This week: smoking streets, burning fruit and keeping our cool as we go
live in virtual reality. We are about to put a whole new spin
on the world of mobiles. We are at the Mobile world Congress in
Barcelona devoted to phones, tablets and all things mobile. Although, if
we look a bit distract the it is because we are preparing for a
rather audacious experiment. It is not that we are not interested in
the floating displays, flash cars, smart shoes all robot drones, it is
just that we are about to bash out something a lot more complicated.
Last year we found an entire programme in 360 degrees allowing
those watching to look around the fantastic locations simply by
turning their heads in whichever direction they please. That is the
power of 360, you feel like you have been teleported into the situation.
We also have the ability to stream 360 live so imagine that, the next
time we send a robot to the men if it has a 360 camera on board, we can
put on a pair of goggles and feel like we are there as well. So that
is what we doing today, ready to go live in a 360, not to the men
admittedly, but to a place that is still a pretty strange landscape.
Here we are at the MWC. Enormous homes of madness and noise as
everyone tries to launch their products with maximum pizzazz and
volume. This event is not just about mobiles, virtual reality is
everywhere. Since you can use the phone as a VI said, many strap
people in and held them about. VI can be totally immersive if you have
your rain 360 chair. -- your very. I do not want to think what kind of
experience this chap is having. It is more about the camera equipment
you can and cannot use. You are currently watching it through a
Nokia professional 360 camera worth about 45,000 US dollars but it is a
beautiful looking thing. It has at lenses so you can see in all
directions but also shoot in 3-D because the combination of lenses
allows that. What is really weird is it has this enormous battery pack.
This thing has a blind spot to about here. Said they have this almost 360
view and stretch it around. Modern cameras will stitch the scene
together, automatically wrapping the weird video into a sphere around
your head and that is what enables them to go live. If you wanted to
stream the full 360 view, you are going to need some extract it.
Hardware boxes and Internet speed. In a trade show like this, we are
not that lucky. The thing we have to accept in the early days is that to
get really high-quality, stereoscopic video, so you can
really look around and feel a sense of depth, it is going to take a
while. There are bandwidth problem and just having equipment that can
transmit and that amount of data, when you look, the picture gets
rendered exactly where you are looking. It will take a while but we
are starting. We are going to be doing two lives, testing to
different cameras and this is no mean feat because as with last year,
we are coming to this before the manufacturers have made bespoke
equipment. To get the picture, sound and interaction, we have to pack
together various bits and hope no one trips over. My microphone goes
into a transmitter which goes into a receiver which goes into a box which
plugs into another box and another mile of Internet cable which is
going to a network access point here than in the garden. The first camera
is for lenses which between them can shoot in whole trial higher. --
ultrahigh. The viewer only sees are part of these as they look around
the scene. At the moment, it is not showing us anything we have. We are
a bit blurry in London. It was our very first attempt so things were
bumpy and rough around the edges. -15 minutes ago we were supposed to
go. We are going live now. That said, it seemed to hang together and
viewers on our you cheap 360 channel got to find out a bit more about a
car planning to go at a house in miles per hour. Three engines. To
name on jets. Rockets. And you need three of them. To get to 1000 miles
an hour. The gas turbine is for your manoeuvres and then the rockets fire
you up to give you the kick to over a thousand. Streaming such a
high-quality picture takes a lot of data hence we have to use that why
Internet connection but for our second attempt, we went commando.
The Ricoh camera is the one we used to shoot the helicopter scene last
year. It is only to Kate, same as a high-definition picture but what you
see is much lower resolution but it means it is possible to stream the
video live over the mobile network which is what we did, in style, with
a drone. A taste of what it is like to be so close to a drome, you might
lose a limb. Weird. Very soon, Ricoh is releasing an update with more
connectors, expandable storage and it will do the stitching in the
camera itself rather than needing a computer. For now, we were pretty
happy with our experiment and very soon there will certainly be more
fully integrated chips to let us go live in 360 with much less bother.
