Disney will debut its first VR short movie

This August at a computer graphics conference in Vancouver, Disney will debut a short VR movie called "Cycles". It took them four months to create using Quill (https://quill.fb.com/) and motion capture. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/19/disney-to-debut-its-first-vr-short-next-month/

Key Takeaway

This is Disney's second foray into VR after making a VR trailer for Coco. They're continuing to bet on VR and we'll likely see more mainstream efforts here soon. If you happen to have an Occulus Rift, have a go at Quill - it looks like a lot of fun to play with.

Rolls Royce Puts R&D Dollars into Tiny Bots for Engine Maintenance

It can take hours to open up an engine on a jet, just to make some small tweak and bring it back to life, or improve performance. Having tiny bots that could walk into the engine, identify issues and quickly fix them means turning a five hour repair job into five minutes.  https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/17/rolls-royce-is-developing-tiny-cockroach-robots-to-fix-airplane-engines.html

Key Takeaway

We've been seeing news about DARPA's dog and other human sized robots that could help with warehouse tasks, military support and other jobs. Small bots have typically only been useful as drones, and nano bots, the stuff of science fiction. With a focus on smaller autonomous bots, we may be seeing the beginning of affordable robot help beyond Roombas.

Facebook Tries to Defend Itself And Ends Up As Holocaust Deniers

Last week Facebook caught media blowback for saying that Info Wars had a right to remain on Facebook despite posting false content. Mark Zuckerberg when further pressed on the issue this week said "I don't think they're intentionally getting it wrong", and has since been in trouble with several Jewish associations. https://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-if-someone-gets-fired-for-data-abuse-it-should-be-me/?utm_source=reddit.com

Key Takeaway

The Zuck chose to stand on neither side of a heated debate, and you can't afford to do that anymore. In an attempt to maintain his stance that his platform isn't political, he's further demonstrated that he has no plans to fix the Fake News issue. It will be interesting to see if he has to stand in front of congress again and explain how or why he's not doing anything about this.