'Auto-Beautification' Selfie Apps, Popular in Asia, Are Moving into the West

The “Intelli-beauty” effect in PhotoWonder.

The days of #nofilter are numbered.

It’s not that it will lose any descriptive truth, as a disclaimer; just that filtering barely registers among the extravagant suite of things you can now do to selfies—like retouch your blemishes, reshape your nose, shrink your thighs, and "apply" makeup.

These are standard features in the clutch of photo editing apps, like BeautyPlus, FaceTune, PhotoWonder, and ModiFace, that take, as their primary subject, the human face.

These apps, which are typically free, are wildly popular in Asia, whose selfie consumers may be the most advanced in the world. Asian companies pioneered mobile retouching as early as 2012 to meet huge demand for the service, as opposed to in Europe and America, where the practice may be about to breach the mainstream.

Earlier this month, Facebook chose BeautyPlus as one of six partner apps through with you can directly share Facebook “profile videos.” Of these apps, which include Vine and Boomerang, BeautyPlus is the only one with retouching features.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company chooses apps based on users’ current editing patterns, and that selfie-retouching was considered a trend on par with things like looping videos and filter effects.

PhotoWonder and BeautyPlus, which together have over 200 million users, both started in China: the former is backed by Chinese search giant Baidu, and the latter is owned by a startup called Meitu, which was recently valued at $3 billion. Although PhotoWonder claims to have users in 218 countries (perhaps double-counting some of the usual 196), it betrays some particularly East Asian aesthetic concerns, like enlarging your eyes and lightening your skin.

“In countries like China, Japan and Korea—where these types of apps are more mature and more widely used—consumers tend to tune up the auto-beautification more.”

Within PhotoWonder, a one-step button dubbed “Intelli-beauty” transforms a photo on just two vectors: one to “thinify” your face and another to “enlarge eyes.” This, we can infer, is the gist of a desirable face: limpid, oversized eyeballs and a delicately tapered chin. An Intelli-beautified selfie emerges rather like a tarsier, or a Bratz doll.

The phenomena of selfies and social media operate on a much larger scale in Asia than they do in Europe and North America combined, said Lev Manovich, a new media theorist. “But what is most crucial is that facial beauty is even more important in Asia than in the West. And it is carefully crafted through use of makeup, skin lightening products, and often also plastic surgery.”

“In other words,” he said, “the beauty ideal is not ‘casual’ or ‘natural,’ but fully engineered.”

That doesn’t mean Western users aren’t catching on to the selfie-editing trend.

FaceTune is the second most popular paid app on the iTunes store in the US, and it has at least one Kardashian seal of approval. FaceTune, which is $3.99, has fewer showy features than its Asian counterparts—you can’t change your makeup, for instance—but it’s a slick compression of magazine-grade retouching.

The filter in action. GIF: Krithika Varagur

Features like smoothing skin and whitening teeth are popular across the board, said Eric Villines, vice president of marketing for Meitu, which makes BeautyPlus. However, the company sees major differences in how Asian and Western users use the app.

“In Western countries, users tend to like things more natural,” he said. “In countries like China, Japan and Korea—where these types of apps are more mature and more widely used—consumers tend to tune up the auto-beautification more.”

Selfie culture is inherently antisocial. You can’t reasonably retouch group shots because it requires a level of interest most people can only muster for their own mug. In particular, the apps that let you digitally overlay makeup seem like an extension of the Netflix-Seamless on-demand continuum: The day may be near when leaving your house seems superfluous, for you could beam out a flawlessly done up photo of yourself from the couch.

'Auto-Beautification' Selfie Apps, Popular in Asia, Are Moving into the West

This Satellite Uses Special Glue to Stick to Space Debris Like Flypaper

Miki Ito and Ait-Mohammed Nori move a mock up version of 'Boy'. Image: Emiko Jozuka

Space debris—fragments of old satellites and rockets that remain in space—poses an epic threat to satellites and spacecrafts currently in orbit. Proposals to eliminate it have so far included everything from harpoons to lasers.

Singapore-based startup Astroscale has a different idea. It reckons it could use a satellite equipped with a specially configured adhesive—whose chemical structure the company is keeping secret—to trap and destroy rogue bits of space waste. The contraption would basically work a bit like flypaper. As well as working on grabbing space debris, the startup is also working on tracking space waste.

