This week, Drex and I talked about Apple’s announcements of smaller iPhones and iPads, Twitter’s tenth birthday, the baseketball game you can play in Facebook Messenger, and everything you need to know about pre-ordering a PlayStation VR headset.

The tech segment runs weekly on Drex Live.

Listen to the segment yourself.

This week, Apple hopes for some new growth for spring with smaller iPhones and iPads, Twitter celebrates a birthday, Facebook Messenger game lets you play virtual basketball with friends, Sony completes the PS VR picture with pre-order details, and how to create fake news videos.

Apple welcomes spring with some new product announcements

Spring arrived on Sunday, and on Monday, Apple gathered media at its campus in Cupertino, California, to show off some new products. And while the past few announcements for the company have been about getting big, this time it was all about being small.

On Monday, Drex and I talked about the smaller iPhone SE, which is a return to the four-inch size that made the smartphone popular in the first place.

But also revealed that day was a smaller version of the iPad Pro. With a diagonal screen size of 9.7 inches, the new tablet is all of the functionality of the larger Pro, with the size of the iPad Air 2.

So you can use the Apple Pencil peripheral and there is a keyboard case for it.

You can take advantage of the higher resolution Retina display, which is arguably better than the larger Pro because of new technology called “True Tone,” which adjusts the white balance of the colour on the screen based on the light where you are.

The new iPad Pro becomes available for pre-order on March 31. It will be available in four colour: gold, rose gold, silver, and space grey.

It will be priced starting at Cdn$799 for the 32GB with Wi-Fi model and $979 for the 32GB Wi-Fi + Cellular model. (If you really want to feel bad about the state of the Canadian dollar, the intro model in the U.S. is US$599.)

The smaller iPad Pro also comes with 128 GB and 256 GB of storage space.

Twitter turns 10

Great article in the Verge recapping the social service’s ten-year history.

Did you know that many of the most usable features – @ replies, hashtags, retweets – were suggested by users. Think it will still be around in another 10 years?

Facebook Messenger game celebrates March Madness

March is when the college basketball season – both in the U.S. and Canada – wraps up with championship games and tournaments.

Facebook, perhaps in celebration, has created a basketball mini-game within mobile apps for its Messenger service.

To play, you need to upgrade to the latest version of Messenger. Then, send the basketball emoji to a friend. After doing that, you can tap on the basketball to open up the mini-game.

You’re presented with a basketball, which you can get into the hoop by flicking up on your phone’s screen. Score 10 baskets in a row, and things get more difficult: the hoop starts moving.

After you’re done, your cumulative basket score is noted, and your friend can try and beat your score.

You can also play chess through Messsenger, by typing “@fbchess play” into a message with a friend. You move pieces basic chess notation to move pieces. @fbchess Ngf6 moves the knight in the G column into space F6, for example.

Pre-order details announced for PS VR

Last week, Sony announced the price of its virtual reality headset, PS VR. Now we know a bit more.

The headset, which requires a PlayStation Camera to work, and, depending on the game, might also require PlayStation Move controllers, is being sold on its own for Cdn$550.

But it’s also being sold in a Launch Bundle for $700, which includes the headset and headphones, the camera, two Move controllers, and PlayStation VR Worlds, which includes five experiences:

• The London Heist puts you in the middle of a robbery
• Into the Deep puts you into the ocean
• VR Luge sends you down a Californian highway in a street luge
• Danger Ball is a VR version of Pong
• Scavenger’s Odyssey is a sci-fi themed driving and shooting sim

You can’t pre-order the PS VR on its own, but if you’re interested in the Launch Bundle, pre-orders began on Tuesday.

Sony says it will have another round of pre-orders this summer, probably soon after the big E3 expo in Los Angeles.

Programmers demonstrate how they can modify video in real time

The next time you watch a video of a politician being interviewed, you might want to question whether they are actually saying what you’re hearing.

Last week, a submission to this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) expo in Las Vegas ended up being circulated through social media channels. It demonstrates how a live video can be hijacked, and the facial expressions and mouth movements of a “target”, say Donald Trump, can be overwritten by an actor.

So the live video becomes a reenactment, with an actor actually providing the performance that seems like it’s coming from the original person.

The demonstration doesn’t deal with the audio issues of truly faking news, but just consider the implications when that part of the puzzle gets solved. Will we ever know what’s real?

