sxsw2018
Latest
Witnessing the Church of Elon Musk
SXSW plays host to big-name speakers all the time. Mother! and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky was on stage yesterday, Apple's Eddy Cue is on a panel tomorrow and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins had a keynote this morning. But something felt different at the Moody Theater in downtown Austin. The crowd was unusually excited, expectant. A thousand or so SXSW attendees, a large number of them press, had congregated, after getting only 12 hours' notice, to hear Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk speak. The panel was scheduled for noon, but at 12:15 PM people were still shuffling in. Either Musk was running late or officials were stalling to let the audience take their seats. A small group in the venue's upper tier began clapping, as though calling for an encore after a concert, and the rhythmic applause swiftly pulsed around the theater, to no avail.
Tennis legend Andre Agassi is building tech to help with dyslexia
Andre Agassi, the legendary American tennis player, made an appearance at SXSW 2018 to announce a partnership with Square Panda, a startup that makes educational apps for kids. Through his Early Childhood Neuroscience Foundation, Agassi and Square Panda are creating Readvolution, an initiative that aims to develop the "first-ever" free dyslexia-assessment game. To make this happen, the plan is to get help from scientists in a number of universities in the US, such as the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and the Weill Institute of for Neurosciences.
The 'Westworld' mobile game is open for pre-registration
If you've been dying to be a part of the team that runs the unsettling theme park in HBO's Westworld, your wait is almost over. At SXSW today, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment announced pre-registration for the mobile game, which will be released this year on Android and iOS. We learned earlier this year that the game is in the works, and today's announcement sheds light on the plot and timing.
Watch the best bits of Elon Musk's SXSW talk
Elon Musk took the stage about 30 minutes late at the Moody Theater in downtown Austin, Texas, and when he finally appeared, the soldout crowd cheered and jumped to their feet, smartphones glowing. His conversation at SXSW was a surprise, announced late the night before, and the talk itself was just as casual. Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan took prewritten questions from the audience and asked Musk for his thoughts on a vast array of topics, covering everything from colonizing Mars to the benefits of a carbon tax and the future of artificial intelligence.
SpaceX aims to test its Mars rocket system in first half of 2019
You might not have to wait long to see SpaceX's BFR rocket system in action ... maybe. In a talk at SXSW, Elon Musk said he expected the spacecraft's first "short up-and-down flights" by the first half of 2019. He was quick to hedge his claim, noting that his timelines tend to be "optimistic" (remember how Falcon Heavy was supposed to launch in 2013?), but this at least gives you a timeframe. Test flights couldn't place too much later when the goal is to send cargo missions to Mars by 2022.
AI reveals even more about Hollywood gender bias
Here's what we know about how women are portrayed in Hollywood cinema: Male characters speak far more often than female ones. Men talk more about achievement, whereas women tend towards positive and emotional language. The majority of best picture winners at the Oscars since 1929 fail to pass the Bechdel test. AI analysis of characters' personalities from StoryFit tells us more: Women are portrayed as very agreeable -- compassionate but not strong-willed. They're low on neuroticism (making them cool-headed but not expressive) and openness (guarded and not a rule-breaker). And their personalities onscreen demonstrate less range than men.
Twitter and Fox Sports have high hopes for their World Cup live show
With the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia just around the corner, right holders to the event are starting to share more details about their coverage plans. And, to no surprise to anyone, social media will play a major role in that. Fox Sports, FIFA's English-language broadcast partner in the US, is going all out on Twitter this year with a partnership that includes a daily, 30-minute live show from Russia and bringing near-live highlights to the platform. Twitter, which has around 330 million active users, has been ramping up its sports efforts in recent years, and it plans to use the upcoming World Cup to showcase the power (and potential) of its platform. Just yesterday, the company announced a three-year deal with Major League Soccer to stream 24 games per season.
Sony's SXSW experiences draw out your sweat and feels
I wasn't expecting to break a sweat when I visited Sony's Wow Studio here at SXSW, despite the sweltering 90-degree weather. The tech giant is showing off about a dozen interactive demos at an air-conditioned warehouse here in Austin, and the event sounded like it would be really chill. But Sony wanted to make its visitors feel connected to its technology, and what better way to engage than through physical exertion?
‘The Future of Secrets’ is a digital confession booth
"I feel like I can justify the worst things I've done." "My initial connection to the majority of my partners is based on superficial sexism." "I once bumped someone's phone when it was charging and it fell off a table and cracked and I just walked away." The experience of reading anonymous confessions is both intimate and detached. Being confronted with people's real-life emotional baggage reveals quiet but deeply human moments, yet divorced from the person who said them, there's no human to project the resulting empathy on.
