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Todd Conaway

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Introducing Amazon Go and the world’s most advanced shopping technology

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Todd Conaway

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A few years ago, video projection mapping (aka spatial augmented reality, or projecting video onto 3D surfaces such as buildings) was a fledgling art form, with a handful of noteworthy examples. Now, a head-turning projection is par for the course for any building opening, product launch, award ceremony or even a big birthday party (if it's good enough for the Queen).

Video projection mapping has the capacity to transform any object into a screen. Forget flat projection, as projection mapping has the ability to take a real-world object, such as a building, and project onto its walls without any distortion.

Events combine motion graphics, , , and video to playfully highlight, deconstruct, rotate, recontextualise and generally manipulate a building's usual geometry.

Often site-specific, the best work enhances rather than effaces the architecture it's projected onto. The sheer scale can be breathtaking and the illusion of everyday and static objects around us becoming animate and playfully reworked can be incredibly exciting. Just look at the expressions on the audience's faces during a projection and you see an almost childlike glee.

We've picked our favourite examples of projection mapping that you must see, ranging from O2's stunning rose, to micro projections on the petals of a flower, to an incredible display the full height of the Sagrada Familia.

01. Bloom

Established in 1947 to provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Edinburgh International Festival celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2017.

To mark the occasion, 59 Productions conceived an opening event that transformed the whole of St Andrew Square into a magical night garden and saw buildings burst into life in a floral explosion of colour, texture and sound.

And rather than being a one-off event, Bloom ran for two nights at the start of the festival, from 10pm to midnight on a 20-minute loop, allowing the audience to enjoy the spectacle at their own pace.

02. Interconnection

The winner of both the Jury's Choice and People's Choice awards at the 2016 iMapp Bucharest competition, Interconnection transformed the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, Romania, into a psychotropic exploration of the interconnectedness of all things, man.

Created by Limelight 3D Projection Mapping, it draws inspiration from contemporary visionary art and architecture, sacred geometry, physics and chemistry, and mixes them all up into a properly mind-altering five-minute trip.

03. O2's Wear the Rose

In September 2015, the O2 joined forces with Projection Artworks to create the world's largest projection mapping project to celebrate the Rugby World Cup.

Making use of 68 projectors and more than 122 moving head light fixtures, the roof of the venue was transformed into the English rose emblem. According to O2, the show could be seen from space.

04. Harrods' Fabergé egg

Projection Artworks was also part of the team that created the world's brightest projection mapping show in Easter 2015. Global design consultancy JUSTSO collaborated with Projection Artworks to illuminate the windows of world-famous department store Harrods.

Conceived for Fabergé's Easter storefront display, the 360-degree mapped 3D installation is based on the company's pendent designs - which are 1/100th of the size of the 1.5m model - and incorporates an interactive touchscreen element to showcase the detail of the jewellery.

05. Box

This video from Bot & Dolly was created without any special effects. As the performer engages with a morphing set, unfathomable shapes, graphics and animations are revealed. As the video continues, we're eventually shown that it is in fact, a robotic mechanism hidden behind every illusion.

Using their state of the art robotic camera systems 'Iris' and 'Scout', the technique allows for millimeter precision of the robot arms.

06. Battersea Power Station Annual Party

Battersea Power Station invited Drive, a UK-based agency that specialises in projection mapping, to create an awe-inspiring visual experience to raise awareness for the iconic building's spectacular redevelopment. This is the result: 360,000 lumens of immersive visuals celebrating the building's past, present and future.

07. Tokyo Station Vision

JR East celebrates the opening of the reconditioned Tokyo Station with a spectacular projection mapping experiment by NHK Enterprise. Brickwork peels away to reveal pistons; clockwork automata strum pilasters while trumpets and cymbals blow and crash from behind bays; at one point a route-map inscribes itself across the facade like a 150m long game of Snake.

This is a great projection, sympathetic not only to the architectonics of the building, but its function too.

