Copyright common sense ripped to shreds

Copyright law takes a step back after rights holders challenge the sensible private copying exception

RIPPING MUSIC FROM a CD to your phone is once again illegal – as is taking photos of designer objects. Copyright law is convoluted, but the UK took a step towards sanity in 2014 with the introduction of a private copying exception, which allowed individuals to back up films in the cloud or rip tracks from CDs into digital formats

However, that has now taken a step backwards, after a legal challenge from rights holders who claimed they weren’t being properly compensated, “for what they saw as a loss of sales opportunity,” said Peter Dalton of tech law firm Kemp Little.

This compensation is required under EU law. “The UK government was keen to avoid any sort of levy, and argued that its limited copyright exception (which allows copying for

personal use only) would not result in any lost sales for rights holders, because it simply reflected what consumers were already doing,” Dalton noted. But rights holders said the government failed to prove that – and the court agreed.

This means that, again, backing up your music collection is technically an infringement – although it’s unlikely anyone will be prosecuted. “Even if it was possible to identify infringers, the cost of pursuing the claim and the potential for bad publicity mean that rights holders are unlikely to enforce against such individuals,” said Rob Guthrie, partner at Osborne Clarke

If you ripped songs when it was legal, you’re in limbo. According to Guthrie, such tracks have an “unclear” status: “The judge who quashed the regulations refused to decide this point, saying it would have to be resolved in future disputes.”

Photo finish

Another copyright change has raised eyebrows. The government plans to extend copyright for “works of artistic craftmanship” such as designer chairs from 25 to 70 years after the creator’s death – the standard UK term for copyright. This will include photos or 2D representations of these objects

Lawyers say the legislation needs refining. “For example, there may be certain circumstances where a use is made of the copyright work that does not commercially compete with the copyright owner,” noted Alison Rea of Kemp Little. For example, “incidental inclusion of an artistic work in the background of a photograph, or where a copyright work is used as part of a parody or pastiche”.

While photographers, museums and publications should be concerned, most of us need not worry. “If you post a picture of a chair you bought on Twitter, the company’s not going to sue you – you just spent £5,000 on a cool designer chair,” said Iain Connor, a partner at Pinsent Masons. “They’re going to say thank you very much.”

They’re worried about knock-offs, or “inspired by” furniture that’s sold for a tenth of the price. “The chairs that retail in Harrods for £5,000, but copies can be bought in the back of The Sunday Times for £499 – that’s what the change is directed at.”

Will it ever get better?

Companies can help by writing in exceptions, letting you share photos of a swish chair or explicitly giving permission to make copies of a song. iTunes does this, letting a track be copied to up to five devices. “It’s an acknowledgement that giving someone a single-use licence is a bit ridiculous,” Connor said.

Despite the law being an ass, the private copying exception is unlikely to be rewritten into the statute book anytime soon. “Unfortunately, in this case, the government appears to have retreated from the issue, having being burned once,” noted Dalton.

“Laws that are rarely enforced, and frequently ignored or not understood, are deeply unsatisfactory,” Dalton added. “Hopefully, the government will return to this issue in the future and bring the law into alignment with the practical and commercial reality of how consumers use their digital media in the 21st century

The case for better battery life

Many factors influence how long a phone lasts between charges. We chart the changes Apple has made to its iPhones over the years

APPLE SURPRISED MANY by offering a branded case for the iPhone 6, and not only because the clunky design isn’t up to the company’s sleek standards. The $99 (£65) Smart Battery Case was seen as an admission that the iPhone is falling behind on battery life, as it features an integrated battery offering an extra 18 hours of time between charges.

Apple steadily increased the iPhone’s battery size until the latest launch: the iPhone 6s has a smaller battery than the iPhone 6. However, it doesn’t mean users suffer, as there are other ways to extend time between charges than shoving a massive battery into a phone. Indeed, our own review suggested there’s no difference in battery life between the 6 and 6s

Larger batteries do mean bigger phones: while the iPhone progressively thinned from 12.3mm with the 3G in 2009 to 7.1mm with the 6 in 2014, it gained a few tenths of a millimetre this year. In terms of weight, it hit its lightest with the iPhone 5 and 5s, putting back on the pounds – well, grams – with the 6s and 6s Plus the heaviest models yet

Battery life and battery size

Size isn’t everything, especially when we’re talking batteries. A lot can influence how long a phone lasts between charges, from display size and pixel density to the chipset it uses and how well it’s optimised. Consider the Google Nexus 6: it ranks mid-table in our chart of eight top smartphones’ battery life in our video-rundown tests, despite having the largest battery of the bunch. Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge squeaks out an extra three hours between charges despite having a battery that’s 620mAh smaller.

Electronic Five stories not to miss

1 Microsoft“sorry” forSurfacePro4

Microsofthasissuedanapologyviaasupport forumforissuesinitsSurfaceBookand SurfacePro4,sayingitwas“sorryforany frustration”causedbythe“lessthanperfect” products.Usershadcomplainedabout flickeringdisplaysandcrashing.While thosewerefixedbyaNovemberupdate, thatappearstohaveharmedbatterylife.

