 Hi, that's fine, you can keep going. That makes me feel very good, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm not too proud to beg for applause as you just witnessed. Hi, I'm Josh Topolski, I'm the editor-in-chief of The Verge, and welcome to On The Verge. Thank you guys so much for being here. Really appreciate it. We have an interesting show tonight. It's kind of a sci-fi themed show. So we're going to be talking about sci-fi science fiction, by the way. If you didn't know that, you have to leave. I'm worried about how many people might have known that. It's cool, we're going to be talking about a lot of science fiction stuff. One of our editors went to ILM, Industrial Light and Magic, and did a tour there and did some interviews there. So we've got some footage of that, which is pretty cool. We have from Microsoft Andy Wilson, he's one of the researchers. He brought a really crazy, I can't describe it, it's like a backpack thing. You'll see it, he's kind of like a nerdy predator. He doesn't actually kill anybody, but it's almost as cool. Paul went out on the streets and asked people about what they wanted, if they could have something from science fiction that was highly entertaining. Oh, and we have some cool stuff here that nobody else has seen. We have the new HTC phones. Not that sci-fi, but they are kind of futuristic, so sort of sci-fi. Anyhow, we should get underway. I just want to thank Ford, our sponsor. They're helping us put this on, and that is awesome. So I think we should get Paul Miller and Nilay Patel out here and get this thing started. Paul and Nilay. Yes. Watch your step on that. So good to see you. So good to see you. Good luck. How are you? How are you? Yes. Hi. Nice to see you again. It's been a long time. We never see each other. We don't work together. That was a great intro, by the way. I don't know if you ever get compliments. I don't. Nobody ever says anything nice to me about the intro. So that means a lot. It really does. Well, I meant it. Thank you. Thank you so much. You want to switch places? Could you get closer? All right. So we have things to talk about besides Paul complimenting my great intro. Thanks for nothing, Nilay. I mean, I deliberately said nothing. There was some news this week. I don't know if you guys heard. Have you heard the news? Have you? Is it the iPhone? There's a new iPhone? Really? It's the new iPhone. iPhone 5 is out this week. Kind of big news. We did a review of it. You can see here. Kind of slightly big news. Kind of a large story. Here's some beautiful shots from our review. It's a fine phone. I reviewed it. If you love the iPhone, you'll love the iPhone 5. But I have to say, I went on the Today Show to talk about, that's a humble brag in case you're wondering. I went on the Today Show to talk about the iPhone 5, which is weird because it's a phone. This is the footage they shot on the Today Show? No, this is our footage, our excellent footage. But also, when we were driving past the Cube very early in the morning, there was a mass of people there, there was a crush of people. And I'm concerned. I think it's a little bit weird that we're still waiting, that people are still waiting in lines for the phone, for a phone. This is a iPhone 6. Here's people right here sleeping outside. I mean, this is the sixth time they've released a phone. Yeah. And it is just a phone. It's the same phone. I'm saying this as a nerd, okay? Here's people outside the Cube. And some of these situations got a little bit scary, a little bit out of hand. I mean, here you've got riot police moving in, just people trying to get their hands on the phone here. I don't know why these guys have hazmat suits. And I'm worried, I mean, here people were just rushing to escape from a scene where they were handing out phones, I guess. And I'm worried what it could mean for humanity, frankly. I'm worried that we're headed towards a scary place. Dystopic. A dystopic nightmare, really, because of the iPhone 5 launch lines. I mean, what's funny is that iOS 6 with the maps, really prescient. I mean, this scene predicted by Apple in its own mapping software. There are some issues, I don't know if you've heard, there are some issues with maps where they're not properly displaying here. This is the Brooklyn Bridge, by the way. That didn't turn out quite right. In the apocalypse, there will be no points of interest. We'll be taking wrong turns all the time. Yeah. It'll be a desolate wasteland. I actually have my phone here. That one's amazing. By the way, I just saw these today for the first time. Really exciting. Paul's not on the Internet, everyone. If the iPhone 6 has some sort of fusion reactor inside of it and something goes wrong, that is what it's going to look like. I have the phone here. I just pulled this up because they were like, well, is there other stuff that's weird? This is the, I don't know what camera I'm going to, maybe this one over here. The Statue of Liberty. There is controversy. Can we get that? It's not there. It literally is not present. It's gone. It's been taken out. Do you have Hoover Dam? Hoover Dam is my favorite. Yeah, here's Hoover Dam. Something's gone horribly wrong with the road. Can we get that up? You see the dip there? The road doesn't go like that. It doesn't go into the water. Hoover Dam is shockingly exciting on the iPhone. Yeah. Look, it's a really nice phone, but they do have problems with maps. When I went on the Today Show, again, humble brag, Al Roker, humble brag, asked me who is my good friend now, asked me, I was telling them about the phone. They were like, what about these maps? The people are riled up. Yeah. Anybody here have any problems with the new maps? Nobody here has a new iPhone. This guy right here. Have you had issues? You going to return it? Yeah, somehow we got here. Not returning it though. You're just going to power through it. That's cool. That's no problem. Yeah. All right, moving on. There is other news in the world. I don't know if you've heard, but we have some HTC phones here that are awfully cool looking. In fact, I'm going to bring them out. Check these out. I think, I have to say, I'm getting excited sexually about what people are doing with starting to do with phones. For a long time, none of you guys can see these. That yellow one