in tech support and found out that they got most of their knowledge from IT Pro. With IT Pro you will get certification ready with access to the full video library of more than 7,250 hours of training. Premium training plans also include practice tests to ensure you're ready before you pay for exams, and virtual labs to facilitate hands on learning. IT Pro for MACI Learning Learning makes training fun. All training videos are produced in an engaging talk show format that is truly edutaining. You can take your IT or cyber career to the next level, be bold and train smart with ACI Learning. Visit info.acilearning.com twit and use the code TWIT100 at checkout to save 30% on your first year of it pro annual training plans. That's info.acilearning.com TWIT with the code TWIT100. And of course, we thank ACI Learning for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, back from the break and that means it's time for my topic. I want to provide an update to an earlier story of the week that I had about WordPress and the ongoing drama Automattic, of course, being behind the sort of commercial side of WordPress and WP WP Engine, a third party that makes a tool that integrates with WordPress and lets you kind of manage your WordPress instance, et cetera. So WP Engine is a hosting provider that was founded in 2010 and uses WordPress software, which is open source, to offer these managed hosting services. Which means that you can go to the website, you can pay a subscription, they will give you a website that you can use that uses WordPress on the back end. And so that way you can have, you know, www.sweaters that look like pajamas.com and then it handles all that in the background. In 2018 there was a company called or a private equity firm called Silverlake that acquired WP Engine. And then Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com and they have long held that WP Engine profits from WordPress but doesn't do enough to help kind of the ongoing development of the platform because the idea with open source is that the community making use of these tools will provide some level of development and ongoing updates to the code and automatic and more accurately, Matt Mullenweg says here's the problem with that they are they the the amount of money that they make is vastly more than the contributions that they make. In September of this year, at a WordPress WordCamp conference, Matt Mullenweg attacks WP Engine, called it a cancer in the WordPress community, afterward followed up with a blog post Even more criticizing the company. WP Engine a couple of days later said, hey, we are issuing a cease and desist on this blasphemy, saying that Mullenweg essentially had harassed. And then the kind of arguments and everything went on from there all the way up to where there was this revelation that Automattic had said, WP Engine, we either want you to pay an 8% royalty fee on all of your revenue, or we want you to allocate 8% of your workforce to work on WordPress development, meaning you need to commit to doing more for the WordPress community. WP Engine rejected the offer and it kind of went on from there. Well, at one point, WordPress did something really interesting. There is a plugin from WP Engine that's called Advanced Custom Fields. ACF WordPress.org took over this plugin that was created by WP Engine and did it in such a way that they claim it was to, quote, remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem. So they took it and they turned it into Secure Custom Fields. It's akin to, let's say, a state, like one state, the state of, I don't know, Colorado, like going to Missouri and taking over. There's a. There's a candy company in Missouri that makes the famous cherry mash bar. And going to that plant and saying, okay, now it's called Cherry Smash and we control this. Now, that's a probably a terrible metaphor, but the point is, it's really wild and unprecedented for them to do this. So they did this after all of this kind of back and forth. And WP Engine said, this is not okay, that there was no consent doing that. Uh, and then afterward, WP Engine said, hey, we're taking this to court. So they went to court. And on Tuesday, as we record this episode on Thursday, December 12, a California district court judge said, automatic, the company behind WordPress.org you have to stop blocking WP engines access to WordPress.org resource resources and interfering with its plugins. So not only do they have to stop with the ACF plugin, but there was also a checkbox that Automattic had put as part of its site, where you clicked the checkbox to say, I'm not affiliated with WP Engine in order to be able to log in. And the judge said, no, that's not going to happen. You need to stop doing that. Well, Automatic spokesperson Megan Fox, and I cannot confirm or deny if that's that Megan Fox that you know of, because I don't know, told the Verge that Look, here's the thing. That injunction came without the period of discovery that is involved in court cases, meaning that all of the details have not been laid out. So when all of the details are laid out, we're very confident that we're going to win this. So now I want to talk to you, Amanda, about this whole thing because it's really. WordPress is huge. And you know, we think about like a lot of people outside of tech don't realize how much Amazon and its AWS is the backbone of a lot of the Internet, that a lot, lot of websites and a lot of online services and a lot of apps and I mean, so much of what's out there uses AWS Amazon web services in some way. But what. And that's one thing that they don't realize. I think a lot of people also don't realize just how many websites online are actually WordPress in the background. So WordPress is a huge part of the web and given that that's the case, it's arguably dangerous or a slippery slope, I guess, to have someone have this much control over a platform. And I hate to say it, but it smacks of a certain person who purchased a social media company and sort of, you know, made decisions that were very much, you know, unilateral and individual. And I find myself being of two minds in the sense that there is a certain level that when someone's in control of something that they made, they should have control over it. But at some point when it become, whenever you say I'm open source, therefore I'm giving it away, you gotta know what you signed up for. And that arguably is where I stand with this. How do you, what's your take on all of this?