When we went to film the collider, we had to stitch the footage
together manually, using a powerful computer and software and many, many
hours. Since then, that cases been released. It has one remote. It also
comes with a box that does all the stitching. In a couple of months, it
will release an update which allows you to do that live. And if you want
to create your 360, this tiny camera plugs into your Android phone. The
videos are not live but the stitching is quick and you can share
it easily on your social network. Anyway, in a 360! Let's see some
phones. -- enough 360! A couple of years ago we got to play with the
Sony camera which could shoot video in super slow motion and we
discovered that everything looks cool when it is filmed 40 times
slower... Well, almost everything. So it is not real surprise that
technology has been shut down and down and made its way into a phone.
This is the new Sony premium and it can feel at 960 frames her second.
Which is great news for glitter borders everywhere. To do this, Sony
has had to invent some super fast storage into the image processor
itself. The problem is, because there is only so much space, you are
limited to only short bursts of slow Mo every few seconds within your
video. It is right when you want to catch something in super slow motion
that is going on for a long time, like this. Not when you want to
catch something that only happens once at a split-2nd, it is quite
nerve racking. Case in point, setting fire to render zest which I
did not even know was a thing. That is a problem. The bursts of super
slow Mo is zero point one eight to second said you have to be spot on
with your timing. For the most part, I was a bit too trigger happy but
when you do get it, flaming oranges! It is worth bearing in mind that
Sony makes the camera parts for many other mobile phones. If this catches
on, we could well see it in other phones before Toulon. What else is
hot here? Let's have a round-up Stephen. Incredibly, at the
convention this is a phone everybody was talking about. It has
resurrected a scintillating piece of nostalgia in the Nokia 3310. Do you
remember that? Close to indestructible, seemingly infinite
batch we live, it now has modern curves, jazzy colours and a new
version of snake. That we has also going back to basics. It has a
physical gesture sensitive keyboard. That is the only nostalgia here,
this classic Norris pencil although I would not sharpen it because there
is quite a lot of digital stuff in the end to allow you to do things
like this. Google would much rather cute talk to your devices. Google
home will finally be available for sale outside of the US and Jaime in
the UK. The company also said it will roll out its digital assistant
to mobile phones running marshmallow and nougat. That is a part from
these two mobiles, set to use and is on at instead. It would get its
assistance smart through a snap on back. Others are ditching
customisation. LG launched a new phone without the capability of its
previous mobile. Customers do not fancy art forking out more. The
screen is twice as tall as wide. And it would not be much of a round-up
without at least one mention of the words - five G. Even a standard
exists, it hasn't stopped anyone here from seeking the term all over
the stands. Nowhere more than here. You can see the numbers ticking
away. Sucking up data 50 times faster than your four D phone. We
are not allowed to touch or use of these phones and that could have
something to do with all the cables. It could be some time yet before you
get your hands on these sorts of speeds.
Over the past few years, the air that we breathe in our cities has
become a big issue. Air pollution is an invisible killer and it is
something that many people from politicians to take companies still
needs urgent attention but what to do? All next week, the BBC is going
to be looking at the issue and possible solutions in the Mac so I
can Breathe serious. We'll be looking at some of the gadgets that
might help us to track the pollution around us so we know what to do with
that data. It only took five days this year for London to reach its
yearly air pollution allowance. People were warned to reduce out
your physical exercise as levels soared beyond those in Beijing. A
place where scenes like this are not unusual. And with limits being
exceeded in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, as well as other cities
across the UK, never before have we been so aware of the air we breathe.
Yet, if they are better or worse days of better routes that you could
take them could using a personal air quality tracker help you make better
decisions about what to do, when? First of all, it depends how
accurate they are and that is something I am on a mission to find
out about. The makers of some of these devices say they have gone
through extensive testing over a long period. While our spot checks
today are just a snapshot, I am curious to find out how they measure
up. To carry out our first experiment, I have come to this
central London amused and I have enlisted the help of the University
of Birmingham who for fairness of the experiment have brought along
this which is going to take some pretty serious recordings of their
quality along with my four devices here to see how they do. This tube
can be attached to a bag to track the OC as well as carbon monoxide.
-- VOC. It tracks carbon monoxide and at a personal and crowd sourced
element to the critical data it already displays. This is smart
phone case has an air quality sensor tracker linked -- tracking VOCs. And
this one called Plume will work alongside the apps. It tracks
nitrogen oxide and VOCs eventually looking at particular matter and O
zone two. They are also available for indoor monitoring. I have given
them five minutes to do their thing but at the moment it is a bit of a
sea of numbers. That I have found a man to find out what this means. I
am joined by Professor Roy Harrison from the University of Birmingham.
