The Return Of MWC

[Music] this week phones phones and more phones mobile world congress is back we're going up a mountain with this good girl and the vfx behind the matrix resurrections they are breathtaking [Music] mobile world congress every year barcelona used to be lit up with smartphone launches and announcements of connected devices beyond what you might ever think of or need now 2020 was pretty much a no-show for obvious reasons and last year well that was just weird we've arrived this is fira barcelona yes the show was back on but we couldn't go although you were there in spirit if not embody yeah the less said about that the better but this year it's back in full swing with all sorts of companies showing off their latest wares so whilst i'm here at the design museum in london where behind me there's a good old-fashioned brick phone and a nokia 3310 remember those we know how fast these phones change so we've sent omar metab and osmonic bao to barcelona samsung nokia huawei oppo xiaomi they're all here and all got something to show that's the thing about mwc isn't it it's all about the big releases say for example this the samsung s22 ultra the supposedly best of their s22 range it comes with a touch bigger screen than its predecessor a slightly more powerful cpu and a bigger sensor so its cameras can take better pictures in low light but they have learned from the s21 ultra because instead of logging a 60 quid case to house the optional s pen they've just given it to you in here and they've got a little slot for it within the phone which potentially spells the end of the note series who knows but what i can say is this does write smooth you know like like pen on paper problem is in some tests the battery life is actually a little bit worse than the s21 ultra and its square design doesn't feel as natural in your hand either and at 1200 quid you wonder if it's worth the huge price tag with such little differences but it pairs well with this the newly announced galaxy book 2 pro this is the most powerful obvious line of the 360 and it starts at around 1099 quid it offers a few interesting tidbits like a 1080p front-facing camera and auto framing which keeps you centered in your shot for your video calls that undoubtedly became more popular over the last two years this can't find me there is it's about me but the multi-control impressed the most where you can keep watch of your smartphone and also use your tab s8 as a second screen creating quite an ecosystem samsung stands for innovation you know typically where we lead others follow bringing all of those elements of the note and bringing them into the s22 because we listened to our customers they wanted that productivity they wanted that solution from us innovation and what our consumers tell us they want will be at the absolute heart of what we do going forward and here's the problem that's it with smartphones we've been held in the kind of a holding pattern for years with only incremental upgrades every release once you've seen one you've seen them all and despite how impressive these handsets are it's all kind of predictable here's another example huawei's latest p50 pro is just another smartphone with small upgrades since the last and their super device software which they announced at the show is again incredible but just another ecosystem they've built to bow against the likes of apple and samsung look here's the point i'm trying to make okay here are some releases from some of the big companies and here are the notable improvements from their predecessors camera quality battery life screen size is all we've got to look forward to anymore okay yes in recent times we've had some exciting innovations like the foldable or the rollable smartphones one noticeable trend is cheaper but feature packed phones like from xiaomi here or going a bit more retro again like nokia but otherwise it's just variations of the same thing and has been since apple debuted the iphone 15 years ago a giant screen can we really call that innovation is there a point to mwc if all you're gonna do is go look at a phone and say oh look that camera lens is bigger there's innovation in the form factor but there's all in also innovation in the connectivity and the content we've seen the content ecosystem um basically develop over over the last years as well so i think with every touch point that the that the phone essentially enables um you'll also find subsequent innovation come from that okay yes innovations involving phones but not the phone itself look it's no one's fault but the next killer device just hasn't arrived yet and so it's all a bit samey so maybe it's not worth coming to mwc again nothing really special out on show it's not just about the glitzy phone launches this thing though it's not just shiny things there's a big mobile ecosystem and i know what's happening i get that but people care about the big phone launches what they might upgrade to next that's what matters here to people isn't what matters there's like loads of going on you know there's loads kind of innovation small players big players i'll show you something so intense cheer up so what are these companies working on in 2022 5g bartenders robot dogs vr roller coasters and you guessed it the metaverse and as i finally get back to an in-person event i'm being made very aware that companies are eager for me to embrace the virtual world but here's one device that is a hundred percent