Ford will begin testing self-driving cars in an unnamed city

Ford exhibited a self-driving delivery vehicle at CES 2018 this week – a modified Fusion. [Guardian]

The self-driving revolution is already upon us, with companies across the spectrum of the technology industry working hurriedly on the kind of software and hardware that will power the autonomous cars of the near future.

But it’s important to also figure out just how that technology will impact society as it hits the road in the coming years. Ford , for its part, is interested in how self-driving vehicles will not only operate in, but also change cities.

Now the automaker has announced it is working with a city in which it will operate its self-driving cars, and how specific businesses can benefit from the technology. Ford isn’t giving any specifics about what city it’s working with, even Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification, Sherif Marakby, wouldn’t spill the beans during an interview at CES 2018.

How self-driving cars will alter cities

Marakby, did, however, explain how by working with partner companies like Lyft, Dominos and Postmates, Ford can better understand the needs of the self-driving car market.

In a Medium post discussing the company’s efforts, Jim Farley, Ford’s executive vice president and president of global markets, explained how self-driving vehicles could be used to provide a means of transportation for people who don’t have access to mass transit.

What’s more, Farley explained how Ford’s partnership with Postmates will give the company a better idea as to how delivery services work in cities and how self-driving cars can be used to save individual businesses on the cost of owning their own vehicles.

Ford says it’s also expanding its work with Dominos and Lyft into cities, which should give them a better understanding of how people will react to major changes in services. After all, if a self-driving car delivers your pizza, you’ll have to go out to the vehicle to get your pie.

Ford already tried this in the suburbs and found that many people were more than happy to grab their pizza from a robot car. In the city though, getting your pizza from such a vehicle could mean running down flights of stairs, or taking an elevator, to your building’s front door, something that’s not going to be easy or convenient for everyone.

How we’ll interact with self-driving cars

When fully autonomous vehicles do eventually hit the road, we’ll need to figure out how pedestrians will communicate with them. Think of all of the small, but necessary interactions you have with drivers when walking to work. You look at a driver when crossing the street to see if they’re staying put, watch their head movements to see if they are paying attention to you and follow their hand motions to see if they’re yielding to you. Without a driver, though, all of those behaviors go out the window.

That’s why Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute is working on a lighting system that alerts pedestrians and even human drivers to a self-driving car’s intentions on the road. The school made headlines about its initiative back in September when it revealed that it was driving cars around Arlington, Virginia, with the driver disguised as a seat to see if pedestrians and other drivers would be comfortable with the idea of an autonomous vehicle.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that certainly needs to be further studied, but will require pedestrians and drivers to learn an entirely new language of the road.

However, companies address these issues, they’ll need to do so soon. Many automakers say they’ll make their autonomous vehicles available for the mass market between 2020 and 2025. Here’s hoping we know how to communicate with them by then.

Samsung's Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus bring major camera improvements

Samsung’s Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are here. Sure, the leaks have ensured that we already know what the handsets look like, but there’s a big difference between seeing a photo of a smartphone and actually using it.

The S9 and S9 Plus are the big follow-ups to the S8 and S8 Plus, naturally, and face formidable competition in Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X (pronounced 10). They’re strikingly familiar looking, but offer major improvements to one of the most essential components of a smartphone: their cameras.

More of the same, in a good way

Put the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S8 next to each other and you’ll have a heck of a time trying to tell them apart. Samsung has kept the same design language from last year’s models, and that’s, well, not a bad move. After all, the S8 is a stunning device. What’s more, this isn’t as big of a release for Samsung as the completely redesigned iPhone X was for Apple, so there’s no particular impetus to make major changes. 

Would I have liked a new design? Absolutely. It’s a disappointment that there isn’t much of a change here. But it’s not something that will hurt the S9 and S9 Plus’ eventual sales.

The S9 and S9 Plus bring more of the same in terms of design with some slight, but welcome, changes.

There are some minor changes to how the new handsets’ look, of course. Samsung said it made the S9’s and S9 Plus’ bezels a bit thinner than their predecessors and, by the grace of God, the company decided to move the fingerprint sensor away from the camera and down to the center of the phone’s rear.

This will make it far easier to use the reader without mistaking it for the camera. It also ensures you can reach the reader without having to stretch your finger across the phone’s back panel.