NASA wants to change the way we think about the habitable zone
"There are great possibilities in expanding the habitable zone beyond our traditional blinders on that vision where it's Earth or nothing." That's Cynthia Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's currently working on a mission to study Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons with a subsurface ocean. Jupiter -- and, by association, Europa -- is well outside the "habitable zone," the gauge astronomers have used for years to determine whether a planet can sustain liquid water, a major precursor for life. But in Phillips' view, being outside of this zone doesn't automatically mean the moon or planet is devoid of life. At SXSW, Phillips and a panel of NASA scientists discussed how they're approaching the search for alien life within our own solar system and beyond -- and as it turns out, they're not necessarily looking for another Earth.
SpaceX and 'Westworld' creators made a Falcon Heavy short film
Elon Musk promised a short film about the inaugural Falcon Heavy launch from the team behind Westworld, and he delivered. The entrepreneur has posted the video, Falcon Heavy and Starman, in two parts on Instagram (update: now on YouTube). It's not exactly a magnum opus, but it does a good job of encapsulating SpaceX's milestone in a short amount of time, including Starman's departure. Surprisingly, the video includes the loss of the center booster -- SpaceX isn't pretending the launch was all sunshine and roses. And naturally, there's no shortage of David Bowie for the soundtrack.
Bose sunglasses hands-on: audio AR makes more sense than you think
This week, Bose made a surprise announcement that it was getting into the augmented reality game. But Bose makes headphones, right? And AR is all about glasses with visual overlays? Well, nobody told them, and that's a good thing. The company believes that the classic approach works fine for many things, but it still presents barriers (cost of specific hardware, battery life and so on). Visual distractions also aren't always appropriate, and sometimes all you need is relevant info -- restaurant opening times, points of interest, for example -- whispered in your ear. That's what Bose is offering, and we (me and my colleague Cherlynn Low in the pictures and video above) tried it out for ourselves in downtown Austin at SXSW.
Vimeo turned popular internet films into an art exhibition
It was hard to leave Westworld at SXSW, but it had to be done. Thankfully, the show here in Austin is full of other tech-themed places to check out. One of them is Vimeo's "The Decade," an art exhibition that turns popular internet films into immersive experiences. The company says the space, which is located inside a hostel in downtown ATX, was created to celebrate 10 years of its favorite Staff Picks. There are eight different installations total, with each being inspired by some of Vimeo's best videos from the past decade. The documentary Jim Carrey: I needed Color, for instance, was brought to life with a showcase of Carrey's real artwork and his painting boots -- all while the film was playing in the same room, naturally.
'Ready Player One' VR games show the future is now
Ready Player One imagines the year 2044 as an industrial wasteland where people escape the perils of modern life by strapping on virtual-reality headsets and disappearing into a vast digital playground called the OASIS. The book, written by Ernest Cline, was published in 2011 -- a year before Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe founded Oculus VR. Since then, VR has become a staple of the technology and gaming spheres, with dozens of headsets on the market -- everything from cheap, smartphone-powered devices to untethered PC rigs costing upward of $1,000 to run properly. Ready Player One may be set in the near future, but it could have easily taken place in 2018. Nowhere is that more apparent than SXSW's Ready Player One VR event.
Surviving Westworld at SXSW
HBO is making the dreams of Westworld fans come true at SXSW 2018. The company built a replica of the show's Sweetwater town in an undisclosed location in Austin, Texas, and we were there to experience it firsthand. Before I tell you how it went, though, it's worth noting that this wasn't a run-of-the-mill installation. HBO says production for the project started in November of last year, and it took a 40-person crew five weeks to build the sci-fi park. In addition to that, the cast playing Westworld robotic Hosts, had a script that was 444 pages long.
We're live from SXSW 2018!
We have arrived in Austin, Texas for the 2018 edition of SXSW, the festival that showcases some of the best things in the tech (interactive), film and music industries. This year, we'll be taking a look at HBO's Westworld installation here on the ground, which promises to be one of the most exciting events at the show. We'll also attend panels featuring Apple's Eddy Cue and YouTube's CEO Susan Wojcicki, among others, as well cover new gadgets like Bose's audio-focused augmented-reality glasses. You can keep up with all the news from SXSW by bookmarking this page here.
Google Assistant now gives you more control over connected devices
Google Assistant has already had control over appliances and other not-so-typical connected devices for a while, but it's been clunky and limited. You could turn your oven on with a simple command, but setting the temperature required that you launch an app first. That won't be a problem from now on: Google has enabled Custom Device Actions, or commands that let you perform hardware-specific tasks. LG's appliances, for example, no longer require that you start with "talk to LG" -- you can set your fridge temperature with a single, simple phrase like "set the refrigerator temperature to 35 degrees."
Bose's AR glasses are all about audio, not video
Bose announced today that it's getting into the augmented reality game. But Bose AR isn't about video, it's about audio and through a "wafer-thin acoustics package," the company says it can introduce a useful and relevant layer of audio into your everyday activities. Bose says the small audio technology produces powerful and clear sound and can be incorporated into wearables like headphones, eyewear and helmets.