“In March, after a series of tests, we finally made a glue that manages to trap bits of space debris while withstanding harsh space environments,” said Miki Ito, an engineer and president of Astroscale’s Japan office, in a meeting room above the company’s research and development lab.

Could a secret glue hold the key to clearing large chunks of space debris in the future? Image: Emiko Jozuka

Astroscale has been testing its secret glue by subjecting it to radiation and extreme temperature fluctuations in simulated space environments. It’s intended for the company’s newest satellite, ADRAS 1, which weighs up to 120 kg and is being readied for a 2018 launch. The satellite features two components: The design of its base part, dubbed “Mother,” is inspired by the Hodoyoshi-3 and -4 satellites that were launched into space by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) in 2014, while a part dubbed “Boy” sits on top of the Mother component and is designed to separate once in space. Boy contains the pad coated with the special glue that will allow it to latch onto pieces of space junk bigger than 10 cm, much in the same way that a spider pounces and immobilizes a bug.

ADRAS 1, explained Ito, possesses three key functions. First, its onboard sensors allow it to autonomously detect and make its way toward a piece of space debris. The capturing process sees Boy separate from Mother, stick out its adhesive pad, and pull in the piece of space debris. Lastly, Boy deorbits, re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere with the aim of destroying both itself and the debris. The intense air drag and high temperatures as it penetrates the Earth’s atmosphere cause both the satellite and the space debris it contains to burn up, explained Ait-Mohammed Nori, an engineer at Astroscale.

Space is a notoriously hostile environment, with spacecrafts and satellites subjected to cosmic radiation, unfiltered solar light, and severe temperature fluctuations. According to Ito, it took a good few months of testing to get the glue strong enough to withstand these typical space challenges.

The basement space where Astroscale's satellites are designed. Image: Emiko Jozuka

The satellite’s construction is carried out in the Japan’s office’s basement, which is sealed off to visitors. Testing is done in collaboration with nine universities.

Astroscale secured up to $35 million in March 2016, but the company would have to have to make an army of ADRAS 1 satellites if it’s going to fight the space debris problem en masse, as each Boy can only take out one piece of space junk (it’ll focus on tackling particularly dangerous pieces).

Mother will deorbit itself within 25 years, and during that period, it will observe Earth and send back data related to its propulsion system, for example. For the moment, Astroscale is still in the testing stage, and Ito said its 2018 space mission is intended to prove that the concept can work and be expanded in the future.

In the meantime, the team is also working on launching IDEA OSG 1, a smaller 380 mm by 600 mm satellite weighing 20 kg, which is being made to collect data on just how many small particles of debris there could be up in space. It will be launched in early 2017 and will spend roughly two years up in orbit.

“There’s no data on how much space debris measuring between 0.1 mm and 10 cm there is up in space, because we can’t see it from Earth,” Ito said. “IDEA OSG 1 will be used to collect data on particles of space debris which can’t be tracked from Earth.”

Outside Astroscale's Tokyo offices. Image: Emiko Jozuka

IDEA OSG 1 has thin polyimide sheets with conductive lines replete with small signal power. Once debris hits the sheet, it breaks up the conductive lines, causing the signal—monitored from Earth by the team—to change. The goal of the mission is to allow Astroscale to collect a sample of the miniscule particles of space debris over a two-year period, and to come up with an estimate of just how many of these small space waste fragments are in Lower Earth Orbit.

Ultimately, Astroscale’s mission is twofold. The company asserts it wants to tackle the human-caused problem of space debris in order to ease the dangers for space missions, and to promote more interest in space among younger generations of kids in Asia.

“The companies that are investing in us in Japan aren’t really doing it for profit,” explained Ito. “They want to be part of something that will benefit the world, and getting rid of human-caused space debris will ensure the safety of future space missions.”

Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan.

This Satellite Uses Special Glue to Stick to Space Debris Like Flypaper

SpaceX Will Send Your Stuff to Mars Starting at $62 Million

Looking to chuck some of your belongings over to Mars? SpaceX has you covered, provided you have the dough. This weekend, the company updated its standard price options to include specs for journeys to the Red Planet.