is ridiculous. I can see them great. They're made of polycarbonate. I'm going to pass them down. Should I pass them down? It's hard not to see the yellow one. There you go. I want the green one. I'm going to just give you that color instead. Because you want the yellow one. These are not out yet, but these are new Windows phone devices, and they're awesome looking. Am I crazy? No, they look great. This to me is like 80s ski gear. Yeah. Which is, is that cool? That's cool, right? Yeah. Very K2. But they're really nicely made. I love the plastic. This is so much fun. Yeah. I just want to say, and this is not to big up HTC or whatever, but I do wish these had Android instead of Windows phone on them. I just think there's an HTC guy in here right now actually crying. I just think we need to get a little crazier with phone design. I think Microsoft is really pushing these colors. The super bright colors. Nokia is doing it as well. Apple can't be the only guys who are doing cool phone design. It needs to end. Right. I can launch into a big rant about this, but I think if you're competing with Apple, and by the way you are if you're making smartphones, you need to bring your A game. I ranted about this in the podcast last night. You need to bring your A game. This B, C, I'm seeing some D stuff out there. Yeah. Just stop that. What was that? LG? Really? They made a square phone. LG is someone who will not be sponsoring any future on the verge of this. While it happens, we can't edit ourselves. Can I see the other two? You want to see my new phone? Bring it. There you are. The thing about them is they look best together. That's true. You have to buy a son of a... This is the phone that I want. It's like this look. Hello? Yeah. Having one and they're just lonely without each other. You want a striped phone is what you're saying. It's like the Beatles recording technique where you have two voices sing over yourself. Harmony is what you're describing. No, it's not harmony. It's... John Lennon would do it because he's- With Paul McCartney. No. He would sing over himself. Which was all voice. Which one of these is... Oh, he would double his... Doubling. Which one is... He's not really... Okay, I'm not going to get into the details here. I'm not getting into the details at all. Anyhow, I'm just happy to see... My point is the iPhone 5 is really beautiful, but these are really beautiful too in a different way, I think. I'm thrilled. I feel like you look at the Galaxy S3 or 4 or whatever it is and it's like, oh, that's good. It has a larger screen. That's empirically great phone, but this is just like, oh my gosh, I need that right now. Yeah. I mean... I have no use for it. We'll have to see what Windows Phone 8 is like. Yeah. I'm not buying these right now. Yeah. But I would consider buying them. And that's the important thing. Well, you know, the rumor is that HTC is making the next Nexus device. Would you wait in line for this? Is that the rumor? That's the rumor. Just make this the Nexus. Just put Android on... All right, whatever. I'm not... You're going to get me on a nerd rant and we'll be here all night as I rant. So we should... There's other little news. We're not going to get into that. We want to get to Andy Wilson because he has some really cool stuff to show off. But as I said, we took a trip. Well, we didn't all take a trip, but Brian Bishop, who you may know who did a lot of our coverage during the Apple Samsung trial, went to ILM and sat down with people there and talked to them about creating science fiction. Everyone is very jealous of that. In film. For film. For science fiction films. You know what I mean. He made a film about making science fiction films. Yeah. It's very cool. Check it out. We'll be back with Andy Wilson. Check this out. We're at Industrial Light and Magic. For the last 37 years, ILM has made some of the most well-known effects in Hollywood history. Have you seen the Star Wars movies? The Indiana Jones trilogy? Or the Transformers films? You know the work of ILM. Jeff White was the visual effects supervisor on the Avengers and Transformers Dark of the Moon. He sat down with him to talk about what first inspired him to get into special effects and a problem ILM had about a particularly colorful Hulk. I think so many of us saw Star Wars and said, okay, this is where we want to work. Knowing that ILM was founded to create that and then just following it over the years and then getting a chance to get a job here was really a dream come true. Let's talk about the most recent film you did, The Avengers. You're actually sitting here in the motion capture stage where you said you shot a lot of stuff for that movie. What's the process? What happens in these four walls? One of the great things about Avengers, especially with the Hulk, was having Mark Ruffalo come up here and do a performance. We actually did several rounds of that. He came here initially just to come here on the mocap stage and we showed him his motion, kind of retargeted onto a Hulk very fast and loose so they could play with some ideas. At the same time, we captured a range of expressions from him that we used to drive the digital version of him. Our process on this one, rather than just jumping straight to the Hulk, was to actually build the digital Mark Ruffalo first and verify that when we took the data that we captured from all his expressions, put it on the digital version of him, and then looked at them side by side, that they would look the same so that we were really figuring out the difficult problems by having a perfect reference. Then because the Hulk had elements of Mark incorporated into his design, which I think was a really great decision for this film, we were able to take a lot of that same work and apply it to the Hulk. Sometimes I feel like you may see CG characters, they will pop out from the environment, they won't blend in, and he is seamless throughout that entire movie. What steps did you take to make him blend in like that? It seemed a step above the stuff I've seen recently. Because the design was based on him, he did a performance for every shot. He actually came up here and put on the helmet cam and put on the ridiculous looking tracking suit and went through the entire process and Joss could direct him and very quickly work