This or That? Future vs. Odd Future

What happens in a music industry where people are more occupied with images than sounds? In 2014, it feels like social media and advertising resonate louder than any sound waves. We know what Miley Cyrus’ tongue looks like without knowing the words to any of her songs. We see Rihanna’s nipples and froth at the mouth without asking for her next album. We all tune in to watch the Grammys, knowing damn well that as soon as they’re over we’ll read and write about how irrelevant they are. America the beautiful.

Future and Odd Future are at polar ends of the spectrum. The first is a withdrawn studio rat, known for guarded interviews and intergalactic warbling. The second is the strongest youth movement of the past five years, built more on attitude than substance. They have their similarities – both acts are brutally honest (pun intended), never choosing to sell out, and Future has even approached OF’s level of grotesque absurdity on wax (“I know my dope raw, I seen it come out her ass / I wipe that shit off, and throw it right in the bag,” he rhymes on ‘Mark McGwire’). But in the larger picture, Future and Odd Future are two different beasts meant for seemingly different markets.

Future is the ultimate pop star, a rapper known most for his hooks and inflammable songwriting capabilities. He can switch from growling about the pain of selling drugs to tenderly murmuring about winning a trophy wife at the press of a button, but he’s far from robotic. His appeal lies not in what he says, but how he gargles it. You can hear the pain in his voice. At the end of his latest album ‘Honest,’ he screams, “I gave my blood, sweat, tears / You couldn’t have known what I did for this,” and on paper it looks so simple it’s stupefying, but when you hear him belt it out, it shoots right to your chest. Whether it’s the cadences of songs like ‘Karate Chop’ and ‘Shit,’ the accent of ‘Tony Montana,’ or the blunt repetition of ‘Same Damn Time’ and ‘Racks,’ one thing is certain – that s–t is kinda catchy.

Odd Future doesn’t give a f–k about catchy. Tyler the Creator takes pride in his chord progressions, and Earl Sweatshirt in his vexed rhyme schemes. They’d love to be on the radio, but not by means of sacrificing what got them to where they are today – an uncompromising expression of self. Part of why the squad is so fertile is because it’s so multifaceted – Frank Ocean is one of the most loved R&B stars of today, The Internet sound nothing like MellowHype, and even Sacramento punk rockers like Trash Talk have signed to Odd Future’s record label. The only collective f–k they seem to give is about not giving one.

Both acts actually started popping in 2011 – Future with ‘Racks’ and OF with Tyler’s ‘Yonkers’ video where he infamously “eats” a cockroach. Can you remember much about ‘Yonkers’ besides the detail above (and maybe the drums)? Can you remember anything at all about ‘Racks’ besides Future’s delirious hook? See what I mean about image and music?

It’s not to knock the Cali kids, but they’ve built their platform on being outrageous. They revamped the modern hip-hop show and brought moshing back. Tyler recently incited a riot at SXSW and has attracted such fervent crowds on the West Coast that concerts have been shut down. The collective was even banned form New Zealand for being “a potential threat to public order and public interest.” In Tyler’s eyes, he’s made Eminem proud – he sounds astonishingly similar to Mathers on certain parts of his latest album, ‘Wolf,’ and their manager, Chris Clancy, came up under Paul Rosenberg.

Future doesn’t really have a father to his style – call him Atlanta’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Perhaps the best comparison would be to Bob Dylan, who had a terrible voice and a knack for songwriting, enough to make him one of America’s most beloved musicians. Future prides himself on innovation – he’s gone on record to say that biters motivate him to try new things in the studio. He’s outrageous too, but not on Twitter or Instagram. The way he manipulates his own voice, whether it’s through Auto-tune or his own vocal chords, has sowed seeds in the music of Rich Homie Quan, Wiz Khalifa, and countless others.

And yet, as popular as Future seems to be, he’d probably kill to have the loyalty of Odd Future’s fan base. They sell out shows, design overly expensive merchandise, and say pretty much anything they want without fear of reprimand. Future almost got kicked off of Drake’s tour for downplaying ‘Nothing Was The Same.’ Even while Future was on stage with Andre 3000 at Coachella, the Outkast member shouted out Tyler, and the very next weekend, Pharrell brought his admirer onstage.

It’s tough to say whose attention each act commands – you’d never hear Odd Future in the club, and there probably aren’t too many Future enthusiasts that tune into Odd Future’s Adult Swim show. Yet they still have a kinship. At their core, both camps just want to be themselves. They’re very childlike (think Future’s chorus on ‘I Won’ and the behavior of the majority of the OF crew at all times), belying a desire to communicate that pre-maturity through their music. Despite what poptimists might think, children have a good ear for simple melodies and fun tunes without any pretentiousness or loaded biases of preference. Critics and fans alike are worried about getting it right and seeming smart and all this s–t that has little to do with simply putting on the music and enjoying it. Future and Odd Future make music that invites that experience. Despite your tastes, it’s something to be grateful for.

View the original article here

Bits Blog: When the Future Isn’t a Keyboard

The Olympics of the Future

Self-driving cars are a given, auto enthusiasts say, perhaps reserved to whiz V.I.P.’s on designated lanes through the traffic-choked capital. To help hoi polloi navigate the city, buses powered by fuel cells will be commonplace, the futurists say. Older people in the graying country might wear robot suits to get around. Next-generation translation services, streamed through wearable technology, will help locals communicate with foreign guests. And perhaps there will be some climate engineering to ease the heat and wretched humidity of the Tokyo summer.

But there are also worries about the future. Tokyo, with 13 million people, is one of the world’s most disaster-prone cities — earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and storm surges. Experts worry about the effects shifting weather patterns will have on the Tokyo Bay section where many of its new Olympics venues will be built.

“There’s no city in the world like Tokyo,” said Hiroyuki Hayashi, a spokesman for the government’s “FutureCity” initiative, which was introduced in 2010 to explore future approaches to urbanization. “It leads in both possibilities and challenges.”

Tokyo fancies itself a city of the future. A similar theme resonated the last time it hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964. It had climbed out of the ashes of World War II and was presenting a shining new image to the world with multiple subway lines, a modern airport and its bullet train system, then the fastest in the world. The country demonstrated its emergence as a technological leader by broadcasting the Olympics live by satellite for the first time.

This time, Japan wants to show a vibrant country, re-emerging from the pain of decades of recession to reclaim its position as a driving force in high technology.

For Hisashi Taniguchi, chief executive of the Tokyo-based robotics company ZMP, the Olympics will be the catalyst Japan needs to leap ahead of other countries in building driverless cars. Google and BMW are also working on autonomous car technology, which experts say is safer and cleaner and leads to fewer traffic jams because of computer-controlled efficient driving. Although big Japanese automakers like Nissan, Toyota and Honda are also working on the same technology, as are smaller Japanese companies like ZMP, the technology has not yet been showcased by a Japanese carmaker in any major way.

The Olympic Games would bring heavy traffic on well-defined routes like those from the athletes’ village to Olympic venues on Tokyo’s waterfront. A fleet of 100 or more self-driving cars and vans could shuttle athletes and V.I.P.’s, Mr. Taniguchi said, and would be easier to place in the Tokyo waterfront’s wide roads than in the congested center of the city.