2RaspberryPi shrinkstoZero

TheRaspberryPiZerocostsonly£4,butis 40%morepowerfulandafifththesizeof theoriginalmodel.The5mm-thickcomputer usesminiconnectors,soyoumayneedto shelloutforadapters,anditalsolosesthe cameraanddisplayinterfaces.Butforless thanthepriceofapint,who’scomplaining?

3Androidtoget split-screenmultitasking

FutureversionsofGoogle’smobileOScould featuresplit-screenmultitasking,according totheteambehindthePixelC(readour reviewonp56).Suchafeaturewouldmake thedevicemoreusefulforprofessionals,but isn’texpectedtoarriveuntilAndroid7N, whichisn’tdueoutuntilthesecondhalf of2016.

4 HasBitcoin creatorbeen found?

Journalistshaveclaimed tohaveuncoveredthe realidentityofthecreator ofdigitalcurrencyBitcoin, whogoesbythepseudonym SatoshiNakamoto.Butitremains unclearifAustralianCraigWrightisthe founder,andhishomewasraidedbypolice aspartofanunrelatedtaxinvestigation shortlyaftertheclaimsweremade

5 UKhackerarrestedafter childtoyfirmisattacked

SmarttoymakerVTechadmitteddataonsix millionchildrenandfivemillionoftheir parentsleakedafterthefirmwas targetedbyahacker. Theattackersaid hedidn’tintendto releasethedata, sayinghewanted tohighlightVTech’s laxsecurity.A 21-year-oldfrom Bracknellhassince beenarrested

Burnt out: how MozillaFirefox can keepthe lights on

Mozilla has dropped its Google funding and shut down two revenue targeting projects. Is the end nigh for the developer?

FILLING A $300 MILLION hole in a budget isn’t easy for any company, but Mozilla is so serious about not taking Google’s money for search referrals that it’s refusing payment even when it could be charging.

Last year, Mozilla cited competition reasons for why it would no longer take Google’s money for search referrals – which was once responsible for 90% (or £300 million) of Mozilla’s income. The open-source company said it’s since made up some of that funding thanks to search deals with Yahoo in the US, Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia. It’s yet to find a deal in Europe, where Google remains the default search engine – a benefit it currently receives for free.

Publicly, Mozilla claims it isn’t worried, with chief financial officer Jim Cook saying in a statement that the developer’s situation is “really strong”. However, the funding shift comes alongside other challenges, including announcements that Mozilla is shutting down Firefox OS, its mobile operating system, and Sponsored Tiles, ads embedded in the homescreen of the browser.

Beginning of the end?

Over the past seven years, Firefox’s global share on desktop has slid from 26% to 15%, according to StatCounter, while Google’s Chrome browser has climbed from nothing to 54%. “In many ways, it’s natural to see Mozilla and Google drifting apart,” Greg Taylor, research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, told PC Pro. “Their original deal was struck at a time when Firefox was the rising star of the web-browser market and virtually all browsing was done on the desktop. Now, Google controls the world’s most popular browser and the world’s most popular mobile operating system, which itself supports a growing share of browsing activity.” The failure of Firefox OS could be as much a problem as the desktop decline, said analyst Jeff Kagan. “I think this Firefox OS problem may be the beginning of the end for Mozilla,” he said. “While this was a good idea, it apparently isn’t winning enough market share to make the effort worthwhile

Firefox, we need you

Taylor disagrees, saying Firefox brings benefits even for those who don’t browse with it. “I think that Mozilla and Firefox have a valuable role to play in the vitality of the broader web ecosystem, so it would be a real shame to lose them,” he said. “Of the other three major browsers [Internet Explorer/Edge, Safari and Chrome], two are not cross-platform, and all are sponsored by platform owners who might be suspected of having ulterior motives.

“We should expect that such competition helps to keep everyone honest, and may also be a spur for innovation in the sector,” Taylor added. “Past innovations such as tabbed browsing or the unified address/search bar were rapidly imitated across the industry after their initial introduction, which suggests that having another team of engineers working on ways to improve users’ browsing experience is likely to have a positive impact on product quality across the sector

Making it pay

The search deals with Yahoo and others will help replenish Mozilla’s coffers, but with 90% of Europeans turning to Google for search, Taylor noted that “it’s not clear how happily European consumers would embrace a browser” that used a rival. Despite Mozilla no longer taking Google’s cash, its search remains the default in Firefox’s search bar across Europe.

But Taylor said there are many ways the open-source developer can fund its work without Google. Mozilla could drive traffic to a web portal or build its own search engine. “But that would be a significant undertaking, so I consider it to be quite unlikely,” Taylor added. Mozilla could also push more for donations – it’s now showing a donation message on homescreens, but it’s a far cry from the insistent plea that Wikipedia shows on every page during its annual drive – or it could start selling services to corporates.