through what the shot was, make some selects off that, then we'd track all of that data, apply it first to our Mark Ruffalo digital double, again make sure that we had that as a good match, and then apply it through a retargeting process to the Hulk. Because the Hulk is such different proportions from Mark Ruffalo, there's a lot of work in terms of taking his performance and then the animators really crafting it into what you see on the screen and a lot of hand-done work in terms of putting that together. What I think then helped us really blend it into the plate was when we were on set, Mark was there for every Hulk shot. We were able to render the Hulk and stack him up side by side with Mark Ruffalo there. There was something that we learned on Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean is you have the real actor there, even if you're not using any part of them, just to have the reference of what do Mark's eyes look like in this shot, in this lighting, in this environment, and then making sure that our Hulk matches that. Because a lot of times we'd put our digital character in there, we'd render it, and like, hey, this looks great. Then we'd start comparing it, like, whoa, there's a lot that's off that we need to go fix, even down to just the angle of the eyelashes could make a big difference in terms of your perception of the character and that kind of match. I think especially for the things where CG tends to be a big struggle, like around the eyes, where you're trying to put some thought and some emotion into the eyes, being able to have that reference performance was really valuable. What are some other areas that are traditionally a struggle when you're trying to go and put a character together like that? I think for the Hulk, he's a human, and yet he's not only giant-sized, but he's got green skin. We sort of joked around all the time that green is a really difficult color. Humans are very sensitive to green and differences in that color. He's in so many different environments. He's down on the Park Avenue Viaduct, and he's jumping up Stark Tower to the outside. The blue sky or the building shadows would all change his green color to sort of bad-looking colors. We had Minty Hulk and we had Pumpkin Hulk. We worked very closely with Marvel in terms of trying to make sure that his color was consistent throughout. Early on in the process, Joss decided that the green really wanted to be a pretty desaturated green. I think that helped us a lot in terms of making him look real because it's very similar in saturation to a natural flesh tone. Rather than something that pops off the screen, he integrates really nicely with the other Avengers that are there. So Joss Whedon, directing the Avengers, not something that had done a huge, big budget film like that before, what was that experience like? I was really excited to get a chance to work with him on this project and had been such a huge fan of his coming into it. It was really fantastic. I think all the humor that you see in the writing and that you see on the screen is what it's like working with him every day. He's pretty amazing at pulling out references to movies and artists that we'd be scrambling to go look up to see what he's talking about. But it was a really phenomenal experience. I think the great thing that he brought to it was making sure that in the end, the visual effects always serve the story that he was creating. I think people really connect with these characters. Then our job was to just make sure everything looked good. One of the really fun parts about working with him is that because he's such a fan of comic books to begin with, he knew what people wanted to see the Hulk do. So he gave us those moments. Another effects supervisor influenced by Star Wars was Grady Koffer. We talked to Grady about his work on the film Battleship and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. So we got a call that there were a few shots on There Will Be Blood that sat in the middle of his movie. And that was kind of the big, whenever they strike oil in the middle of it, and there's the big geyser of oil. And there were lots of ways to tackle that kind of shot. Now for Paul, who's definitely a purist and really honors the craft of filmmaking and likes the purity of the frame and all of that. Because I could have done, this was a little early, I could have done a big CG simulation and done all of that. And for that show, that didn't really seem like the right solution. It was something, actually a special effects form was great, had a pretty good looking kind of representation of oil. And we did a big kind of, we shot it as kind of a miniature. We actually sprayed oil up in the air down in LA and filmed all of these elements. And it became kind of a large kind of comp of those kind of elements. And it worked really well and it was all very real. And then a lot of the cameramen got covered with this kind of fake oil. But it worked out in the end. You were the supervisor on Battleship, you guys have a long history of great sci-fi movie special effects. When you're taking something on like that, was it daunting? And what is the process and some particular innovations you guys brought to the table with Battleship? It was daunting. For sure. And a lot of that were, I mean, there was a lot of big ideas in this. And that's kind of what you want. When you find a director who, and Pete is definitely an idea guy. It's kind of nonstop. He'll show up in the morning and go, I've got it. Get my previs guys out here and he'll throw out some of these interesting things. And you go down all these different kind of creative journeys and ideas and stuff. But when he pitched it, it wasn't just kind of naval warfare. It was naval warfare meets sci-fi alien invasion on a grand scale, on a summer blockbuster scale. And he wanted spectacle. It's like he wasn't shying away from it. He was like, I'm here. I'm making a big mega summer movie. And the way he described it was that this alien invasion, they land in these ships called stingers, which are, if you look at kind of their silhouette, they're kind of based on these water bugs. So they can kind of hover or kind of walk along the surface or float along the surface of the ocean. But he wanted them to start kind of submerged. So in