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Today at Nvidia’s GTC conference the company unveiled a wild technology demo and it’s straight out of Black Panther. Simply put, a driver using virtual reality was remotely controlling a car in real life.

“He’s not with us,” Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, said pointing the driver on the stage. “He’s looking at this virtual world through live video.”

The driver was sitting on the stage of the convention center wearing an HTC Vive and seated in a cockpit-like car with a steering wheel. Using Nvidia’s Holodeck software, a car was loaded (the same Lexus used in Black Panther). Then, a video feed appeared showing a Ford Fusion behind the convention center.

The demo at the show was basic but worked. The driver in VR had seemingly complete control over the vehicle and managed to drive it, live but slowly, around a private lot. He navigated around a van, drove a few hundred feet and parked the car.

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The car was empty the whole time.

Nvidia didn’t detail any of the platforms running the systems nor did he announced availability. The demo was just a proof of concept. Jensen even exclaimed “we don’t know what to call it. What do we call it?”

Self-driving technology is a massive market for Nvidia, and the company is a leader in supplying technology. And demos like this are a great way to keep the attention on the company’s capabilities.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed a forthcoming generation of the company’s self-driving Drive PX supercomputers for use in vehicles – the successor to the current Drive Pegasus, which will be called the Drive Orin and which will use essentially two Drive Pegasus computers combined into one, much smaller packages.

This should ramp up the self-driving computing capability of vehicles in general, since Pegasus, when revealed in October of last year, contains two Xavier computers and two post-Volta GPUs. The Drive PX Pegasus was reportedly ready to power Level 5 autonomous robotaxis, without any onboard manual controls required onboard the vehicle for human intervention or takeover.

No word on when Orin will ship or what it’ll enable. Pegasus is already running post-Volta GPUs and will only soon be shipping samples to customers, so Orin is likely quite a ways out and still essentially a glimpse into Nvidia’s deep roadmap for autonomous driving.

MoviePass is going to start playing favorites. The company just announced a partnership to offer a set of exclusive perks through Landmark Theatres, the indie theater chain co-owned by Mark Cuban. The app’s two million users will now be able to take advantage of these features at Landmark’s 255 screens in 53 theaters.

The partnership is a pretty big deal for MoviePass subscribers, who up to this point have been encouraged to view local movie theaters as a kind of brand-agnostic all-you-can-eat buffet. The deal will allow movie-goers to use the app for e-ticketing, seat selection and to make reservations for advanced screenings — all sorely missing features in the remarkable if at times glitchy MoviePass user experience.

“There is no better place to watch a movie than Landmark and now MoviePass customers will be able to enjoy all of our theaters,” Cuban said of the deal.

New perks considered, we’re inclined to agree. As a MoviePass user myself, I can say the service is a ridiculously good deal — at least until the company runs out of cash and has to start making some. The one catch is that the experience can be a little stressful. I love seeing movies, but I’m the kind of person who normally would buy tickets in advance for a showing a few hours away. Unfortunately, MoviePass requires that users show up to the theater to buy tickets IRL before a showing, and sometimes getting there super early isn’t an option. Still, it’s a small price to pay for the service’s heavily subsidized small price to pay.

Getting to the front of the ticketing line and being that jerk juggling your MoviePass card while fighting with the at times buggy check-in process detracts a bit from the otherwise seamless experience of seeing all the damn movies you want. Landmark’s new features could assuage those anxieties, particularly if they help subscribers plan a little further ahead. I know it’s enough to nudge me toward my city’s three Landmark-owned theaters, and I suspect other MoviePass users will feel the same way.

Other theater chains will likely keep a close eye on that kind of behavior as those companies decide how cozy to get with the disruptive movie subscription service that’s keen on driving potential movie-goers back to the popcorn lines.

Well, at least it’s not another subscription service. Turner today announced the forthcoming launch of its new live sports streaming service, Bleacher Report Live, which is expected to roll out in April. The service, which can also be referred to as B/R Live, takes its name from the popular online destination for sports fans that Turner acquired in 2012 as a means of courting a more millennial audience.

Most notably, the new service will offer a pay-per-game option for those who just want to tune into individual games, without having to commit to yet another subscription.

B/R Live will provide access to a range of sporting events, such as the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League, NBA League Pass games, 65 NCAA Championships, PGA Championship, National Lacrosse League, The Spring League, Red Bull Global Rallycross, World Arm Wrestling League and others.

Specifically, the NBA League Pass will allow fans to purchase and watch live NBA games in progress at a reduced price, which isn’t something that’s been done before.

The NBA games will also be available in the NBA App and on NBA.com, in addition to B/R Live, starting with the 2018-2019 regular season.