- [22:02]
Amanda Silberling
To use the Internet parlance, it feels very like the girls are fighting.
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Micah Sargent
The girls are fighting. Yes.
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Amanda Silberling
Um, I don't know. I mean, I think something that gets overlooked here is that this conflict more so than anything is impacting people that build websites using these tools, which is a lot of people. And the sort of like tech squabbles that then make normal people have to like reckon with this is a little, it's a little off putting.
- [22:40]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I just, I think when it comes to, when it comes to these individual tools, it makes me wonder, not even wonder, it makes me feel for the other kind of larger companies out there that have not necessarily equal stake as WP Engine. But you know, who is Automattic, AKA Matt Mullenweg going to go after next? And we can't forget too that over time Automattic has become kind of a big company. Yeah. Not only are they WordPress, they're also day one, the journal, their long reads, their beeper, which is the messaging platform, their WooCommerce, which is a commerce platform, their Pocket casts, the Podcasts app, their NewPak, which is a tool for publishing stuff. Their Tumblr, which of course is the social media, a site that has all but died, but still is out there. They are a Kismet, which is a spam filter and they are Gravatar, which is a tool that some websites use to help kind of create a global avatar. And these tools, I especially think of something like Akismet, where if you've got a spam filter tool and you suddenly don't like a service that's out there that could otherwise reach people, what happens when you start filtering out, you know, things that you don't want to have attention. Or if on Tumblr a company comes along and wants to advertise on that platform and you don't want that company there, you know, you can start to make these different changes or in a podcasts app, what if you started to get rid or not let be displayed podcasts that are about using WP Engine, for example, to create your next website. Now I want to be clear that those are none of that is the case. These are just examples of what it means when you have that much control and that you're not this like small company that is, you know, woe is me. These places are taking advantage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is the part that I'm more on WP Engine's side, so to speak, because it feels like you just don't want to be on the side of the group or the person who is making these wide sweeping rules over a large part of the Internet. And that's where I find it interesting that the automatic is saying you got to wait for discovery because once discovery comes about, we've got this. And I know they can't be like, oh, we're going to lose. They've got to be positive about it. But it's just I am curious to see where this is going to go, is what it boils down to. I think that it's going to be fascinating watching what precedent potentially gets set here and what that does when it comes to this not small portion of the Internet, particularly in the U.S. yeah.
- [26:13]
Amanda Silberling
I think it's a little hard to pit automatic as this like small open source warrior given. I mean, how you pointed out that this is a really big company now and also not to do ad hominem, but Matt Mullenweg came to disrupt and he was wearing a $240,000 watch.
- [26:42]
Micah Sargent
Holy.
- [26:43]
Amanda Silberling
Okay, so that's what I have to contribute to this.
- [26:45]
Micah Sargent
Thank you for contributing that to this. Yeah, you know, take that for what what you will, listeners. Take that for what you will. And if you hold up your wrist and that watches on your wrist, Amanda and I will applaud. That would be amazing. No. So thank you, Amanda Silberling, for being here with us today. If people would like to stay up to date with the stuff you are doing, where should they go to do that?
- [27:15]
Amanda Silberling
Normally when I do these outros, I'm like, unfortunately I'm still on X, but I think I finally have broken the habit. I'm pretty much only posting on Blue sky now, which is Amanda. Omg. Lol. Why you made. You may ask why. And it's because I just have that URL for some reason and I think it's fun.
- [27:38]
Micah Sargent
It's fun. It is fun. Well, thank you so much, Amanda and we'll see you next year.
- [27:45]
Amanda Silberling
Yeah, and we'll be a little less festive.