“What exactly the best option is depends on circumstances that only Mozilla’s executives are privy to, but the bottom line is that if you control access to 15% of the world’s web traffic then you should be able to find some way to stay in business,” Taylor said.

Vulkan The open-source Vulkan API is the Khronos Group’s latest brainchild. Billed as a low-level API, Vulkan helps developers to get closer to bare metal for low latency among commands.

or low-overhead API, because they have a more direct path of control over the GPU. For example, most OpenGL drivers must include memory and error management, as well as shading language compilers and sources. Because the driver does a lot of work, it can impact performance. On the Vulkan API, the Khronos Group starts by giving developers more explicit access. The application will now be in charge of memory allocation and thread management when generating command buffers, for example. Vulkan will mean more work for developers, but the low-level API is also more flexible. “As much of the design of Vulkan is being driven by the games engine vendors, we expect to see many AAA games engines running very efficiently across multiple platforms using Vulkan,” says Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group. “Many nongaming applications, such as VR and CAD design, will also benefit from Vulkan’s efficient and predicable performance.” The Khronos Group indicates the Vulkan could also work on mobile devices, as well as game consoles and vehicles. Google, for instance, recently announced that it will release Vulkan for Android. The move to Vulkan should be natural for mobile app developers, as many use OpenGL. “OpenGL ships on every smartphone including Android and iOS, Windows XP to Windows 10, Mac, and Linux.” says Trevett. “Many mobile developers first write their app on a desktop machine and then take to code to mobile devices.” Vulkan won’t be finalized until later this year, so we don’t have many details on the specifics. We do know that the Khronos Group plans to use its SPIR-V (Standard Portable Intermediate Representation) language to provide native support for shader and kernel features. It eliminates the need for a built-in high-level language source compiler by allowing the high-level language front-end to provide Vulkan or OpenCL drivers with a standardized program. SPIR-V also lets developers use SPI binaries, so the code can work with discrete GPUs, onboard processor graphics, and SoCs.

Vulkan & Industry Support 
In the past, the lack of reliable support from industry partners often delayed or derailed OpenGL development efforts. With Vulkan, the Khronos Group has partnered with today’s biggest hardware developers, including Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ARM, Qualcomm, and Imagination Technologies, as well as software developers, such as Blizzard, Epic Games, Valve, and TransGaming. Jem Davies, ARM vice president of technology, media processing group says, “Vulkan is a big step forward in enabling our ecosystem of developers to unleash the capabilities of the latest ARM GPU technology.” The Vulkan API also received a boost from AMD’s Mantle initiative, as AMD allowed the Khronos Group to use parts of Mantle to serve as Vulkan’s foundation. In its brief existence, Mantle found favor with a few game developers, such as EA with Battlefield Hardline and Cloud Imperium Games’ Star Citizen. In a blog post about the transition, Robert Hallock, AMD head of global technical marketing, says, “Mantle has seen acclaim for many improvements in gaming and game development: higher frame rates, reduced rendering latency, reduced GPU power consumption, better use of multicore CPUs, and re-pioneering new features like split-frame rendering. Vulkan combines and extensively iterates on these characteristics as one new and uniquely powerful graphics API.”

The Future With Khronos
“Khronos is fully committed to supporting and developing all of its 3D APIs as long as developers use them,” says Trevett. “Vulkan is the newest member of the family, and will be great for many developers, but OpenGL and OpenGL ES are not going away—and are being actively evolved in parallel with Vulkan—as the release of OpenGL ES 3.2 and OpenGL extensions at SIGGRAPH [2015] demonstrates.” Vulkan is also designed to port easily across platforms and hardware, so the open API should be a boon to developers that want consistent performance for games that run on all different devices. Whatever comes along, the future of open-source graphics acceleration looks much brighter than its recent history.

State Of The Art Standards OpenGL

Remember the API wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s when Microsoft’s Direct3D and early DirectX versions competed against variants of OpenGL? Microsoft’s DirectX, of course, has been the de facto standard for years, yet something still stirs in the land of OpenGL. The Khronos Group (the industry consortium that took over the development of OpenGL) recently announced the Vulkan open standard API, which is designed to provide applications near direct control over GPU acceleration. Could we soon be witness to API Wars II? We’ll examine the history of OpenGL and see what the future holds for open API standards.

