Click US special Click

in an American air-strike.

Now it's time for Click.

This week we are heading to the US and jetting into the future.

There will be robot holograms, swashbuckling drones,

and imaginary sea monsters.

This is absolutely stunning.

You thought you knew virtual reality, well so did I.

You thought you knew virtual reality, well so did I.

Then I came to NASA's jet propulsion laboratory.

These are genuine images collected by the Mars Rover Curiosity,

and the Mars orbiter.

Over there, there is Curiosity.

Hello, old friend.

I can actually walk around the Mars Rover.

Look at this!

Destination Mars is opening soon as a tourist attraction

at the Kennedy Space Centre, but it is already a collaborative

experience that allows scientists to discuss the Red Planet

while standing on Mars.

Despite that view being very small at the moment,

it really does work.

With the HoloLens, there are no cables and no external sensors.

This thing knows where it is and which way you are looking

simply by the sensors that are in the headset,

and that means there are no restrictions,

which means I can keep walking over here, and walk all the way

up this hill.

Or if I really want, I can just disappear off this way

and carry on trekking across Mars.

Excuse me, everybody.

Carry on about your work.

I'm still on Mars!

Ooh, there's a photocopier!

In theory, that means if you have the data and know

what the landscape on Mars looks like 100 miles that way,

I could just keep walking!

HoloLens is actually an augmented or mixed virtual reality,

which means real objects and virtual ones can appear

alongside one another.

JPL is using it to take plans off the computer screen and think

about them in 3-D at full scale before anything is actually built.

We have to build this thing here on the ground,

and people have to get around it.

You have to be able to put your arm in and turn

a screwdriver, for example.

That is a time-consuming thing to check on a 2-D computer screen

at a smaller scale.

We can place pointers on the model, on the hologram, for example

if we want to talk about that antenna, I can place a pointer

there and you and I can both see it and everyone participating

in the session can see it.

These pointers really do get over the final drawback to the mixed

reality experience, the fact that you can't actually touch

the 3-D model.

I dare you not to imagine this changing our world.

Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Mind equals blown.

This is stunning and I am totally buying into virtual reality.

But guess what, it gets even better.

In Salt Lake City, Mark Cieslak has been having the fright of his life.

In the shadow of Utah's peaks, cutting-edge virtual reality

is being developed.

Welcome to the Void, or to be more precise,

the research and development facility.

Just inside here is one possible future for virtual reality

technology.

The Void is a virtual reality experience that takes place

inside specially constructed sets.

Kitting up requires a backpack, chest rig, and headset.

What you see inside the headset, you feel and touch in

the real world.

Its creators call this setup hyperreality.

OK, so I'm in a temple.

I look up and I can see the stars, some ruins around me,

and if I reach out and touch the walls and feel them,

I can feel a throne in front of me.

I think myself and my other two cofounders really wanted to create

a holodeck, we are all Star Trek geeks.

Magic and illusion design, film production and television

production were in our background.

I can see flames rising up.

As I get closer to them, it gets hotter.

Sensors trigger heaters, which makes me think the stone bowl

in front of me has erupted in flames.

Over here I can see a torch.

Oh!

I can feel it is well.

I take it out of the hole in the wall, and I'm holding

in my hand what seems to be some kind of Aztec torch.

OK, so the headset again is prompting me to look for things

inside the environment.

To look around for clues as to where I have to go next.

The ability to explore wirelessly massively changes virtual reality.

One of the limiting factors of high-end virtual reality

in the home is that the headset still needs to be tethered

to a computer, which limits how far you can move from the computer.

The guys here have thought about that and cheated a little bit,

because the headset is still tethered to a computer,

but the computer lives in this backpack.

The rest of this rig is capable of doing a bunch of other things.

It is equipped with pads which trigger a physical feeling

when things are activated.

The door has just shattered in front of me, and across my chest it felt

as if the rocks from that door smashed into me.

The current generation of this kit does have its limitations.

There are definitely limits, going upstairs or climbing

are challenges that we will have to face later.

It turns out the team at the Void can't just rely on technology

to create this experience.

I have been in illusion design and creation for over a decade,

and it turns out that magic and virtual reality belong together.

So you can take things like misdirection and psychological

cues and place them together.

