VR is a tricky medium to do well, but Harmonix’s upcoming Rock Band VR might just be the perfect fit. The game has always been about making players feel like they’re real rock stars, living in an alternate reality where they chased their dream and actually did master the guitar and make it big. Virtual reality finally gives Rock Band players the chance to feel real stage presence, and Rock Band VR takes advantage of that while still delivering a solid game that’s fun to play, too.
I tried Rock Band VR via a demo hosted by Harmonix to showcase the power of Nvidia’s gaming GPUs for VR. The Oculus Rift title uses Touch controller integration, using a special mount accessory that’s currently shipping in the box with Oculus Touch to bring your guitar controller into the virtual world.
This trick works amazingly well – the guitar really does seem to track with 1:1 accuracy in-game, and it adds a lot to the overall immersive feeling of the experience. Plus, since you’re using the guitar as your primary interface device, you don’t miss having the Touch available to use with your hand, as you might in some other experiences that combine the controller with other physical objects.
The Rock Band VR gameplay experience is a bit different from traditional Rock Band games – you’re not playing along to a rigid river of timing markers that tell you what to hit when. Instead, you look down at your guitar’s headstock to see what the next chord is you’re supposed to play, then you play that for the next bar on time with the beat.
I didn’t have much time with the game, and I’m not naturally musical, so I admit I was a bit lost about how to do well for most of the time I was playing. But the great thing about Rock Band VR’s implementation of in-game music play is that I didn’t notice how bad I was doing, and still had a great time. There’s a lot of ability to just go off-script and do your own thing along to the song, with relatively little in the way of punishment. You even get points for creativity.
On the flip side, there’s a lot of reward if you do well, and you can add additional challenge and fun by switching around the stage to occupy different positions – like a real lead guitarist might.
The crowd, the ability to watch and interact with your bandmates and the feeling of playing, which does feel like it more closely approximates actual guitar-playing all combine to make this a terrific virtual reality experience. In fact, Harmonix has done something more than just build a cool game – it makes you feel like there’s plenty more room for VR to grow in ways that extend beyond what we’ve seen so far.
Rock Band VFR is arriving in early 2017, and the version I played definitely felt like it was ready to roll so watch out for it to come soon.

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Remember that plane that landed in the Hudson which resulted in a Tom Hanks movie? That whole saga started with a flock of Canada Geese getting shredded through the plane’s jet engines, destroying them. By “them,” I mean both the birds and the engines, but for the purpose of this story, the latter is probably most relevant.
Birds at airports can be a terrifying ordeal, so you’d be unsurprised to hear that airports pay a pretty penny to keep the area around an airport clear. Clear Flight Solutions ‘ Robird is a drone that flaps its wings and scares the bejesus out of other birds to keep aviation safe.
Traditionally, airports, fruit farms at harvest season and others have chased off birds by using a highly skilled falconer to fly a trained bird of prey in an area. Clear Flight Solutions’ Robird is the remote-controllable, doesn’t-need-feeding version of the same idea.
“The theory is simple,” Wessel Straatman, one of the engineers behind the product tells me. “Birds know that birds of prey are territorial. When we fly Robird in an area, other birds learn that it’s dangerous to be there. As a result, they’ll avoid it, solving the problem for a period of time.”
“We can actually drive birds in the direction we want, much like a sheep dog can be used to control sheep,” the company’s operations manager Robert Jonker tells me. “It works incredibly well.”
The company has been working on perfecting a wing-flapping drone for 15 years, trialling its product in its native Netherlands. Now, it’s ready to go international.
“We don’t sell the Robird as products,” Straatman says of the 3D printed, hand-assembled drones, “but we offer their use as a service.”
The company is tight-lipped about how much it costs to hire its services, and is reluctant to share its precise pricing model.
“Every job is different, requiring us to travel somewhere. We use two people on each job: An observer and a pilot, and of course there are other considerations too, depending on the specifics of each assignment,” Jonker explains. He eventually suggests that a day of having a Robird scaring birds out of an area will set you back $1,000 – $1,500.
In theory, operating a fleet of Robirds is scaleable; you could build the drones faster than you could train a falcon, and you don’t have to feed it hamburgers, keep it warm or sing it lullabies when it’s its bed-time (obviously, yours sincerely knows a lot about the care and feeding of birds of prey).
In practice, I wonder whether needing a two-man crew and not selling the birds to pest control agencies may prove to limit the company’s growth. Especially, perhaps, because the logistics of serving the 16,000 square mile country of the Netherlands will be somewhat different to having to potentially cover 3,800,000 square miles in the U. S.
“We think we are ready to scale and we already have a lot of interest from military and international civil airports here in the U. S.,” Jonker tells me. He explains that Clear Flight Solutions would team up with a local partner who has the relevant licence to operate these types of drones for legal compliance purposes.
But really, all of this is just an excuse so I can post the video below. Let’s face it, what could be more awesome than a drone flying like a bird?