“With such a well-defined target, driverless cars seem a lot more realistic,” Mr. Taniguchi said. His RoboCar uses laser range finders, infrared distance sensors and image processing to spot obstacles and maneuver its way through traffic.

The risk is that while the technology might be ready in seven years, regulators in Japan are not known for acting quickly. Tokyo officials will not definitively rule out the driverless car idea, though they point to a list of regulatory hurdles before the technology is allowed.

The country wants to showcase other transportation technology, too. Hino Motors, together with its parent company, Toyota Motor, plans to release a new fuel cell-powered bus in 2016 that reduces greenhouse emissions. And while the Japanese do not expect to be riding the nation’s magnetically levitating train that zooms at 300 miles an hour until 2027, government officials have suggested that the operator make at least part of the line available to visitors to the Games.

Tokyo has also promised the Games will be green, or at least carbon-neutral with efficient natural-gas turbine power stations and solar parks across the country.

Then, of course, this being Japan, there are the gadgets.

Takahito Iguchi, founder of Telepathy, a start-up, envisions a Games where visitors could constantly live-stream what they see with wearable devices like the company’s Telepathy One headset, which floats a microprojector and camera in front of one eye. The first version is expected this year, giving it time to catch on.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest cellphone carrier, has introduced “instant translation” glasses that use cameras, text recognition technology and translation software to render Japanese signs, menus and whatever else its wearers see into the visitors’ language. The company also plans to have its cellphone service ready to process data 100 times faster than current networks.

The futurists also envision wireless charging stations everywhere, flexible displays that will turn a variety of surfaces into information hubs and television featuring “super hi-vision” that is 16 times the level of detail of current high-definition TVs.

“Japan still has great technology, and the Olympics gives people like us license to suggest wild ideas,” Mr. Iguchi said.

For some living in Tokyo, preparation for the Games is less about chasing utopian dreams and more about addressing the grave challenges the city faces. For all the talk of renewable energy, the nuclear crisis at Fukushima, 160 miles north of Tokyo, is not yet under control. There is a big question mark over Japan’s future energy policy. Much of the city’s newest developments are centered on the vulnerable coast.

Tokyo must spend the next seven years retrofitting its older buildings with Japan’s advanced earthquake technology, strengthening the city’s flood gates and updating its aging expressways, experts say. Tokyo could show the way forward in urban renewal, too. It recently used advanced “stealth demolition” technology — jacking down a building rather than blowing it up — to raze an old skyscraper in central Tokyo.

The aging population is also a challenge for Japan. Though the Olympic committee promotes Tokyo as a center for youth culture, one in five Tokyoites are already 65 or older, and the government estimates that ratio will rise to one in four by the time the Olympic torch arrives. Current forecasts suggest that demographically, 2020 could be Tokyo’s last hurrah; after that, the city’s population could enter a long decline.

The robot maker Cyberdyne thinks its robotic suits will help older Japanese and visitors get around during the games. Its Hybrid Assistive Limb is a battery-powered pair of legs that anticipates and augments body movements. Since 2010, the company has leased about 400 suits to 170 hospitals and nursing homes in Japan.

Some Tokyoites are concerned that the city’s remaking will go too far. The redevelopment of some of Tokyo’s most beloved neighborhoods is already underway, including the relocation of Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market. Some question whether the city of 13 million really needs an expensive new 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium — wildly futuristic in design as it is — when its population is expected to shrink.

Christian Dimmer, an urban designer and assistant professor at Tokyo University, said that if Tokyo’s population was declining, it could ill afford the white elephants that have come to haunt previous Olympic hosts.

“It’s important to understand that the Games are a means to achieve a more resilient, self-reliant society and not as an end in itself,” he said. “That would be a terrible waste of resources.”

The Future of Quake, Rage, and id Software

Quake-Con 2013 is happening in Dallas, Texas this weekend, but there is, and has been for many years, a noticeable absence of Quake. IGN asked developer id Software’s studio director Tim Willits for a status report on the legendary shooter franchise.

“The brand is critically important to us. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we’re not going to forget about it.”

Bethesda’s VP of marketing, Pete Hines, shrugs, smiles, and elaborates, “It’s a franchise we should make a really good game for at some point. But we aren’t officially talking about what id is up to.” Hines says Quake is “still on our radar, and it’s something the id guys talk about. Like, when, or how, or by who? I don’t know. We’ll see. But there’s nothing that we have where it’s like, ‘No, we’re never doing another one of those.’ Everything has possibilities.”

By who? id Software already outsourced its famous Wolfenstein series to Machine Games, developer of Wolfenstein: The New Order. A similar thing could happen for Quake in the next generation, perhaps, and it’s something Willits says could keep Rage going.

“The [Rage] franchise is not dead,” Willits says. “But I don’t know what we’re going to do with it.” The developer is already deep into development of a new project after Doom 4’s troubled production started over. “There are lots of opportunities, or for someone to license it,” he continues. “We always keep our eyes open for developers. Maybe a hot developer comes down the line to do something and we want to work with them. We don’t have anyone right now, but that’s a possibility.”

id hasn’t “had that conversation” in an official capacity yet, Willits clarifies. “It’s not really a conscious decision, but it’s a logical thing. It could happen.”

What definitively won’t happen, Willits says, is starting something completely new. With so much else going on, like the desire to see a new Quake, to fix Doom, to bring Rage back, Willits says “I know we’re not going to do another new IP.”

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.

Judge Considers Limits on Apple’s Future E-Book Deals

In a sometimes testy hearing in United States District Court in Lower Manhattan, Judge Denise L. Cote said that she was considering a plan in which Apple would negotiate contracts with publishers in a staggered fashion — possibly six to eight months apart — to prevent them from engaging in another price-fixing conspiracy.

Judge Cote ruled in July that Apple colluded with publishers to raise the price of e-books before the introduction of its iPad in 2010. Those charges were brought against Apple and five major publishers by the Justice Department in 2012. The publishers all settled, but Apple held out and went to trial.

The judge’s proposal was a scaled-back version of the guidelines put forth by the government last week, when it suggested that Apple be forced to end its agreements with the five settling publishers and avoid entering similar agreements with producers of movies, TV and music. Apple responded by calling the proposal a “draconian and punitive intrusion” into its business.

The publishers who settled also objected to the Justice Department’s proposed remedy, saying that it would fundamentally change their existing settlements.

In court on Friday, Judge Cote said that she wanted an injunction to be tailored so that it would encourage innovation in a rapidly changing e-book business and yet prevent collusion on price in the future.

“I have no desire to regulate the App Store,” she said.

But Judge Cote also slammed the publishers for lacking “contrition” and said that she feared future collusion in the e-book market. Although the publishers eventually agreed to settlements, none of them admitted wrongdoing.

Judge Cote said that the publishers had played “a rough and tumble game” and engaged in “blatant price fixing.”

“None of the publisher defendants have expressed any remorse,” she said. “They are, in a word, unrepentant.”

Lawyers for Apple and the government said in court that they would meet in the next week and discuss the judge’s proposal. Another hearing is expected later this month.

Apple and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster settled in April 2012; Penguin Group USA and Macmillan settled later. Penguin has since merged with Random House, which was not named in the lawsuit.

The Media Equation: TV Foresees Its Future. Netflix Is There.