SGI & OpenGL 
Short for Open Graphics Library, OpenGL has long been designed as a multiplatform, cross-language API for hardware-accelerated graphics rendering. The open-source nature lets hardware and software developers customize the API for high-performance computing fields and applications, which have historically included CAD, flight simulation, scientific and information data analysis, and videogames. As previously mentioned, Microsoft’s DirectX has been the primary area of focus of game developers over the last decade, but OpenGL is still vital for those running games on Linux and Mac operating systems. OpenGL was officially released in 1992. SGI, which is now known as Silicon Graphics International but was Silicon Graphics, Inc. at the time, developed the standard. In 1992, SGI was acclaimed for its digital visual effects platform and technology. For example, SGI products were used to create the groundbreaking visuals in “Jurassic Park” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” The initial API for OpenGL served an open alternative to SGI’s Iris GL, which was the proprietary graphics API on SGI workstations. On the whole, SGI viewed OpenGL 1.0 as a state machine that controls a set of specific drawing operations. For programmers, OpenGL 1.0 served as another way to specify geometric objects and render those objects within the card’s frame buffer. Within a typical program, OpenGL 1.0 starts with calls to open a window where the application will draw. The calls are made to allocate graphics language context, as well as to control the frame buffer. In the early 1990s, most consumer graphics cards didn’t support OpenGL, so it wasn’t initially the most useful tool for game designers. In 1996, the OpenGL API found a strong advocate in id Software’s John Carmack, who developed Quake for OpenGL and found that, at the time, it was a much better videogame API than Microsoft’s Direct3D. Carmack and id went on to create GLQuake, which was a source port for Quake and Quake 2 that took advantage of the OpenGL API. GLQuake allowed for effects such as transparent water, reflective surfaces, and shadows. In part due to Carmack and Quake’s influence, graphics card companies began to support OpenGL via MiniGL drivers that allowed for better 3D acceleration. NVIDIA would add even more augmentations to OpenGL with register combiners. This was notable because the combiners took full advantage of NVIDIA’s TNT hardware and let the GPU access, from any stage, the texture values and per-vertex colors. Versions of OpenGL evolved along with new hardware advancements. OpenGL 1.1 was released in 1997, while OpenGL 1.2 (and 1.2.1) hit in 1998. Imaging subset was one of the most important features added to OpenGL 1.2 for image processing, as the subset included core capabilities for 3D texturing and level of detail controls. When NVIDIA released its GeForce 256 (the card where NVIDIA coined the term “GPU”) in 1999, OpenGL was able to take advantage of the card’s distinctive T&L (transform & lighting) features, because the API had a dedicated T&L pipeline. Microsoft, by comparison, had to add T&L to support the DirectX standard with the release of DirectX 7.

Fahrenheit 
In 1997, SGI and Microsoft joined forces to “create a common, extensible architecture” under a project code-named “Fahrenheit.” The undertaking was designed to bring together the consumer (DirectX) and professional (OpenGL) graphics APIs, so developers would only need to know one API for graphics and visualization applications. At the time, Ed McCracken, chairman and CEO of SGI, said, “Today, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft are defining a clear path for developers that enables both of us to expand the market for graphics.” The alliance would last only two years. Microsoft and SGI could not find common ground, and the entire project was abandoned with little to no functional code ever produced. Experts have speculated a variety of reasons for the failed marriage, and although a general lack of industry support was seen as the primary roadblock, there’s never been a clear story about why the project failed. Microsoft, of course, continued work on its DirectX API, and when Windows 2000 was released, the OS was loaded with DirectX 7.

Progress Slows 
At the turn of the century, the once prolific group of graphics AIB (add-in board) developers had started to dwindle. Microsoft had begun to work primarily with NVIDIA and ATI, and a new version of DirectX would often coincide with Team Green’s and Team Red’s newest GPUs. OpenGL, on the other hand, tacked on support with the updates that sometimes didn’t appear until a year after the relevant hardware had been released. For example, OpenGL 1.3 wasn’t released until 2001, almost three years after OpenGL 1.2. Some have pointed towards the ARB (Architectural Review Board) as a major factor in the delay, as new features required approval from a standards committee. It didn’t help that many members of the ARB were rival companies, and intellectual property threats in particular were seen as key frustrations. In some cases, the biggest advances were made in OpenGL extensions, rather than updating the standard as a whole. With each company promoting its own technology, OpenGL began to fall behind. By 2002, Microsoft had created DirectX 9 and a high-level shading language (Shader Model 2.0) to support GPU improvements for pixel shading, vertex shading, and overall visual quality. OpenGL, at the time, wasn’t able to take full advantage of dedicated hardware shader pipelines. To help catch up, the ARB would work with 3DLABS to spearhead the development of OpenGL 2.0 and support for shading language. OpenGL 2.0 wasn’t released until 2004, and not long after 3DLABS exited the graphics card business altogether, stopping development in 2006.

