Hay Festival Click - Short Edition

A glorious weekend in beautiful Wales.

This is Hay-on-Wye, known as the town of books.

This is where authors, thinkers and even royals come

to embrace their love of reading and discuss some

And once every year, it becomes the centre of the literary world as

Of course it is also just a nice place to sit and read.

The Hay Festival has been described as the literary Glastonbury -

But it turns out you don't have to have

Case in point, in about ten minutes, we're on.

To paraphrase the acting God that is Kevin Costner, if you build it,

Filling up the BBC tent as we brought Click live to an audience

who were in no way bribed to be there that

We brought the geek with talk of 360 vision.

The weird thing about this, if you ever try this, it looks as

We amazed science wiz Dr Emily Grossman with 360 sound.

And we gave a sneak peek of our upcoming adventure in China.

And it all ended with a musical climax where we played the tent.

Yes, you heard me - we played the tent, live.

But we weren't the only geeks at Hay, so we used the opportunity

to meet and chat with some of the big names in science and tech.

Almost 18 months ago, the quest to build the world's first commercial

space line suffered a major setback after a tragic accident.

After the accident in October 2014, a thorough investigation was

undertaken by the NTSB, the US accident investigation board.

They established over a period of six or seven months exactly what

happened to cause the breakup of the spaceship.

Having understood the causes of that accident, we have completed

That was rolled out in Mojave a few weeks ago.

We are completing ground tests of that vehicle and will be back

into the test flight programme in a few weeks.

When the original project was announced,

the implication was you would be up and running within a short time.

I think we have learned that space is hard.

And particularly if you are building a vehicle

which needs to fly many hundreds if not thousands of times

with paying passengers on board who expect a high level of safety.

None of that comes as a surprise to me.

I would have thought that would be on the table from the beginning.

We knew it was hard, but we looked at what was potentially possible,

but as you get further into the project and you understand the true

complexities and making sure you are not just delivering an extraordinary

experience, but an extraordinarily safe experience,

It seems to me if you were carrying freight

to the International Space Station, you'd make a bit more money.

Is that where you are going with this?

Our focus to date has largely been on getting people into space.

But we also recognise there is a huge demand right now for launching

So satellites are getting smaller, smarter, cheaper and lighter.

There is an insatiable desire for the data they can generate up there.

But the cost and availability of launch

It is one of these unusual industries which

has proven itself to be incredibly important, but the technology used

to get people and payload up there has not changed dramatically

We are very focused on getting this first step right,

but we also spend a little bit of time thinking what might come next.

Another fascinating talk, this time from roboticist Fumio Iida.

In his research he asks the question, why do robots,

with all their processing power and sensors, still find it

Especially when the animal world finds them the

We are trying to learn how we make motion in an efficient way.

We can walk for hours and hours without any problems,

but if you want to make robots walk in a similar way they can only walk

for 20 or 30 minutes and they run out of battery.

He argues that even the robots we have seen that can walk well

Instead, we should build bodies that are naturally balanced,

that stay upright, and that move without any processing power.

The amazing, jawdropping moment from your presentation was

Can you explain for our audience the bit about the fish?

So, this is an experiment done by researchers in the US, who made a

fish dead from a brain perspective, so they anaesthetised it.

If you put the fish on the table, it is just dead.

As soon as he put it in a water flow it starts swimming.

The reason is that to swim, the fish doesn't really need brain

All it needs is a well-designed body in the right environment,

and it reacts to the right stimulus from the physical environment.

How hard is it to make a body that walks by itself?

You showed a video of a body that walks by itself.

You have to think about many different things.

You have to think about the weight of the body,

the weight distribution, the friction, dumping, also the shape

Mechanically it is challenging to design,

The robots that can handle the real world best certainly do

The trick, of course, is achieving in the lab what Mother Nature has

We are not the only ones working incredibly

Lara has been out and about in the park playing with some animals.

This week I am testing some gadgets that need a little bit of help

I have been asking around the BBC for any suggestions

and it seems that someone is meeting me here at midday.

Pleasure's all mine, Cocker, Hacker T Dog here, star

Here I am making my break-out presenting debut on grown-up telly!

Normally, it is us humans who get the great gadgets to play with.

This week, I have something for you guys, so I wondered

There is even something to keep dogs fit and healthy.

I think we might need to find a real dog.

Whilst I go look for one, can you make yourself useful?

This is like one of those human fitness track

It is available for iOS, Android and Windows phone.

You set it up in pretty much the same way you do

any activity tracker, only you need to input the breed of dog,

It should be able to tell you how much activity the dog needs to be

getting and you can start tracking what it is actually doing.

You can see how much activity the dog has been getting throughout

the day, and if you want to look at what has been happening over

the week, here is the full data, and you can tap on any day to get

210 minutes of activity on Sunday, that was a busy day!

This is an app that uses artificial intelligence to identify what breed

It can give you a percentage like us to familiar breed and can tell the

difference between a real dog and an inanimate object, like a cat!

It was spot on for Truffle, and some other dogs are tested it on.

But it wasn't so lucky when it came to Lucky's mixed breed.

And just to add a totally pointless but compelling extra, or you can

photograph friends and family to see which dog they most resemble.

Although it did seem to think that Hacker was real.

Ball Ready is a quirky combination of snack feeder and ball thrower.

It can entertain your pet when you can't

and you can select the quantity of food you wanted to provide.

It can be used indoors or outdoors, and after firing out balls for the

dog to fetch, it will reward them with snacks for returning them.

Admittedly, it takes a bit of practice,

but once they have got the knack it is a great way to wear them out.

That is it for the short version of Click. The full version is mine. And

next week we will be in China. Can't wait. See you there.