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This year at CES we sat down with the Turner Sports team to hear about what tech-related plans they have for 2017.
First we got a chance to speak with Turner Sports’ analysts and NBA legends Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley, who discussed what cool tech they saw at this year’s CES and also how technology is changing the way fans watch sports.
Then we talked to Craig Barry, EVP & Chief Content Officer at Turner Sports about how things like e-sports and VR fit into the brand’s content strategy.
When it comes to VR, Barry noted that Turner Sports thinks it is just getting started, and the VR content we see being put out today (like a basketball game shot with a 360-degree camera) doesn’t take advantage of all the technology has to offer.
So the company is keeping an open mind and exploring all the ways that VR could strengthen the viewing experience. One way Barry sees this potentially happening is via social viewing experiences, where you could put on a VR headset and be seated next to your best friend (who may be across the country with his own headset) courtside at a basketball game.
Check out the video above to hear directly from Shaq, Charles Barkley, and Craig Barry.

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There’s a new buzzword in computer design circles every year. This year, the buzzword is without question bots.
As with anything we build, we give bots names. It’s something most of us don’t even question. They come pre-personified and ready for us to start that human-computer relationship, just like HAL 9000 or Her : there’s Siri in our iPhones, Alexa in Amazon’s Echo and there’s even Facebook Messenger’s PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) Bot.
A name can be a way of expressing trust in an object — or expressing control over it. In design terms, a name is a kind of affordance — a handle we can hold onto.
As the resident language expert on our product design team, naming things is part of my job. When we began iterating on a bot within our messaging product, I was prepared to brainstorm hundreds of names. Gendered, non-gendered, functional, etc.
But first, we did some testing with actual end users to understand their relationship with bots, language and names. We learned that giving a bot an identity isn’t always for the best. Calling a bot Siri does not necessarily have the same relationship-building effect as calling your car Bessie or Old Faithful.
In a voice-activated bot, names are pretty functional: saying “Siri,” “Alexa” or “OK Google” is the conversational equivalent of opening Google and entering a search term. When you see a search bar, your brain leaps from idea — there’s something I want to find — to action. We do this so often — more than 40,000 times a second — that we don’t think of it as conversing with the system, though we are asking a question and expecting a response.
But names don’t trigger an action in text-based bots, or chatbots. Even Slackbot, the tool built into the popular work messaging platform Slack, doesn’t need you to type “Hey Slackbot” in order to retrieve a pre-programmed response.
Speaking our searches out loud serves a function, but it also draws our attention to the interaction. This can have both good and bad effects. Voice is fundamentally more “humanizing” than text. A study released in August showed that when we hear something versus when we read the same thing, we are more likely to attribute the spoken word to a human “creator.”
But what is humanizing can also be irritating. We may find it far more exhausting, as humans, to say “OK Google” 75 times a day than to silently open a laptop and search.
From a design perspective, bots are aligned with the whole concept of messaging-as-a-platform — we could build a bot right into our own messenger using the same simple elements we’d already designed for human-to-human conversation.
So when we experimented with building a bot, we wanted to use those simple elements to communicate. We gave our test bot a name and let it introduce itself like a real person would: “Hi, I’m Bot, Intercom’s digital assistant.”
What we found was surprising. People hated this bot — found it off-putting and annoying. It was interrupting them, getting in the way of what they wanted (to talk to a real person), even though its interactions were very lightweight.
We tried different things: alternate voices, so that the bot was sometimes friendly and sometimes reserved and functional. But we didn’t see much change.
It was only when we removed the name and took away the first person pronoun and the introduction that things started to improve. The name, more than any other factor, caused friction.
We’ve been telling ourselves scary stories about robots for more than a century, stories in which we simultaneously pity and mistrust them. When we name the tools we use, we assert control over them; we do that because we want to be the ones having the interaction, doing the job.
The digital tools we make live in a completely different psychological landscape to the real world. We can’t get a handle on them, literally. There is no straight line from a tradesman’s hammer he can repair himself to a chatbot designed and built by a design team somewhere in California (or in Dublin, in our case).
Unlike most writers in my company, my work does its job best when it’s barely noticed. Control is incredibly important in designing digital tools — most language we see and experience in a product is about affording control and understanding to you, the person using the product — not me, the writer. To be understood intuitively is the goal — the words on the screen are the handle of the hammer.
Names and identity lift the tools on the screen to a level above intuition. They make us see the tool in all its virtual glory, and place it in an entirely different context to the person using it — and not always a relationship that person asks for or appreciates.
This might be because of novelty — we might become more comfortable with the virtual, more trusting of it (though this year’s headlines haven’t given us much to trust). But despite the hundreds of movies we’ve made and books we’ve written about robots, introducing personality into technology might not be the way we become more comfortable.
There’s another school of thought in design, one that describes it as almost invisible. Siri and Alexa might have been thought of as examples of this type: you can’t really “see” them, and so they disappear into the background. But that’s not necessarily true.
As humans, we’re visual people — we respond to what we see. But even more than that, we’re social — we respond to the things we can speak to. It’s why we name our possessions, and why we fear the pretend humans we’ve been imagining for so long.
The real measure of success for today’s designers is making technology disappear so that it becomes a true tool for humans. The true measure of success for a designer who deals in words is making tools quieter to use, so we can use them more intuitively.

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We’re cold and we’re tired. But we’re nearing the end, and we saved the best for last.
We’ll be making Crepes live on stage. We’re chatting with the CEO of Arduino, and we’re also hanging out with LeEco and will chat about their global plans.
Then, at 2:00, we will have the final round of Hardware Battlefield where four hardware companies will pitch four expert judges in a bid to win $50,000.

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