08. Dr Blighty at Brighton Pavilion

Dr Blighty was a free production that became one of the highlights of the 2016 Brighton Festival, transforming the Brighton Pavilion, on England's south coast, into an Indian scene.

Produced by Nutkhut and animated by motion design and projection mapping specialist NOVAK, it celebrated Brighton Pavilion's history as a WWI hospital for wounded Indian soldiers. A specially commissioned soundtrack by Shri and Ed Carter rounded of the colourful event.

09. Speed of Light

Not all projection mapping examples can be measured in metres. The Theory's personal project Speed of Light bills itself as the worlds smallest all action police chase.

Using hand-held micro projectors with an iPhone video source, Tom Jenkins and Simon Sharp create a dynamic and witty film on the surface of their own office that proves size isn't everything.

10. As Above, So Below

Light Harvest assembled a whole team of artists for this unusual mapping for Manhattan Bridge. The animation makes great use of the heavily rusticated facade of the bridge but where it really shines is in the tunnels underneath.

The entire curved ceiling becomes animated, when entering the tunnel the audience becomes immersed in the projection.

11. Willow - 'Sweater'

Using two walls, a treadmill, and some nifty projection, director Filip Sterckx creates a virtual world for the Willow's music video. As with most projection mapping it's the technique that charms here.

Singer Pieter-Jan Van Den Troost gropes at doors that aren't really there, trots on the spot down imaginary stairs, and kneels pretending to be paddling in the sea. It's all surprisingly lo-tech, and all the better for it.

12. Lighting the Sails

Jørn Utzon's inspiration for Sydney Opera House's iconic shell roof is brought to life in this work by Urban Screen. The roofs appear as fabric ship sails, undulating in the wind. The distinctive chevron tiles - a labour of love for Utzon - pulse, fold, and rupture to reveal the rich interiors.

All of Urban Screen's projections are worth watching, particularly Tag und Nacht for its clever interplay between in the interior and exterior, and the seminal 555 Kubik.

13. Scintillation

Xavier Chaissaing's super low budget film demonstrated what an inventive artist can achieve with limited resources. The film was shot with a DSLR and a motion control rig made by the artist himself.

Its innovative mix of stop motion footage and live camera projection is particularly bewitching in the scenes where the projection is viewed through the translucent petals of a flower.

14. Omicron

One of the few permanent installations in this list, Omicron can be seen at the Hala Stulecia museum of Architecture in Wroclaw, Poland.

Romain Tardy's minimalist aesthetic takes its inspiration from the period in which the dome was built and does an incredible job of highlighting its structural qualities, making the heavy concrete construction light and dynamic. The making-of video is interesting, too.

15. Sagrada Familia (Ode à la vie)

Gaudi's plans for a polychrome facade on the Sagrada Familia have been realised, albeit only for 15 minutes. Moment Factory combined video projection, gobos, sharp beam lights projecting beams into the sky, and lighting from the interior to create a spectacle it describes as a, "living fresco made of colour, light and sound".

To work with the complex geometry of the cathedral a 3D scan was used to help map and light a show that works with the host architecture in brilliant symbiosis.
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15 projection mapping demos that will blow your mind

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A few years ago, video projection mapping (aka spatial augmented reality, or projecting video onto 3D surfaces such as buildings) was a fledgling art form, with a handful of noteworthy examples. Now, a head-turning projection is par for the course for any building opening, product launch, award ceremony or even a big birthday party (if it's good enough for the Queen).

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Realistically, here's what the very near future of self-driving cars looks like

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Realistically, here's what the very near future of self-driving cars looks like

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Todd Conaway

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Benoit Tessier/Reuters

It's been 60 years since the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine gave us the promise of flying cars. But our personal mobility options remain, today and for the foreseeable future, earthbound.

Will the promise of self-driving cars be as elusive? In short, no.

The dream of taking a road trip in which we pay more attention to a new book or movie than we do to the driving task is well within reach.

Still, we're not there yet. And people are just beginning to ask a very important question: How might our nation's roads and highways, and the driving done by we humans ourselves, need to change as autonomous vehicles become more ubiquitous? As researchers at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute who study many of the implications of self-driving cars, we find the answer in two important sets of realities - those we know, and those we don't know.