But Netflix already has.

Netflix knows a little about transformation. It’s worth remembering that it managed to go from the largest user of the Postal Service to the largest source of download traffic on the Web in the span of months, not years. After a big stumble on pricing in 2011, Netflix recovered and then some, using its expertise in technology and algorithms to accrue over 36 million users worldwide, a number that will probably grow when it announces its earnings on Monday. Its stock has already risen more than 200 percent in the last year.

But few would have guessed that Netflix’s software expertise would extend to entertainment produced by top-flight actors, directors and writers. Beginning this year, Netflix streamed four original series — “House of Cards,” “Hemlock Grove,” “Arrested Development” and “Orange Is the New Black.” The shows earned generally good notices, kicked up a great deal of chatter, and, drum roll here, were nominated for 14 Emmys. It was the first time an Internet-only service earned a seat at the big-boy table in television.

The Emmys were the most prominent marker of change, but hardly the only one, in a week full of headlines about what TV is becoming. It’s not their first foray, but if Apple and Google move further into the television space, they are sure to collide with not only traditional players, but Netflix, Amazon, Sony and Intel. And Aereo, which so far is a small but persistent player backed by Barry Diller, won another court victory for its plan to totally upend broadcast networks, by streaming their content without compensating them.

Meanwhile, what were the traditional television players up to? Squabbling yet again over retransmission fees, with a standoff between CBS and Time Warner Cable that could set off a blackout, driving audiences to other ways of viewing. The only constant was steady price hikes on cable bills.

The future of television — a place where cable is not the only answer for average viewers — just drew a little closer.

Netflix has earned its place in that future. It won some victories on the programming side by financing creators and staying out of their hair, an approach invented and perfected by HBO. Given that HBO pulled in 108 Emmy nominations last week, Netflix has a long way to go. But David Bianculli, a professor at Rowan University in New Jersey who blogs at TV Worth Watching, suggests another view.

“It took HBO 25 years to get its first Emmy nomination; it took Netflix six months,” he said. In that sense, Netflix is more like Pixar than Hulu, showing that a Silicon Valley company could produce creative, successful programming.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told The New York Times last week that the Emmy nominations solidified the idea that “television is television, no matter what pipe brings it to the screen.”

He’s right. Television used to come over the air or through the coaxial cable. Now it seems to come from everywhere on all kinds of devices.

Both Google and Apple continue to hover around the honey pot of television. Apple’s rumored effort at making a TV set has been like Godot — much anticipated, never arriving — but in the meantime it is in talks with distributors like Time Warner Cable and programmers like Walt Disney to explore collaboration on apps.

Google has been in talks with program providers, including cable channels, about distribution over the Internet, a more complicated approach — the cable systems that distribute programming would be left out of the mix — with a higher risk in execution.

In both instances, the companies are taking the same wine and putting it in a new bottle, creating a new interface to replace clunky remotes while hoping to gain a lot of valuable data in the process. Figuring out how to put a new skin on the same database can be lucrative — Weather.com, a huge business, is built on existing government data — but it’s one thing to present better navigation, and another to produce better television.

Apple reinvented the music industry on its terms and in doing so cut the legacy music business in half. The TV business, which is still sitting on healthy earnings, if not ratings, saw that movie already and wants no part of it.

But Apple is nothing if not relentless. One of its reported approaches is to enable ad-skipping while making a payment to ad-supported networks. “In essence they were saying that they would cut them a check while destroying their business model,” said Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst. “How long do you think that conversation lasted?”

Meanwhile Google is selling its ability to make content more visible and searchable; that sounds like the favor Google did for the newspaper business, which, like music, is half the size it once was.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Bits Blog: Hope for the Future of Chromebooks and Ultrabooks

window.location="http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?origURL="+escape(window.location)+"&r="+escape(document.referrer);

Future of 3-D TV Murky as ESPN Ends Channel

That impression was cemented last week when ESPN, the nation’s largest sports network and an early adopter of 3-D technology, said it was turning off its three-year-old 3-D channel. A spokeswoman said the decision was “due to limited consumer adoption of 3-D services to the home.”

The news spurred debate about whether anyone would be left watching in 3-D soon, or whether anything would be available worth watching.

“Many in the industry have said over the last few years that if ESPN ever pulled the plug on 3-D TV, that would be the format’s final chapter,” Phillip Swann, the publisher of the industry Web site TVPredictions.com, wrote after ESPN’s announcement. “Today, it’s hard to deny that statement.”

The only other big 3-D channel, called 3net, a joint venture of Discovery Communications, Sony and Imax, said it was undeterred by ESPN’s decision. But 3net has had a hard time getting onto cable and satellite systems, and a Discovery spokesman said last week that “it’s our equivalent of R&D,” or research and development, hardly a rousing endorsement.

The format is healthier at the box office, but even there, only 36 films were released in 3-D last year, down 20 percent from the peak in 2011, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. Over all, 3-D box office revenue was flat.

When television manufacturers started to aggressively market the technology in 2010 — helped by the theatrical release of “Avatar” by James Cameron in December 2009 and fantastical ideas about how it would feel to be immersed in a sporting event or an action movie — skeptics predicted little consumer demand for 3-D television. They turned out to be right. Television owners generally rejected the glasses that were usually required to see in 3-D and found that the format was not as immersive as promised.

But pioneering networks like ESPN, which is controlled by the Walt Disney Company, learned much about what did and did not work in producing 3-D. In stadiums, for instance, 3-D cameras had to be closer to the field than traditional cameras.

ESPN televised 380 sporting events in 3-D, but the dedicated channel never became big enough to be rated by the Nielsen Company. That may be because it was sold separately from other channels; the research firm SNL Kagan recently estimated that it had “well under one million” paying subscribers.

Amy Phillips, an ESPN spokeswoman, said, “While we don’t necessarily have a gauge of the most popular, we do know from viewer feedback that big events like the B.C.S. National Championship Game and the tennis majors were fan favorites.”

Some Summer Olympics events were televised in 3-D last year, too. NBCUniversal has not said whether it will do that again during the Winter Olympics next February in Sochi, Russia.

Carolina Milanesi, a research vice president for Gartner, a technology research company, said the 3-D format suffered from “a chicken-and-egg situation where content wasn’t created because of low penetration of 3-D TVs in the home, and consumers were not buying 3-D TVs due
to the lack of compelling content.”

While many big-screen television sets now come with 3-D capabilities and glasses, most households with those sets rarely use them, if at all. “Our family falls in that category,” Ms. Milanesi said.

Data from DisplaySearch, a unit of the NPD Group, suggests that sales of 3-D sets are stronger overseas. For the 3net joint venture, that has been important.

“The content library is helping us across a number of business segments,” said David C. Leavy, a spokesman for Discovery. “Some Europe and Asia markets where there is more interest and competition among operators are doing deals with 3-D content.”

Meanwhile, the television manufacturers that had been pushing 3-D are now promoting a newer format, “ultra HD” or 4K, which promises four times the resolution of the high-definition sets that most Americans own. Never mind that in many cases the additional detail is not perceptible by the human eye; 3net has been emphasizing its production of programming in 4K, and ESPN said its experiments with that format would continue.

ESPN also left the door open to more 3-D programming, if only slightly.

“Creating quality 3-D telecasts takes skill and learnings specific to 3-D production — and we have more experience than anyone to do that,” Ms. Phillips said.

“If consumer adoption should take off in the coming years,” she said, “we have the knowledge and the expertise to ramp up quickly and deliver compelling programming.”

Gadgetwise Blog: The Tarot Sees a Full Battery in Your Future

The Powerocks Tarot auxiliary battery is the size of a stack of credit cards.

Backup batteries usually trumpet their capacity, but capacity results in size: they are sometimes as large as a paperback book. The Powerocks Tarot, though, trumpets its size, because it’s just about the same as a stack of credit cards.

Its capacity isn’t bad either. At 1500 milliamp hours (mAh), it should be enough to top up an empty iPhone.

In a test, the Tarot filled a completely drained iPhone to 65 percent capacity in nearly an hour. It filled the high-capacity battery of a discharged Motorola RAZR Maxx HD to 39 percent. That’s impressive, considering that Motorola’s big auxiliary battery, the 4000 mAh P4000, filled the same phone to 89 percent.

Although Powerocks claims the Tarot is small enough to fit in a wallet, it had better be a big wallet. While the perimeter measurements are about the same as a credit card, it’s about as thick as a stack of 10 credit cards.

There is nothing fancy about the case, although it is available in black, silver or pink. It has four L.E.D. lights that show battery level. A red L.E.D. turns blue to let you know when the Tarot is done charging.

The battery comes with a cable that has a standard size USB on one end and a Micro USB connector on the other. It doesn’t come with a charger, but you can plug it into a computer or, in all probability, the one that comes with your phone.

The Tarot is available from Powerocks online for $35.

Books of The Times: ‘Who Owns the Future?’ by Jaron Lanier

While working on “intriguing unannounced projects” for Microsoft Research — “a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft” and a speculative strategy for “repositioning earthquakes” — Mr. Lanier found time to follow up on his first book, “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010). That was a feisty, brilliant, predictive work, and the new volume is just as exciting. Mr. Lanier bucks a wave of more conventional diatribes on Big Data to deliver Olympian, contrarian fighting words about the Internet’s exploitative powers. A self-proclaimed “humanist softie,” he is a witheringly caustic critic of big Web entities and their business models.

He’s talking to you, Facebook. (“What’s Facebook going to do when it grows up?”) And to you, Google. (“The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency.”) And to all the other tempting Siren Servers (as he calls them) that depend on accumulating and evaluating consumer data without acknowledging a monetary debt to the people mined for all this “free” information. One need not be a political ideologue, he says, to believe that people have quantifiable value and deserve to be recompensed for it.

It’s true that Mr. Lanier was once driving in Silicon Valley, listening to what he thought was some Internet start-up “trumpeting the latest scheme to take over the world,” when he realized he was hearing Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” (“If you select the right passages, Marx can read as being incredibly current.”)

He is no “lefty” (to use his word); he sees high-tech thievery as an apolitical problem. And he is too much of a maverick to align with anyone’s thinking, even his own. Whether it is a boast or a mea culpa, Mr. Lanier acknowledges: “I was an early participant in the process and helped to formulate many of the ideas I am criticizing in this book.” And “to my friends in the ‘open’ Internet movement, I have to ask: What did you think would happen?”

“Who Owns the Future?” reiterates some ideas in Mr. Lanier’s first book: that Web businesses exploit a peasant class, that users of social media may not realize how entrapped they are, that a thriving middle class is essential to keeping the Internet sustainable. When “ordinary people ‘share,’ while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes,” even that elite will eventually be undermined. Mr. Lanier compares his suggestions for reconfiguring this process to Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” but the last thing he worries about is writerly grandiosity. “Understand that in the context of the community in which I function,” he says of Silicon Valley, “my presentation is practically self-deprecating.”

Mr. Lanier’s sharp, accessible style and opinions make “Who Owns the Future?” terrifically inviting. What is he calling for? Just “The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity.” He much prefers sweeping formulations to qualified ones, although, as he points out, “being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist.” This book may not provide many answers (“It is too early for me to solve every problem brought up by the approach I’m advocating here”), but it does articulate a desperate need for them.

“Who Owns the Future?” overlaps with “The New Digital Age,” Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s much more polished work of Web analysis. Their book focuses more on global issues, but disagrees with specific points.

“The New Digital Age” looks forward to self-driving trucks that can ease the strain on Teamsters; Mr. Lanier rambunctiously writes of “Napstering the Teamsters” out of work, and of how such technology could go terribly wrong. The books also disagree on whether surgeons’ work will be enhanced or diminished by robotics.

And where Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen see promise in technology’s effect on the Arab Spring, Mr. Lanier is sick of the back-patting about social networking. Revolutions can happen without it, too, he says.

Mr. Lanier may not have any personal animus against Mr. Schmidt. But he describes listening to him and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos discuss the future of books just as he, Mr. Lanier, was struggling to write his first one. This prompts an attack on how Siren Servers could undermine and impoverish the world of reading, just as they did music. (Mr. Lanier is also a musician. He specializes in the arcane and innovative, as might be expected.) More generally, and very quotably, he warns against being seduced by “dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste.”

Finally, “Who Owns the Future?” takes some of it biggest swipes at those who do presume to own the future: fans of the Singularity (the hypothetical imminent merger of biology and technology), Silicon Valley pioneers seeking “methusalization” (i.e., immortality), techie utopians of every stripe. Yes, Mr. Lanier happens to be one of them. But he is still capable of remembering when, in his boyhood, prognosticators foresaw Moon colonies and flying cars. Now they think about genomics and data. Mindful of that way-cool past, he says, “I miss the future.”

Today's Economist: Casey B. Mulligan: The Future of Driving

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

Driverless vehicles would be a windfall for households and businesses that acquire them but would probably increase traffic and nationwide fuel usage.

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Google and other innovators are working on vehicles that someday might drive themselves with little or no attention from human passengers. The vehicles of the future will have fast, observant computers that automatically communicate position and road conditions with other vehicles on the road.

Driverless vehicles are expected to help children, the blind, the elderly and others who currently cannot safely drive themselves. Helped by their huge amounts of data and computing power, driverless cars are also purported to reduce traffic congestion and nationwide fuel consumption by driving smarter.

But smarter driving will lead to more driving, because smarter driving reduces the cost per mile of vehicle usage. The end result of additional driving could be more traffic and more aggregate fuel consumption.

These days, a driver has three main costs of the trip to consider: fuel consumption, vehicle wear and tear, and time and attention devoted to driving that could be for something else. (Drivers also need to consider other costs of vehicle ownership, such as the purchase price and the cost of insuring the vehicle.)

Fuel and wear and tear cost roughly 50 cents a mile, which is why employers reimburse employees for job-related personal vehicle usage at about that rate. At an average speed of 30 miles an hour (including stops, traffic conditions and so on), each mile takes two minutes of driver time. For those who value their time at more than $15 an hour, the time cost of the trip exceeds the combined fuel and wear and tear costs.

Research has shown that cutting travel costs through reduced gas prices causes people to drive more, for example by eschewing carpools and public transportation. A driverless car should also cause people to use their vehicles for more miles, because they could use their time in the car to sleep, work, watch television, read a book and do other things they might normally do at home.

Households and business may also begin to use vehicles with no human passengers or drivers in order to move goods from one place to another and, by economizing on the human driver costs, they may want to move more goods than they do today.

As people take on additional activities in their personal vehicles, they may also demand larger vehicles that necessarily require more fuel per mile.

Before driverless cars are adopted, a number of hurdles must be cleared. Some refinements in vehicle technology need to be resolved; insurance companies and state regulators must also figure out liability issues.

Even if driverless vehicles led to more congestion and more aggregate fuel consumption, driverless vehicles would be a welcome technological advance, because the billions of hours that people already devote to driving could be put to alternative uses.

But expect new driving technologies to increase the number of vehicles on the road.

The 3-D Printer May Be the Home Appliance of the Future

When Brook Drumm saw clips from the speech at his home outside Sacramento, Calif., he wanted to reach through his TV and give the president a fist bump. Mr. Drumm, a bald, goateed father of three, designed the Printrbot, a desktop 3-D printer kit. Like a number of other 3-D printers, it uses heated plastic — applied layer by layer to a heated bed by a glue-gun-like extruder — to turn designs created on a computer into real objects.

As Mr. Drumm illustrated in the Kickstarter campaign he used to raise more than $830,000 to start his business in late 2011, the Printrbot is small enough to fit on a kitchen counter, next to the Mr. Coffee. “The goal for the company,” Mr. Drumm said in world-beating tones, “is a printer in every home and every school.”

The technology for 3-D printing has existed for years, and President Obama was referring to its applications in manufacturing. But there is a growing sense that 3-D printers may be the home appliance of the future, much as personal computers were 30 years ago, when Dick Cavett referred to the Apple II in a TV commercial as “the appliance of the ’80s for all those pesky household chores.”

Like computers, 3-D printers originally proved their worth in the business sector, cost a fortune and were bulkier than a Kelvinator. But in the last few years, less expensive desktop models have emerged, and futurists and 3-D printing hobbyists are now envisioning a world in which someone has an idea for a work-saving tool — or breaks the hour hand on their kitchen clock or loses the cap to the shampoo bottle — and simply prints the invention or the replacement part.

Bre Pettis, the chief executive officer of MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based company leading the charge in making 3-D printers for the consumer market, has seen how the technology is already being applied. “We have stories of people who have fixed their blenders, fixed their espresso machine,” he said.

A file-sharing database MakerBot oversees, called Thingiverse, currently holds more than 36,000 downloadable designs. “One of my favorite stories from Thingiverse is a dad who has a daughter who is 41 inches tall,” Mr. Pettis said. “They were going to an amusement park, and she wasn’t going to be able to go on any of the rides because the minimum height was 42 inches. The dad made orthopedic inserts for her shoes.”

Last fall, MakerBot opened what may be the first retail store devoted to 3-D printers, in Lower Manhattan. Inside, demonstration models of the company’s Replicator 2, a slick, steel-framed machine with the boxy dimensions of a microwave that sells for about $2,200, are constantly printing, turning files created on Trimble SketchUp and other computer-aided design (CAD) software into things like architecture models or smartphone cases.

Emmanuel Plat, director of merchandising for the Museum of Modern Art’s retail division, said that in his experience, watching a 3-D printer work can induce future shock. “When people see the machine function, they’re mesmerized,” said Mr. Plat, who counts himself among those impressed.

As part of its “Destination: NYC” collection in May, the MoMA Design Store will feature a Replicator 2 printing New York-themed items for sale, like a miniature skyscraper or taxi; people can also buy the printer, Mr. Plat said.

In an age when shooting video with a phone and sending it to a friend across the world is old hat, it’s not easy to wow anyone with technology. Still, everywhere he goes lately, Mr. Plat said he hears people gushing about 3-D printing. “The word is out in the design community and creative community,” he said. “The applications are limitless.”

Beliefs: A Home-Schooling Pioneer Looks to the Future

“Bill and Mary Pride have eight kids, all of them home-schooled,” begins the short profile, under the headline “Crash-Tested Homework.” The family’s home classroom is “stuffed with a Mac, Apple IIGS, Amiga, a 386 clone, various CD-ROM devices, Nintendo, a Miracle piano system, and so on.”

The small photograph accompanying the article shows Bill Pride, with his beard and wide red suspenders, presiding over a gaggle of children and two stone-age desktop computers. “In between lessons,” the article continues, “Ma and Pa and their computer-savvy kids have evaluated every piece of educational software known to be on the market. The kids are ceaseless and merciless testers.” Curious readers could find the family’s judgments summed up in “Prides’ Guide to Educational Software,” published the previous year.

Today it is clear that Mrs. Pride, who would later have a ninth child, was ahead of her time. Not only has skepticism of birth control increased in the evangelical community, but home schooling has become more widely accepted, by Christians and secularists alike. In 2007, according to the most recent count by the National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency, 1.5 million children in the United States were home-schooled. And Mrs. Pride has solidified her reputation as a hero to conservative Christians, a scourge of feminists, and a tribune to all home schooling families.

In 1985, in the first of her 11 books, “The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality,” Mrs. Pride chronicled her post-college embrace of evangelical Christianity, which led to her repudiation of what she saw as anti-biblical feminist ideals. But most of her books are resources for home-schoolers. She founded and edits Practical Homeschooling magazine, a popular resource for this growing population, and its companion Web site.

Mrs. Pride’s beliefs on religion and family life are, to use her word, “old-fashioned”: in addition to opposing birth control, she believes the man should be the head of the household. Yet in her embrace of technology and the Internet, Mrs. Pride is a total Webhead, as befits the wife of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate whom she met when both were working “at the key-punch room in Raytheon,” the military technology company.

On closer look, she is a bit of a cantankerous misfit, both in the world of conservative Christianity and the world of Web-happy distance learners.

For example, right now Mrs. Pride, who lives with her husband and, at the moment, five of her children outside St. Louis, does not regularly attend any church, although they have regular “home church” on Sunday evenings. She offered many reasons none of her most recent churches had worked out.

“Abusive pastors,” Mrs. Pride said, a bit cryptically. “And then again,” she continued, “when you have written all these books and have this huge number of children, you cannot visit quietly anywhere. And frankly the way our schedule has been for years, it has been so exhausting that I was never awake on Sunday to go anywhere.”

Earlier in their married life, the Prides belonged to the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, a denomination that was folded into the Presbyterian Church of America in 1982.

Mrs. Pride was born in 1955 and nominally raised Catholic in Newton, Mass. Her parish church seemed to offer sermons only about the Vietnam War. “After this went on for months,” Mrs. Pride said, “I said if they’re never going to talk about God in church, I may as well stop going.”

Mrs. Pride skipped a grade in elementary school, after she was “discovered reading ‘Jane Eyre’ in first grade,” she said, and later graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., at 18. She started reading the Bible in college, where she was also influenced by the books of the evangelist Francis Schaeffer, which she was given by students sitting “at the Jesus Freak table.”

Mrs. Pride is as skeptical of many trends in technology and education as she is of many trends in churches. The early 1990s, she said, were “the golden age of educational software.” It was like Eden before the fall.

“It wasn’t all, ‘Let’s find a Hollywood voice actor, or ‘Let’s meet the Common Core standards,’” she said. “They were being innovative.”

Ms. Pride reminisced fondly about games like Rocky’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, “where you solved puzzles by inventing things.”

But now, “education software qua software has pretty much died,” she said. “There used to be this huge thriving market of stuff parents would buy their children, but if you look at Amazon now, it’s a few branded programs, like ‘Blue’s Clues,’ and it’s all very grade level and organized.”

Mrs. Pride initially chose home schooling, in part, because she deplored the liberal trends she remembered from the Newton public schools, where her books often contained what she called “sexually explicit information,” and from gym class, where students were taught “yoga and Transcendental Meditation.” She said one women’s studies class contained a “very out-there viewpoint” about “worshiping the goddess.” An English class was organized around Marxist notions of “power.”

Yet, like many liberal critics of public schooling, Mrs. Pride laments teaching materials geared to standardized tests. She misses the earlier more anarchic days of computer software. And while some Christian home-schoolers fear that the Internet may contaminate their children’s manners and morals, Mrs. Pride seems unworried. She and her children were beta testers for the first online academies, in the early 1990s, and she is excited by what is developing.

“Distance learning is coming on gangbusters,” Mrs. Pride said. “EdX will be very interesting. And what Harvard and M.I.T. are doing. And the MOOC initiative. ...”

And so she went on, sounding like a teenager with a major in computer science and a part-time job at Raytheon.

mark.e.oppenheimer

@gmail.com; twitter/markopp1

Future of TV to Be Displayed at Electronics Show

Almost every major electronic device you own is a black rectangle that is brought to life by software and content. So how can hardware companies make their products stand out in a sea of black rectangles?

That challenge will be on display at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Tuesday through Friday at the 46th annual Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest technology conventions based on attendance, which is expected to exceed 150,000 this year. And one that is particularly acute for television makers. “The hardware is no longer what’s driving the future,” said James L. McQuivey, an analyst for Forrester Research. “The hardware is kind of boring.”

More exciting things are happening in software, Mr. McQuivey said. For example, dozens of tablets are on the market, but Apple and Amazon lead the pack because of the impressive apps and digital content available for their devices, he said.

This year, television makers like Samsung, Sony, LG and Panasonic are trying to grab attention by supersizing their television screens and quadrupling the level of detail in their images. And manufacturers continue to push the idea of “smart” sets by adding apps and other interactive elements.

For the electronics industry, the television is an important but increasingly difficult product to sell. Just seven years ago, big-screen sets that cost thousands of dollars were major profit generators. But more recently, even as televisions have gotten bigger and better looking, they have dropped significantly in price amid heated competition.

To make matters worse, consumers are buying new televisions as often as they buy a new car, not as often as a new computer or phone. And people can now watch video on smartphones, tablets and computers, reducing the need to buy a television at all.

Sales of televisions over the holiday season were down 2 percent from the previous year, according to Stephen Baker, an analyst for the NPD Group. Mr. Baker said one problem for television makers was that bigger screens, ranging from 50 inches to 55 inches were taking sales from televisions in the 40- to 49-inch range, once an especially popular category.

The average selling price of a 45- or 49-inch set was $615, but sets in the range of 50 to 54 inches actually had a lower average price, $520, Mr. Baker said. This is because people who bought the smaller televisions opted for features like LED screen technology and Internet capability, but more budget-conscious consumers chose size over other features.

As they try to prop up profits, electronics makers are trying hard to establish a new high-end category of televisions. They are promoting what they call Ultra High-Definition televisions, which have four times as many pixels as their high-definition predecessors. Some of these new televisions can cost as much as a car, like Sony’s 84-inch Ultra HDTV, which is priced at $25,000. But Sony says it will unveil Ultra HDTVs at the show that are smaller and less expensive.

Mike Lucas, a senior vice president at Sony, called its 84-inch set the Ferrari of televisions. But he said that with the new versions, “we’re moving out from the Ferrari world and more into the Audi, Lexus and Mercedes side of the world.” He declined to say how much the smaller Ultra HD sets would cost, but said they would be more expensive than the older HDTVs.

Samsung will also introduce new televisions this week, including an Ultra HDTV that emphasizes software. Joe Stinziano, senior vice president for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America, said a majority of the new Samsung sets this year would be smart televisions — Internet-enabled televisions that run apps for things like Netflix and Facebook.

“The television has always been the center of the entertainment of the home,” Mr. Stinziano said. “Now it will be the center of a connected home.”

Media Decoder Blog: Hulu's Chief Is Leaving, Raising Questions About Its Future

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesJason Kilar, the founding chief executive of Hulu, gave no indication why he was moving on.

8:39 p.m. | Updated
Jason Kilar, the Web wizard who turned Hulu from a punch line into a popular source of online video, said on Friday that he would step down as the site’s founding chief executive in the next three months.

The announcement is certain to turn up the volume on something that’s a constant hum in the media industry: speculation about the future of Hulu — and if it has one at all. Its owners, the Walt Disney Company, Comcast and the News Corporation, also run the ABC, Fox and NBC networks, and they do not agree about what to do with the Web site. Perversely, the more popular Hulu becomes, the more of a problem it is for the owners, since it may be taking viewers and advertising dollars away from their core television businesses.

Mr. Kilar never saw it that way, however. He was Hulu’s best advocate, sometimes clashing with the network executives on Hulu’s board and arguing that they had to keep investing in the site, since television’s future will surely involve Internet distribution.

For many Americans, that future is already here: Hulu’s streams of TV shows attract 30 million unique visitors a month via computers and untold millions more via tablets and Internet-connected television sets. Three million pay for Hulu Plus, its subscription arm — not bad for a start-up once ridiculed as “ClownCo.”

Mr. Kilar declined an interview request on Friday. In an e-mail message to employees, he gave no indication why he was moving on or what he might do next. “My decision to depart has been one of the toughest I’ve ever made,” he said.

He said his departure would take effect within the first quarter of the year. No successor was named. Rich Tom, the site’s chief technology officer, will also depart in the first quarter.

Mr. Kilar, a former executive at Amazon, has in the past been mentioned for a number of prominent jobs in Silicon Valley. He was a top candidate last year for the chief executive position at Yahoo, but Hulu said he declined to be considered. The job later went to Marissa Mayer, a longtime Google employee.

His departure comes just several months after the only independent owner of Hulu, Providence Equity Partners, sold its 10 percent stake, originally bought for $100 million, for $200 million. Mr. Kilar and other employees also sold their stakes in the company at that time, netting Mr. Kilar about $40 million, according to an executive with knowledge of the transaction.

On Friday, there was widespread praise for Mr. Kilar for steering Hulu through sometimes turbulent seas. “He defied enormous odds, built from scratch one of the top five digital video brands, created two viable and growing businesses (free and pay) and got his well-deserved payday — not bad for five years’ work,” J. B. Perrette, who used to help oversee NBC’s investment in Hulu and now runs Discovery Communication’s digital operations, said in an e-mail.

That said, Mr. Kilar’s announcement did not entirely surprise many in the industry. During his tenure, he sometimes clashed with the owners on Hulu, exemplifying the divide between new, disruptive modes of distribution like the Internet and the more traditional operations at major media companies. As the parent companies pulled back on the amount of ABC, Fox and NBC programming provided to Hulu, the Web site invested in original content to fill the gaps and attract attention. That investment effort continues, led by one of Mr. Kilar’s deputies, Andy Forssell, but many in the industry say they believe that Hulu’s future remains fuzzy.

An internal memo obtained by Variety in August showed that the owners may want to change their agreements with Hulu so that it is no longer the exclusive distributor of repeats of television shows like “The Office” and “Family Guy.” That way, the owners could also sell repeat rights to online video services like YouTube, Netflix or Amazon.

Some of the owners also wanted more advertisements on the site, which had revenue of about $700 million last year but is not yet believed to be profitable. Much of the revenue came from Hulu Plus, and therein lies another fault line: the owners may concentrate on the paid part to the detriment of the free streaming part.

The owners had no comment about any of that on Friday, though. Robert Iger, Disney’s chief executive, called Mr. Kilar an integral part of the Hulu story and said in a statement, “We are proud of his achievements, we appreciate what he’s built, and we share his confidence in his team’s ability to drive Hulu forward from here.”

This month, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG Research, predicted that News Corporation would seek to acquire its competitors’ stakes in Hulu in 2013. Comcast, he said, has no managerial control of Hulu and Disney “appears increasingly less interested” in the site.

In August, News Corporation said that Jonathan Miller, the company’s chief digital officer since 2009 and a vocal champion of Hulu, would leave the company. Mr. Miller represented News Corporation on the Hulu board and had helped the media company broker a stake in Roku. And Chase Carey, the No. 2 to the chief executive of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, is said to be less enamored with the service.

News Corporation has had some high-stakes stumbles in technology with both Myspace and its tablet-only publication, The Daily, which has led some analysts to expect the company to tread cautiously with future digital investments like Hulu.

Mr. Murdoch, however, praised Mr. Kilar for “building Hulu into one of the leading online video services available today.” He added, “It’s incredibly well positioned for the road ahead.”

NBA: Dwight Howard Dismisses Questions About a Future With the Lakers

Though many people are waiting for Dwight Howard to make his debut with the Lakers others are looking towards the future.  Will he stay and re-sign with the team?  Read more after the jump.

Shay Marie x Sabrina B.

He’s in the last year of a contract paying him $19.5 million this season and is in the long-term Lakers’ plans. He just doesn’t want to discuss whether they’re in his future plans.

“I’m not going to get into that stuff,” Howard said Friday in a quiet moment before the Lakers last to Sacramento, 103-98, in an exhibition game at Thomas and Mack Center.

“I’m happy that I’m here. This year is very important, and I’m looking forward to doing some great things here.”

It makes financial sense for Howard, 26, to stay. He could re-sign for five years and $117.9 million, as opposed to a four-year, $87.6-million deal with another team.

Howard appears to be enjoying LA but whether or not he’ll re-sign with the team is definitely dependent on how they perform this season.  I’m anxious for the season to start.

LA Times

NBA: Dwight Howard Dismisses Questions About a Future With the Lakers

Though many people are waiting for Dwight Howard to make his debut with the Lakers others are looking towards the future.  Will he stay and re-sign with the team?  Read more after the jump.

Shay Marie x Sabrina B.

He’s in the last year of a contract paying him $19.5 million this season and is in the long-term Lakers’ plans. He just doesn’t want to discuss whether they’re in his future plans.

“I’m not going to get into that stuff,” Howard said Friday in a quiet moment before the Lakers last to Sacramento, 103-98, in an exhibition game at Thomas and Mack Center.

“I’m happy that I’m here. This year is very important, and I’m looking forward to doing some great things here.”

It makes financial sense for Howard, 26, to stay. He could re-sign for five years and $117.9 million, as opposed to a four-year, $87.6-million deal with another team.

Howard appears to be enjoying LA but whether or not he’ll re-sign with the team is definitely dependent on how they perform this season.  I’m anxious for the season to start.

LA Times

Bits Blog: The Future, as Imagined by Google

Larry Downing/Reuters

In Eric E. Schmidt’s future, his life will be a lot easier.

His bed will wake him up when he cycles out of R.E.M. sleep. A driverless car will take him to work. Returning phone calls, scheduling events and other routine tasks will be taken care of by devices using artificial intelligence. A microrobot he swallows will monitor his insides and alert his doctor if something is wrong. At night, a robot will go to parties in his place.

“He’ll have a good time and report back in the morning,” said Mr. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, speaking Monday at the company’s Zeitgeist sales conference in Paradise Valley, Ariz.

Mr. Schmidt was describing to Google’s biggest advertisers and partners how technology can change the world, from tracking financial assets to education to measuring the results of nonprofit initiatives. Some of the things he mentioned, like universal language translation and artificial intelligence, are Google projects.

More important than making his daily life easier, he said, technology will open up the world to people who have never been connected, like those in developing countries.

“Imagine going from no information to all the world’s information with one device,” he said. “No textbooks to all textbooks. No language to all language.”

For companies like Google, billions of people newly connected also means a new source of talent, Mr. Schmidt said.

“Maybe Botswana has the next generation of great U.I. designers,” he said. “We don’t know because we haven’t explored.”

Google and other tech companies will have succeeded, he said, when none of this seems magical, or even visible, because technology will imbue everything in our lives, which is a theme of Google’s.

Its Internet-connected eyeglass frames are the first step, though for now they stand out, as they did on the faces of the couple of dozen people wearing them at the conference while socializing at cocktail parties and sitting by the pool, including Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin.

“Eventually technology just disappears,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s the ultimate achievement. No more ports and prompts and plug-ins.”

The Future of X-Force Revealed

Just as expected, Marvel revealed the series behind another one of its teasers from last week. This time, the reveal ties into another announcement from earlier this week: the end of Rick Remender's Uncanny X-Force. The black-ops kill team will indeed be sticking around, but under new leadership with all-new members. Cable and X-Force #1 hits in December, from creators Dennis Hopeless and Salvador Larroca.

According to issue #1's cover, the new team consists of Cable, Colossus, Dr. Nemesis, Domino, and Forge. Quite a different line-up, indeed. “The X-Force that Cable’s leading is a group of outlaws trying to save the world,” said Hopeless. “They’re fugitives being chased across the globe and doing what good they can while always looking back over their shoulders. There’s not much room for error on this team.”

“We knew the return of Cable had to be big and this is going to be one of the most explosive Marvel NOW! launches, " added Marvel's Editor-in-Chief, Axel Alonso.  “Dennis and Salvador are bringing a new look and feel to the X-Force, with a story that hearkens back to the core themes that made them such a phenomenon while moving them forward in an exciting way.”

Cable leading X-Force. Discuss.

Joey is IGN's Comics Editor and a comic book creator himself. Follow Joey on Twitter, or find him on IGN. He loves superhero pets so hard.

The Future of Gaming in Virtual Reality

Standing next to id Software’s John Carmack, I almost lost my balance and fell over during the first few seconds of playing Doom 3 on a prototype Rift virtual reality headset, an ugly wad of electronics attached to an elastic ski goggle band.

While wearing the headset I still had to press buttons on an Xbox 360 controller to switch weapons, move forward and fire, but aiming and looking were accomplished simply by turning my head. It was surreal and surprisingly responsive. After the initial disorientation and dizziness dissipated, I was entirely immersed within the world, with the game’s visuals wrapping around my entire field of view.

The Rift is the best headset of its kind Carmack has ever seen. After id Software shipped Rage, Carmack decided to check up on the status of virtual reality, something he hadn’t looked at since the early 1990s. “We did a bunch of deals with people way back with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and they were all loser deals with companies that went bankrupt. That was not the right time,” he said. He assumed there’d been a lot of progress in the meantime. He bought a few headsets and was disappointed.

“They just sucked really bad. They were not at all what I wanted to see.” He started disassembling the models and trying to solve problems the manufacturers hadn’t. “It was getting to the point where there were a few people questioning ‘what’s John doing playing around with all this stuff in the office? He should be working on Doom 4 all the time.’”

An opportunity to legitimize his tinkering with headsets at work came up when id Software decided to revamp Doom 3 and handle development internally. “How do you get people to give a damn about an eight year old project? Yes, it’s got higher resolution, looks nicer. We did lots of things to make it a better game, but it’s still not something lots of people are going to care about.” He initially wanted to use the VR angle as a way to grab the press’ attention, and continued to make progress turning Doom 3 into a virtual reality experience.

For hardware, he initially focused on the Sony HMZ-T1, which outclassed all other sub $10,000 models and which was “in many ways a big advance over the crap that was there before. It has nice displays, excellent resolution, a decent field of view. Sony brought it to the level of just barely bordering on interestingly acceptable at about a forty-five degree field of view.”

Carmack stressed the importance of field of view, saying limiting it too much made wearing the headset feel like “looking through toilet paper tubes.” With the Sony headset, the view was good enough for exploring, but not for combat. “The Sony also has a bunch of latency in their processing which is deeply unfortunate and completely correctable and I wish Sony would fix that.” It had potential, and Carmack said others at id were impressed by his progress, but Sony’s headset just wasn’t enough.

So Carmack decided to start building something on his own in an attempt to improve on existing designs and expand the field of view. Though he tried numerous configurations, he kept returning to the idea of somehow incorporating the screen of his mobile phone. “There’s reason to believe all the billions of dollars of effort that goes into developing mobile device technology, that that’s the right train to hitch yourself to. I was heading down this route when I ran across Palmer Luckey and his Oculus company.”

Luckey launched a Kickstarter on August 1 for Oculus’ Rift headset. In a few days over $1.1 million dollars have been offered up by developers and curious technology aficionados. Those who backed $300 or more will receive a fully assembled Rift and its only game, Doom 3.

“There’s a small VR community that talks about homebrew head mount displays, and he was really the star.” Luckey was on the sixth or seventh revision of his Rift headset, and Carmack was impressed. “He had found the right display panel, the right drivers, the right optics and packaged it all together.” Carmack contacted Luckey and mentioned he was going to demo a virtual reality version of Doom 3 at E3 2012. Luckey mailed Carmack his handmade Rift prototype the next day.

Carmack made adjustments on the software side and soon had something he liked, all the while being mindful of response time. “There’s an important threshold around 20 milliseconds of end to end response time, from the time that you move to the time the image changes. If you’re under 20 milliseconds it really feels like you’re moving a window around in a solid world.” The response time on the unit Carmack was demoing had a 40 to 50 millisecond response time. “There’s a subtle sense that the world is pulling behind you.” Ideally, he said, there should be no delay.

Delays in response time are common to all types of gaming, but are especially important to keep at low levels when considering movement in virtual reality gaming because the lag is far more noticeable. “The difference of 20 milliseconds on there, it’s obvious to everybody. Your brain knows for every contraction of muscles in your neck that orients your head into a different way, your brain has a model of what it’s supposed to see as you do that muscular contraction, and that’s measured in a small number of milliseconds.”

While I played briefly, the delays weren’t especially noticeable. If an imp jumped from the shadow of the room, I quickly swiveled my head to aim them pressed the Xbox 360 controller’s trigger to fire. It felt a little floaty at first, but I started to find a rhythm for the control as I turned my head from side to side to look both ways down a catwalk and ensure demons weren’t getting ready to pounce. It was a very natural behavior, and surprising only because checking around corners is usually such an artificial process driven by mouse and WASD movement or rotating thumbsticks.

To make the game really work, Carmack had to make changes. “Even for a [shooter on ] 3D TV you have to take the crosshair out and put in some kind of a laser sight. In 2D we always do head kicks as a directional cue and damage indicator that knocks the head sideways. That’s a good, positive thing to do on a static screen. In a head-mounted display you don’t want to knock the head around.” He noted that cut-scenes were particularly problematic, because control of the perspective would suddenly be ripped away from you, severing a delicate intuitive link between reality and the virtual space.

At E3 2012 when Carmack first demoed the virtual reality version of Doom using the Rift prototype, he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the response. “Things blew up a lot beyond our expectations. It caused some problems internally where everybody had a freakout, this wasn’t really part of the plan, this was a little ancillary thing. So what are we doing about it? Everything has worked out fine, I’m very pleased to say.”

Before E3, Carmack expected Luckey would make around 100 Rift kits essentially for his friends. “At this point now he’s making it for several thousand other people. The price point he came out with was around half of what we thought it was going to be.” Despite the excitement, both Luckey and Carmack are eager to stress that the Rift in its current state is not a mass market device. “There is exactly one game it has support for, you’re not buying this to play games. This is for developers to start building support for the other games that we’ll eventually make a consumer device for. You can’t play movies in it, there are no other applications. All that will come, but it’s not here right now.”

While Carmack has been working on modifying Doom 3 to work in virtual reality, he also gave some hints about what a game designed entirely for a head mounted display might be like. “FPSes are the obvious thing you could do. But there’s a lot of benefit from very subtle motions, from just walking down a corridor, all the little subtle motions that your head’s making, and just being able to look over at a handlebar on the side or something. There’s more value in that than I expected, even in third-person games or god games.”

Carmack seemed equally interested in the implications of headsets for far more sophisticated interfaces than those available now. He said a pair of cameras attached to the outside of the headset would be ideal, in part for safety reasons so you’re not completely oblivious to the outside world while wearing the device, but also to track the position of body parts. “It would be able to identify your individual digits as you lift up your hand, work out the user interface that you want to do. Kinect user interfaces suck because you position your hand at three o’clock and wait two seconds, and [there are] all sorts of reasons why stuff like that is a bad idea. But when you get down to the point of being able to track digits in front of it, there’s a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do user interfaces. You’ve got your obvious gestures and swipes and pinches, I’m excited to see what people wind up doing.”

Though it’d be years away, having an entirely self-contained product distribution system through the head mounted display is something Carmack sees as promising. “You could buy your stuff there, and it’d just be the equivalent of a tablet that happens to have optics where you could put your head in it.”

Clearly Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are seemingly obsessed with alternate control methods between Move, Kinect the Wii-mote and the upcoming Wii U platform, but will the headsets like the Rift eventually eclipse all those efforts?  “Yes, I think immersive virtual reality is a far more powerful I/O device than all the little things you do with your hands in front of a TV screen.”

So when might we start to get a clearer picture of what the actual results might be? “This is not the promised land, but you can see the promised land from here. We need to figure out what steps we need to do to get there. I think that can happen largely over the next year.”