their reveal, and this is kind of a big part of the movie, they all kind of breach up through the water and then they splash back down. That's already pretty hard, right? We know that that's kind of a large scale fluid simulation and that was going to be something we're going to wrap our heads around. But as the project, we were in pre-production, he said, okay, not only do they breach and they sit on the surface of the water, but I want them, I want all of these tubes and stuff underneath them. And they kind of suck water up out of them and then recycle it over them constantly. Like they're just constant waterfalls. And of course you nod, you're like, okay, that sounds great, very interesting. And so we kind of knew at that point that, and IOM has actually a great history of water shows specifically, they've done some really, really groundbreaking stuff. But maintaining that over the course of this entire show, for a lot of it in broad daylight and in very, very wide kind of spectacle shots, we knew we were going to have to raise our game. And it was pretty amazing here at IOM because they have a really, really strong R&D department. And so you get all these guys together in a room and they came up with, they call it the Battleship Water Project. And pretty much over the course of almost a year, they re-engineered how we tackle kind of large scale fluid simulations at IOM. And then how we render it for all, we wanted to kind of represent water kind of through the entire kind of lifespan of water from a big kind of splashy mass of water to the little spitty kind of particulate that comes off of that, to the little mist that comes off of that. And all of it we wanted to be influenced by air fields and simulated kind of movement of vortices in the air. It was a huge, huge project. But at the end of the day, it really enhanced kind of your experience of these stingers and became a part of their personality. Pete's mandate from the beginning on this film was authenticity. Everything had to be very authentic. And we were scouting the Missouri one day down in Pearl Harbor and there was kind of a cut-in throughout the day that Pete wanted to have a bit of an effects meeting dockside at the end of the day. So I met him and so we're kind of sitting there and there's this like wall to wall, there's the Missouri, kind of beautiful and majestic, kind of filling the horizon. And he said, all right, that I get. That's real. You know, I feel that, that ship. Your work has to look just as good as that. I have to believe your work. And it was, I mean, it was a challenge, you know, that's no pressure. That's no pressure. Yeah. But, you know, but it was great. And it actually, it set kind of a high lofty goal for us. And that's, that's kind of what you want, you know, you want to aim high. Well Grady, thank you so much for spending some time with us. It's been a real treat just to get an insight into what you do every day in the facility. And yeah, thanks so much. Hope to talk to you again soon. Yeah, awesome. Pretty cool stuff. Now, I'm, I was not a big fan of Battleship personally, but, but I think, you know, I know what you're saying. It's based on a board game. Maybe not that great of an idea for a movie. But you've got to respect those water effects. You cannot mess with the water effects. So I think we should bring out our guest. He's a brilliant guy. He's a principal researcher at Microsoft. He's making some frankly bizarre stuff. And I'm looking forward to this conversation. Please welcome Andy Wilson from Microsoft. How are you? Thanks so much. No pressure. No pressure. You have to one up Battleship. Can you do that? I'll try. It's kind of low pressure. So Andy, these guys don't know you. Maybe they know you a little bit. I saw you did a video months ago, like a year ago or something that I thought was really cool. Yeah. I came to visit your home away from home, your lab. Yeah. Which you actually do live in. It was a lot of fun. You do live there, right? Yeah, pretty much. Tell me what you do. Where, how did you, how did you start doing this and what do you do at Microsoft? And give me your, give me a little your backstory. So I'm a researcher at Microsoft. Microsoft has a, as a big research group of about 850 PhD level folks doing research on all sorts of things. I'm mostly interested in natural user interaction and different ways that we can exploit sensing technologies and display technologies in completely novel ways and remake the way that we relate with computers. So a lot of the things you saw there are prototypes where we believe very firmly in building things and playing with them and just sort of finding our way through all these new things just by experimenting and trying as many things as we can. And your work is, I mean from what I saw and some of the stuff we're going to show today, your work is really about, I mean we're very used now to these kinds of, we have a screen or we have something in front of us, we have something in our hand and we interact with that. We're kind of like going into that interface. Your stuff is like taking that interface out into the world. I mean a lot of what you do is, it's like projecting onto the world basically and making the world the interface. Where does that, where does that instinct come from? I mean what is the end game for you with that? So that's right. So I like to call it beyond the surface. So I worked on the first version of Surface, the one that used video cameras, the large 30 inch tabletop. And so for me it's always been about what can we do with sensing technologies in interesting ways. And for me the work that we've done with depth cameras for example, you know, lifts all of the interaction we're getting off of touch screens out into the real world. And that's where we really live. We don't live in the flat plane of a display. We live in the real world. Let's bring the sensing and display into our real world. I mean you headed up the Surface project when it was a large table. So I did the very first prototype and a couple of us, a couple guys and I did the first efforts around Surface and building the first prototype. It was a lot of fun. Was it painful to watch Microsoft introduce a tiny tablet called the Surface? Did that make you feel? I was very flattered that they decided