Starting slowly, and in cities

For starters, we know that self-driving cars won't become commonplace overnight. The vast majority of cars on the road now have no automation features or only very limited automation, like cruise control. You can find a few self-driving cars being tested on public roads now if you know where to look. But you won't likely find many in a dealer showroom for at least 10 years.

Another factor that will further delay the widespread use of autonomous cars is that many people hang on to their cars as long as possible. The number of highly automated cars as a share of everything on the road will grow over time, but only relatively slowly.

In addition, we can be quite confident that autonomous cars will appear on city streets before they make it to the interstate highways. The reasons have more to do with public policy than they do with technology. Local governments are typically more nimble than state and federal agencies, which is one reason why you can find robotic taxis being tested right now on the streets of Pittsburgh, Phoenixand San Francisco.

Interstate highway operations and safety rules are governed by state and federal laws and regulations, which are much more complex. For the most part, self-driving cars will be ready for the open road long before the open road is ready for them.

Another factor delaying the widespread use of self-driving cars is money. The transformations that will support autonomous travel won't be cheap.

That's true for the private companies designing and building self-driving cars, and for the taxpayer-funded government agencies that design and build the roads on which they'll drive. Ensuring cars can communicate with each otherwill require industry investment; their ability to converse with roads, pavement markings, road signs, and traffic signals will need government support.

Yet some states already are short of moneythey need to repair existing roads and bridges, much less build new ones or add technology to the mix. The certainly high price tag raises vexing questions about our current (and likely outdated) funding system.

Toru Hanai/Reuters

Many questions remain

That gives us a good start when imagining what could be possible in a world with more autonomous cars on the road. But there is still a lot we don't know.

Some unknowns are fairly technical. How well will autonomous vehicles operate in rain or snow? And how will they handle changing conditions on unpaved roads, which make up nearly half of the country's 4 million miles of road?

Other unknowns are more about the transportation system as a whole. Will self-driving cars help to ease traffic congestion, or make it worse? Without a lot of autonomous cars in the world to test or experiment with, we're left to rely on computer modeling to aid our search for answers.

To say that modeling the effectsof these vehicles in a real-world setting is complex is putting it lightly; making allowances for unpredictable human behavior in that modeling only compounds the complexity. For now, any argument that self-driving cars will be an antidote for congestion may be, at best, uninformed and specious.

Will self-driving cars make our roadways dramatically safer? Most crashes result from human error, so it seems logical to assume that removing humans from the process reduces the likelihood of a crash.

We're long on hopes here, but so far short on evidence, especially about what might happen during the transition period when both self-driving and conventional vehicles are sharing the roads. There is reason for cautious optimism, because federal agencies do have preliminary data suggesting that the safety performance of some self-driving cars is better than national human-driving averages.

We don't know whether car ownership trends will change. People might want their own personal self-driving auto, or maybe they'll just want to call a robotaxi whenever they need a ride. TTI research showed that respondents in one Texas city were evenly split, 50-50, on whether they'd ever travel in a self-driving car.

We expect that as people experience more automation in their cars and become knowledgeable about potential safety and other benefits, acceptance and likely adoption will increase. It's unclear how people will spend their timein a car that drives itself and how that might influence other travel-related decisions, including decisions about traveling more, or less.

What drivers will need to know will have to change, too, in ways that aren't entirely clear. We'll have to adapt driver education programs and tests to ensure people understand how to operate self-driving vehicles safely. We'll all need to know about humans' roles in emergency procedures, maintenance tasks, or other new elements of autonomous driving.

And what about liability? If a car with no driver is involved in a crash ( yes, that happened), who's at fault? If a car with no driver is stopped by a police officer for driving too slowly ( yes, that happened, too), to whom should the citation be issued? For the time being, the onus is on the human driver who must remain alert and be ready to take over vehicle operations.

This list of queries is merely a start. As with any emerging research and development venture, unforeseen issues and new questions will arise. Put another way, we don't yet fully know what we don't know.