- [27:49]
Micah Sargent
Indeed. Indeed. This is not glued to my head, so it will come off. All righty everybody, it is time to take another break before we come back with a familiar face who had an exclusive time to talk about a new product slash project, slash service. Look, you'll see in a minute, but let me take a moment to tell you about Big ID who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. Of course you know that data security is paramount. But now you need to fortify against bigger problems. All custodians of data need proactive solutions. Luckily, with BigID, you can trust that your most valuable asset is secured. Ensure the promise of AI doesn't become a security pitfall by using BigID's Gen AI solutions to help you navigate that labyrinthine world of AI from the CISO perspective. Because BIGID is the first and only solution that allows you to take a defense in depth approach to automating manual processes, improving accuracy and actionability and applying AI and ML to cut through the noise, improve risk management and enable a robust data security strategy through unmatched data source coverage. And they do this because BIGID allows you to find and classify your data accurately and at scale on prem or in the cloud. So you get structured, unstructured and semi structured data covering hundreds of data sources. You can train AI on only data that is safe to use. You can minimize your attack surface through policy driven retention management by removing redundant and outdated data. And you can audit and inspect what data is being shared with AI and be alerted when usage policies are breached. Telenor uses BigID to show its customers it's handling data in a secure way. Here's a quote. We want to focus on the business and have a partner like BigID to focus on the tech. We wanted a partner that understood what we're doing and can help us. Companies who use Big ID are showing that they're taking data seriously and you know, you can count on having a really great opportunity here because Big ID has won numerous awards including market leader in Data Security Posture Management in the Global Infosec Awards by Cyber Defense Magazine, Best data Security company in the Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, and a coveted spot in the Citizens JMP Cyber 66 report which recognizes big ID for elevating data management and security with first of its kind AI technology. So start protecting your sensitive data wherever your data lives. @bigid.com TNW Get a free demo to see how Big ID can help your organization reduce data risk and accelerate the adoption of generative AI. Again, that's bigid.com TNW Also, there's a free new report that provides valuable insights and key trends on AI adoption challenges and the overall impact of Gen AI across organizations. BigID.comTNW and of course we thank Big ID for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. And now we're back from the break and we are joined by a familiar face. It's Jason Howell. Hello, Jason.
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Jason Howell
Hey, how's it going? Just, you know, wearing very dated face computer architecture on my, on my head right now. Don't, don't worry about this thing.
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Micah Sargent
You know, I feel like it's, it could be coming back into style. I think if I saw one of those today and I never heard about Google Glass, I would feel a little bit more like, oh, that's probably just, you know, some, some, some headset that people wear these days. I, it doesn't seem as out of place as maybe it once did.
- [31:37]
Jason Howell
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that I kind of one of the many things that I came away from this whole Android XR experience which we're going to talk about with which is how far we've come from Google Glass more than a decade ago when it was really, I think history has shown this was ahead of its time and now it's paved the way for things that are a Lot more normalized now and still very cool.
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Micah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely. So this is the part where you get a moment to brag because you who got to be a part of a pretty exclusive experience. Can you tell us about what that is?
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Jason Howell
Yeah, well, Google unveiled just this morning Android xr, which is its new platform built around Android and with Gemini AI at the core. They said it's their first OS built with Gemini kind of from the ground level and they're launching that to essentially do, or hopefully, but from their perspective do for extended reality devices like VR and wearable glasses and that sort of stuff. What they did for smartphones with Android, you know, more than a decade and a half ago. And Google reached out to me last week and said, hey, we'd love to invite you down to Mountain View to try out our prototypes. You can't shoot any video or take any pictures of your experience, but you can hang out with the execs that made this stuff and check it out. And I spent like an hour and 15 minutes going through all of their hardware and I felt very special. Mike, let me just say that that is very cool.
- [33:11]
Micah Sargent
Yeah. So with Android xr, I think it represents Google's renewed commitment to XR after. You know, we've got Google Glass, we've got Daydream VR. How does this approach differ from those earlier efforts? I think without getting too much into the Gemini AI just yet.