B/R Live enters a market where streaming sports services already exist, and takes a knowing approach to differentiating its offering from the others. In terms of rivals, both fuboTV and Disney’s upcoming ESPN+ are subscription-based, while the new CBS Sports HQ is free.

But B/R Live instead will offer a variety of pricing options, including the ability to pay for games on an individual basis, as well as pay via subscription. At first, however, only pay-per-game will be available, with subscriptions to follow later in the year.

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“As viewing habits continue to evolve, Turner is well positioned to provide fans with direct access to premium live sports content that is highly coveted by audiences of scale, including a high concentration of millennials,” said David Levy, President of Turner, in a statement.

“When we first acquired Bleacher Report in 2012, we knew the definition of a network was changing and we anticipated a time when B/R would become a virtual network. Today is a significant step in that direction and we will fully leverage the reach of B/R and its deep connection with passionate sports fans to provide compelling experiences for them across this new, exciting platform,” he added.

The service is being powered by Turner’s iStreamPlanet technology, which counts among its customers Fox, fuboTV, Hulu, CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network, NBC Sports, and others. It will also offer a feed of real-time sporting events to scroll through, and personalization feature that help connect fans with their favorite events and teams.

At launch, B/R Live will make all content free during the first few months, as part of an introductory preview period. This will begin with Johnny Manziel’s debut in The Spring League on Saturday, April 7, 2018.

B/R Live will launch on iOS, Android and the web.

Google will be acquiring Tenor, which powers a variety of GIF keyboards on phones and messengers like Facebook Messenger, the companies announced today.

Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand within Google, the company said in a blog post. Tenor has increasingly positioned itself as a search company, using that as a metric for engagement and success as users tap into a massive database of GIFs. The company said it has more than 12 billion searches every month, and is one of the first major exits for a small but relatively hot space around tools that allow users to easily share GIFs. The company works with advertisers to create sponsored GIFs that slot into its searches, which are usually pretty compact and offer an opportunity to generate a lot of engagement.

GIFs have increasingly been pretty interesting because they offer an opportunity to compress a lot of information into something that’s easily shareable. Tenor CEO David McIntosh will often say that the company is about conveying emotion — and really, that isn’t something that often goes very well over text. If you’re watching the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, you’re probably better off searching for a GIF of your team rather than just blasting a text message to your group of friends.

“With their deep library of content, Tenor surfaces the right GIFs in the moment so you can find the one that matches your mood,” Google Images director of engineering Cathy Edwards said. “Tenor will help us do this more effectively in Google Images as well as other products that use GIFs, like Gboard. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand, and we’re looking forward to investing in their technology and relationships with content and API partners. So whether you’re using the Tenor keyboard or one of our other products, you can expect to see much more of this in your future:”

When you open Tenor, you’ll only find a small slice of GIFs that are available as the company is looking to compress the amount of time you actually spending digging around for a GIF you want to share. The theory is that if it’s easier to find and share one, you’ll do it again and again. This isn’t dissimilar from Google’s approach either, offering itself as a utility that’s a quick get-in, get-out experience that builds a level of stickiness that’s hard to unseat. Google is, of course, worth hundreds of billions of dollars off the back of a massive advertising business that basically prints money.

Tenor isn’t the only one in the space. Giphy, for example, also has a GIF keyboard and has a pretty large database of GIFs. Giphy says it has 300 million daily active users, though depending on who you talk to in the Valley that can mean a couple different things. Nevertheless, all of these companies have been able to attract venture financing. There’s also Gfycat, which positions itself as a tool for creators, that says it has 130 million monthly active users.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But by positioning itself as a search company that slots into a messaging ecosystem, Tenor seems like a natural piece of the puzzle for Google. It also gives the company a small wedge into the messenger space as it’ll have an opportunity to touch all the platforms that are connected to Tenor like even Facebook messenger, though that one tends to flip between GIF platforms indiscriminately.

Nvidia and Arm today announced a partnership that’s aimed at making it easier for chip makers to incorporate deep learning capabilities into next-generation consumer gadgets, mobile devices and Internet of Things objects. Mostly, thanks to this partnership, artificial intelligence could be coming to doorbell cams or smart speakers soon.

Arm intends to integrate Nvidia’s open-source Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) architecture into its just-announced Project Trillium platform. Nvidia says this should help IoT chip makers incorporate AI into their products.

“Accelerating AI at the edge is critical in enabling Arm’s vision of connecting a trillion IoT devices,” said Rene Haas, EVP, and president of the IP Group, at Arm. “Today we are one step closer to that vision by incorporating NVDLA into the Arm Project Trillium platform, as our entire ecosystem will immediately benefit from the expertise and capabilities our two companies bring in AI and IoT.”