What is certain is that we're experiencing the most pivotal time in transportation history since we started building interstate highways. Our cars won't be able to fly, but they will be much more capable than we're used to.

They're not quite ready yet - and we're not either - but it won't be long. We can expect it to be an eventful ride, no matter who's in the driver's seat.
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SEE ALSO: The 3 biggest risks facing self-driving cars

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Realistically, here's what the very near future of self-driving cars looks like

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It's been 60 years since the cover of Popular Mechanics magazine gave us the promise of flying cars. But our personal mobility options remain, today and for the foreseeable future, earthbound. Will the promise of self-driving cars be as elusive? In short, no.

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Todd Conaway

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The first time Alex Acero saw Her, he watched it like a normal person. The second time, he didn't watch the movie at all. Acero, the Apple executive in charge of the tech behind Siri, sat there with his eyes closed, listening to how Scarlett Johansson voiced her artificially intelligent character Samantha. He paid attention to how she talked to Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, and how Twombly talked back. Acero was trying to discern what about Samantha could make someone fall in love without ever seeing her.

When I ask Acero what he learned about why the voice worked so well, he laughs because the answer is so obvious. "It is natural!" he says. "It was not robotic!" This hardly counts as a revelation for Acero. Mostly, it confirmed that his team at Apple has spent the last few years on the right project: making Siri sound more human.

This fall, when iOS 11 hits millions of iPhones and iPads around the world, the new software will give Siri a new voice. It doesn't include many new features or tell better jokes, but you'll notice the difference. Siri now takes more pauses in sentences, elongates syllables right before a pause, and the speech lilts up and down as it speaks. The words sound more fluid and Siri speaks more languages, too. It's nicer to listen to, and to talk to.

Apple spent years re-architecting the technology behind Siri, transforming it from a virtual assistant into the catch-all term for all the artificial intelligence powering your phone. It has relentlessly expanded into new countries and languages (for all its faults, Siri's by far the most worldly assistant on the market). And slowly at first but more quickly now, Apple has worked to make Siri available anywhere and everywhere. Siri now falls under the control of Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, indicating that Siri's now as important to Apple as iOS.

It'll still be a while before the tech's good enough to make you fall in love with your virtual assistant. But Acero and his team think they've taken a giant leap forward. And they believe firmly that if they can make Siri sound less like a robot and more like someone you know and trust, they can make Siri great even when it fails. And that, in these early days of AI and voice technology, might be the best-case scenario.

Siri Grows Up

If you want a good example of why Apple likes to control everything about its products, just look at Siri. Six years after its launch, Siri has by most accounts fallen behind in the virtual assistant race. Amazon's Alexa has more developer support; Google Assistant knows more stuff; both are available in many kinds of devices from many different companies.

Apple says it's not its fault. When Siri first launched, another company provided the back-end technology for voice recognition. All signs point to Nuance as that company, though neither Apple nor Nuance ever confirmed a partnership. Whoever it was, Apple happily blames them for Siri's early issues. "It was like running a race and, you know, somebody else was holding us back," says Greg Joswiak, Apple's VP of product marketing. Joswiak says Apple always had big plans for Siri, "this idea of an assistant you could talk to on your phone, and have it do these things for you in a more easy way," but the tech just wasn't good enough. "You know, garbage in, garbage out," he says.

A few years ago, the team at Apple, led by Acero, took control of Siri's back-end and revamped the experience. It's now based on deep learning and AI, and has improved vastly as a result. Siri's raw voice recognition rivals all its competitors, correctly identifying 95 percent of users' speech. The AI works in two distinct and critical parts of the system: speech-to-text, in which Siri tries to figure out what you said; and text-to-speech, in which Siri speaks back.

Among Siri's most important jobs entails distinguishing your voice from everyone else's, especially as these systems become more personalized. The more data Siri has, and the better Apple's models become, the more it can discern between people and understand even heavy accents. It's also a security concern: Researchers recently found they could communicate with Siri at frequencies too high for humans to hear, rendering the hack invisible. Siri needs to learn to separate human speech from machine speech, and your speech from everyone else's.