The S9 and S9 Plus, which are powered by Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Android OS, also get the same screen size as the S8 and S8 Plus. The S9 comes with a 5.8-inch Super AMOLED screen, while the S9 Plus gets a 6.2-inch Super AMOLED panel. Samsung says it made the S9’s and S9 Plus’ displays brighter than the S8’s and S8 Plus’, but I wasn’t able to test that on my own.

Lights, camera, emoji

Samsung’s biggest improvements to the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus are the handsets’ cameras. Interestingly, Samsung chose to give the S9 Plus a dual-lens shooter, while leaving the S9 with a single lens. So far, it seems as though the additional lens will only be used for Bokeh-style photos, though.

Both the S9’s and S9 Plus’ cameras feature mechanical apertures that physically open and close depending on the type of lighting in which you’re shooting. Samsung says the cameras uses a mechanical dual aperture of F1.5 and F2.4. The company claims that this increases the amount of light the camera can capture by 28%.

In one demonstration a Samsung spokesperson pointed the camera into a cylinder that was almost completely dark. The camera, however, was able to use the minuscule amount of light inside to capture an image of the inside of the tube: an image of a roundabout.

The S9 Plus gets a new dual-camera setup around back.

The S9 and S9 Plus also get improvements to their low-light image clarity. Usually, when you take a picture in poor lighting the resulting image is noisy and distorted. Samsung says it addressed this by using what it calls multiframe noise reduction. The phones take three sets of four frames from your photos and then interpolate them to get a noticeably clearer image than those taken by Samsung’s previous generation phones.

An example the company showed us did, in fact, look clearer when taken with the S9, but I didn’t test the S8 and S9 side-by-side on my own, so I won’t make a call on whether it truly improves clarity until then.

Samsung is also touting the S9’s and S9 Plus’ slow-motion capture capabilities. The company said that its image sensors now have built-in memory that allows the camera to take video at 960 frames per second. The phones can manually or automatically activate slow-motion mode when they detect movement within the frame. 

The feature works well in practice, but you have to line up the area of the screen where you think the movement will occur. What’s more, you can only shoot one 0.2-second clip at a time. That short amount of time stretches out to 6 seconds when played in slow motion, but I’d like to be able to record more action at a time.

Like Apple, and as predicted, Samsung has included augmented reality-style emojis to its latest smartphones. These AR Emojis capture an image of your face and then turn them into cartoon emojis that you can share with friends. Unfortunately, my emoji didn’t look anything like me at all. You can also transform your emoji to look like different animals like a rabbit, similar to Apple’s Animojis.

Unlike Apple’s Animojis, which move in near-perfect sync with your face, however, Samsung’s AR Emojis couldn’t quite match my facial movements. Of course, Samsung is constantly updating its software features — the company’s phones received an update while I was testing them — so this could change by the time the S9 and S9 Plus hit the market.

The S9 sticks with a single camera setup.

Both the S9 and S9 Plus also get a slick new live text translation feature and AR make-up testing through Sephora and CoverGirl. The translation function can look at printed or written text in 54 different languages and instantly overlay their English translations over the original text. It’s stunning to see in real-time and worked extremely well during my hands-on.

The make-up feature, meanwhile, lets you use the S9’s and S9 Plus’ front-facing cameras to let you virtually try out make-up and then purchase it directly from Sephora and CoverGirl. I’ve got to admit, I didn’t think it would be helpful, but now I’m certain I need some hot pink lipstick from Sephora.

Performance and power

Inside, the S9 and S9 Plus use Qualcomm’s (QCOM) Snapdragon 845 processor. Surprisingly, the S9 gets 4GB of RAM, while the S9 Plus gets 6GB of RAM. This is the first time Samsung gave one version of its Galaxy phones a leg up over the other. Both handsets, however, come with the same 64GB of internal memory and expandable storage slots.

In terms of battery life, the S9 comes with a 3,000-mAh battery, while the S9 Plus gets a 3,500-mAh battery. That makes sense, though, as the larger S9 Plus will run through power faster than the smaller S9.

And of course, Samsung has included a headphone jack with both the S9 and S9 Plus, ensuring that you can both charge your phone and listen to music at the same time with ease.

The S9 and S9 Plus will be available for pre-order on March 2 and in-store purchase March 16. An unlocked S9 will cost $719, or $30 per month with 24 months financing, while the S9 Plus will cost $839, or $35 per month with 24 months financing. Both phones will be available on all major wireless U.S. carriers. Stay tuned for my full review.

How 5G wireless will soon supercharge the internet

5G wireless connectivity is coming this year, and companies are running a full-court press to make sure you know about it.