metaverse proof as screens get bigger and bigger what happens if you make a phone with no screen at all no buttons no screen purely voice controlled put it on and sign our social media these are titan from my manu they're 4g enabled earbuds with the funds functionality and they can even translate other languages in almost real time whilst not needing to connect to a phone like most other devices why don't you tell me an interesting fact about yourself a trick is [Music] so you're french you're from the sunny coast um and you live in manchester it rains all the time exactly that's cool that's awesome that is awesome i love that and whilst one company is ditching the screen the astrocyte 5g is adding even more to it a regular rectangular phone where's the innovation watch this boom it's a mechanical keyboard on a phone and whilst i may enjoy a keyboard on a phone it doesn't exactly scream rockstar but this does zurich based startup miktek has developed what they're calling audio augmented reality these wristbands connect to a smartphone app and the sensors translate your motions into music when you think of a cello here's the neck of the cello and then my right hand is the bow hand so essentially be like [Music] that's all very cultured but let's be honest nobody plays the ear cello i'll throw a beat behind it now i can start really rocking out [Music] but the final word has to go to japanese company tololu who have found a truly novel way of transporting people to the other side of the world this is a live video link to japan someone is standing there with a tablet and you have these buttons along the bottom and all you do if you want to turn around just press your button [Music] look at that you can even push buttons to pick things up or even pay for goods but some parts do feel a bit dehumanizing uh and i feel super guilty about this is this button here and uh i don't know why but you can go boop and the joke that was a big gym that was a big gym the buttons that make other humans jump should just not exist osmond and omar holla it sounds like some companies are breaking new ground there so has the visit to the show been worth it for me no it hasn't because it's the same as every other mwc that i've been to a new smartphone with a couple of improvements from the last one that's absolutely not a trick i've been trying to tell omar all along it's not just about these devices it's about the wider ecosystem we've seen the metaverse and the advancing connectivity needed that conversations happening 5g low latency things that are around the phone that's where the innovation will happen nothing to see there is no meta versus yet that's yeah because it these conferences like this to sit down get it done advances connectivity it's not just about that but the reason people care about these conferences is because of the smartphones the main devices not secondary things you know it's all about the smartphones okay you're like an old murray couple i'm gonna leave you to keep battling this out we've got the optimist and the pessimist here osman and omar thank you hello and welcome to your weekly tech news roundup it was the week big tech got involved in the war between russia and ukraine google removed russian state-funded publishers such as rt from google news and youtube and has turned off live traffic data in ukraine on its maps service apple says it's stopped selling its products in russia and has restricted apple pay and spacex has sent starlink satellite terminals to ukraine after its deputy prime minister requested the dishes over twitter in the week that ford is splitting into two companies one for electric and one for combustion vehicles toyota had to shut down its factories in japan after a possible cyber attack the world's biggest selling car manufacturer stopped for a few days after kojima industries was left unable to ship plastic parts and electronic components in time to the assembly lines activity monitoring company fitbit is voluntarily recalling its ionic smartwatch after users reported burns from its internal battery overheating the wearable device was launched in 2017 and the company is issuing full refunds and discount codes for those affected and finally apple co-founder steve wozniak's new venture includes finding junk in space privateer came out of stealth mode this week hoping to accurately track and map the increasing number of satellites and debris in earth orbit looks like they're working on a vacuum cleaner back in 2016 i met hitoshi araki creator of a prototype augmented reality game called haddo where players had to blast away their opponent's shields with fireballs it was brilliant fun and what's even more brilliant is that six years on haddo is now a serious sport played competitively in 28 countries and now i've been invited back to play against a former uk champion in a match with a difference see tom park is not in the same room as me we're being connected using 5g and this is an occasion where any delay across the network can seriously spoil the farm most people when they think about 5g think about moving large amounts of data but we're not we're not we make very small amounts but it has to arrive in the right order and it has to arrive quickly i should have done with a bit of lag to be honest where is he i got him i got him it's probably like they've just attached it to a cat or something down haven't they we've already done matches in the uk between different cities and