Khronos Group Takes Control
At SIGGRAPH 2006, the OpenGL ARB passed governance of OpenGL’s API over to the Khronos Group. One of the first acts of the Khronos Group was to establish an OpenGL Working Group that would be responsible for controlling and evolving the OpenGL standard. At the time, ARB secretary Jon Leech said, “The evolution of the OpenGL API and the membership of the ARB have reflected the changes in the graphics industry over the years as the use of 3D graphics moved from high-end workstations and simulators to PCs and mobile laptops, thanks to a new generation of consumeroriented companies, such as Apple, ATI, and NVIDIA. We have decided to move the OpenGL specification into Khronos to ensure the future health of OpenGL in all its forms.” With a joint road map, the OpenGL train was no longer off the tracks. But by this time, OpenGL API support was not nearly as important to developers as Microsoft’s DirectX, and the standard was years behind. By 2008, the Khronos Group was able to deliver OpenGL 3.0. This release marked a major revision of the API, as it included a new version of the OpenGL shading language (GLSL 1.3) and a set of OpenGL extensions that would bring the new functionality to older hardware. AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA all made contributions to the design of OpenGL 3.0 and would immediately support it within the respective product lineups. The Khronos Group also focused on defining how the OpenGL specification would evolve and retire obsolete functions. In the press release announcing OpenGL 3.0, the Khronos Group stated, “The new OpenGL API supports the future creation of profiles to enable products to support specific market needs while not burdening every implementation with unnecessary costs. To avoid fragmentation, the core OpenGL specification will contain all defined functionality in an architecturally coherent whole, with profiles tightly specifying segment-relevant subsets.” Barthold Lichtenbelt, chair of the OpenGL working group at Khronos, said, “OpenGL 3.0 sets the stage for a revolution to come. We now have the roadmap machinery and momentum in place to rapidly and reliably develop OpenGL and are working closely with OpenCL to ensure that OpenGL plays a pivotal role in the ongoing revolution in programmable visual computing.” In March of 2009, the Khronos Group released OpenGL 3.1, which had additional shading language updates and improved programmability that would allow for more efficient development of supporting software. “The rapid nine-month development of OpenGL 3.1 demonstrates the scheduledriven approach to the standard that is enabling and inspiring cutting-edge, crossplatform GPU functionality,” Lichtenbelt said. “OpenGL 3.1 answers the requests from the developer community to streamline and modernize the OpenGL API.” OpenGL 4.0 landed one year later. The 4.0 update introduced shader stages that let the GPU offload tessellation from the CPU, as well as the ability to use per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions. The greater flexibility helped to increase rendering quality and antialiasing. At the same time, Khronos introduced OpenGL 3.3 and a set of ARB extensions, which brought many of OpenGL 4.0’s new features to older OpenGL 3.0 cards. Subsequent releases of OpenGL have rolled out on a fairly consistent basis. For example, OpenGL 4.2 was announced in 2011, OpenGL 4.3 in 2012, OpenGL 4.4 in 2013, and OpenGL 4.5 in 2014. With the latter, the Khronos Group introduced core functionality for DSA (Direct State Access) that lets developers set and query the properties of objects, which could be textures, shader programs, and frame buffers, among others, without binding the object. This way, developers using or designing middleware won’t need to activate and undo bindings. DSA-like functionality has long been a part of Direct3D. For easier porting between OpenGL and Direct3D, OpenGL 4.5 offers a DX11 emulation capability

Vulkan 
With OpenGL brought up to speed with many of the most critical graphics acceleration techniques and technologies, the Khronos Group set its sights on something new. Vulkan is a ground-up design that removes much of the complex driver overhead that can slow down performance. Developers call this a low-level

Hooked On A Feeling KOR-FX Gaming Vest Puts Your Body Into The Action

For years—decades, really—we’ve relied on primarily two senses to absorb and experience our favorite videogames in all their glory. We see them and we hear them, simple as that. Sure, countless technologies intended to more fully immerse gamers in their games have come along. Some, such as 3D gaming, have gone, while others, such as multichannel surround sound, are here to stay. The fate of others, such as Oculus and its VR competition, remains to be seen. What all of these have in common, though, is that they give our eyes something different to see or our ears something different to hear. Maybe it’s time to give another one of the five senses some love. Of course, we can reasonably remove two of those senses, unless smelling a Last of Us Infected or tasting a sample of World of Warcraft’s Carrion Surprise seems appealing to you. That leaves us with touch, which, in the context of gaming, is frequently referred to as haptics. Haptic feedback, which delivers various physical sensations to the body, is hardly new to the gaming scene. Videogame controllers have included various implementations for nearly two decades— who remembers the Nintendo 64’s Rumble Pak? Joysticks with force feedback were popular among flight sim enthusiasts and other aviation games. Peripherals and accessories that use haptic feedback to make games more immersive are well-established. Still, there’s plenty of room for innovation, a fact that Massachusettsbased Immerz knows well. The company’s KOR-FX gaming vest, which launched last year, is designed to take haptic feedback to new, more realistic, heights. The KOR-FX vest takes in-game positional audio of all kinds and translates it into haptic feedback that will shake you to your core, almost literally. When a grenade explodes to your right, the KOR-FX rocks your body accordingly. When a speedboat roars up to the docks to help you make your getaway, the KOR-FX delivers the physical sensation to let you know it’s here. Make no mistake, though—the KOR-FX is way more than a rumble pack you wear on your chest. The latter rely on small spinning motors to make their vibrations, while the KOR-FX’s 4DFX technology uses a pair of specially designed transducers to produce haptic feedback that is in a class of its own. This is a harness that can harness your game’s sounds like you’ve never before experienced.

