It’s not exactly autonomous, but it works. Nissan believes the fastest way to get driverless cars on the road is to give them remote human support – and it’s using NASA technology to do it.

Nissan demonstrated its Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) platform at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, which incorporates a degree of teleoperation into the autonomous car system. Although vehicles will be able to drive themselves most of the time, human “mobility managers” can remotely take control in unexpected situations.

“Autonomy systems are not simple, it is a very hard problem,” says , director of Nissan’s Research Center in Sunnyvale, California. “You need to make sure you can handle all situations, all the time, every time, before you can say your system is fully autonomous.”

A live broadcast from the company’s Silicon Valley facility more than 800 kilometres away from Las Vegas showed a self-driving vehicle encountering a construction obstacle.

The car stopped, put on its hazard lights and sent an assistance request via an LTE wireless connection to a mobility manager on stage at the show. After receiving the notification, the manager pulled up a satellite feed and drew a route around the obstacle on his desktop computer. Following the relayed instructions, the car took the designated path around the construction and resumed its course.

The incident took 90 seconds to resolve, but the results were also transmitted to a second autonomous vehicle close behind. Coming across the same obstacle and receiving the same instructions, the second car was delayed by only 12 seconds.

Nissan is developing the system with NASA, which uses a similar hybrid troubleshooting process with its Mars rovers.

“We tell the rover to go explore a rock, take a sample from it and send us back the results,” says , director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “If it runs into a situation it’s not familiar with, it goes into safe mode and waits for further instructions or commands.”

Automotive analyst Mark Boyadjis at research firm IHS Markit is impressed by Nissan’s system. “Making a car drive itself has been done, now it’s about trying to make it work on a mass scale,” he says.

Business model taking off

THE future looks curvy. A spate of gadgets sporting concave displays has already been launched, and the big manufacturers will soon be hurling yet more TVs and smartphones with curved screens on to the shelves. that even Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 6 will bend to the craze later this year.

There’s more to the trend than just a novel shape, though. It may be tapping into a deep-seated desire to get away from the hard corners and rectangles that have defined our appliances for decades. The craze for curves is also fueling a search for materials and manufacturing techniques that will help companies exploit it to the full.

“The first adjective used by people to describe curves is ‘soft’,” says Oshin Vartanian, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, Canada. “The story about curvature is a real story about emotion in the brain.”

Vartanian and colleagues espouse the fledgling field of – understanding the neurological basis for our appreciation of beauty. Last year, he used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test people’s reactions to pictures of household interiors, asking them to rate rooms as “beautiful” or “not beautiful”. A large majority favoured rooms with curved features and furnishings over ones packed with straight lines. The scans revealed that curved contours tended to stimulate the pleasure centres of the brain, whereas angles activated circuits in areas that detect threats ().

The findings reinforce a similar study conducted in 2010 at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where visitors were shown objects with straight or curved outlines. Here, too, fMRI showed they had a preference for curves.

But electronics has been trapped within a straight paradigm for decades, mostly because of limitations in our manufacturing know-how. That’s changing. Samsung’s Galaxy Round smartphone, released in South Korea last October, uses a bendable version of Corning’s Gorilla Glass called Willow. Corning has since announced an upgraded version, its 3D Gorilla Glass, which it says can bend up to 75 degrees without breaking. And in an industry where even a small advantage in a product’s looks can translate into billions in extra revenue, some manufacturers are turning to sheets of artificially grown sapphire for their next-generation screens.

“Electronics has been trapped in a straight paradigm, mostly owing to manufacturing limitations”

Companies selling curved screens say they offer tangible benefits. The concave shape , allowing screens to be dimmer and thus extending battery life. Adding a curve to a widescreen TV enhances a screen’s central sweet spot, giving the viewer the illusion of being immersed in the action.

Not everyone finds curviness a big deal. “It’s distinct and different and unique. It does create a ‘wow’ factor,” says Paul Gray of industry analysts NPD DisplaySearch. “But the reasons for curvature beyond the styling seem to be extremely tenuous.”

Some industry-watchers believe the fascination will prove to be a fad, but curved screens remain a fast-growing market. Gray’s firm projects that global curved TV shipments will grow from 800,000 units this year to more than six million by 2017 – proof that we like what we see.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Bending the rules”

High-definition TV delivered the crispest picture we had ever seen, from breathtaking nature footage to the wrinkles on Brad Pitt’s face. That’s nothing – the next TV you buy will be four times as sharp.

After years of gimmicky innovations such as 3D, gesture recognition and on-screen apps, ultra high-definition is finally a technology that could take off.

Ultra high-definition is also known as 4K, which refers to the 3840-pixel horizontal resolution of the screens – in other words, nearly 4000. This is four times the 1080-pixel resolution of current high-definition screens, and creates much finer detail and greater texture. Even close up the picture doesn’t pixelate.

Kevin Spacey’s on board

Most major manufacturers, including Sony, Samsung and LG, already have 4K products on the way. More important to the technology’s uptake will be the fact that a host of content producers and distributors are lining up to support it as well. Until now there has not been enough 4K content to make it a realistic proposition. Normal HD content looks terrible on 4K screens.

“This is a natural evolution,” says Joris Evers at Netflix. The online streaming service announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week that all its original programmes are being produced in 4K. The second season of the Kevin Spacey drama House of Cards, for example, will be available on 14 February in 4K.

YouTube demonstrated 4K streaming at the show and Sony announced that its Video Unlimited download service is now stocked with 140 movies in 4K.

Prices for 4K TVs are falling, which manufacturers say will encourage uptake. “The price gap between full HD and UHD will be less than 10 per cent by the end of this year,” says Samsung co-CEO Boo-Keun Yoon.