what we're looking to do is matches between different european countries especially at the moment travel's difficult where is it where is it and it allows experience teams to actually have to play and train against each other and the next stage on from that will allow us to get the teams in tokyo who are the best in the world without question to be able to train us without having to get on a plane to go there and the reason that we're here is to see the cambridge wireless 5g test bed in action which allows companies to experiment with how best to make use of the technology's speed and features and understand its limitations the test bed facility here at cambridge wireless allows you to put artificial lag artificial stutter into the system which means that you can effectively try and push the data packets out of order with each other you can delay them arriving and you can see just how much you can cause problems with the system before you start to get a breakdown in what in the end result you want to achieve and therefore know what you can operate within what 5g really will exploit is what we see in industry where we can see manufacturing applications that we simply weren't capable of delivering before but really what it means is it allows us to control things at a long distance in real time okay here's a different example of how 5g can stream a lot of data very quickly and it's a more relaxed demo well for me at least i'm driving this robot around the car park and in a moment i'm going to try and do something that may one day be needed in disaster zones and medical emergencies my job is to somehow get this multi-jointed monstrosity to grab this bag of fake blood and load it into this container sounds easy might be messy but it turns out that in vr it isn't actually that bad i have to say this is actually much more intuitive than i thought it was going to be i thought i was going to have to somehow embody a multi-jointed robot but it's just a case of dragging the arm around to where i wanted to lifting up the bag of blood and if you look below yeah there's a basket you can just lift it over there swinging the blood bag into the basket just drop it i think you're in there letting go perfect nice and so the idea with this is then that this could be happening anywhere in the world exactly anywhere it could be in china doing this it could be in low earth orbit you could be down a mine shaft and yeah you could sit comfortably in your office and control a robot from from wherever you need to be now i'll be honest there is a very slight lag but for what i'm trying to do i think that lag is totally manageable job done blood delivered well done good job yeah it's all very easy when you're just pooping around a car park but now it's time to see how this can all be done in the wild here's paul carter the yorkshire dales national park in the north of england a favored destination for walkers hikers and climbers in the event that any of them get into difficulty it's the volunteers of swaledale mountain rescue who go out to hell i'm spending two full days with them during the changeable and challenging conditions of storm eunice to see how tech can make a difference as beautiful as the landscapes around here can be in conditions like today they can be pretty treacherous especially for emergency services like mountain rescue and one of the biggest problems they face is the complete lack of any mobile phone coverage i mean i've got absolutely nothing so what the team here are doing is they're trialling a range of solutions utilizing 5g technology to help make their lives easier and also to help save lives [Music] one of the best tools in a rescue team's arsenal is still of the canine variety this is kez a mountain search dog an all-around very good girl what she doesn't know is that thanks to the 5g network that's been installed here her every move on the hillsides can be tracked remotely back at base we can see where she's going on a tablet so that's the dog on the screen there yeah yeah just just uh just it's a little bit grayed out but yeah he's running around he's moving a bit all of this is possible because of equipment stalled at the temporary base station what we have here is is a mobile base a 5g mobile base station we bring it with us and to fill the coverage whatever isn't it uses a closed mobile frequency spectrum backed up by an internet connection via starlink satellites which allow the team and people back at base to share communications audio and video and data at low latency and high speed communications is vital to the team and it's vital to the to the casualty we're looking for and eventually find the possibilities are endless there's no greater need for speed than when lives are in danger smrt took us out in the now driving reign to see a full-scale medical rescue drill in action and just how important sharing data quickly in such scenarios can be 40 minutes ago the police called the team to tell us that there was an injured walker somewhere up the hill there this is a 5g non-standalone system we have two antennas one here and one up there and we attach this to the wall because of this complexity of the weather conditions today we did a range test and we we reached all the way up to the hill to the to the top of this hill here uh with full bars of 5g this rapidly deployed 5g network allows the rescue team to use medical devices to monitor the casualty on a phone and transmit this back to