Immersion Through Science
Founder and CTO Shahriar Afshar relied on the principles of neuroscience in order to engineer a product that would shake up the gaming world. “We use the human brain as the main hardware, which our electronics merely trigger to project tactile/emotional reality,” Afshar says. “We achieve this by activating the limbic system in the brain by means of concurrent audio and tactile feedback, as well as visual clues that help cement the experience as highly immersive. The end result is a physical presence that none of the preexisting technologies can deliver.” According to Afshar, the KOR-FX vest turns the wearer’s chest into an echo chamber that actually amplifies the vest’s directional tactile feedback, which it extracts from in-game audio. Specifically, proprietary algorithms use a game’s sounds to create haptic information. The vest’s transducers vibrate in such a way that mimics the naturally occurring vibrations that take place in the chest as a response loud noises or speech. The brain then interprets the vibrations that the KOR-FX generates as the real thing. “In this manner, external sounds, like the sound of a grenade explosion, are experienced as a powerful personal sensation that is immediately internalized and felt as though it happened in the real world (or something close to such an experience),” Afshar says. “The trick was finding how to extract the haptic information from ordinary audio that’s available in all forms of entertainment such as games, music and movies.”

From Kickstarter To Kicking Your Chest 
KOR-FX has at least one thing in common with Oculus VR’s buzzy virtual reality headset: Both rocketed to success by using The People’s Venture Capital Firm: Kickstarter. On June 9, 2014, Immerz launched the KOR-FX Kickstarter project, seeking a $75,000 investment from prospective backers. The community jumped all over the project, ultimately raising over $180,000 to make the KOR-FX a reality. Immerz began shipping the vest last year, starting with its Kickstarter backers, but the company can trace its history back to 2009, when Immerz developed the first prototype. “The whole process was exciting,” says Immerz CEO Seth Fandetti. “Kickstarter was a great experience and helped us build a community of like-minded enthusiasts who wanted to try our product and help fund the project. The community gave us great ideas and suggestions about what they wanted from a haptic gaming vest.” In 2009, the first-generation KOR-FX vest wasn’t a vest at all. The plastic harness looped over the wearer’s shoulder and looked like a pair of headphones lying flat against the chest, just below the collarbone. After developing two successive plastic prototypes in 2010 and 2011, Immerz realized that a different approach was needed to bring the KOR-FX to market. In 2012, the company began experimenting with various types and sizes of vest for the KOR-FX. For the next two years, Immerz honed its vest design. “Getting the ergonomics right, so that the unit is both unisex and one-sizefits- all, was the most challenging aspect of developing the KOR-FX,” Afshar says. “It took a few years to finally converge on the vest form factor as the most flexible and universal design, allowing for quick mounting and removal, easy adjustments, ease of use in any position or sitting arrangement, and, most importantly, total comfort during long gaming sessions.” Afshar says that Immerz wanted the KOR-FX to be comfortable to the point that gamers forget they’re wearing it. Last year, the company settled on a final design and took it to E3 just days after launching the Kickstarter campaign. The move worked, as Immerz reached its $75,000 goal a week later. After that, KOR-FX was no longer a prototype; it was a product. Then the real work began, as Immerz ramped up production to fill the orders of the over 1,000 backers who contributed enough to receive a KOR-FX vest.

Suit Up 
The KOR-FX system consists of two pieces, the KOR-FX vest and a wireless dongle that plugs into a 3.5mm audio source. The 3.5mm plug makes the wireless dongle compatible with a variety of audio sources. As you might imagine, this lets you use the KOR-FX on not only videogames but also music and movies. The dongle has a 3.5mm audio out jack that connects to a pair of headphones. To power the box, you’ll need a USB power source or, alternatively, four AA batteries. The vest itself runs on four AA batteries. A pair of dials on the dongle adjust the volume output to the connected headphones/headset and the intensity of the vest’s feedback, respectively. It’s a great setup, but the KOR-FX’s real magic is the number of “dials and knobs” it has, which lets you customize the KOR-FX’s acoustohaptic feedback according to the game you’re playing. On the right side of the vest, when you’re wearing it, you’ll find the power button, the Bind button (which establishes the wireless connection between the vest and the dongle), and the Mode button. On the left side are two buttons that adjust the intensity of the vest’s haptic feedback. The two intensity buttons are selfexplanatory, but the Mode button requires a brief exploration. Its primary function is to filter out portions of the audio spectrum that trigger the vest. So, for example, on the first setting, the KOR-FX will only utilize the low end of the audio signal’s frequency range—in other words, the bass. Moving up to the second setting will include the audio’s bass and mids, and this is the setting that Immerz recommends. The third and final setting incorporates the full audio frequency range for the vest’s haptic feedback. The Mode button also helps you position the vest on your body in order to experience the best possible haptic feedback. By pressing and holding the Mode, the vest’s transducers will fire at full strength, letting you adjust the vest for the best possible fit and feedback. When you’re set, pressing the button again cancels the effect. Naturally, each game you play will have a different sonic footprint, so you’ll want to tweak the KOR-FX accordingly for the most immersive experience every time. We recommend playing each game for at least a few hours in order to experience all of its nuances, letting you dial in the perfect settings. Once you’ve strapped on the vest and are ready to use it, Immerz recommends an 8-hour break-in period before the KOR-FX is able to deliver the perfect acoustohaptic experience. Afshar explains the reasons behind the break-in period: “It is both an issue of the fabric and the internal structure harmonizing to haptics signals. As with any electrical transducer, our ACH transducers reach peak performance and highest efficiency after the initial break-in period.”

