The over-ear headphone has been completely reimagined. From cushion to canopy, AirPods Max are designed for an uncompromising fit that creates the optimal acoustic seal for many different head shapes —fully immersing you in every sound.
AirPods Max combine high-fidelity audio with industry-leading Active Noise Cancellation to deliver an unparalleled listening experience. From deep, rich bass to accurate mids and crisp, clean highs, you’ll hear every note with a new sense of clarity.
have poured my blood sweet and tears into making this magazine. This is the first of many issues that will be coming from Techstar Magazine. I chose to focus on making it about technology and travel. Two topics I am interested in learning more about. While it was mandatoy to focus on travel for this magazine, it has given me the opportunity to expand my knowledge on technology all around the world. Had I not been told to focus on travel, I would have focused on technology in the United States and had a more narrow minded approach. I loved creating a vibe for this magazine that both suited the topic and my personal taste. I have learned a lot while making this magazine and will continue to learn as more issues are published.Issue 05 Fall 2022
Editor-in-Chief Christi Zargaryan Junior Editor Kristy Zergeryen
The contents in TechStar are copyright materials no portion of the issue may be reproduced without written persmission from the publisher. Copyright © 2022 by TechStar Magazine
MIUMIU.COM
Headphones are one of the biggest audio markets right now and we’re continuously testing new models as they arrive. Read on for our pick of the best value performers to undergo our rigorous review routine.
It’s a shame the AirPods Max are so much more expensive than their noise-cancelling rivals, but once you try them it’s hard to take them off. The plush design and comfortable fit present an immediate feeling of luxury, and this only grows once you start playing music.
The active noise cancelling works brilliantly, general sound quality is
crisp and impactful, and the 3D Spatial Audio feature is a gamechanger if you’ve never used it. This uses head-tracking tech to create a surround sound effect, which can give movie playback a definite edge compared to other headphones. Battery life is respectable too, with Apple’s 20-hour estimate tracking well with our own testing.
The Bose 700 on-ear headphones are still the runner-up in our best headphones list and sport a smart design and cool features. They are equipped with eight microphones, six of which are employed to deliver Bose’s champion noise cancellation when listening to music or talking on
the phone. It offers up to 11 levels of adjustable ANC that work equally well to neutralize noise across different frequencies.
The 700s produce clean, balanced audio for crisp highs and solid bass; lows are felt more when listened to at maxANC level.
Sony’s new flagship headphones are the ultimate all-rounders, offering superb noise-cancelling, exceptional sound performance, tons of comfort, intuitive controls and plenty of special features. So, pretty much like the previous XM4s did, then.
These Sonys are a confident, convincing and enjoyable listen in every respect: low frequencies are muscular but agile, highs are well managed and there’s plenty of detail across the range. Noise cancelling—always an XM-series strong point—banishes pretty much all external sound, and the excellent Sony headphones connect app allows you to personalize your audio according to perfered taste.
The touch controls and battery life (30 hours with ANC on, 40 with it off) also beat the competition and though the design tends towards the bland, the fact that both the headphones and packaging are made almost entirely from recycled materials is a further mark in its favor.
By Grace Stetson
At the end of May, 443 days after its closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tech Interactive, San Jose’s family-friendly science and technology center, reopened to the public. Throughout the busy day, staff was visibly enthusiastic to see its community members again.
Stevens, who assumed her position in October, was ecstatic not only to welcome back the public, but also the Tech’s staff, who made the reopening possible following last spring’s seamless transition to virtual and hybrid programming.
“We’re still thinking about what we can do to help our community, but also making sure our staff is taking care of themselves,” she says, noting that this was the first time she’s met many staff in person. The team is following Santa Clara County’s Public Health guidelines to ensure safety, and the museum will require masks and physical distancing for
the foreseeable future—even after the statewide reopening in June.
Throughout the last year, Hart has used lesson plans from the Tech’s programming—such as the Engineering and Design Challenge—to keep her students interested and engaged. An alumna of the tech academies program, which provides professional development to educators in underserved communities, Hart says she was grateful to see The Tech’s most recently opened exhibit Solve for Earth focus on sustainability practices with
hands-on examples from Bay Area cities. The exhibit had a notable effect on her student Catherine.
The Tech will be open weekends and holidays this summer as vaccination rates increase.
Japan has a national gift for holding in balance the stateliness of tradition and the marvel of novelty. So it ought to come as no surprise that on the western margin of the archipelago, on a serene bay in a remote area of the Nagasaki Prefecture, there is an enormous theme park dedicated to the splendors of imperial Holland. It follows with perfect logic that the historical theme park’s newest lodging place is the world’s first hotel staffed by robots.
The hotel, even before it opened last summer, had received extensive coverage in the international and domestic press for its promise of novel ease and convenience. But when I arrived at the Huis Ten Bosch theme park very late one humid summer night, just days after the fanfare of the robot hotel’s ribbon-cutting, nobody was quite sure where it might be found. Even the employees of the resort’s Hotel Okura, a towering copy of Amsterdam’s
Centraal Station replete with stone reliefs and mansard roofs, discovered themselves unable to come to my aid. In rudimentary Japanese I asked where one might find the Henn na Hotel. The name is an untranslatable double entendre: The literal meaning is “Strange Hotel,” but it’s very close to the word for “evolve”; it’s designed to acknowledge the slight uncanniness that might attend the coming hospitality singularity. The dual meaning, however, seemed lost on the Okura’s concierge, whose rigorous training hadn’t prepared her to counsel swarthy, disreputable-seeming, late-arriving foreigners in search of evolved accommodation. Before I could back away, she held up one finger, then marked a third place for good measure. “Maybe,” she concluded, “it is here.” I did a little Kraftwerk automation dance to clear things up, but it only seemed to alarm her further.
My journey had taken 24 hours, and I looked forward to interacting with no more humans en route to a dreamless sleep.
The world of tomorrow exists in Japan today–at a hotel run by robots.
She bowed and looked at her feet, then busied herself at her drawer, eventually withdrawing a map of the park and its environs; at almost 400 acres, Huis Ten Bosch is nearly the size of Monaco. Her pen hovered over the park’s periphery, at the verge of the hills that surround mock Holland.
The concierge had reddened considerably. She did not know where one might find the hotel; at the same time, it was a source of great shame to her to think she might disappoint a patron. The Japanese language and culture do not distinguish between a guest and a customer—even, as in this case, a customer of somebody else’s hotel—so her inability to assist felt to her like a jagged tear in the social fabric. For my entire tenure at that counter, she was going to mark, with fear and hope, an arbitrary sequence of potential strange hotel locations. I backed away, bowing, to spare her this potentially endless exercise. The Japanese desire to save face makes omnipresent the threat of looping infinite regress, and it wasn’t fair to either of us to let it.
This initial exchange was depleting but in an instructive and relevant way. One of the many wonderful contradictions of Japan is that it hosts both the world’s most mature service industry and the world’s most advanced androidal technology. It was, in fact, with that contradiction
in mind that I’d set out to visit our service future, to see how nostalgic I’d be, in the face of their summary deletion, for human beings.
From the outside, the hotel was white and boxy and modular, an interlocking assemblage that had obviously been clicked together onsite.
The glass doors slid open, revealing a small anteroom lined with rows and rows of bone-colored orchids. The light background music would have made an excellent soundtrack for an anxiety dream set in a bouncy-castle ball pit. A second set of sliding glass doors parted and a large furry creature, like an overgrown tooth lined in pink felt, cocked its head and welcomed me, first in Japanese and then in English, to the robot hotel.
At the first check-in counter was a small toy robot with a friendly face and sparkling pupils. One counter over stood a young female android in a buttoned white tunic, with a round white bellhop cap over a side-parted cascade of black hair and a scarf tied around her neck. A small sign in front of her said that she spoke only Japanese. She bent her head silently forward and smiled. The third lane advised that here English was spoken. Behind the desk, wearing a periwinkle bow tie, a bellhop cap, and a neckbeard, was a human-scale velociraptor.
It reared back and lifted its talons as if preparing for a hug, and its jaws twitched and stuttered. The female android glanced over and blinked slowly. I approached the floor mat, where two velociraptor prints indicated where one was supposed to stand for check-in. The velociraptor bowed deeply.
“Please say your name in full,” the velociraptor said. The robot voice, whose only concession to human or dinosaur speech was a throatily serrated edge, came from a speaker somewhere below and behind the counter. I entered my name, inserted a credit card, and got a receipt for a room in the B wing. The screen asked me to direct my attention to the facial-recognition tower in front of me, for keyless entry, “while the machine authenticates your face.”
“Check-in is all finished,” the velociraptor said. “Enjoy your comf-fordable stay.” The velociraptor bowed very slowly and deeply, the sort of bow one practices on the off chance one might one day encounter the emperor.
At some point in the past 50 years, the status of robots underwent a shift in the popular imagination: They evolved from something that might save us—from tasks deemed dirty, dangerous, or repetitive—to something from which we
might have to be saved. Dirty and dangerous are not all that controversial; nobody of sound mind longs for the days when humans regularly fell into vats of boiling steel. It’s repetitive that presents the real problem, for what the march of the robots has shown is just how wide a swath of human activity is so repetitive as to be plausibly automated. The fear of
repetitiveness is not, of course, a fear of robots themselves. It’s the fear that there’s just nothing all that special about people. We’re not afraid of the encroachment of machines; we’re afraid of the increasingly unignorable fact that we ourselves are not.
“
It has not been until the past decade or so, when robots have eaten their way up the class hierarchy, that we’ve been so stunned to be divested of the talents that once seemed inalienable. It was one thing when robots replaced blue-collar workers, because nobody ever defined humanity as the beings that attached one small part to another small part a hundred times an hour. It was quite another when the robots expanded into, say, medical diagnosis, because expertise in radiology seemed like something closer to our hearts. For that you had to be expensively educated. The benefits (in which we’re all autoscanned by subway turnstiles for metastatic tumors) far outweigh the costs (in which radiologists can no longer drive Ferraris).
The robot hotel and the service industry, looked to be the perfect place to evaluate the possible dispensability of humans. It’s neither assembly-line work nor radiology. The service industry is of paramount relevance because the most difficult thing for us to relinquish is the fantasy that human beings should
ultimately be defined as “the things that make other human beings feel good.” If a robot can successfully provide companionship, what’s left for humans? It’s no longer even a question of what humans might do. It is a question of who us humans might be.
Nowhere else has this question become more urgent than it has in Japan. On the one hand, Japan is the kind of place where you might buy one macaroon and recline on a corn-husk pillow as the macaroon is placed in a protective sapphire box, then wrapped in the finest antique silk, and finally delivered unto your outstretched hand with a personalized haiku and a three-minute standing ovation. On the other, Japan has for decades been at the vanguard of service robotic research, developing, employing, and exporting androidal assistants for health care, eldercare, sexual relations, and even just simple company. In American airports, we’re just starting to get accustomed to the supersession of chirpy waitstaff by greasy iPads.
Beside the check-in desk there was a little sign indicating that the
robot porters were only available until 10 pm and that they served only the A wing. The ramp down to the B wing was lined with a kind of slatted screen. I noticed that the screens were sweating profusely, even dripping onto the carpet below. I reached out to touch one; it was cold and clammy, like a panel of defrosting robot bones.
My room was at the most distant end of the corridor. It seemed clear I was the only person in the entire wing. I touched the blinking lozenge that said Scan, and a blue light shone forth from a little black surveillance globe. The door clicked open. The room was quite large by the standards of Japanese hotels—you could hold your arms out and spin and not touch all the walls—and as I walked in, the lights snapped on in an orderly fashion. I was startled by a tinny little-girl’s voice, which spoke to me in Japanese from a plastic pink robot doll at the bedside. It was mostly head, a large block that curved like an inverted molar, or perhaps a diseased turnip, with two yellow antennas emanating from the crown. On the forehead, the robot had three black hearts in a row, as though it had been branded the property of a good-natured love cult. What I had felt since my arrival at the empty robot hotel was a very slight unease,
but nothing so far had had the nauseating force of the actual uncanny; everything had seemed algorithmically Lynchian, without genuine perversity or dislocation. The branded turnip-tooth, however, glowed with a faint menace. It chatted with me as I approached.
There was a little drawing of how to properly massage the pink tooth-turnip’s forehead to encourage its silence.
A small laminated card in front of the robot advised me that it was called Chu-ri-chan. The card, which represented the guest as a disembodied green head, suggested one call out Chu-ri-chan’s name, to which it would reply nandeshouka, or “May I help you?” “If,” the card continued, “red LED is ON of neck, please talk following sentences.” The sentences included questions about the time, the weather, the room temperature, the weather tomorrow, the prospect of turning the lights on and off, and the offer of a “morning call.”