Learn to Talk

One helpful way to understand how these systems work is through Apple's process of teaching Siri a new language. When bringing Siri into a new market-say, Shanghai-the team first finds pre-existing databases of local speech. They supplement that by hiring local voice talent, and having them read books, newspapers, web articles, and more.

Apple's team transcribes those recordings, matching words to sounds-and more importantly, identifying phonemes, the individual sounds that make up all speech. (In English, "fourteen" is a word, the toothy "e" sound in the middle is a phoneme.) They try to capture these phonemes spoken in every imaginable way: trailing off at the end of the word, harder at the beginning, longer before a pause, rising in a question. Each utterance has a slightly different sound wave, which Apple's algorithms analyze to find the best fit for any given sentence. Every sentence Siri speaks contains dozens or hundreds of these phonemes, assembled like magazine cut-outs in a ransom note. It's likely that none of the words you hear Siri say were actually recorded the way they're spoken.

Acero offers an example: "You want to watch this?" versus "I like your watch." In the first case, Acero's voice naturally ticks upward as he says "watch," but moves down in the latter. "It's the same word, but it sounds completely different," Acero says. He couldn't use the same recording of the word "watch," or even the same individual phonemes, in both sentences. Systems that do sound like your old GPS navigating to "one Siiiix NINE fourteenth STREET PhilaDELphia." It's hard to listen to, especially for more than a few words at a time.

Even a few years ago, computers and servers didn't offer enough processing power to pore over a vast database to find the perfect combination of sounds for every call and response. Now that they do, Acero and his team want as much data as possible. So once they've built an initial model, they roll out Siri in what they call "dictation-only mode." You can't talk to Siri, but you can tap the microphone button and dictate a text message or web search. This gives Apple's machines inputs from many accents, different-quality microphones, and a variety of situations, all of which make Siri work better for more people. Apple collects (anonymously, it says) and transcribes that data, improving the algorithms and training the networks. They supplement with location-specific data and spoken customs-you'd say the score is three-zero in the US, but three-nil in the UK-and continue to refine the system until Siri has a near-perfect understanding both of what Shanghainese words are, and how people say them.

At the same time, Apple launches an epic search for the right voice talent. They begin with hundreds of people, all brought in to record a sampling of things Siri might say. Acero then works with Apple's designers and user-interface team to decide which voices they like best. This part skews more art than science-they're listening for some ineffable sense of helpfulness and camaraderie, spunky without being sharp, happy without being cartoonish.

The next part is all science. "There are many voice talents that sound good," Acero says, "but it doesn't mean they'd be a good text-to-speech voice." They run speech through the models they've built looking for what's called phoneme variability-essentially, the sound-wave difference between the left and right side of each tiny utterance. More variability within a phoneme makes it hard to stitch a lot of them together in a natural-sounding way, but you'd never hear the problems listening to them speak. Only the computer sees the difference. "It's almost like when you're doing wallpaper on a wall, and you have to look at the seams to make sure they line up," Acero says.

When they find the person who sounds right to both human and computer, Apple records them for weeks at a time, and that becomes the voice of Siri. This has been the process for each of Siri's 21 supported languages, localized for 36 countries-more than all its major competitors combined. In all, 375 million people use Siri every month. That's a big number, especially for a much-panned voice assistant with a long list of serious flaws.

Still, 375 million people pales next to the billion-plus Apple devices in use around the world. Nearly everything Apple sells includes Siri, from iPhone to Apple Watch to MacBook to Apple TV. At some point soon, analysts estimate more than a billion iPhones alone will be active simultaneously. Siri's a popular and important feature, but it's not quite ubiquitous. And for most people, it's definitely not essential; you don't need Siri to function the way you need your phone. Now that Apple has an assistant it trusts, it has to teach people how to use it.