- [33:31]
Jason Howell
Yeah, I mean, I mean that is really a big key part of it is this moment that we're in AI and this being a really wonderful kind of conduit to kind of bring that into the experience. But, you know, I think a lot of people are going to have the knee jerk reaction of oh, great, Google's launching this next thing, you know, start the timer until it's gone. But I kind of feel like this is a little different. Like Daydream, yes, was a VR platform that Google really worked on for maybe three years. It was also very early, early into this VR resurgence when we saw Oculus, Excel and become the Meta Quest and everything. The landscape has proven itself a little bit more at this point. I think what Google has done here is they've recognized that there is yet another field of technology that they can potentially get a lot of support. A lot of manufacturers who are thinking about creating these different headsets and we're not just talking VR, we're talking wearable glasses and other form factors that we haven't even really seen yet. Why not give them an OS that is tailor made for that specific thing? We've already got Android and I think really they're very motivated around this right now because more and more it seems like the benefits of artificial intelligence and the benefits and experience of virtual reality. In my mind it's kind of like a chocolate and peanut butter butter thing. You know, it's kind of like they, they complement each other so well. So it makes sense that Google would want to be, you know, have its Gemini at the core of it.
- [35:06]
Micah Sargent
Yeah. In fact just this morning I was actually no, we don't have a lot of time so I will not tell the story, but let's just say I used a little AI XR moment this morning and I thought, wow, you know, this is one of those things. I took a photo of something and I asked AI for some help with this thing and it worked really well. But let's talk about. Now we can talk about the integration of Gemini AI into Android xr that's central to the functionality. So tell people what are the unique features that Gemini brings to the platform when it comes to interaction and that, that term that Apple definitely likes. Spatial computing.
- [35:46]
Jason Howell
Spatial face computer. I think, I think what's different here is that Google has done a lot of work on the mobile phone with Gemini on creating this experience where if I have a phone and I'm running Gemini, I can point it at a sign that's in a foreign language and I can say, hey, translate that for me and it'll do it on my phone. Now we're kind of. And we can have that conversation in order to get there. Right now we're at this point to where wearables aren't always going to be like the Samsung Project Muhan device. That is this large gargantuan VR headset that can be. But they can also be the glasses that we just wear on a daily basis and that are have the ability through that Gemini AI to view the landscape, view our lives the way we do and then create context and actionable items around that. So for example, it creates memory. This is one really interesting thing about Project Astra, which are the glasses approach that we saw at Google I o earlier this year. I got to play around with that is this idea of the fact that at one point I was at a table with a bunch of bottles of liquor and I asked Gemini what could I make with this and it gave me a couple of ideas and I had some follow ups and then I went on my demo and then a little bit later I was like, hey, remember back at the bottles of liquor, there was a book Sitting next to that. What was the name of that book? And I hadn't mentioned anything about the book when I was over there, but because it has that multimodality, because it's kind of seeing the life that I'm living while I'm using it, it knew the name of the book and it could tell me all about it. And it has that memory. And once you start to think about that and how it can instruct you, if you're. The example that Google gave was hanging shelves, but in the demo it was this coffee maker. How do I use this coffee maker? Are these the right coffee pods for this coffee maker? And it knows how to do all that and instruct you through it and, and it just, you know, and then you take that and put it into the glasses paradigm, where I think something like that is incredibly useful and it just opens up a whole field of possibilities.
- [38:00]
Micah Sargent
Definitely. Now, your demo included, as you mentioned here, the Project Muhan, I guess, VR headset from Samsung. How did this hardware showcase the capabilities of Android xr, especially in terms of that visual fidelity and pass through technology, which of course makes it into XR versus AR VR.
- [38:23]
Jason Howell
Yeah, this is this. The, the whole fidelity aspect of things has been a hill, a hill that I've been willing to die on for many years at this point when it comes to VR. And I've encountered people that are like, no, that's not the most important. And I'm not saying it's the most important, but I am saying it's pretty darn important. And when I put on the Project Muhan goggles, you know, again, remember, this is a prototype, it's not available. Probably the release version is going to be different. Different. I was very struck by a few things, by the context in which the pass through camera was representing the real world in a way that my eyes didn't have to do any gymnastics to make or account for any distance differences between what I expect to see versus what I am. I never felt tenuous or unsafe when I was walking through it. It really felt like the representation of the world that I was seeing through the past pass through was the representation that I would see. You know, it was maybe, maybe resed down slightly but hardly noticeable to my eyes at that moment. And then the fidelity of the virtual objects that interplay with it. There was a, you know, there was a moment where I had a window and I could move it behind a couch. You know, I could, I could actually move my hands forward and shift that window and it had a spatialized understanding of the room to know that that window is now behind the couch and how that window looks next to the couch. You know, the sharpness, the quality. I saw this AR core bird from a webpage and said, you know, throw this into the room at real size and it popped it up there. And I was just kind of blown away by the level of detail and the sharpness. I really felt like I was looking at a high resolution monitor with my eyes and I didn't see that screen door effect. I didn't see the spacing of the pixels or anything like that. It just looked sharp and it. And it was a sharpness that matched pretty closely to the sharpness of the room. And I think that's a really big deal when you're talking about true virtualized experiences.
