11/02/2017 Click - Short Edition

In a moment we'll have Newswatch, but first, here's Click.

Few things say the future better than robots.

We seem to be in an era of massive advances at the moment.

This week, a leaked video from Boston Dynamics shows

off its latest machine, called Handle, something its founder

Rolling on with the wheel theme, Piaggio, known for its Vespa

motorcycles, has revealed a new robot servant called Gita.

This robo-suitcase follows its owner's every move,

using cameras in its body and in the user's belt.

But sometimes it's good to look at where we've come from.

The Robots Exhibition at London's Science Museum

is a 500-year history of humanity's attempts to create robots that

There are more than 100 robots here, including some old friends that

And this amazing swan, made from silver, is all the more

incredible because it was made over 200 years ago, in 1773.

If you accept that these clockwork creations are indeed robots,

then you can also argue that the earliest robots were clocks.

It was these mechanical marvels that made the Industrial Revolution

possible, mobilising hundreds of workers to be at the same place

at the same time, enabling goods to be transported,

trains to run accurately, and allowing industry to become

The Industrial Revolution was also the catalyst for massive social

change across the world, bringing about the rise

of the working class, and sparking ideas like capitalism and Marxism.

Now, in the West, Cuba found itself at the epicentre of this shift.

It was the poster child for communism in the West,

right in the back garden of the US, the heart of capitalism.

Richard Taylor has been to Cuba to see how the island is now moving

The iconic images are strikingly familiar.

Cuba today still feels in some ways otherworldly,

Life for most of its 11 million citizens is simple.

They've been living in a state-enforced digital wilderness.

A decade ago, you needed a permit just to buy a PC.

Today, if you're lucky enough to own a smartphone,

There's no mobile data, so Cuban apps are designed to work

Until recently, even basic internet access could only be found

at desktop computers inside state communication centres.

Long queues persist but now people are coming to buy internet

scratchcards which can finally get them online elsewhere.

In this Havana park, small gatherings of Cubans

But getting online is slow, unreliable and,

Luis Rondon Paz is a self-proclaimed hack-tivist, and as a former

government IT administrator, knows the system well.

Everything in Cuba is restricted, filtered, as the rest of the world.

Basically, they censor everything that might

It might be porn, gay, or political things.

But the biggest barrier for locals - the price.

A single hour of full web access costs $2,

The government says expanding the internet is a priority

and central Havana is now conducting trials of in-home net access

And it boasts of a growing number of public wifi hotspots,

too, around 300 in total, and growing.

Still, not exactly blanket coverage for a country 700 miles wide.

Cuba blames its ageing communications network

on the six-decade-old trade embargo with the US.

Critics say that's a convenient excuse for a communist state that

fears losing control over information.

Relations with America are now at best uncertain

In the aftermath of the President's historic visit here two years ago,

prospects for American companies doing digital business

Company boss Eric Schmidt inking a deal in December that gives Cubans

fast access to content from services like YouTube and Gmail.

The thing is, when you're running an internet-based business,

the last thing you want to do is traipse across town

So some Cubans who are fed up with the government strategy

on access have come up with their own rather inventive solutions.

The results are found on rooftops in towns and cities

across the nation, in the form of pole-mounted antennaes

which are pointed towards the local communications centre,

giving them internet access and even wifi.

The practice isn't exactly legal, but as I discovered that minor

detail doesn't deter Cubans from getting their information fix.

This is the paquete semanal, literally the weekly packet.

It refers to a highly organised service in back streets and front

rooms across the country, giving locals content downloaded

often only hours earlier via satellite.

There's pirated movies, news shows, documentaries,

It's hugely popular with customers who can fill their USB drives

with an entire terabyte, hundreds of hours, for the price

And the rise of the paquete is the price the Cuban regime itself

is paying, a reaction to the state dogma of keeping

Cuban authorities should be less afraid of the free flow

of information because the need for information functions

People need information and people will get information,

no matter if you are going to provide it or not.

There's a political need to understand differently

Progress is undoubtedly too slow for many Cubans.

But recent overtures do at least give some people

Ever wondered what cats get up to when no one's there?

Meet Roxy and Zara, who seemed agreeable to taking part

If you've ever wanted to watch, talk to or even play with your cats

when you're not with them, then this could help.

Once the device is connected to your home wifi, you can login

anywhere you can get your phone online.

There's a laser game to play, snacks at the tap of an icon,

and a function to proudly make and share videos and cat snaps.

This rather unusual looking setup works in quite a similar way.

This smart collar has been around a little while now and is available

It allows owners to keep an eye on temperature,

pulse, breathing rate, heart rate variability and even

the positions a pet is in, so could be particularly beneficial

if there are health concerns or an injury to keep an eye on.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a game of cat and mouse going on here,

the latter played by a remote control rodent.

Although it actually consists of the cat being chased

by the mouse, which probably says it all about my day's filming.

That was Lara, and this is Maria, the first blockbuster robot

from the ground-breaking 1927 film Metropolis.

The visual effects in that movie were absolutely stunning,

given that it is actually 90 years old.

Next, we are going to continue our look at some of the visual effects

behind the latest blockbuster movies.

We have Adam Valdes, BAFTA and Oscar nominee,

to tell us more about the visual effects he used to bring back

Every time you see the world in Jungle Book, someone has

fabricated plants, trees, the dead twigs and leaves

And it's only really when the surrounds around him

makes him feel present within it that the magic

trick comes off, that you believe that this is just a photograph,

So we take a shot like Mowgli saying goodbye to his mother and we say,

John really wants some sort of physical contact.

It needs to be an intimate moment, their eyes need to be locked

We can't have a feeling that he's acting to a tennis ball,

We really need to feel the scene emotionally.

You can locate the positions of his hands, the puppet

And we can track it really carefully in three dimensions

That way we make sure the contact is correct,

and then we simulate the fur on the mother's neck.

And we actually replace the better part of his hand with the digital

double of his hand, so that the CG hand and the CG fur of the mother

wolf are actually in the computer together,

and when we put our lighting on that and create the final images,

The magic trick is blending the hand into his arm.

The render power required to generate a movie like this,

I think it was 240 million renderer hours, or something like that.

Which means if it was one computer it would have taken 3000 years,

These individual frames that you see can be 40,

50, 60 hours on a computer just rendering one frame.

We'll see more and more imagery where we really start to not

be able to tell the difference between something that's

That was Adam Valdes on the magic behind the Jungle Book.

And that's it for the shortcut of Click and the robots at the London

museum. I'll put a load of photos up

on Twitter for you to browse The full version of Click is up on

iPlayer for you to view whenever you fancy.