the crew at the base station the remote monitoring devices mean the rescue crew don't have to stop to check the patient as they head down the mountain and medical staff at base can keep an eye out while the crew are concentrating on navigating difficult terrain so i'm getting enough information here to tell me i'm happy with the casualty so the lower does not have to stop at any point for the volunteers working at night brings extra challenges using infrared and thermal imaging which can also be streamed remotely the team can locate casualties more easily there may be something just the other side this wall this is currently all an ongoing trial it's a partnership between several bodies including safe netics north yorkshire council smrt and local universities [Music] for these guys where conditions can change any minute connectivity is absolutely crucial some of these ideas are still in their infancy and logistically there are hurdles still to be overcome but who knows if you ever find yourself needing to be located by a search dog you never know she just might be more on the grid than you are i think paul may have made a new best friend there now this time of year is movie nomination season and for us at click that also means the opportunity to talk to some of the greatest minds in visual effects to see what they've been up to over the past year first up a look at the bafta-nominated matrix resurrections i've had dreams that weren't just dreams am i crazy we don't use that word in here personally getting on board with the matrix was was huge um i think a lot of people in this industry will have probably had the matrix affect them in different ways there was a huge expectation on the movie shoulders but also particularly on vfx obviously we're revisiting a world that had been created 20 years ago so we knew that these assets were alive somewhere we just had to try and track them down and find them and it wasn't uh sadly the case that they all just live in a nice hard drive and we can just ask warner brothers hey can we have all the assets and they send them to us lots of email threads different people old companies trying to you know look through their backups and try and find whatever we can we eventually managed to restore i think it was a sentinel a harvester and a fetus a fetus egg stalk now we find all the files we're like well how do we open it and none of the modern 3d packages will open these files so found an old version of the file that we could open it export in a different way and then be able to pull it in they needed upgrading you know they were built a long time ago topology's different textures we obviously had to redo look dev so they gave us a perfect starting point to build on and it was even just exciting just opening those assets and going this this is from the matrix this is from the first matrix this is wicked just getting to spin around the models and see how they were made it was really cool we did add more details you know just the way that the geometry intersected in the way that it was previously built so we upped the detail we upped the resolution you know we were a 4k movie so we had to make sure it held up at 4k which the previous versions needed a little bit of a boost same with the fetus fields and the fetus eggs again we kept the overall design we kept the little fetus baby exactly the same just we extended these stalks and added more detail more cables and that kind of fitting with the story in this case because this is 60 years time has passed and the machines have sort of evolved they're harvesting methods to draw more power so we have thicker cables io city is sort of the new zion of this movie like the expanded city that was one of our biggest builds we had to break it down into lots of sort of small sections we wanted to try and create a believable city that you could feel that people have lived there for a while and they've figured out how to irrigation channels farming dwellings we tried to sort of block out these different areas that you could buy as real and then obviously populate it with little people little chimney stacks atmospherics it was set in the huge cavern so we wanted to make sure we've got a sense of scale our vfx work will always be better if we're building off the back of something real or if we've got something real to reference before we build our vfx it'll always look better we can create whatever you like we can create wonderful environments as much imagination as you like but as soon as you start putting something real into it you just need something to ground it and i think if you build do a partial set build of exactly the kind of idea that you want you know you want to light your characters in a certain way the background behaves a certain way behind them so once you've got something captured on camera it's so much easier to extend that in cg and build on the same thing and you know be a part of that after all these years to be going back to where it all started back to the matrix great work and next week we'll have the second in our visual effects series not to be missed that's it for this week though as ever you can keep up with the team on social media find us on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbclick thanks for watching bye [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

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Id: uHxtduRWk2M

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022