- [40:18]
Micah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah. That sharpness is so important and I think makes all the difference there. Now you had features like multimodal controls, eye tracking, which of course is important, and circle to search for Android XR's versatility. Which of these features, or maybe there is one that I haven't mentioned that you do you think sets it apart most from something like the Apple Vision Pro, that very, very expensive headset, or the Meta Quest.
- [40:49]
Jason Howell
I wish that I have had, have had at this point, by this point an experience with Apple Vision Pro, because I'm sure that there's some real good kind of analogs to be drawn between what I've witnessed and the Apple Vision Pro. So put that on my list. If anyone wants to get that for me for Christmas, that would be great. But I mean, the eye tracking was really impressive. I will say that it was a short kind of IPD setup process. Interpupillary distance is a new phrase that I learned this week. You know, where it, where it understands the distance between my two eyes. And then I had to do what felt like almost like an optometrist test to kind of follow the dots, keeping my face in one place and following the dots with my eyes in order to set up the eye tracking. And then from there, you know, I always thought that eye tracking would be kind of inconvenient because it's like not everything that I look at do I want to, you know, place an action on. But the way it worked is if there was an actionable item that I was looking at, it kind of would highlight that item slightly. It might grow a little bit or change a slight color. And then my hands were just resting in my lap and if I wanted to actually click that, I just, you know, pinched my pointer to my thumb. I didn't have to raise my hand to do it. It was just in my lap and I just pinched it and it accepted the click. And again, this goes back to the multimodality of controls, which in this case, what that really tells me is, again, AI seems to be really good at bridging the gap from a conversational standpoint of, I don't know the proper syntax, but I know I want to ask a question and have you do something or look something up. In the case of controls, it's very similar because you can kind of jump between these control mechanisms pretty easily. At one point, I could, you know, there was like a desk situation, a standing desk with a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse. I could wiggle the mouse and it knows right away, oh, you're in mouse mode now. And it switches over. And then the second I hold my hand up, it's right back to hand control. And it can bounce between these things. And so it just becomes very versatile from a user perspective. I don't have to think very much about it. It just kind of knows how to follow along with what I want. And I thought that was pretty impressive.
- [42:59]
Micah Sargent
That is nice. And it also feels to me like a really good extension of what Android is, where if you have that familiarity of Android, then there are going to be some things that you kind of can latch onto and go, oh, right, this is the design language, I guess, there. Now, the Android XR does adapt its UI and its processing workloads based on hardware, from VR headsets to smart glasses, which is, I think, really cool that it can be all those things. How does this flexibility impact its potential adoption across those different use cases?
- [43:41]
Jason Howell
Well, I mean, I think that flexibility is incredibly important, you know, because I definitely had questions about this. If someone, if a developer is developing for Android xr, I saw two very different use cases. I saw the Project Wuhan, which is the fully immersive big goggle. A lot more space to fill with that information. And then I saw the Project Astra, which was the glasses with a small display in the center of my eye, which is actually very neat, which we'll talk about. And how, as a developer, do I gracefully scale between these? The way they put it, which I think makes a heck of a lot of sense, is they've done. Google has done a lot of work making it so that developers who create apps for smartphones don't have to create an entirely new app for the tablet. When they download an app from the Play Store, it knows what device you're using and therefore it can scale appropriately. In this case case it kind of does the same thing. They were only really showing two different kind of physical use cases of this, the two different formats of wearable face computers. But there are inevitably going to be others that come along and based on this kind of flexibility in how they scale it, I think it's going to make it a little bit easier not knowing what a developer actually has to go through. But the way they put it, just a couple lines of code. I always love that phrase. Is it really just a couple of lines of code? But that's what they said just to be able to scale this. And I'm sure there's a little bit of tweaking on how it looks when you're working with this many pixels versus that many pixels. But it should be pretty dynamic.