There was a little drawing of how to properly massage the pink tooth-turnip’s forehead to encourage its silence.
I manipulated the bedside tablet for a few minutes, skipping through the options to call for help or watch television, until I found the panel for turning off the motion-detecting lights. Henn-na’s pursuit of unprecedented efficiency that’s one more step it is saving its customers.
“Enjoy your comf-fordable stay.” - check-in robot comf-fordable
New Australian gaming technology that allows groups of friends to roam about together in virtual reality chasing zombies has grabbed the attention of global gamers. The founders of Melbourne-based Zero Latency have found themselves at the top of an exploding world market
Pumping adrenaline, you’re one of a small team of elite fighters negotiating a chaotic cityscape. You’re on a mission to save the world from zombies in the wake of an epidemic that is wiping out humankind.
One of the zombies looms from behind a parked car, and you shoot it as your comrades despatch other
undead amid the deafening noise.
The action is in fact taking place in an empty, warehouse-sized room in Melbourne, Tokyo or Las Vegas. You are participating in a radical freeroam virtual reality game.
Zombie Outbreak and Zombie Survival form part of a suite of immersive virtual reality games developed by Zero Latency, an unlisted company based in the city of Melbourne. The games, the product of Australian information technology, engineering and business knowhow, have catapulted the company to the top of the burgeoning global VR gaming market.In another Zero Latency game,
What distinguishes the Zero Latency technology from competing systems is that it can involve several players in one game, who are free to walk around the space, uninhibited. Until now, VR has been a largely insular experience, the company’s CEO Tim Ruse says.
Virtual reality projects a fictitious but credible three-dimensional scene onto your brain. It does this through sophisticated software and hardware.
Singularity, players must overcome a horde of rogue robots powered by an artificial intelligence agent.One trick is to give the impression of depth by displaying two slightly different angles of a scene in each eye via a custom helmet. The helmet, along with a replica gun and a backpack bearing sophisticated electronics, constitute the players’ kit.
Transceivers—electronic devices that can both send and receive radio signals—in the game venue and the backpacks track players in real time.
Zero Latency is the brainchild of the company’s three co-founders Scott Vandonkelaar, Tim Ruse and Kyel Smith.
Vandonkelaar wrote the original
software, while Smith developed the electronics and other hardware. Ruse has focused on the business model and capital raising.
“We have a tracking system that allows you to experience any digital world like it’s real life. You put on the backpack and headset and walk into a space. It tracks you and the other players,” he says, adding that the virtual space is much bigger than the real space.
“It allows you to interact with a digital scenario... It is the wireless
and social model that is the differentiator for us,” Ruse explains.
The components are either copyright or patented.
“It took little iterative steps to get here,” Ruse says.
“We were very focused on creating a new form of entertainment going very much from the beginning.”
Players are mostly males aged 25 to 40 years but Zero Latency wants to attract more females to get involved in the games.
Seattle, Washington, USA
s usual, I went up to Seattle for PAX, and while I was up there I heard about the Living Computer Museum, an institution in southern Seattle founded by Paul Allen to preserve PC history. I took a day off from the show to wander down there, got a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum, and then got
around to writing about it. Fall’s busy video game release season buried me, and while I eventually transcribed a full hour of audio and wrote the story, it seemed weird to run it six or eight months after the fact—so it just sat on my hard drive.
Paul Allen passed away October 15, though, and as a result it seems like a great time to celebrate one
of his lesser-known ventures. What started as a bit of nostalgia for him, a PDP-10 in a nondescript Seattle warehouse, is now one of the best computer museums I’ve ever been to, a truly special place where visitors can go hands-on with everything from a CDC 6500 to an Apple I to a Xerox Alto. I hope you’ll enjoy this look into the museum.
I hope you’ll enjoy this look into the museum though, both its public-facing side and the enormous support operation it necessitates, and thanks to Paul Allen for founding such a wonderful institution.
“Other museums put a glass in front of their computers. We put a chair.” I toured Seattle’s Living Computer
Museum for over an hour with Exec. Director Lath Carlson, but it’s that one simple line that stuck with me most—a perfect encapsulation of
what makes the Living Computer Museum special.
Housed in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood, the Living Computer Museum doesn’t look like much from the out-
Outside the mainframe room, things start looking more familiar—at least to me. There’s a PDP-8 nearby, this one for visitors to play chess against. It takes forever.
But past that are the minis, some of which are more special than others. Traf-O-Data was the first company founded by Gates and Allen, intended to process traffic reports.
The Living Computer Museum also houses Steve Jobs’s first computer, a customized Apple I—also behind glass. “In ‘85 when Steve was forced out of Apple he left and literally left everything in his office. He didn’t take anything with him,” says Carlson. Apple’s HR department put his stuff up for grabs, “And this engineer that worked there, Don Hutmacher, kind of wandered over there, took a bag of Starbucks coffee and that computer off the shelf.”
”It was modified in some way by the first four employees of Apple,” expersses Carlson. “They’ve all been here and seen it and they go ‘Oh yeah, I drew that arrow on there’ or ‘Oh yeah, he had me wire in that one
Most of the collection is hands-on though, including another Apple I—“It’s the only regularly operating Apple I in the world and we let people use it,” says Carlson. Then past that is a Xerox Alto, the machine Steve
Jobs “borrowed” from when making the Macintosh. The Alto’s running Maze War, either the original first-person shooter.
It starts to feel like there’s a new wonder around every corner, provided you’re at all invested in PC history. Continuing on, every era is represented. There’s an Apple II, a Commodore 64, a TRS-80, a collection of Windows 95 machines, a NeXT Cube—even an Apple III, which Carlson calls a “really horrible machine,” continuing “We’re constantly struggling to have software to run on it.”
There might not be every bit of software on-hand that you remember, but it definitely triggered my nostalgia interacting with physical media again, especially when that entails the clunky floppy and CD drives of years gone by.
goes on behind closed doors, since Carlson was kind enough to allow me back there.
In short: A lot. A lot. The museum, as I said, takes up two floors. It’s well-lit, very modern and clean looking. Then we go up another flight of stairs and suddenly I’m in the warehouse where they stored the Ark of the Covenant.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves stretch on and on and on, barely enough room to walk comfortably between them. It’s dark up here, and everywhere you look there’s more stuff. Carlson chatters as we walk. “These are all CRAY-2 logic modules. We have entire bins of mice from different eras, cables. We have over 3,000 ICs (integrated circuits) in our collection, so you need a particular chip for something we probably have it. Oscilloscopes…” It’s about half stuff that’s been donated, half Paul Allen’s private collection, at least up here.
The Living Computer Museum’s own museum is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg though. I absolutely urge you to go see it, but I’d also love to give you a glimpse of what
Further down you enter the software archives, “Everything from more modern machines and Atari and all kinds of things like that to games that are on paper tape. Here are punch cards.” Carlson pauses. “I don’t even know what some of these are. We have a couple-year backlog generally.”
The racks continue. Carlson takes me through a few shelves’ worth of
“Other museums put a glass in front of their computers. We put a chair.”
- Paul Allen
schematics. “We actually use these. The engineers have to pull these all the time. That’s another thing that sets us apart from a normal museum. It’s not like they’re just going into that drawer and sitting forever.” There are VHS tapes, and folders full of training materials from defunct companies.
The museum also replaces most power supplies even when it leaves the rest of the machine alone. “A lot of the old power supplies used oil impregnated paper. Over time the oil actually leeches out and you’re left with paper. When you apply voltage and there’s paper in there, guess what the paper starts to do?”
And then there are the really special projects—namely, the Cray-2. When Carlson shows it to me, it’s covered by a blanket and sitting in
its own special storage room. The Cray-2’s been a dream for the Living Computer Museum since its inception, one of the most popular and recognizable supercomputers ever built. The problem? When decommissioned, most were killed in a way that would make it impossible to salvage—wires cut, usually.
That means the Living Computer Museum might actually be able to get it up and running, then make it accessible to visitors—the same as any other machine in their collection.
One remaining challenge? Getting enough Fluorinert, a liquid-cooling compound in the Cray-2’s waterfall loop. “The whole machine gets filled with Fluorinert including the power supplies down there, and it flows through the boards at one inch per second, taking that heat away.”