Ask Me Anything

All you need to know about Apple's intentions for Siri can be gleaned from one commercial. The spot follows Dwayne Johnson through a day in his life with his sidekick Siri. Johnson uses Siri to check his calendar while working out and zen-gardening; he checks his reminders; he summons a Lyft, which of course he drives; he checks the weather while speeding recklessly; he checks his email while painting the Sistine Chapel; he does centiliter conversions with his hands full; he FaceTimes and takes selfies from space. Siri calls him "Mr. Big, Bald, and Beautiful," in a way that hopefully will feel slightly less uncomfortable in iOS 11.

From the beginning, Joswiak says, Apple wanted Siri to be a get-shit-done machine. It drives him crazy that people compare virtual assistants by asking trivia questions, which always makes Siri look bad. "We didn't engineer this thing to be Trivial Pursuit!" he says.

Instead, Joswiak is still focused on helping people do more with the help of an automated friend. He points to Siri's ability to do complicated file-search on the Mac, or the upcoming HomePod's deep knowledge of music. Another example came a few days after our meeting, when Siri won a technical Emmy for its voice search and controls. There really is something wonderful about saying, "Hey Siri, rewind two minutes," and watching it happen.

Siri can't do everything, or even most things. It's most useful for saving you a few taps and types, not solving complicated trivia or debating whether we're living in a simulation. Yet because Siri shows no bounds-you can ask it anything-users will try everything. "It is not trivial for users to know what they can say," Acero says. Part of his job entails helping Siri communicate its skills better, and fail gracefully when it must. "We're trying to endow Siri with these kind of capabilities, where it may know what it doesn't know," he says. "But that's a tough problem." Apple's website, and even its commercials, are designed to help people better understand what Siri can and can't do.

Another challenge is just getting people to remember Siri exists. "People have their habits of doing something," Acero says. "If they're used to typing, all of a sudden changing that, it takes a while." So Apple's trying to nudge users in the right direction. In iOS 11, Siri becomes a lot more present and a lot more proactive. It'll watch you browse the web and then suggest Apple News stories for you to read, or help you add a calendar event for the massage you just booked through Groupon. The new Siri is a shape-shifter, syncing your settings between devices so no matter what gadget you're using, Siri knows you as well as always.

Over the years, Apple's been slow to let developers integrate with Siri. While Alexa and, to a lesser extent, Google Assistant have encouraged others to build apps for and including their assistants, Siri's walls have stayed closed. All those things The Rock can do, he can only do in Apple's own apps. It refuses to acknowledge the existence of Google Maps or Outlook on your phone, and certainly won't turn on any light bulbs made without HomeKit. Last year, the company cautiously let more developers in, allowing users to use Siri to make calls with WhatsApp, summon a ride from Uber, or send money with Venmo. The doors creak wider in iOS 11, but only slightly.

Such slow-moving has cost Apple its lead in many people's eyes, as Amazon and Google hoover up developer support and race ahead in features. Joswiak at least projects patience. The question, he says, is not how many things Siri could do. "It's 'how do you do it right?' Because what we didn't want to do is become prescriptive." He bristles at Amazon's and Google's demanding syntax, which require you to say things like, "Alexa, ask Daily Horoscopes about Taurus" or "OK Google, let me talk to Todoist." He'd rather wait until you just say what you want, however you want, and have it happen. Apple, as always, prefers doing nothing to doing something halfway.

The syntax problem ultimately comes back to the same thing Acero heard listening to Samantha and Theodore Twombly fall in love on-screen. The best computers-even the science-fiction ones-sound human. "It has the right pauses, the right intonations, smooth voice," he says. "And just a little bit metallic in the sound." He wants to build something that good, and give it to everyone. Anytime you want to check the progress, just check in with Siri.
UPDATE: This story now spells Greg Joswiak's name correctly.

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How Apple Finally Made Siri Sound More Human

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The first time Alex Acero saw Her, he watched it like a normal person. The second time, he didn't watch the movie at all. Acero, the Apple executive in charge of the tech behind Siri, sat there with his eyes closed, listening to how Scarlett Johansson voiced her artificially intelligent character Samantha.