- [45:20]
Micah Sargent
Nice. Then Google's use of technologies like Raxiom's microled displays and split compute configuration. These wild words seem intriguing. How do these innovations contribute to the overall experience and feasibility of Android XR devices?
- [45:37]
Jason Howell
Well, Raxiom's microled display is critical. Excuse me, I'm getting over a cold critical to what we saw with Project Astra. That is the wearable glasses with a small display in the front. You know, I saw one with a monocular display and a binocular display. So a single and then a double one in both eyes. And I mean they were bright, they were clear, they were sharp and basically These Raxiom micro LEDs are just this tiny, incredibly bright intent, incredibly high res displays that are embedded into the frame and then they have this, it's essentially projected into a wave guide down into the lens, into the actual lens receiving area that then reflects it into your eye. And so un going from this tiny, tiny little dot to a full image. And like I don't know how like I'm sure there are other ways to skin that cat, but I was really impressed. This is, this was an acquisition by Google a couple of years ago and they've been, you know, there's been little news about it, how they were going to use that technology in augmented reality devices going forward. Here you go. When you're talking about split compute configurations, this is really just the sense that that project AstraZeneca isn't doing all of this processing in the glasses form factor itself. It's really meant to kind of connect to your phone and share the workload. So if I take a picture with those glasses, it's sending the picture through to my phone and it's immediately putting it onto Google Photos or it's streaming my directions from my phone to my glasses. That's what kind of all that is. And ultimately, you know, what does it make room for? It just allows for those glasses to be far more capable at that size because they can't get too big otherwise, you know, people aren't going to want them if they're big and hulking and fat and all that kind of stuff. So offload it with the thing you already have in your pocket.
- [47:31]
Micah Sargent
Absolutely. Well, we are just about out of time, so I guess I'll ask you quickly if there's any last thing that you'd want to say about them in your time with them, and then, of course, give us the rundown on how people can find the work that you're doing.
- [47:45]
Jason Howell
Yeah, my last thing was another thing that really stood out for me. And I know that Apple Vision Pro does this, so I love to see how they do it. But Google's spatialization of flat 2D footage was really impressive. And even in Google Photos, essentially you're going to be able to go through all of your Google Photos library and see all of your pictures, all of your videos fully spatialized thanks to AI. And I saw examples of it and I was blown away. Like, I would not have known that it wasn't created for 3D if they hadn't told me. So it was really impressive. Cool way to rely. Live your memories and all that kind of stuff. As for the work that I've done, it's been a very busy day. I am now a contributor to Digital Trends, so consider me a writer, I guess, at this point also. So you can find my article on this at Digital Trends. You can also find a full video on my YouTube channel. It's YouTube.com where I dive into the entire experience and basically describe it because I don't have video to show you, but I walk through the entire experience and tell you everything I did.
- [48:49]
Micah Sargent
Awesome. Jason Howell, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Break a leg on your show today and congratulations on this exclusive. Very cool. Very, very cool.
- [49:01]
Jason Howell
Thank you. Always so much fun to rejoin you guys again. Thank you. Micah, good to see you. Bye, everybody.