The Future According To KOR-FX 
Despite the fact that the KOR-FX vest has yet to celebrate its first official birthday, Fandetti says that Immerz is already hard at work developing new hardware and software to make acoustohaptics even more immersive. Like any good piece of hardware, version 2.0 of the KOR-FX vest is already under development, Fandetti shares. “We had tons of great feedback from our customers for improvements they would like to see in the vest,” Fandetti says. “We also have a list of improvements we have been working on over the past year that we are going to build into the next version of the product.” According to Fandetti, Immerz is preparing the next-gen KOR-FX with a goal of having it ready when upcoming VR products reach the market. Although he’s tight-lipped about specific details, Fandetti reveals, “We are also looking at other forms and application for our haptic solutions in our labs and have some great ideas brewing. . . . In the future we hope to have a full product line of haptics products that complement different applications and uses.” Although the KOR-FX in its current for should work with any game, Immerz is also working on an SDK that will let game developers tweak and tune their games specifically for the vest, which should allow the vest to make games feel even more realistic. Fandetti admits that the process hasn’t been without challenges, but he says that Immerz recognizes the value of making an SDK available. “We would love to give developers the ability to trigger haptic sensations of sorts,” he says, “to help them craft and conceptualize their virtual world with visual, audio, and haptic stimulation. Having this type of immersion . . . is going to be critical to making truly immersive titles in the future. “We still have every intention of bringing an SDK solution to market, but we want to make sure we do it correctly.”

Not Your Father’s VR 
Clearly, we’re still a long way away from fanciful implementations of VR, such as a fully functional holodeck. Nevertheless, the virtual reality hardware available to gamers today is miles ahead of its ancestors. “It’s a very exciting time in technology, where being immersed in your environment is the next evolution of many forms of media,” Fandetti says. We are evolving our haptic solutions daily and are so excited to show the world the next generation of haptics

ICANN Seeks Input On Plan To End U.S. Oversight Of Internet Names

The United States’ control over the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) could end soon. Under a new proposal now open for public comment, the “global multistakeholder community” would take control from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The idea for the transition, which ICANN says is an “important Internet governance milestone,” was first announced in March 2014. It would include three categories of IANA functions: domain names, Internet numbering resources, and protocol parameters.

Now, Direct From Outer Space: More Affordable Internet Service

About two-thirds of the world still does not have access to the Internet. That’s one reason Farooq Khan, president of Samsung Research America, cites for developing a vision of a “Space Internet” to provide Internet access to virtually every part of the globe. Khan’s proposal is to deploy thousands of low-cost micro-satellites placed in low-Earth orbit. Combined with a new wireless architecture, each satellite could provide terabitper- second data rates, Khan says. Together, the satellites could provide Zetabyte/month capacity, which equates to about 200GB per month for 5 billion users worldwide.

Most Teens Finding Friends Online

For teens, spending time online is about more than just playing games, posting to Facebook, and sharing photos on Instagram—it’s about making friends. According to a study by Pew Research Center, 57% of teens between ages 13 and 17 have made a new friend online, and 29% have made more than five new friends online. Social media sites are the most common spots for meeting friends online, followed by video games. Just 20% of teens surveyed say they’ve met an online friend in person. How do these friends communicate? You guessed it; the majority of that communication is electronic. About 80% use instant messaging, 72% use social media, 64% use email, and 59% use video chat.

Should You Go Solar ? Google Knows

Interested in investing in solar power but not sure it’ll work in your home or neighborhood? Google introduced a new tool, Project Sunroof, that can help you decide. It’s simple: Enter your address and let Project Sunroof go to work. By combining the aerial mapping used by Google Earth with information from other databases, Project Sunroof figures out how much sunlight hits your roof throughout the year, says Carl Elkin, who developed the idea as part of his recent 20% time for Google. The high-resolution mapping accounts for roof orientation, shade from trees and buildings, and local weather. The tool is in pilot phase, available only for addresses in Boston, Fresno, and the San Francisco Bay Area, but should be more widely available soon.