What is going on? We are getting different readings but they'll
should be giving us the same impression of the pollution. And
this is where the fun begins. Let's look at our first device. This is
the Atmo Tube. Jono it is looking at 0.22 ppm of which is saying it is
good at quality. 93 out of 100 so things are pretty clean, this one
says. This will be mostly coming from traffic. Indoors, there are
other sources but now we are outdoors. Comparing that to your
readings, are they on track? I would say that our reason it -- our
reading is different pollutant but rather more polluted than the 93 out
of 100. I wouldn't call it good, I would call the air quality average.
This one is reading carbon monoxide. It is giving us concentrations that
appeared to be a little bit above 1.5 parts per million. That would be
consistent with what we are seeing in the nitrogen. -- nitrous dioxide.
That in a sense is a more predictable sense with the ones
depending on the organic compounds because that is a big range of
substances and the sensitivity will not be the same for every compound.
Then we are looking at the i-Blades phone case. It is calling this
street zero which is a funny way to work. I think it is. Ideally it
needs to be zero in a clean atmosphere but if you don't have an
independent monitor, how do you know where the clean atmosphere is? I
have a bit of difficulty with this one. The final one
we have is Flow by Plume. Sensor is looking at correlating with our
device in the car. It is telling us that the pollution level is high. I
understand that that is a judgement against health -based standards from
the World Health Organization. I do find a little bit surprising because
I wouldn't regard the levels here is high and certainly not as a
particular health risk, for example. For the second part of our
experiment, we have come to a somewhat busier street. They could
street, the home of Sherlock Holmes were our investigation shall
continue, Professor. The readings are changing. What you make things?
Well, it is a busy street. Our reference analyser in the car is
looking at concentrations about double of those we are reading in
the news or three times higher. White Atmo Tube registers are rising
pollution but still kept -- calls the air quality good. The i-Blades
case rose from zero and Flow by Plume and simply says high. There is
an argument from some bat by tracking this data and taking
control ourselves, we are diminishing the government's
responsibility to actually improve the situation but what does our
scientist walk away from our day's activity thinking? They are very
variable in their performance. One could try and use them to judge
which routes were the best ones if one was walking to work, for example
but that would not be a simple button because the pollution levels
change from day to day raised on the weather so you need to do the
different routes many times in order to get them representative at
looking at the actual pollution levels but I suspect the answer will
be no better than just looking at the traffic and to say wow, this is
a quiet road, why don't you use this one? -- why don't I use this one? I
need to run a lot with the devices or keep my eyes open without.
That was Lara and a bigger source of air pollution in the developing
world at -- is that produced by the burning of kerosene. It is also
dangerous and can cause housebuyers. Obviously it would be preferable to
move to solar power but are rigged like this costs $200. Something many
families cannot make as a single lump sum. This company is suggesting
renting a solar system like this with a panel and all this kit to
families in return to micro- payments of about 50 cents a day
that they can make on the mobile network. Once they pay for the
equipment, they get to keep it. If they stop making payments at any
point, this box can be contacted over the mobile network and be
switched off. A similar scheme is being piloted with gas in Tanzania
to try to move people away from cooking with charcoal. Again, the
barriers to entry meant buying an exact -- entire gas can it staff is
expensive. But this allows micro- payments over mobile which all are
small and announced it be released to each person. You can ask to move
the metre but if you do it sends an alert to the scheme at's
administrators. Here is something else that has
impressed us at NWS C. Look at our faces in this picture. This is a
phone that was released a couple of months ago that allows you to take
three photos. Then you can view the photos in 3-D without glasses on the
screen because it has a lenticular display. Which means your left I
only get left information and the Right I only get right eye
information. If you hold it right at the sweet spots, you get a pretty
picture. If you hold it outside the sweet spot, everything goes crazy
and I wouldn't recommend that. That is it for Click in the MWC in
Barcelona. I hope you enjoy that. Be kind but be honest. Thanks for
watching. I will see you soon. For most of us, Friday
was a miserable day but, for the favoured few,
it was glorious. If you don't believe me, look
at the Weather Watchers picture.