- [49:05]
Micah Sargent
Good to see you, too. Bye. Bye. Alrighty, we're going to take another break. Before we come back with, I've got another story of the week for you, but I want to tell you about Shopify, who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing, you can Think like Allbirds or Untucket. You think about an innovative product, you know, a progressive brand that buttoned down marketing, but something you might overlook. It's the secret that actually the businesses behind the businesses, they are making the selling and for the shoppers, the buying simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. See, nobody does sales better than Shopify. Home of the number one checkout on the planet. Definitely my number one checkout. I love using Shopify and the not so secret secret with Shop Pay, that boosts conversions up to 50%. That means way less carts going abandoned and way more sales being made just like that. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or scrolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify, upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Allbirds uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com TWIT all lowercase go to shopify.com TWIT to upgrade your selling today. Once again, shopify.com TWIT and we thank Shopify for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All right, back from the break and I wanted to talk about now that it's actually officially and truly here and available to people who have the latest phones and some of the latest Macs and some of the latest iPads, et cetera, Apple Intelligence has hit the masses. The only really big thing that's still not out there is the improved Siri, which is its own thing that's coming later down the line. But what is here now is the set of graphic generation tools. So Image Playground, Genmoji and some other tools like enhancements to the writing tools that we've already Talked about using ChatGPT within the app and something called Visual Intelligence, which is a way to use the view that you have to kind of interact with an AI. So I want to talk about Genmoji and Image Playground and I thought I'd do that by showing you a little demo. So here I am in imessage and I'm currently talking with a very real person called Micah Twit, which many of you who followed along for a long time know. That is my account that I use for when I am, you know, showing examples with iOS and stuff at Twit. So if I tap into the imessage section here at the bottom, down in the bottom left hand corner, I have my emoji button that lets me type an Emoji. So if I tap on it, I can see the basic emoji that already exists. Smiley faces and faces and clouds and cowboys and whatnot. And I'm going to go ahead and prompt the chat to give me an idea for an emoji that I should create. And while they. While somebody is coming up with an idea, an appropriate idea, I'm going to go ahead and do one. So in the top right hand corner, there's a little button that lets you create emoji. But here's the thing. You can also type into the Describe an emoji section, which will let you do your basic search, but will also let you do even more. And just in time, I'm going to type this in a rabbit waving. And so you'll notice that if I just typed in the word rabbit, it would have shown me a rabbit that is already an emoji. But because this has detected that it is not currently an emoji, I have seen a prompt that pops up that says create new emoji. So I'm going to tap on that, and up will pop this genmoji section that is specifically trained on how Apple's emoji already look. Because it knows how Apple's emoji already looks, it can use that to inform what its emoji look like. Now, this first one, not going to lie. A little creepy, a little bit too anthropomorphic. Looks like it might work out like its chest is a little too swole. But the next one's a little cuter. There's one with a carrot, and it presents four options. These genmoji or these genmoji are generated on device. And when you scroll through the four options, options, when you get to the final option, it will start to generate more for you. So let's say you get to the end and you're like, okay, I'm still not loving these. This one's an emoji that has overalls. If I scroll over again, then another one has been generated and it will start to generate another one. So I'm going to choose the one with the bow tie. So I tap on that and now I can send my emoji. And as long as you and the person on the other end are both running the latest version of iOS, then they will appear as emoji to the other person. You can use them in the exact same way that you would other emoji, and it will pop up. Now, I can also type in down in this section if it wants to allow. It looks like it's kind of freezing up here. Here. We'll have to force restart that. But I can type in another emoji that John suggested, which was a very happy Chihuahua. So I can tap into this and we'll tap into the imessage, we'll choose the emoji again and we'll go a very happy ch and create new emoji. So up will pop probably a very toothy Chihuahua. I wouldn't be surprised. Oh, actually that's not bad. So we've got a Chihuahua wrapped in a blanket, which is so cute. So I'm already choosing that one. I don't need to wait for one. And we can send that off now. This is one way of doing it. If we tap on the emoji and we do something like Micah, then it will see that I've chosen a name. So I will choose me and make sure that that is the appearance that I want. And then we'll do Micah holding a Chihuahua. Then it's going to start to generate that so it knows that I want the person Micah to be part of this emoji. And now it shows me holding a Chihuahua and honestly, believably in my hand, because that is how I hold Chihuahua. And there's a couple of options that pop up just as usual. And again, these are all on my device locally, so I can choose that one and then it saves these Genmoji after the fact. So there we go. Up pops my little Chihuahua friend. Now, that is one example of using the new features. But the other one that I want to show you is an app called Image Playground. And within Image Playground, you can create images using any number of things. So I can have just a sort of specific prompt, or I can have a person kind of inform what the image is going to look like, or I can use an image that already exists. And we will take a look at that in just a moment. But I have one more break to take before we come back to take a look at Image Playground. I want to tell you about Melissa, who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. The trusted data quality experts since 1985. 