Announced last month, Arm’s Project Trillium is a series of scalable processors designed for machine learning and neural networks. NVDLA open-source nature allows Arm to offer a suite of developers tools on its new platform. Together, with Arm’s scalable chip platforms and Nvidia’s developer’s tools, the two companies feel they’re offering a solution that could result in billions of IoT, mobile and consumers electronic devices gaining access to deep learning.

Deepu Tallam, VP and GM of Autonomous Machines at Nvidia, explained it best with this analogy: “NVDLA is like providing all the ingredients for somebody to make it a dish including the instructions. With Arm [this partnership] is basically like a microwave dish.”

Nvidia has taken the AutoSIM virtual environment for testing autonomous cars it originally showed off at CES, combined it with its Drive Pegasus AI in-car computer and created a virtual testing and validation loop that can handle billions of virtual driving miles in hyperrealistic environments, with the ability to model edge cases and recreate conditions that would be difficult to test exhaustively on real roads.

The system designed for use by its partners is called Drive Constellation, and involves using two different servers to accurately simulate real-world autonomous driving in a totally virtualized enviroment. One server runs Nvidia’s Drive Sim software, which will simulate an automated vehicles sensory experience while out on the road, providing photorealistic camera captures and data from virtualized LiDAR and radar systems that accurately mimics what would be captured driving on a real road.

The second server in the system is running an Nvidia Drive Pegasus AI, or the ‘brain’ of an autonomous vehicle, which processes the data fed from the first server just as it would if it was real data being fed from vehicles sensors capturing it from the road. The Pegasus-powered server then returns its control commands back to the simulator, telling it to carry out driving activity just as it would a real car on the road.

This is what Nvidia terms a “hardware-in-the-loop” cycle, and it can run at 30 such exchanges per second, helping to validate autonomous driving software performance. And because it can be fully controlled by the tester, the Drive Sim part of the equation can be tuned to provide a realistic driving experience like one might encounter on roads, or artificial conditions like enduring 24 hours of blinding, peak mid-day sun – or whatever edge case a researcher or developer might want to test and optimize for.

Edge cases remain the primary concern for anyone developing autonomous cars, and the issue with relying on real-world testing to build software that can properly handle these edge cases is that they don’t occur often, and they’re seldom replicable. Software simulation is a way to prepare for these rarely occurring instances without risk and without having to wait for conditions to align themselves just right (or wrong, as the case may be).

Nvidia’s Drive Constellation is going to start becoming available to some of its partners through early access during the third quarter of this year, and will roll out commercially sometime after that. Of course, Nvidia also announced today that it’s temporarily suspending its autonomous driving testing while it investigates the recent Uber self-driving car testing accident that resulted in a pedestrian death, but more testing in simulation should, in theory make for fewer potential accidents on real roads.

The James Webb space telescope is certainly one of the most anticipated projects coming out of NASA, both because of its grand scale and its interminable gestation time. Well, the latter just got a little longer: the launch of the Webb, expected previously in mid-2019 (and before that in October 2018), has been delayed to at least May of 2020.

NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot and others from the organization announced the news in a conference call.

“All the observatory’s flight hardware is now complete,” Lightfoot said. “However, the issues brought to light with the spacecraft element are prompting us to take the necessary steps to refocus our efforts on the completion of this ambitious and complex observatory.”

The Webb is essentially the successor to the Hubble, which has done yeoman duty and by far exceeded its mission parameters — but all the same is coming to the end of its time. Conceived more than 20 years ago, it has faced repeated delays, as any project of this scale can expect to.

The $8 billion telescope will be the best eye in the sky and the most in demand, but once it goes up, it can’t be serviced or visited. That means everything in one of the most complex imaging devices ever created must work perfectly in outer space for decades, with no chance of physical intervention. So you can understand when its creators say they’d like to take a few extra months to quadruple-check some things.

Various small issues have arisen during testing and a Government Accountability Office report, like a cabling mishap that created a tear in the immense folding sun shield. “Those are avoidable errors, but in developing very complex systems, those things do happen.”

If you read between the lines, though, it seems that primary partner Northrup Grumman is getting the stink eye here; the company seems to have contributed more than its fair share of mistakes.

A consequence of the delays and new tests is that the project will now likely go over its $8 billion pre-launch budget cap and will need to be re-authorized by Congress. Considering the ballooning budget on something like the California high speed rail project, the Webb seems like an example of extreme fiduciary responsibility, and Congress knows to haggle, delay further, or cut corners will merely cost it more in the long run.

 

When it comes to augmented reality technologies, visuals always seems to be a pretty essential part of most people’s definitions, but one startup is offering an interesting take on audio-based AR that also calls on computer vision. Even without integrated displays, glasses are still an important part of the company’s products, which are designed with vision-impaired users in mind.