to reuse our name. I thought that was a great choice. But now you can't call the Surface the Surface anymore. That's right. There's that right now. And that hurts doesn't it? A little bit. You can share. There's no judgment here in this room. So you also incorporate a lot of Kinect sort of like technology into what you're doing. Is Kinect the first, I mean that's, you know, there aren't many consumer products that are actually utilizing the physical around you to be, is that the first step? Do you see that as just like the version 0.1 of this? Absolutely. It's the opening move and I think a great renaissance in natural user interfaces. You know, people have been doing this research for a long time. I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab in the 90s and we were doing a lot of this hand tracking kinds of things and interacting with things on screen that now you can go out and buy. It's really nice to be able to see that move from the lab. Gosh, it's taken a little while. But now it's like, now that it's commodity, at least for certain kinds of applications, let's think about other applications where this would actually be useful. Is this the kind of thing that you would find in a conference room at a workplace? That gets me excited when I hear that. Would we find this in a conference room? Probably. Yeah, I'm working on it. Is there anything more exciting than something in a conference room? I mean I know that's up here. That's like you're in bright orange on the conference room tech, but like can we go to red? What about for the home? What about for the kitchen, for instance? Kitchen is a nice one because you don't want to get your hands all dirty on the touch pad. So maybe you put that on your tabletop in your kitchen counter and you actually lay out the recipe and the things that you need. We've had a few demos over the years at Microsoft where it would be really fun for kids. You set out the recipe and the ingredients for the recipe and kids get that. Can I pitch an idea to you for the kitchen? So I'm imagining something like these tentacles hanging down over your kitchen work surface and then you use some kind of motion tracking. The tentacles are all full of different spices. And you use the motion tracking. You put a chicken or something underneath and then you just kind of minority report the spices all over it. Excellent. Minority report, yeah. Do you think that's something you could work on? Sure, absolutely. We actually have... Please make that happen. For me, we actually have some video stuff that you couldn't bring with you. This thing is called a Beematron. Can you explain? Is this the Beematron? That's the Beematron. And so the Beematron is a pan-tilt motion platform, kind of like what you see at rock concerts with lights, except we replaced the light with a projector and a depth camera. And so what we're doing is projecting the car and the car responds to the real world just as if it were a real model radio controlled car. And so by using the pan-tilt movement, we can actually get all the way through the room. We can project a graphic into this person's hand and move that graphic from one hand to the other. Here's another shot of a ramp. This guy's a terrible driver. Yeah, absolutely. So the idea really is to bring the interaction out into your entire world. So with one camera, one projector in this motion platform, we can track these people. We can project graphics onto this person and react appropriately. She can actually pull graphics from the wall and send them from one place to the next. Like a spice, for instance. You could track the... Get the curry. Yeah, exactly. Paprika, boom, tentacle down onto the chicken. And then you have another one that we have video of, which is called the Holoflector. Can you tell me a little bit about this? This is like... This freak, this is insane. So this is not done in post, right? This is actually a video shot of a mirror. And I'm standing in front of the mirror and then I'm interacting with this graphics. And it's a little bit like the Pepper's Ghost illusion you might have seen in a Disney theme park. It's a little different, but we can superimpose graphics onto it. And so it's really augmented reality, but in a very large form factor. And we're incorporating some concepts from the phone. Here's maybe I'm doing a little holographic phone call. This is actually a connect recording. Is that you? Is that... That's you talking and holding yourself? This is my little homage to Princess Land. That's a little weird. But you brought something today. I did indeed. And we should take a look at it. Let's check this out. What is it called? What did you bring? This is the wearable multi-touch projector. Okay. I'm going to come up with a better name for that. The wearable multi-touch projector. Let's check this out. Yeah. You want some... You need help? This is handsome. This is nice. Now, what did you say this is called again? We call this the wearable multi-touch projector. We got to come up, but why don't you just call it the Predator? I mean, it's kind of, I don't know, a little bit, looks a little bit violent. So this is kind of like a connect here. It is basically like the connect. It uses the same technology. It's a short throw version of connect. So it actually works in the sort of arm reach volume, just the area in front of me. And you think in the future, everybody will have like a Lenovo laptop hanging off of their side? Is this the future? I feel like... So we build prototypes, right? And I'm just starting the projector. There's also a laser projector. Is it a Pico projector? Pico projector, indeed. Okay, great. And so this is actually our second prototype. The first one we built actually just connected to a desktop. First one had a desktop that was hanging off of you. That's right. So very... It was like a full gaming tower. Exactly. With wheels. And you had like a little assistant to carry next to you. This is our second one. And of course, if we were to consider productizing this, I mean, we would not have this. But this is a really nice setup because we can actually write like really sloppy code and get that running on here and do all the experiments we want to do. So you admit your code is sloppy. Absolutely. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. All right. So show us what this thing does. And then tell me why it does it. Right. So the idea is to bring some of the interaction into the world. So we can actually co-opt surfaces in the world. And I'm just going to lean over here and start this. And it'll take a moment to start, hopefully. And... What version of Windows is this? This is Windows 7, actually. So you haven't upgraded yet, huh? Not yet. Not yet. Interesting. So I'm going to move the camera to... Ignoring that completely. Yeah, exactly. I'll move right past that. So here I am. So I'm going to touch the wall here. You notice that I get a bit of a menu. Okay. It's a little bit like our Windows Phone interface. This is the new Windows Phone 8 I've been hearing about. So and you notice that as I move back and forth... Oops. There, it just disappeared. That's all right. We can start that again. And as I move back and forth, it actually stays the same size. We're actually using the depth camera to rectify or make it appear as if the graphics are the same size. So the real goal would be to stabilize it so it feels like there's actually paint on the wall. So what I'm going to do is show you a couple things. There's a phone icon. We can actually touch this. And there's this ubiquitous slide to unlock. Oh, ubiquitous. That is a patent case right there. All right, there we go. Apple, are you watching? Because you're going down. You're done. Why even bother? I would just take whatever money is in your bank account right now and send it back to Apple. So we have a dial pad here. So we can do the kind of expected thing. You notice there's this sort of red ball here. And it's showing me where it thinks my finger is. Is this an actual phone number? Well, gosh, I hope not. Keep going. Yes, OK. Let's call someone. And I'm just dialing a random number. Please don't call that number. Is this actually capable of dialing? It is not dialing. So that's just something we've been playing around with. But it gives you an idea of the sensing technology that we have. So we can do a few other things. Oh, by the way, it's multi-touch. Right? So and we can just. Now what if my finger got in here? What would happen if this guy came in? It might work. Try it. Oh, it works. You come in. Oh, yeah. Look at that. It is working. Yeah. How do I erase this? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. This is horrible what you've drawn. It totally is. Let me see if I can do something. Yeah. So it works a little bit better if you come in from the side. And it's a little flat. Oh, there we go. OK. And that has to do with the way that the algorithm works that we run. Oh, I was going to draw a face. But that's obliterated. Right. Now you notice that I'm actually stopping each of the little demos by putting my hand over the camera. It's kind of a funny thing to do. But it's a way for us to reset the system. I'm going to show you a couple more things. OK. Great. So here's your map. And again, as I move back and forth. Apple might want to also take note of this. And so it's multi-touch as well. And so I can scroll around. And there we go. So that's the map. Yeah, nothing surprising there. And then let me show you. Can I see the Hoover Dam on that? I just want to see if it's intact. So there's a couple of other things that we can do. One is the notion of being able to invoke an application just by drawing the space in the world that you want to see it. And that's not. Be the space that you want to see is what you're saying. Yeah. So can you tell me what the practical, what you envision a practical application for this is? What is that? What is that? A tip calculator? Yeah, exactly. Something like that. So actually it's a currency converter. Oh, that's great. So give me a practice. So I'm walking around. I'm just going to go to the screen when these are just commonplace. Give me a scenario where this is becoming, I need this. So a good one would be where we just met and we're maybe we met in the hallway and we're, I want to show you something over here and I want to show you it in the large. I don't want to like huddle around the tiny little phone. I can actually throw this up on the wall and imagine it's bigger and brighter and all these things. Projector technology is going to get better, of course. Then we can interact with this as if it were a real large multi-touch display. So the guy's like, oh, I just met this nerd with this thing on his, and now he wants to show me something. Exactly. That's right. But of course everybody will have them. Well, imagine it's a tiny thing. Maybe it actually fits in a button on your shirt. The entire thing in a button on your shirt. You think we can get there? I think so, in just a matter of time. All of these things that I'm showing you here are really small when you sort of take them in the limit. The Pico projector is just a, there's not even a lens on a Pico projector. Can you show the audience, turn around here. I just want you guys to see, you're seeing the back, but do you see this whole setup here? The idea that this could get down to the size of a button seems, frankly, like a pipe dream. Are you on any dope right now? But look at the size of the first cell phones, and look at what they're at now. That's true. They were originally this tall. They'd have wheels on them, and a thing with a wire that came out. If you took a modern cell phone and showed it to somebody from 30 years ago, they'd be like, what is this alien technology you're showing me? It does look alien. Well, this certainly does, yeah. Let me show you one more thing. So let me set this, and then I just want to give you a little bit of an idea of the processing that we're actually doing. So this is just a display that shows the fingertip tracking, and you notice it's multi-touch. And then as I reach in, it goes from hover state to a touch state, and we're doing two at once. And then finally, I'm going to back out a little more time, and real quick I want to show you the nature of the processing that we're doing. And this is basically just showing you the depth stream that we're getting from the Kinect camera. Oh, wow. Can I get in here? Yeah, you can get in there. So you can get an idea of some of the processing that we're doing. Do you want to? I don't know what this is. Yeah, exactly right. It's