Something touches you...

Oh!

Cobwebs, there are spiders everywhere!

We can't see the headset view for the next bit as it is a bit

scary for this time of day.

As I stepped into what I thought was a huge cavern, I was attacked

by a giant sea monster.

This is the effect it had on me.

It's moving!

Ah!

Off camera, fans blast cold air at me, simulating a monstrous roar.

That was awful!

I'm back in the real world, that was intense.

The team here have collaborated with the moviemakers behind

the new Ghostbusters film, creating an attraction

for Madame Tussaud's in New York.

But their ultimate goal is to create their own experienced

centres, a bit like VR arcades, providing a host

of different virtual destructions.

Wow!

Tell me that was incredible as it looked, because it looked

incredible.

It was incredible, a little bit scary as well,

but a terrific experience.

I suppose this is what VR has lacked so far, it looks brilliant

because you can look and listen all around,

but you can't actually feel the environment.

I have tried a lot of VR games and experiences,

and I think I might have trained my brain to know

that they are completely false, there is nothing in the room

that is real.

When I see a wall I can't touch it.

So at first it was a bit unnerving when I went into the Void

and I could touch the surfaces, and when I sat in the throne

it was really there.

It really helps to sell the idea that you are in these spaces.

Is this the future for VR?

I think it is one possible future for entertainment VR.

The idea of a lot of people going into one massive space

and all playing games together at the same time is not a new idea,

we used to have videogames arcades in the 80s.

I think interactive videogame arcade might be a thing in the next decade.

Pretty good. Absolutely.

Hello, and welcome to the Week in Tech.

This was the week that Google's Deep Mind team teamed up

with the Moorfield Eye Hospital, to try to detect the onset

of blindness.

A million anonymous eye scans are being analysed for early signs

of disease humans might miss.

I will have to go in a minute, that will be the self driving robot

delivering my lunch.

Just Eat have joined forces with Starship Technologies

to autonomously deliver food orders in London.

The robots will be watched over remotely by humans,

who can take control at any time.

Hopefully they are not hungry.

Ever thought hamsters on a hamster wheel are not really achieving much?

No, me neither, but here is a solution anyway.

The hamster-powered hamster drawing machine lets the energetic creature

effectively take a selfie.

This artist's nifty use of open source software has made it possible

to translate the efforts of the hamster into a work of art.

Finally, an engineer in Cambridge has spent four years and ?40,000

filling his living room with one massive game of Tetris.

Initially, James Newman just wanted to see how a transistor works,

but he said he got carried away and now he has 40,000 transistors

and 10,000 LED lights.

Where does it go?

There?

Today, I am getting to take a big one off my bucket list.

I am at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, and I am facing

down a drone that can really look after itself.

This is research that will help drones to fly smarter and avoid

obstacles, be they natural or man-made.

Honestly, I'm still more afraid of it than it is of me.

So, the system knows where I am because I'm covered in reflective

markers on my arm, my glove, my helmet and on the foil.

So, you see the nice little wireframe depiction of me

on the screen.

It is sampling the entire world that it concerns itself with.

It tries to connect a path through this world

that is free of obstacles.

But these obstacles might move and intersect with a path,

it has to replan, and all of this is very computationally expensive.

It could take days or months to compute, but we have to do it

in a matter of a few milliseconds.

How many times have you been hit by the drone and how many times did

you hit it?

How many drones have you been through?

More than I would like.

I think of it as like training a semi-wild animal, you don't know

quite what it is going to do.

It bites once in a while, but it has been going better

recently, so we will say ten times.

Let's say ten.

I am so Luke Skywalker right now.

My bad, probably...

That is one of the most exhilarating things I have done today.

The point of this is to arm drones with the ability to avoid things,

pigeons, people, random fencers.

But on a large level we will also need to be able to monitor drones

as they go about their daily business, and that is

what Kate Russell has been looking at.

Los Angeles International airport, the seventh busiest in the world.

Last weekend it handled a record 1.2 million passengers going home

for Independence Day celebrations.

It is not just people and aeroplanes that air traffic control have

to worry about.

Last year, there were 39 near collisions between drones

and aeroplanes in Los Angeles, and almost 250 incidences

across the US.

It's something we are all trying to wrap our arms around.