Crippling the internet

But there are still major obstacles to overcome. One of these is internet bandwidth limitations. While higher-capacity Blu-ray discs that can hold the bigger 4K video files are on the horizon, digital distribution is the only way to access content at the moment.

Consumers will need faster connection speeds and more generous monthly usage limits. Netflix’s 4K streams, for example, require a constant connection of at least 15 megabits per second – that’s about seven gigabytes of usage per hour.

Google is hoping to remedy that with its announcement of VP9, a video encoding standard that aims to cut bandwidth requirements in half. The royalty-free VP9 is very attractive to anyone pushing 4K, which is why many manufacturers are building it into their upcoming hardware.

“If you want to watch 4K without crippling the internet, this is the way to do it,” says Google’s Matt McLernon.

Bigger is better

The big question is whether consumers will see a big enough difference to rush out and buy a 4K TV. The higher resolution is most noticeable on larger screens, but not everyone has the space for one. Samsung’s smallest 4K screen is 55 inches. “It’s unrealistic in a lot of living rooms and out of range for a lot of wallets,” says Frank Gillett, an analyst at Gartner.

That may be why the Consumer Electronics Association has modest expectations for 4K in the short term, predicting only about 60,000 sets will be sold in the US this year. However, it expects that eventually, all TVs sold will be 4K. That will happen within five years, says Evers.

This article will appear in print under the headline “See the bigger picture”

I’m cruising the wide boulevards of Las Vegas with Matt Ginsberg, inventor of EnLighten, a smartphone app that can supposedly predict when red lights will turn green.

I’m sceptical until we hit our first red light, whereupon the app displays a countdown and a voice says “at least 60 seconds”. The prediction – based on analysing real-time traffic data – turns out to be a few seconds off, but I’m nevertheless impressed that it appears to work.

Ginsberg, chief executive of Green Drive, is showing off the free app this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. EnLighten feeds off real-time traffic data supplied by cities, then uses a phone’s GPS and accelerometer to determine its user’s location and velocity.

When it detects that its driver’s car has stopped, it combines the location information with current traffic data and generates a prediction for how long the stoppage will be. The traffic light systems in many cities are dynamic and alter depending on the real traffic situation. A few seconds before the green light is set to appear, the app – for iOS and Android – sounds a chime to alert the driver, who can then re-focus his or her attention appropriately.

Green Driver has so far signed up nine towns and cities. In Oregon, Portland and Ginsberg’s home town of Eugene are both involved. Also on the list are Pasadena, Arcadia and San Jose in California, Salt Lake City and Provo in Utah, Garland in Texas, and Las Vegas, although both Las Vegas and San Jose have requested that the app remain in a test phase until further results can be assessed. Ginsberg’s goal is to have 50 cities on board by the end of the year.

He hopes that his app will make sitting at the lights a more pleasant experience. “If I want to talk to you, I can talk to you. You’re not always doing that thing you do when you’re at a red light, where you’re constantly checking to see if it’s changing,” he says. “It also doesn’t seem as long because you can see the progress.”

Ginsberg aims to sell his patented technology to car-makers, so that it can be built into cars. That would avoid draining smartphone batteries and allow for integration into other car systems.

IN AN effort to keep audiences flocking to the cinemas to see the latest movies, studios and theatres are gambling on the 3D movie experience.

At first glance, the gambit makes sense – the industry needs the wow factor to woo consumers who have ready access to file-sharing websites. They can also play pirated movies on elaborate, home theatre systems that deliver high-quality thrills without the steep price of a night at the multiplex. Will opting for 3D films that require special electronics equipment and software to view properly pull in the customers and stop would-be pirates in their tracks?

Perhaps not, says Wayan Palmieri, chief technology officer of Digital Revolution Studios, a 3D production house based in Van Nuys, California. Because today’s films all end up in digital format for home consumption – either as Blu-ray discs or downloadable files – he says they are all vulnerable to being hacked and pirated. It’s only a question of time.

“It’s a vicious cycle right now but I don’t see it stopping at any point soon,” he says. “There will be pirated 3D Blu-rays, I’m 100-per-cent sure of that.”

It’s already happening, after a fashion. Recent films such as Piranha 3D and Jackass 3D can be found on file-sharing directories such as The Pirate Bay. But they are typically 2D files ripped from DVDs and then turned into anaglyph 3D. This 3D format requires only glasses with red and blue lenses, and can be watched on any screen – using processing software such as StereoMovie Maker and AviSynth.

It is proving difficult to copy 3D films in the format used by 3D-ready TVs, which project the same image from two slightly different angles.

“At present it seems that no [file] format can do the full 3D experience, or none that I could find anyway,” says Eric, a DVD ripping enthusiast in London, Canada, who didn’t want his last name used.

Pirating DVDs in new formats is about to get easier, though. In November, Chinese firm Fengtao Software released its latest DVDFab product, which claims to be the first that can fully rip and convert a 3D Blu-ray disc into a file that can be played on home systems.

Illegal 3D movies aren’t yet stiff competition for cinemas because demand for 3D TVs is still low: adoption was sluggish in 2010. That will likely change as the sets become cheaper, the technology improves and more movies are available. Last year 25 3D titles hit the silver screen, and 39 more are planned for 2011. Ironically, by bringing out more the studios will provide the incentive for pirates to hone their craft and keep cinema-goers at home.

Indeed, piracy among 3D films will soon be just as common as the 2D counterpart is today, says Sara Mora Ivicevich, also with Digital Revolution.

“It’s going to be a short window where the people who are investing the money in the display tools to watch 3D are most likely to invest the money in buying the content,” she says. “When it all levels out I’m sure we’re going to see something different.”