Aira has built a service that basically puts a human assistant into a blind user’s ear by beaming live-streaming footage from the glasses camera to the company’s agents who can then give audio instructions to the end users. The guides can present them with directions or describe scenes for them. It’s really the combination of the high-tech hardware and highly attentive assistants.

The hardware the company has run this service on in the past has been a bit of a hodgepodge of third-party solutions. This month, the company began testing its own smart glasses solution called the Horizon Smart Glasses, which are designed from the ground-up to be the ideal solution for vision-impaired users.

The company charges based on usage; $89 per month will get users the device and up to 100 minutes of usage. There are various pricing tiers for power users who need a bit more time.

The glasses integrate a 120-degree wide-angle camera so guides can gain a fuller picture of a user’s surroundings and won’t have to instruct them to point their head in a different direction quite as much. It’s powered by what the startup calls the Aira Horizon Controller, which is actually just a repurposed Samsung smartphone that powers the device in terms of compute, battery and network connection. The controller is appropriately controlled entirely through the physical buttons and also can connect to a user’s smartphone if they want to route controls through the Aira mobile app.

Though the startup isn’t planning to part ways with their human assistants anytime soon, the company is predictably aiming to venture deeper into the capabilities offered by computer vision tech. The company announced earlier this month that it would be rolling out its own digital assistant called Chloe that will eventually be able to do a whole lot, but is launching with the ability to read so users can point their glasses at some text and they should be able to hear what’s written. The startup recently showed off a partnership with AT&T that enables the glasses to identify prescription pill bottles and read the labels and dosage instructions to users.

The company is currently in the testing phase of the new headset, but hopes to begin swapping out old units with the Horizon by June.

After rocketing to a $250 million valuation in 2015 amid a massive hype cycle for on-demand companies, on-demand startup Shyp is shutting down today.

CEO Kevin Gibbon announced that the company would be shutting down in a blog post this afternoon. The company is ending operations immediately after, like many on-demand companies, struggling to find a scalable model beyond its launching point in San Francisco. Shyp missed targets for expanding to cities beyond its core base as well as pulled back from Miami. In July, Shyp said it would be reducing its headcount and shutting down all operations beyond San Francisco.

The company raised $50 million in a deal led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins back in 2015, one of his last huge checks as a variety of firms jumped onto the on-demand space. The thesis at the time was pretty sound: look at a strip mall, and see which businesses can come to you first. Shipping was a natural one, but there was also food, and eventually groceries. Today, there are only a few left standing, with Postmates, Instacart and DoorDash among the most prominent ones. Even then, Instacart is now under threat from Amazon, which is ramping up its own two-hour delivery after buying Whole Foods.

“At the time, I approached everything I did as an engineer,” Gibbon wrote. “Rather than change direction, I tasked the team with expanding geographically and dreaming up innovative features and growth tactics to further penetrate the consumer market. To this day, I’m in awe of the vigor the team possessed in tackling a 200-year-old industry. But, growth at all costs is a dangerous trap that many startups fall into, mine included.”

Shyp is now a casualty of the delivery space. Where it originally sought to make up the cost of delivery in the form of cheaper bulk costs for those deliveries, Shyp’s one-size-fits-all delivery — where you could deliver a computer or a bike — eventually ended up being one of the most challenging and frustrating elements of its business. It began adding fees to its online returns business and changing prices for its bulk shipments. As it turns out, a $5 carte blanche for delivery was not a model that really made sense.

Indeed, that growth-at-all-costs directive has cost many startups, with companies like Sprig shutting down and many companies getting slapped on the wrist for aggressive growth tactics like text spamming. It also meant that startups had to very quickly develop an effective playbook that, in the end, might not actually translate to markets beyond their core competency. Shyp pivoted to focusing on businesses toward the tail end of its lifetime, including a big deal with eBay, which we had heard at the time was doing well.

“We decided to keep the popular-but-unprofitable parts of our business running, with small teams of their own behind them,” he wrote. “This was a mistake—my mistake. While large, established companies have the financial freedom to explore new product categories for the sake of exploring, for startups it can be irresponsible.”

But Gibbon said the company kept parts of its popular but challenged models online – which may have also contributed to its eventual shut-down. The company expected to be in cities like Boston, Seattle and Philadelphia in early 2016, but that didn’t end up panning out. And Shyp increasingly felt the challenges of an on-demand model, trying to push the cost to the consumer as low as possible while handling the overheads and logistical headaches of a delivery business.

“My early mistakes in Shyp’s business ended up being prohibitive to our survival,” Gibbon wrote. “For that, I am sorry.”