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It was recently Leo's birthday and so I sent him an image of us both celebrating his birthday as per Apple's Image Playground. And I also generated some photos of my dogs using photos of my dogs. So here's one of Missy and she this was using a photo from my photos library to make it and then my dog Henry and again using a photo from my photo library so I can tap on the bottom on this plus button and I can describe an image. So let's say a cup of coffee sitting on top of a laptop just freak people out. So that prompt will pop up and it will try to generate this. So as you can see, oh no, there's a cup of coffee that is sitting on top of a laptop. Again these are general generated locally on device and so here we have that cup of coffee. This is actually a full on like cappuccino or latte or some sort and then I can add some different some different themes or adjustments to it by tapping on show more to see some suggestions. So we could give it a theme, we could give costumes if, especially if you're working with a person, accessories if you're working with a person. But we're working with places. So I'm going to put this in space. So it's a cup of coffee sitting on top of a LAPT in Space. And here you can see that that's going on in space. Now I'm going to go ahead and remove both of those prompts here and we're going to start fresh. But we're going to tap on the little icon in the bottom right that shows people, and I'm going to choose myself and then I'm going to strictly use the tools at the bottom. So we'll give it a theme first, which is winter holidays, and then we will give it an accessory where of course, I would be wearing a scarf, and we'll see what it comes up with. So here's what Apple Intelligence thinks I look like wearing a gray scarf. Not bad, not terrible. I have to say, gotta give it props because the teeth used to be terrible and they have made some improvements to the teeth. So I think that looks a little bit better. Oh, there you go. Now you get some bad teeth. Here's one that's like, what in the world? So with this one we'll choose Done and stick with it so you can see it. I like that the snow is on the hair, which is pretty cool. But at any time you can go in and edit each of these photos and make changes there. And so we can go back to this and choose Edit and then go from here using the prompts that we already created of Mica Scarf and Winter holidays to see what else it comes up with. And we like this one where the teeth aren't quite as strange and it feels like the ears are more accurate. Now we can save that one to our home screen. So that is Image Playground and also Genmoji, which are just two of the tools. As I mentioned, some of these tools already existed, like those writing tools. They just have been enhanced a little bit and now they've opened up access to the ChatGPT integration, where when you are writing something, a prompt, when you're asking for help, if it doesn't seem to know what it's supposed to say, it will ask you, hey, do you want to use ChatGPT to inform what's going on? You can log in with your Chat GPT account if you have one. You don't have to. That will keep it more private because it kind of creates an individual instance for that. So that's entirely up to you. Apple also says that some new capabilities are going to be available in the months to come, like Siri. It's also going to gain what they call on screen awareness, which in doing so will mean that there's going to be a bunch of new actions that Siri will be able to take on your behalf. So you can imagine being able to have it kind of open an app and interact with the app. It'll be even more that you can do like you could with shortcuts, and I think that that's really going to push things forward in a way that we haven't seen before. So I'm really excited to see how that all shapes up and iOS today is going to be the great place to go to watch all of that as well as of course Hands on Mac. So that stuff is coming up. But excuse me, I just wanted to give you kind of a brief glimpse at what's possible right now with Image Playground and Genmoji. Of course, check out MacBreak weekly where they talked about these new tools as well and I'm sure provided some kind of look into things like Private Cloud Compute and the other stuff that works in the background. With that we have reached the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at TWiT TV TNW, so head there to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you would like to get all of our shows ad free, I want to invite you to join the club. We've got a two week free trial going right now at TWiT TV Clubtwits, so if you've not joined the club before, now's your chance to try it out for free. Love to see you join the club where you'll gain access to ad free versions of every show, access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special club Twitter events get published there. Access to the members only Discord Server A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at TWiT, and of course access to the video versions of of our Club Twit exclusive shows. If you are already a member of Club Twit then might I invite you to refer your friends when you do so you can earn months of Club Twit for free. TWiT TV Club TWiT referral is where you head to learn more about that. Be sure to check in this Sunday as I host Hands On Tech every Sunday at 11am Pacific Time. Also you can follow me online at Micah Sargent on many a social media network or head to Chihuahua Coffee. That's Chihuahua Coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online and be sure to tune in next week at 9am because at 9am next Thursday I am hosting an early Crafting Corner. So those of you, you who live outside of outside of the US but basically anybody who wants to tune in at that earlier time can do so so 9am Pacific time as opposed to our typical Wednesday night for Crafting Corner this month. So just a reminder about that for you club members and once again, I thank you for listening to the show and telling your friends about the show. And I will catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly before it will be on our little holiday break and back again on January 2nd. So one more episode, then a break and then back on January 2nd. 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