I will not talk about how subjectively recent the last entry seems.

Instead, let’s talk science! Been a pretty good week for cool science stuff and I am happy to my writing all about it on this lovely August evening.

I will also not talk about how rapidly this summer seems to be passing me by.

Tonight, we have gamer science, scary cool space science, scary bad hacker science, and autonomous car related science. Four fun stories, and what the hell, let’s get right down to it.

First, we have gamer science.

Gaming Of The Future

We will start off with the Kickstarter page of a way cool technology with a ridiculously pretentious and overblown name, Oculus Rift.

Believe it or not, that is not the name of an obscure cult game from the DOS era or a Star Trek destination that seems far too good to be true… and is. It is a VR helmet that promises to deliver that fully immersive video game experience that we all thought we would have by now, back in the 90’s when the whole “virtual reality” buzz was going around.

Here is their spiel :

With an incredibly wide field of view, high resolution display, and ultra-low latency head tracking, the Rift provides a truly immersive experience that allows you to step inside your favorite game and explore new worlds like never before.

Sounds good to me. I have only been waiting for something like that for like, my entire life. And those are the three things that nobody that I know of has gotten all working at the same time before. You were always sacrificing at least one of them to get the other two to work.

The low latency is especially important, because VR systems which did not update the screen fast enough when people turn their heads before (in other words, high latency) actually made people acutely motion sick because what their eyes were telling them and what their inner ear was telling them was badly out of sync. Makes me feel ill just thinking about it.

And it makes sense that this is the time for the VR revolution to finally happen, in this era of dirt cheap accelerometers and motion tracking software.

I hope these guys make it. I only wish I could donate.

Devourer of Worlds

A warning for Felicity : the following story is scary and about a massive black hole. You might want to skip this one and pop down to the one about black hat hackers.

Here is the scary space story : In a distant galaxy, far far away from our own little cosmic back yard, a super massive black hole is devouring a star, and we get to watch.

Heck, we even get to listen. Well, “listen”. It turns out the ripples in space caused by this massive calamity are so regular, they can be likened to sound^[1], and if they were a sound, they would be rockin’ the celestial spheres at a completely inaudible 4.8 milliHertz.

So, not exactly the next “sound” to rock the charts, but still, pretty damn cool.

Now of course, as a science fiction thinker, I immediately imagine that the star involved has a wise and ancient civilization on one of its planets that will be tragically destroyed by the incessant munching of this very real version of Galactus or Unicron.

Of course, it is equally likely that one of the planets is host to a race of complete and utter bastards for whom all the good and decent species of the Universe will shed not a single tear.

It’s just fun to speculate.

Four Million Places To Stay

On to some bad news for the hotel industry : a Black Hat type hacker has figured out a way to seamlessly hack into about four million hotel room doors that use those swipe cards as keys.

Turns out, all you need is an Arduino microcontroller and the right software, and you can essentially read the code for the door right off the lock, and then just feed it back in, and presto, the door opens. It is exactly the sort of technology that heroes and villains have in action movies, only presumably without the huge LED that displays each number of the code as it is cracked.

I have wondered whether such a hack was possible ever since my first science fiction convention, when I first encountered the keycard locking system. I reasoned that it was highly unlikely (at the time, before the wireless revolution) that all these locks were connected to a central computer, and therefore their locking code had to be stored in the lock itself.

So I can only assume that these four million locks are pretty old by today’s standard. And they will all have to be changed. This is not a software problem. If the “key” to unlocking the lock is stored inside the lock, you have to change the whole lock.

Gonna cost some chains a lot of change.

Stop In The Name Of The Law

Finally, touching on one of my favorite subjects, autonomous driving, the EU will soon require all new cars to have autonomous self-braking systems in order to prevent crashes.

Makes sense to me. The technology has proved itself fully on the roads of the world. It clearly prevents a wide spectrum of crashes and makes those that do occur a lot milder. I see this as no different than requiring seat belts or airbags. Anything to make the road safer, and it is hard to make an argument that it violates your rights to crash if you feel like it.

What really intrigues me is the view down the road about ten years, when most cars on the road in Europe have one of these systems installed. Will we find that road casualties have taken a drastic drop?

I sure hope so. We all know that driving is one of the leading causes of death in society, but we don’t pay attention to it because it’s “normal”.

It is good to know that people are still working hard to make driving safer.

And a computer’s reflexes are a million times faster than yours.