cool though, right? Check this out. Yeah, there we go. Oh, did I turn it off? No, it's gone. Yeah, so I got too far away. I was too funky for it, which is a problem. A lot of people feel I'm too funky. And then... And the sheets. And the other thing that we've been studying is the idea that we can actually project onto anything, not just a whiteboard or a wall or something like that. And then we can actually track this notepad, for example, and actually use that as a display. You're tripping me out. And so we can actually do slide to unlock. The ubiquitous slide to unlock. And then we can even do it on your back. So it's a turnaround. On my back? Yeah. Yeah. So for instance... I don't like where this is headed. Do I need to take my pants off for this demo? Let me see if we can get this to work. So yeah, there we go. So... Oh, I like this. You're a little bit lower. I have a little bit of a back pain in my... Yeah, right there. It's perfect. Can you press really hard? Oh, yeah. Slide to unlock. There we go. Ooh. Right. So literally, we can use any surface available. Is slide to unlock supposed to make you sexually aroused? Is that a thing? All right. That's very cool. That's very cool. Just turn around here. Let me just... Andy Wilson, everyone. Andy Wilson and his... And we never did come up with a name for this. I'm gonna call it the Sex Machine. Is that cool? Sure. Andy, thanks so much. Stick around, guys. We have a video. Paul took to the streets and asked people about what they wanted from sci-fi technology and there's really one great interview in this video that I want you to take note of. Really smart, awesome dude. So check it out. Andy, thanks again. Thanks. So we're in Union Square right now and we're gonna ask people what sci-fi gadget do they most want in their real life? I think it's the Minority Report touch screen. Josh thinks it's teleportation. Michael Shane thinks it's... Do you sniff pears? I don't know. Joshua Dupolsky. Oh. Hey. Hi. But I'm convinced people are gonna say Minority Report. David Pierce? No one's gonna say that. Minority Report. No one's gonna say that except nerds. Well, we're gonna find out. Regular people are gonna say Teleporter. We're gonna find out right now. What gadget from sci-fi would you most want in your real life? Teleportation machine. Teleporter. I need the transporter from Star Trek. I'd have to say teleportation. Teleportation. Convenient. Everybody's saying teleportation. New York's a bunch of lazy people. Yeah. Communicator. I would love a communicator. Yeah? I would love to be able to talk to everyone and, like, sort of break down walls that they have. I loved the Jetsons. Okay. And I loved when she got up in the morning and she was ready in five seconds because the machine came over her. Maybe some sort of device that would take my thoughts and put it on paper. The quick quotes quill, I think is what it's called. I would wanna fly. Who doesn't wanna fly? Sure. Sure, so... Would it be a jet pack or just be like a supernatural innate ability? I think a jet pack would be cool. Something that would subliminally produce happiness. Just that if you wanted it, you requested it, you got it. Just be happy right now. Yeah. Do you wanna draw some picture? I'll do what I can do. Can you draw us the future? Draw me in the future where I'm happy. Are you not happy now? No, I'm so miserable. Where would you go right now if you had a teleporter? I'd go to Hawaii. That's a good idea. What if you had a teleporter, then you had, like, an hour of nausea after every time you teleported? That's fine. You're sick of what? Well, it's better than six hours of nausea on a plane, isn't it? Yeah, but that's, like, low-level nausea. Plane burn. Plane burn. Right. Maybe the gadget's within you, you know? Maybe you're a gadget. What? No, I'm a human being, but the term gadget being a mechanism to produce something is it's all within ourselves, you know? I guess I think of technology as, like, gadgets, like watches and WXGA touch screen. So bad for me. I think people are just, people just want their lives to be better. They want to love each other, and they want to be in Hawaii right now. They want to end slavery of the mind and literally. And I think that's pretty awesome. But I still want a hoverboard, Josh. Teleporter. Teleporter. That's what I want. You heard it here first. Michael Shane says he wants a holodeck for sex. That's a pretty good one, too. Hey, guys. Paul and Eli, everyone. Just let me be, let me be crystal clear, okay? Paul ran up to me on the street. I was walking to the office, and he said, what technology do people want from science fiction in their real lives? I said, teleporter. I was utterly... I said, everyone is going to say teleporter. Everybody wants the teleporter. Everybody always says to me... Paul would not listen to me. He fought with me. There were some fisticuffs. Anyhow... I screwed up. Neal, we don't know what... I just want to point out I was right. Neal, we don't... Have you ever seen... What would you want? The great Mel Gibson science fiction film, What Women Want. I thought you were going to say Battlefield Earth. Battlefield Earth. Which is excellent. Everybody should watch it right now. No, if I could read minds, it would be great. You want to read minds? Yeah. Earlier, I thought we were talking about this before, and you said you wanted an invisibility cloak. Yeah, and I thought about it. Which is, I think, a very creepy thing to want. I just want to be able to be invisible. Like why? For what reason? Can you think of any reason that isn't heinous to be invisible? Think of one reason that is not diabolical to be invisible. You can't rob a bank. Shyness. I'm very introverted. Yeah, you're so shy. I'm super from Voldemort. Hide from Voldemort. Is that what you just said? That's not a user, like a real consumer need. I mean, do you have to drag us into Harry Potter talk with every conversation? You would want not to be invisible, which is gross. I was thinking about it. But to read people's minds. Wouldn't it be great to be at a keynote event and really know what Phil Schiller's thinking? He's like, God, the phone. I don't know what you're used for. I was just thinking about all the places I go where people tell me one thing and I know that they're thinking or believing something else. He's thinking like, crap, it just has a bigger screen. That's probably- You mean when he's like extra real icons? Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, I would go to Apple before the announcement and I would use it to read the minds of the people who are working there. And then I'd write a story about it. And Paul, what would your science fiction invention be if you could have it in real life? I just wish I could. I wish I had a time machine so I could go back in time. And when you said, everybody's going to want teleporters, I would have listened to you. Because you're my boss and you're my friend and you don't lie to me. You're trying to help me. You were trying to tell me the truth. It's true. I don't like where you two have been this whole episode. I'm in the middle of something very weird. I also want to have hoverboard. Yeah, hoverboard. Oh, okay, fine. Oh, the shoes that- Yeah. What? The shoes that what? Marty McFly shoes with a hoverboard. They place them themselves. All right. Okay. All right. Okay. Are we done with this? Thank you for acknowledging just how deeply wrong you were. Yeah. I appreciate that. So we have, let me just turn this card over here. We have one other thing that we're doing tonight that is something we haven't done before. And it's kind of a big deal. Like the SnorgTeez girl. Nobody knows what I'm talking about. Let me explain. We'll never... We're never going to get through this unless I explain. There's a company called SnorgTeez. I love the voice of them. What? There's a company called SnorgTeez. And there was a period on the internet where every site that I went to, there would be an ad on the side that had a picture of a girl and it was like SnorgTeez. And she was wearing a shirt that said, I'm kind of a big deal. Yeah. And so now whenever I say something's a big deal, I in my mind see the little banner ad of the SnorgTeez. You know what? Some things you just should keep to yourself when you're talking. I guess that's what we've learned. I like that you said we'll never get through this unless like- Unless I... I think we would have gotten through it fine actually. Okay. So here's the thing. We're going to show you a video of us, of the three of us driving around New York in a car and then I'm going to tell you something kind of awesome. So watch this. New York is an amazing place and I definitely don't spend enough time doing things. So we're going to take the Ford Focus electric out and see what we can do in New York on a single charge. This whole car is basically a gigantic video game and I believe Paul will do the best at not only winning the video game, but surviving the video game. I'm trying to drive much more efficiently than I'm sure Neal and Josh are driving. I'm sure they're just doing donuts. So there's a lot of cool information in this dashboard. What the most important thing is the butterflies. The butterflies represent how efficient you're being and I'm going to be the most efficient. I'm thinking we're pretty close to the Guggenheim. This is the most incredible pretzel I've ever had. So where should we go next? You know the best part about a car like this is the smug sense of superiority. I'm actively saving the earth. Keep left onto Maurice Avenue. All right Denise, let's go save some baby pandas. Oh my God, what is happening ahead of us? Film this. My God, look at all those motorcyclers. What is going on? This car is the future and this car is very clearly the past. It's an electric car. We're test driving an electric. It's all electric, this car. Okay. Yeah. We're at Prospect Park right now. You take a little breather and regroup. Please say a command. Call Paul Miller. What do you think your car's name would be? Like little buddy. Little buddy? I have a very different relationship with your car than I do with mine. Her name is Denise. And you're gonna make it funny, right? Yeah. Spent the day driving. Down to 30% of the battery, 26 miles left to go. It's not so bad. Still just one butterfly, but I'm coming for you, Neely. I'm coming for you. Please say a command. Goodbye, Denise. Goodbye forever. This trip has inspired me to see more. I'm gonna latch my teeth onto this city like a vampire onto the neck of its victim, and I'm going to suck and suck until the city is drained, and when I'm done, I will fly away like a bat, in the form of a bat. Yes. So I know what you're thinking. Why, why are they driving around in the Ford Focus Electric? We were test driving the car for you. Not you guys here, just don't get too excited. We're giving away a Ford Focus Electric to a reader of The Verge. It's a $40,000 car. Just can I be clear? It's very expensive. And it actually does show you butterflies. Ford is giving us one to give away, and here's how we're doing it. We're gonna hold a contest. Whoever can catch the most butterflies. No. Mail us actual bodies of butterflies. We are going to have a GIF off. A GIF away. Yeah. Or GIF if you're from Canada. We, when this goes up, here's what we're gonna do. We want people to make hilarious GIFs out of the show, this show, and post them, and then the editors of The Verge will pick a winner, whoever made the funniest GIF. We are so vain. Yeah. We're extremely vain, and then that person will win, that person will drive away in that car. We're making it easier for the GIFs. It's still a material. You, let me explain. You can be creative. You can do whatever you want. It's just gonna be based on the show. And the winner, as chosen by the editors of The Verge, will drive away, or fly away in the form of a bat, but also in a Ford Focus electric, which, like, they're not even out yet. So, yeah. We're giving away a car, which is the most expensive thing by far we've ever given away. And we don't have to have a raffle. And we don't have to have a raffle. Huge victory for everybody. Everybody here is like, you're gonna raffle it off right now, right? I have like a one in 150 chance of winning it. And that's our show. That's our entire show. I wanna thank Andy Wilson, Paul and Neelai, obviously, and you guys for being here. Thank you so much. And of course, our sponsor, Ford, for giving us a car. That's pretty cool. Thanks so much. We'll be back next month. If you wanna write aberger. That's actually the end of the show.