This Way Up for Saturday 24 June 2017
This Way Up for Saturday 24 June 2017
The tech transforming golf, young folks' home in Finland, news in bed, and where to with wearables?
The tech transforming golf
Sports fans are a demanding lot! They want live action, instant replays and super slow mo, as well as perceptive commentary and insightful analysis supported by the latest data beamed live and direct from the field as well as from the players themselves.
Animation Research in Dunedin brought you the graphical interpretation of the 1992 Americas Cup. Fast forward 25 years and we can all be yachting experts without any of us falling overboard or the sea spray and lifejackets.....all you need today is a screen!
And similar technology is being used in televised coverage of golf too. For the first time the spectator will know far more about how a player is performing than the golfer or their caddie out on the fairway.
Ben Taylor is the golf operations manager at Animation Research. He's been working on the TV coverage of the 117th US Open golf championship that's just tied up at Erin Hills in Wisconsin.
Life at the young and old folks' home
Young Finnish people are moving into Helsinki's biggest state-run rest home as the country grapples with a housing crisis.
The founder of Homes that Fit Miki Mielonen talks about the programme.
In return for a certain number of hours spent hanging out with more mature residents of Rudolf Seniors Home, the young people get a cheap place to stay.
What started out as a solution to the challenge posed by youth homelessness is now expanding to other parts of the country.
"The youngsters have brought an energy and positive spirit into the place with them. It is a very simple model that would be easy to spread to other countries" - Social worker Kristiina Stenman quoted in The Guardian.
News in bed: where do you get yours?
Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
UBER's CEO Travis Kalanick steps down after his controversial stint in the spotlight.
And from renewing a passport to paying your speeding tickets; how often do you deal with the government online?
Finally, fake news, the rise of the messaging app, and more of us are reading the news in bed than on the commute to work – these are some of the key findings from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017.
Where to with wearables?
From the first fob watch to Snapchat's Spectacles (a camera mounted in a pair of sunglasses) humans have been attaching all sorts of devices to our bodies for hundreds of years.
Photo: STRINGER / IMAGINECHINA
Now the race is on to develop the next generation of wearable technologies that will make our lives better, easier and more productive... in theory, at least.
Paul Lukowicz is a professor at Kaiserslautern University in Germany who specialises in artificial intelligence.
He was recently in New Zealand for the C-Prize technology seminar - part of a wearables design competition organised by Callaghan Innovation.
"In five years, people are probably not going to be talking about wearables anymore ... Basically, the tech will be so integrated that we won't even think about it as a technology. So, it'll no longer be about building novelty stuff. We'll see truly smart garments that monitor the body, collect and analyse information, and then react to it via algorithms and features" - Wearables specialist Mikko Malmivaara