BARCELONA — 5G wireless is coming faster than you might think. But as the advent of this next generation of over-the-air broadband draws near, the hype surrounding it is starting to ebb.

Last year, a typical quote about 5G might have sounded like the declaration that Meredith Attwell Baker, president of the wireless trade group CTIA, made at a conference in September: “5G will make every industry and every part of our lives better.”

Google’s self-driving Waymo cars will be picking you up soon

A Waymo minivan similar to one that could soon be picking you up. (image: Fortune)

AUSTIN — A self-driving car from Google (GOOG, GOOGL) may be coming to a street near you. But you won’t be able to buy it, and you’ll have to wait longer to get a ride if snow regularly features in your city’s winter forecasts.

John Krafcik, CEO of of Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo, laid out the company’s ambitions and its potential obstacles in two SXSW appearances at SXSW, an onstage interview with Vice News correspondent Evan McMorris-Santoro and an evening chat with comedian Adam Carolla recorded for Carolla’s podcast.

The potential promise here is huge — safer roads for everyone, and consequence-free napping behind the wheel for people willing to pay about what a human-driven Uber or Lyft costs today. But you may need to get over the notion of traditional car ownership along the way.

The promise of self-driving cars

“We’re working to build the world’s most experienced driver,” Krafcik said in opening his sales pitch. “Everything that we learn in one of our cars gets passed to all of our cars.”

Waymo’s software has already driven 5 million miles in U.S. cities, including an “early rider” test in Phoenix using modified Chrysler (FCAU) Pacifica minivans that began taking signups last April. Waymo has since grown confident enough to remove the self-driving-car equivalent of training wheels: a human “safety driver” at the wheel as a backup.

Powering the vehicle’s self-driving capabilities is an array of cameras, radar and Lidar sensors, many on the car’s roof, which detect everything nearby from other vehicles and pedestrians to cyclists.

At the evening event, Krafcik displayed a Lidar view of the event venue, a bar on the east side of Austin, showing people as glowing outlines. Seeing himself lit up as if by radiation, Carolla joked “I think I just got testicular cancer, so thanks for that.”

In both talks, Krafcik emphasized that Waymo’s cars aren’t connected — they don’t need a 5G wireless link to go anywhere. “The car has everything it needs to drive on the car itself,” he told McMorris-Santoro. “There are no signals coming from outer space or something telling it to turn right.”

The resulting ride may not be too exciting but is safe. “It doesn’t speed,” Krafcik added. “It’s very persnickety about following the rules.”

The Waymo system also thinks well ahead, which he said invalidated the question of how a car would decide which pedestrian to hit in a crash. “We can see three football fields down the road,” he said. “We would come to a stop before we ran into these folks.”

He added that the software does have “a hierarchy of concern” about the relative vulnerability of other road users. Presumably, an awareness that humans are squishier than cars would at least direct it to take out a Prius before a pedestrian.

Tuesday evening, Krafcik cited another benefit. “Just a few of those cars provide a really good example for human drivers to follow,” he said, citing studies showing people drove better after the addition of autonomous cars.

When and how much

Waymo’s system represents a major advance over the semi-autonomous systems of Tesla (TSLA) and GM’s (GM) Cadillac subsidiary, both of which demand continued human attention. Krafcik said passengers quickly set aside hangups over needing to trust a computer completely — a Waymo clip shows Phoenix testers taking selfies and naps.

Waymo plans to have service in every major metropolitan area by 2028, with thousands of cars driving themselves by 2020.

Its rollout will begin across sunnier climates first, though. “Snow and ice are challenging for our current system.” Krafcik said Tuesday morning. For example, the car’s sensors don’t have defrosters, although the next revision will add them.

But even then, Krafcik cautioned that Waymo cars won’t be able to cope with the sort of weather — blizzards, torrential rain storms — that keep self-aware humans off the roads.

In the same vein, he asked that states refrain from regulating Waymo’s software more strictly than the human sort, notwithstanding anxiety about artificial intelligence. “Hold us to the same standards as human drivers,” he requested.

Waymo will offer these cars as a service, telling Carolla that a ride would cost about the same as an Uber or Lyft: “a couple of bucks a mile.”

Waymo has no plan to make or sell cars itself. “We’ve always considered ourselves, in this space, as enablers of the incumbents,” Krafcik said in the morning. For instance, Avis (CAR) and AutoNation (AN) help to maintain the company’s minivans.