Parallels Desktop For Mac Supports Windows 10, Adds New Features

Parallels has been making tools to help Mac users run Windows applications for years, and it’s continuing the tradition for Windows 10. Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac is up to 50% faster than previous versions, is ready for OS X El Capitan, and has a Travel Mode that temporarily shuts off resources that drain power, extending battery life up to 25% when you’re on the go. Desktop 11 lets Windows 10 users take advantage of Cortana when using both Windows and OS X, marking the first time Parallels Desktop has ever made a Windows feature available for OS X applications.

Take Beautiful Photos Through That Rain-Covered Window

If you’ve taken a picture through some sort of obstruction and haven’t been happy with the results, a group of researchers from MIT and Google feel your pain. The researchers detail their plan in “A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography.” Rather than capturing a single image, users take a short image sequence while slightly moving the camera, similar to taking a panoramic shot. An algorithm uses the differences that often exist in the relative position of the background and the obstructing elements from the camera and separates them based on their motions. See below for a before and after shot.

Browser Extension Works To Block “Sneakiest Kinds Of Online Tracking”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working to help keep more of your Web browsing habits private. The EFF’s Privacy Badger 1.0 browser extension blocks certain kinds of super-cookies and browser fingerprinting, which are two relatively new techniques the online tracking industry uses to follow Internet users from site to site. Privacy Badger works with the new DNT (Do Not Track) policy, which you can set in your browser settings or by installing Privacy Badger to opt out of online tracking (Privacy Badger will not block third-party services that honor all DNT requests).

Microsoft Bounty Programs To Be A Lot More Bountiful

Microsoft is expanding its Bounty Programs in an effort to bring “defense up on par with offense,” the company states. With the rollout, the Bounty For Defense is increasing from $50,000 to $100,000 USD, which, Microsoft notes, “rewards the novel defender equally for their research.” Also, Microsoft is running a bonus period until Oct. 5 of this year for any authentication vulnerabilities in MSA (Microsoft Account) and AAD (Azure Active Directory). Between now and Oct. 5, payouts will double to $30,000 USD.

EK Announces AIO Liquid Cooling Products With Predator Line

EK Water Blocks plans to roll out its first all-in-one cooling products this fall. The company says its new EK-Predator product line will have two models, a 240mm version and a 360mm version, and will target the mainstream market. The company cobbled together individual components aimed at enthusiasts and modders from its existing product lines and assembled them into the new AIOs. Those components include Supremacy MX water blocks (designed for Intel CPUs), CoolStream PE radiators, Vardar fans, a 6W DDC pump, and an integrated Fan Splitter hub

NZXT GRID+ V2 Controller Makes It Easy To Control Up To Six Fans

A modern interface and streamlined installation help make the NZXT GRID+ V2 simple and unintrusive: two great qualities for a digital fan control. The fan controller has six individually controlled channels and up to 30 watts total output. Two fan control profiles—silence and performance—adjust fan speeds based on CPU temperature. Or, you can use the included software to create multiple custom fan profiles and manually adjust fan speeds to suit your own needs. The $29.99 GRID+ V2 doesn’t require an open 5.25-inch slot, so you can install it virtually anywhere.

PNY’s New Anarchy DDR4 Desktop Memory Kits Are Ready For OC’ing

PNY designed its new Anarchy X DDR4 2800MHz and Anarchy DDR4 2400MHz for extreme overclocking. The company says both upgrades combine tightly screened components and select ICs to offer the best in speed, low latency, stability, and overclocking that gamers and PC enthusiasts need. Uniquely designed heat spreaders are sleek and stylish and come with clips in a variety of colors. The Anarchy DDR4 2400MHz kits come in 4GB to 16GB capacities at prices ranging from $39.99 to $134.99. The Anarchy X DDR4 2800MHz is a 16GB kit for $149.99.

BenQ Introduces XR3501 Curved Display For Immersive Gaming

The new BenQ XR3501 LCD monitor is big, with a huge 35-inch screen. It’s fast, with a speedy 144Hz refresh rate. And then it goes one step further: This display features the greatest curvature currently available in an LCD monitor. BenQ says it wanted the XR3501 to envelop the gamer and provide a truly immersive entertainment experience, so it gave the screen a 2000R curvature, which is similar to that found on an IMAX theater screen. The XR3501 also has a 21:9 aspect ratio and sports 2,560 x 1,080 resolution. This screen will put you right in the middle of the action.

ADATAs Premier SP550 SSDs Aim At Price/Performance Sweet Spot

ADATA has announced a new line of SSDs called Premier SP550. The new line uses TLC (triple-level cell) NAND, a type of flash memory that is generally less expensive but also slower than other types of NAND, to hold down costs. To help improve speeds, ADATA has used the latest SMI controller and added support for SLC caching and DDR3 DRAM cache buffer. ADATA says the Premier SP550 is aiming at a performance sweet spot, and the SSDs have read/ write speeds of 560/410 MBps. The new line is available in these capacities: 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB.