Sport Technobabble

Hello and a slightly belated welcome to 2016!

Sounds like the future

but it's right here, right now,

and so is Technobabble.

So, how shall we kick off this New Year, then?

Some life resolutions? An earlier bedtime?

Er, nah, let's have a shedload of tech.

Coming up today,

Frankie finds out how technology is helping Team GB's top athletes...

-Great stuff, Frankie.

-Yeah.

-You're as fast as Mo Farah.

-Yeah!

..Paul is up for the quest when he looks at role-playing games...

Get to playing some of these role-playing games.

..and Rita takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour

of Google HQ in California...

Come on in.

..but, first, Ellie is getting her geek on with some top tech apps.

Today, I've found you some geeky arts.

Let's start with Brain Dots.

It's a brain training game where you have to think creatively

to make your way through each level.

In the game, you need to make the two dots come together

and you do this by drawing

a line or making shapes

and, later on, obstacles are also introduced

and I love how the game makes me think about physics

when figuring out how

to beat each level.

The next app that I've found,

it's called Operation Math.

It's a game where you help

a superspy called Agent Prime

in his mission to defeat Dr Odd.

Your missions take place all over the world

and you use your maths skills to help solve addition,

subtraction, multiplication and division equations

to get to the next level.

Here's an app that you should try before getting a good night's sleep.

It's called Star Chart and it allows you to look at the stars

through your device and see the constellations above you

and some constellations can even help you navigate like a compass

if you're lost so it's really cool

to learn about the constellations around you.

Well, I hope that keeps you occupied for a while. You're welcome.

Thank you, Ellie, my down under chum.

Some advice for you Babblers, don't be a drongo, mate,

and download apps without permission from your olds

or you'll be as popular as a rattlesnake in a lucky dip.

BEEPING

There goes the message alert.

This week, we're trying out another name.

Are you ready?

Babchat.

The less said about that the better.

Righto, Babchat, do your thing.

How do athletes keep getting better?

A question of Olympic standards, there, Owen.

Now, our Frankie is a bit of a sport billy.

Let's see what he's up to.

MUSIC: Pacific State by 808 State

Frankie, lad... What the... Are you being pampered?

Hey, Vlogster. I take it you're interrupting my me time

-because you want something.

-Indeedy, Frankie.

One of the Babblers wants to know how our athletes

keep getting better and better

and I've got the perfect place for you to go and investigate.

Game on, Vlogster.

Such a delightful young man.

I'm sending Frankie to the English Institute of Sport's

performance centre at Bisham Abbey.

This facility is used to train

some of Britain's leading sportsmen and women.

He's going to meet senior physiologist Dr Richard Burden

who will seriously put Frankie through his paces.

Richard, why is this on my face?

Sorry, Frankie, I really can't hear you.

Why have I got this attached to me?

OK, so you're attached to a gas analyser

and we're going to be measuring how much oxygen you're taking in.

So what's going to show up on your screen?

We get a really good idea of being able to measure how much oxygen

that you're taking in and how much carbon dioxide is going out.

So, basically, it's going to show you how unfit I am.

Precisely.

Awesome. Let's do it.

OK, Frankie, so we're now going to see how hard you can work.

That's really good. Great stuff.

Three, two, one.

And relax.

So, Richard, you tested my oxygen levels. What's next?

Got a great test for you, Frankie.

Just over here. Come this way.

Whoa! Richard! I'm still attached!

D'oh! Lack of oxygen to the brain, that, Frankie.

Welcome to our altitude chamber

where there's essentially less oxygen.

Why would you want there to be less oxygen?

The body senses that there's less oxygen going around

and starts to produce more red blood cells.

So, the more red blood cells you have,

the better the oxygen can transport around the body

to the muscles and be used as energy.

It's an environmental chamber so we can also increase the temperature.

Make it really, really hot and humid.

So for playing in places like Qatar, where the World Cup's going to be,

-you know, this would be quite useful for their training.

-Exactly.

One of the other reasons we may get athletes to train at altitude

is because it's just harder, which you are about to find out.

This is an anti-gravity treadmill.

This sealed chamber is going to create an upward force,

an upward pressure,

which allows us to be able to reduce your bodyweight.

So does that mean I'll be able to run faster?

At a particular bodyweight, you are going to be able to run faster.

Will I be able to run as fast as Mo Farah?

We'll see.

Let's do it! I'm excited!

I'm going to use the anti-gravity treadmill to reduce your bodyweight

and you're going to feel a pressure kind of lifting you up a little.

This is weird.

That's now reduced your bodyweight by 30%

so I'm going to keep you running at the same speed

-but I'm going to take you back to normal bodyweight.

-OK.

-That's back to normal bodyweight.

-I feel so heavy!

-Feel really heavy, right?

-I feel like I'm getting sucked in.

OK, but now the hard work begins

because I'm going to start to increase the speed,

somewhere close to the speed that Mo Farah finishes races at.

-OK?

-OK.

We'll make it easy for you to start with, OK,

so we'll take some of your bodyweight off again.

-It's great stuff, Frankie.

-Yeah.

-You're as fast as Mo Farah.

-Yeah!

I'm the man! I'm going to win! I'm going to win!

But the real test is running like Mo Farah at your real bodyweight.

And you're going back to normal bodyweight.

Got to keep up with the treadmill.

Good work, Frankie.

And you're now at normal bodyweight.

-This is so fast.

-You've now got to keep going for 10k.

-No!

I can't do that!

Whoa!

And relax.

Straddle there.

And we'll slow you down.

OK, Mo,

you're really fast.

What does all this technology mean for the future of our athletes?

We're always researching and innovating new ways,

new technologies, to further increase the chances of our athletes

performing at the highest possible level.

You know what, Vlogster?

I reckon technology in sport is a winning combination.

You're not wrong, Frankie, and you know what?

There's more.

Swiss tech-sperts are developing the next generation tennis court.

Touch sensitive, intelligent and able to analyse every moment of gameplay,

this smart court will be the ultimate connected sport experience.

That sounds incredible. What else have you got for me?

Meet this six-metre-long sailfish.

It leaps, dives and barrel rolls its way through the waves,

reaching speeds of 30mph.

That is impressive. What else have you got in your locker?

Snowboarding with this future concept jacket from Australia.

Wearable tech designers reckon fin-shaped metal alloy turbines

like a jet engine could give riders faster speeds and longer airtime.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Oh, there's the final whistle.

Okey-dokes, time for a bit of role-playing.

HE COUGHS

I'm about to chase the most ferocious animal known to man

down this deep, dark wormhole without a safety net,

wearing just a vest

and surviving by eating only wriggly grubs.

Guessed who I am? No?

Dangerous Steve Backshall.

Oh, have it your own way. Here's Paul.

Hey, guys. Today, I've got awesome RPGs for you to dive into.

Number one on my list

is Kingdom Hearts 2.5.

This is an RPG that combines

Japanese storytelling

with your favourite

Disney characters

in an epic quest to save the universe

from darkness and the heartless.

A quick tip, though. If you use Donald or Goofy,

try not to give them all of your health potions.

They like to use them a lot.

Next up is Trove, which is a massively multiplayer RPG

placed in a world

constructed entirely of cubes

and you're free to explore it

so delve deep looking for loot, confronting monsters and bosses.

There are a lot of classes to choose from

but, if you're looking for something fun,

I suggest trying the Fae Trickster.

He's got a lot of tricks up his sleeve

and he's a great class to start out with.

Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire -

it's a long-running series where you hunt for monsters in the wild.

Catch 'em, tame 'em, battle 'em in an epic quest to travel the world

and catch them all.

Be careful when building a team, though.

Try to keep a varied group of Pokemon.

Fire is weak versus water

and grass is weak versus fire.

So grab your robe, your wizard hat, your beard

and polish off your finest staff

and get to playing some of these role-playing games.

Thanking you, Paul. OK, who's messaging this time?

Will computers ever be smarter than humans?

Accessing databanks.

You humans do have a reason to be smug.

Your brains are so advanced

that today's most advanced computer systems don't even come close.

Researchers in Japan recently used

the fourth most powerful computer in the world

to simulate one second's worth of 1% of the brain's activity

and it took the computer 40 minutes.

Similarly, Google has tried combining 16,000 computers

to mimic the human brain.

Over three days, this system watched 10 million YouTube videos,

at which point it could - drum roll, please -

recognise a picture of a cat.

Whizzkid scientists at IBM have built a computer system called Watson

that was able to beat all contestants on an American TV quiz show.

Watson could do this because it can pass unstructured information.

In other words, read English.

To win the quiz show, Watson read the whole of Wikipedia

and was then programmed to make sense of and use the information

that it read.

British tech-sperts have been able to combine Google and IBM's research

to create a computer program

that can, with just a tiny amount of initial data and limited feedback,

begin to teach itself.

The researchers have put the program to the most prestigious of tasks -

to play classic computer games.

So futurologists think you'll have to wait until 2029

for computers to become smarter than people,

when they'll be able to produce a better version of themselves

than humans could.

Smarter computers are predicted to display emotional intelligence

like telling jokes and stories

and being romantic.

Maybe your operating system won't only

be telling you where the cinema is

but will be asking you there on a date.

Not that that will help me.

I keep asking out Siri

but she's always washing her hair.

Rita,

rescue me!

Hey, guys. My name's Rita

and I'm an interaction designer at Google and this is a day in my life.

I'm in charge of taking ideas and translating them into interfaces

that are really usable.

Hey, I live here.

Come on in.

Sometimes, stairs are the worst.

OK, they're always the worst so, at Google, we get to take the slides.

This is one of my favourite cafes around campus.

That's it. Thanks so much.

Why are you stinky?

The biggest thing at Google is collaboration.

The best solutions come when everyone is working together.

So I can't take you inside this room.

This is where we user test a lot of our projects.

It's super secret and super cool.

As you can see, there's a lot of awesome stuff around campus,

like this T-Rex.

Because campus is so big,

we get these awesome bikes to get from place to place.

And this is the Google Maps Street View car.

We use this to map the world.

And that wraps up our time at Google today.

Thanks so much for stopping by.

Rita, that was, like, totally awesome.

OK, just time for another Babblebuster

and today's letter is O.

O is for ohnosecond.

An ohnosecond is the tiny fraction of time

it takes you to realise you've just made a big mistake,

like the moment you accidentally delete the phone number

of that cute girl that you met at the pool on holiday

or when you hit the send button on an e-mail

and realise you forgot to include the attachment. D'oh!

Right, that's it. I'm out of here.

Next time on Technobabble,

Lucy goes hands-free when she takes a self-driving car for a spin...

Now we're speeding up.

It's blowing my mind!

..Nicky and Sammy sort the non from the sense

with their guide to internet slang...

-YOLO.

-You only live once.

..and Aoife is back to talk simulator games.

Good luck trying to explore it all.