Citizen’s volunteer ‘safety’ app accidentally doxxes singer Billie Eilish

Citizen, the provocative crime-reporting app formerly known as Vigilante, is in the news again for all the wrong reasons. On Thursday evening, it doxxed singer Billie Eilish, publishing her address to thousands of people after an alleged burglary at he…

TCL’s huge glasses remind us good AR is difficult

If augmented reality glasses become a groundbreaking product category, they will need to look similar to regular prescription glasses. TCL is showcasing a pair of frames at CES 2023 that — while inching further in that direction — accentuate how tall of an order that still is. TCL describes its RayNeo X2 AR glasses as having a “subtle and lightweight body for everyday wear,” but their comically oversized nature makes us question whether “subtle” was the best word choice.

TCL says the RayNeo X2 “harness pioneering binocular full-color MicroLED optical waveguide displays.” While that’s quite a mouthful of technical jargon, that’s because the company isn’t (yet) aiming these glasses toward consumers. Instead, it’s a developer platform to flesh out over time as AR tech gets smaller and better.

TCL’s glasses run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 platform, the same chipset found in the Meta Quest 2 VR headset. Its MicroLED display has an impressive 100,000:1 contrast ratio and can reach a brightness of 1,000 nits, which should help make its visuals readable in bright sunlight. In addition, as reported by CNET, TCL says it will offer prescription inserts that allow you to use them in place of regular glasses — not on top of them.

PR image of the TCL RayNeo X2 AR glasses with the product name and phrase
TCL

Rather than approaching AR like HoloLens or Magic Leap, where 3D-animated virtual characters leap across your furniture, TCL’s glasses are more in the vein of Google Glass. For example, the company says its “smart GPS” navigation system uses simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to overlay virtual directions while showcasing nearby landmarks. The glasses can also deliver on-screen call and message pop-ups or translate in-person conversations with real-time subtitles. In addition, it can play music quietly so that others around you won’t hear. Finally, it has a built-in camera for capturing first-person videos, stills and time-lapse photos.

These are all ways AR glasses could — and likely will —enhance our lives someday. But it’s 2023, and a company well-established in advanced display technology still has trouble shrinking its glasses to a more subtle size. It helps to understand how deeper-pocketed competitors like Apple still haven’t announced consumer AR wearables despite reportedly working on them for the better part of a decade. This category requires advances that have taken loads of time — and will likely take at least a bit more.

While we wait for AR glasses to advance to the point where we’ll want to wear them publicly, TCL is recruiting developers to help it prepare for that day. The company will start offering the RayNeo X2 dev kit to software makers “in select regions” by the end of Q1. It says a commercial launch will come later, although we imagine that will fare better with future iterations that don’t make you look like 1970s-era Michael Caine.

HTC builds a standalone VR / AR headset to rival the Meta Quest Pro

Years after unofficially exiting the consumer VR space in favor of enterprise products, HTC has returned with its first standalone headset for consumers. The Vive XR Elite is a $1,100 flagship for VR and passthrough mixed reality (MR). Although that pu…

After 30 years of ThinkPads, Lenovo decided it’s time for a ThinkPhone

Believe it or not, ThinkPad business-oriented laptops have been around for 30 years, and Lenovo is celebrating by adding a new mobile companion: the ThinkPhone. Designed for IT pros to pair seamlessly with ThinkPad PCs, the handset launches “in the com…

EA says 60 percent of corrupted ‘Madden NFL 23’ franchise save files are gone for good

EA gave Madden NFL 23 players an unwanted gift last week: corrupted save files. The publisher said on Saturday that anyone who tried to access the game’s Connected Franchise Mode (CFM) during a server outage has a 60 percent chance of losing their saved data forever.

The initial server issues occurred on Wednesday, December 28th and stretched into the following day. As a result, EA says files were corrupted for anyone who logged into franchise leagues during that period. (Save files should be unaffected for anyone who didn’t.) Unfortunately, EA’s development team estimates it will only recover 40 percent of the corrupted franchises.

Making matters worse, EA tweeted on December 28th that “users should now be able to play CFM without issue” — three days before delivering the bad news about lost saves. After apologizing, it encouraged affected gamers to “start a new franchise as the mode is up and running.” The publisher also directs customers to follow the Madden franchise account on Twitter for further updates.

The Madden series’ franchise mode first appeared in Madden NFL 99, with the rebranded CFM arriving in 2013. (The latest version lets you control a player, coach or owner throughout a simulated career.) Considering how many hours it can take to build your league, it’s hard to imagine gamers with borked saves being content with EA’s advice to start a new file.

Walter Cunningham, last surviving Apollo 7 astronaut, dies at 90

Walter Cunningham, an astronaut who was the last surviving member of the 1968 Apollo 7 mission, died on Tuesday at 90. The Iowa-born Cunningham served in the US Navy and Marine Corps before joining NASA in 1963 and eventually taking part in the Apollo program’s first crewed (and first televised) flight.

NASA confirmed Cunningham’s death and added that he was “instrumental to our Moon landing’s program success.” According to the Houston Chronicle, Cunningham died in a local hospital of complications from a fall.

Apollo 7 was NASA’s first spaceflight after the 1967 Apollo 1 tragedy, where a fire killed three astronauts during a rehearsal test. This led to a longer-than-usual training period, as NASA shelved human-crewed spaceflight for 21 months following Apollo 1. The crew spent many long hours studying the spacecraft’s design and construction of the Apollo command and service modules (CSM) to help avoid a repeat tragedy, which could have been perilous for the astronauts and the program. Finally, the crew splashed down on Earth on October 22, 1968, after nearly 11 days in space. Apollo 7 further tested NASA’s equipment and helped pave the way for Apollo 11, where the first humans walked on the moon.

Four astronauts laughing and looking to the horizon in a 196
Left to right: Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele, Walter Cunningham, Dr. Donald E. Stullken
NASA

Cunningham retired from NASA in 1971 and tried his hand at public speaking, radio hosting, offshore engineering, commercial real estate and venture capital investing. Unfortunately, he also became an outspoken climate change denier. Speaking to Forbes in 2013, Cunningham went through a laundry list of fossil-fuel industry talking points, framing modern NASA as an organization controlled by the media while claiming climate-change science was closer to demagoguery than fact. (For the record, climate change is real, and we’re running out of time to avoid catastrophe.)

“I definitely believe that we lived in the good old days,” Cunningham said in a 1999 NASA interview. “We lived in the golden age of manned spaceflight. We’ve been in space now for over 40 years. The first 40 years of aviation, we went from just barely flying to jet transport, you know. And now, we haven’t moved that far since we went into space. The days through Apollo will be remembered; there’ll never be another time like that again. Even when we go to Mars, it will be different. And I feel just fortunate that I was a small part of this particular time in spaceflight.”