There is technology out there that we are entertaining,

it is difficult to understand exactly how we can get our arms

around that activity, especially in an airport as complex

as Los Angeles.

One system being trialled links official data streams and other

useful information such as weather forecasts so that drone operators

can fly more safely.

All you have to do is fire up an app, so you can receive traffic

alerts and know what hazards might be in the area you're in.

As well as helping drones fly more safely, it also helps airports

like Los Angeles know who is in their airspace.

I got an exclusive look behind the scenes.

You can clearly see the areas that show where operators

are discouraged from flying.

The three representations up here, if you click on any of them,

will give you information such as altitude, numbers to call,

who they are, when they made the request and the type

of device they are flying.

We can quickly establish a dialogue with a drone operator and suggest

that they bring down their drone.

This system is only a pilot, but it is clear that airports

across the world are going to have to figure out how they manage

air-traffic control of drones as they become more common.

As difficult as it is, the skies are only

going to get busier.

Last month, the rules for drones were relaxed in America

as the Federal Aviation Administration announced that

operators can freely fly drones in daylight hours at altitudes

under 400 feet.

NASA is best known for putting expensive rockets into space.

But the second letter in NASA stands for Aeronautics, and they are trying

to get into the increasingly busy airwaves.

You can get on better with managing the traffic and a team

of researchers here at NASA.

They are figuring out how to structure a broad platform to let

drones exist with stakeholders.

It is about large-scale visual line of sight and beyond that.

Technologies on trial include live data bases,

dynamic geo-fencing and sensors so drones don't crash

into buildings, aircraft or each other.

Largely, there will be flexibility for operators based

on their business needs.

Whether they are doing deliveries, surveillance or search and rescue.

Technologies are still in their infancy with a lot

of lessons to be learnt.

The drone market is exploding, promising to double year on year.

Whatever platform is adopted, it will have to be the ultimate

exercise in rapid scaling to keep up with the demand.

Back in Los Angeles, I am looking at something very sexy.

It is sales data, some of the sexiest I've ever seen.

The more information feels like a physical object,

the more your brain goes to work and can easily understand it.

I am in the company of a man who has devoted his life to developing user

interfaces which turn data into visual things that our visual

brains can understand and analyse.

The more information feels like a physical object,

the more your brain goes to work and can easily understand it.

The human visual system is amazingly good at seeing patterns.

We want to build large-scale interfaces to let people do that.

We are inside the data right now?

Inside someone's spending habits.

I've been in worse places.

This technology is already being used by large companies

to visualise information on data that is usually impossible to get.

The screens and animation are controlled by the wand,

which can spin, zoom and fly through it.

We can pull ourselves up to get a conference in view of the city.

It is very reminiscent of kind of interfaces featured in the movie

that has become a touchstone for this kind of thing,

Minority Report.

There is good reason for that.

John is the man who designed the user interfaces

in Minority Report.

I had been at MIT for many years and I was building

interfaces like this.

The production designer for Minority Report visited,

he said, I think this solves Stephen Spielberg's problem.

I moved out to Los Angeles, spent a year designing

the technical, architectural designs.

For those who don't need the full experience,

here is something a little more average.

This is John's office collaboration tool, which allows many people

to show and discuss their work on the big screen or on the wall.

It allows anyone to use any device, the screens will appear on the wall.

You've got tablets, laptops, those screens are being passed

on to these walls.

Then, anyone can grab a screen and move it somewhere else.

When I say anyone, not just in this room, anyone in any

office that is connected.

Hello, New York!

There, he's pinching at one of our images and taking

it to New York.

Out go one-person meetings, and in comes a free-for-all

where anyone can show anyone anything, video feeds from the web

or live footage from the office.

The future is not just about sharing screens, it is also

about sharing processing power.

John's newest project is an operating system that

would allow different computer programmes to interact with each

other by moving the devices they are running on closer together.

The data is now flowing through the signals

in our analysis module.

It means any programme can talk to the other programme,

just like people.

Compatibility?

That is a rude word when it comes to technology.

It will be a brighter future, if it happens.

For years, Minority Report has been to go to vision of the future,

almost a cliche.

And yet, it is actually happening now.

That is it for this week, we will see you next week.