Last week, Drex and I talked about DeepMind’s exploits playing the game Go, online petitions, PlayStation’s virtual reality headset, PS VR, and the new Disney Infinity play set, Marvel Battlegrounds.

It all happened on Drex Live and you can hear it for yourself.

This week, a look at the merits of online petitions, superheroes star in new game from Vancouver studio, and a computer beats a human at Go. But first, PlayStation has revealed what its virtual reality headset will cost.

PlayStation VR releases in October for $550

PlayStation stands to dominate the early adoption of virtual reality. PS VR is priced at $550, compared to $850 for the Oculus Rift and $1,150 for the HTC Vive.

And while the other systems require a high-performance camera, all you need to use the PS VR is a PS4.

Almost. Sony has been a bit coy about the fact that you’ll also need the PS Camera peripheral, and some games may require that you have PS Move controllers.

Those additional things aren’t going to set you back too much. The Camera is $60 and the move controllers are around $50.

The PS4 doesn’t have the processing power required for VR, so an external processor unit ships with the PS VR. That’s included in the cost.

Sony plans on releasing PS VR in October. They also plan to have some 50 things to experience with PS VR before the end of the year, from tech demos to games like EVE: Valkyrie.

There has been no announcement about pre-orders for the PS VR. But there will be pre-orders at some point so you can be sure you’ll get one on launch day.

One small step for man, one giant leap for AI

The best way to demonstrate how smart machines have become is by having them play games, which require both an understanding of rules, but the ability to respond to the actions of another player.

This was demonstrated most popularly in the two chess tournaments that pitted IBM’s Deep Blue against world chess master Garry Kasparov. The first match, in 1996, was won by the human. A year later, after some upgrades, the computer won.

But that was child’s play compared to what happened in the past week, when a machine, DeepMind, a Google project, defeated Lee Sedol, perhaps the world’s best Go player, four games to one.

The difference between chess and Go was described eloquently by Edward Lasker, a chess master and Go player:
“While the baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.”

DeepMind reportedly learned how to play the Go by playing games against itself. According to one of the machine’s creators, Demis Hassabis, that likely led to some gaps in its knowledge.

But despite the lack of experience playing against a real Go player, DeepMind succeeded despite suggestions that the game of Go is too intuitive for a machine to play.

Each of the matches has been archived on YouTube.

Things the Internet is good for #612: Online petitions

There are so many things about the Internet that are good and bad. You can get the craziest t-shirts ever imagined. And it is full of cat photos. You can find out what’s going on anywhere in the world. And you have to wade through Trump talk to get to anything interesting. You can start a petition. And you can start a petition.

Petitions are fantastic devices for the general public to make an impact on decisions they normally would not be able to influence.

But not all petitions are the same. There are petitions that can convince Amazon to stop selling Robert Pickton’s autobiography. And there are petitions to try and get a CEO to resign.

I’m not suggesting that there isn’t something to be discovered in the WestJet case, in which a former flight attendant has initiated legal action around a sexual assault accusation.

But to think that a CEO is going to resign because of it is a bit much.

Although public outcry – and 180,000 names on a petition – did get Des Hague to resign.

Maybe it can even get get the provincial government to stop discriminating against people with disabiltiies.

New Disney Infinity Play Set designed in Vancouver at United Front Games

Released yesterday is the new play set for Disney Infinity 3.0, Marvel Battlegrounds. Three new characters join the roster: Ant-Man, Black Panther, and Vision.

Developed in Vancouver at United Front Games, Battlegrounds brings four-player arcade fighting to Infinity for the first time. You can use all the Marvel Infinity figures in the game, and UFG has built Battlegrounds so that players can try out as many different characters as possible. Every week there are three new trial characters to use, and by playing you’ll earn tokens that you can spend on any character you want to play.

Marvel Battlegrounds is an absolute riot to play.

This week, Drex and I started off talking about all the things you can do with your digital photos, including all the items you can print photos on. If you’re going to print some photos, or make a photo book, or put an image on a mousepad, I recommend you check out the London Drugs Photo Lab, where they can do it all locally, cheaper, and faster than any of the web services.

We also talked about the stupid robots designed by Simone Giertz and a new data storage method that will make sure those photos of your terrible haircut will last forever.

It all happened on Drex Live on CKNW. You can listen here.