The damage shakes out to $62 million for a Falcon 9 rocket launch with a payload of 4,020 kilograms (8,860 pounds) and $90 million for a ride on the much-anticipated Falcon Heavy rocket, set to debut in late 2016, which can ferry 13,600 kilograms (29,980 pounds) to Mars.

Updated price options on SpaceX website. Image: SpaceX

In addition to adding an interplanetary destination to its wares, SpaceX has also upped the payload capacity of the Falcon 9 to low Earth orbit from 29,000 pounds to over 50,000 pounds.

It’s likely that these numbers will be subject to further change over the coming months, especially considering the Falcon Heavy has not yet flown. But the fact that Elon Musk and his team thought it was high time that Mars was added to the list of Falcon rocket family destinations shows how serious SpaceX is about flying its Dragon spacecraft to Mars in the near future.

“SpaceX is planning to send Dragons to Mars as early as 2018,” the company announced on its Facebook page on Wednesday. “Red Dragon missions will help inform the overall Mars architecture that will be unveiled later this year. These missions will help demonstrate the technologies needed to land large payloads propulsively on Mars.”

So, if you have a spare hundred million lying around, this is your chance to splurge on your very own Martian mission. Bon voyage.

SpaceX Will Send Your Stuff to Mars Starting at $62 Million

Watch the Fastest 'Half-Life 2' Speedrun Yet, Coming in Under 41 Minutes

It took me around 17 hours to beat the legendary first-person shooter Half-Life 2. I remember being blown away by David "Marshmallow" Gibbons' speedrun that chopped the whole experience down to a mere 2 hours and 57 minutes. By last year, players like Twitch's chili_n_such had whittled that down to an hour and 19 minutes. Now, though, SourceRun's international team of players have successfully worked together to create a single playthrough in which they beat Half-Life 2 in just 40 minutes and 49 seconds.

The 17 speedrunners achieved such a short run by using a 2006 version of Half-Life 2 that predates the now-standard "Orange Box" engine released in 2007, as it still contained glitches that have long since been patched and featured "significant movement differences." It's a monumental achievement, and the team released it with proper fanfare this morning with a premiere unveiling on Twitch before uploading it to YouTube. You can check out the full speedrun below.

It's a dizzying experience, and not at all like a standard playthrough. Thanks in part to a glitch that lets players go above the ceiling and another glitch that makes protagonist Gordon Freeman move much faster than normal by spamming the "duck" action, the footage shows Gordon flying through walls and leaping into corridors and buildings that normally would take much longer to reach. Enemies fly by with little interaction. Scripted events get glitched because the prerequisites haven't been done. It looks more like a weird, futuristic skiing game than a first-person shooter.

The speedy process also guts many of the cutscenes and interactions between characters, but the ones that remain sometimes left me giggling, such as when Alyx Vance remarks to Freeman as he comes flying through the wall: "I can't believe you made it so quickly on foot."

If you want to see the numbers behind the project, the team created an exhaustive spreadsheet detailing the specific segments, the glitches used, and SourceRuns' time comparisons to their previous efforts.

You can watch an archived version of today's Twitch stream below, where the team discusses the more technical aspects of the speedrun at length. It's fascinating stuff:

Watch the Fastest 'Half-Life 2' Speedrun Yet, Coming in Under 41 Minutes

How to Sound Check the World’s Most Powerful Rocket

A 25 hertz horn. Image: Illudium Pu-36.

Heavy rockets are infamous for the raw acoustic power they produce at liftoff. Even Walter Cronkite, normally unfazeable, lost his cool while watching a Saturn V rocket launch up close in 1967. With that in mind, imagine the epic sonic rumblings we’re in for with NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the rocket currently being developed to launch humans to Mars, which will generate 20 percent more thrust than the Saturn V. Talk about turning the volume up to 11.

Indeed, SLS is expected to produce such thundering noise that its payload, the Orion crew capsule, requires intense sound testing at the world’s most powerful acoustic chamber: the newly completed Reverberant Acoustic Test Facility (RATF) in Sandusky, Ohio.

RATF. Image: NASA

Containing over 100,000 cubic feet of space and 36 super-loud, nitrogen-driven horns, this chamber is capable of producing 163 decibels of sound pressure, loud enough to rupture eardrums. In a video posted Friday, NASA acoustic engineer Aron Hozman shows off this amped-up environment, and its role in making sure that the first human Mars mission can withstand the blaring acoustic output of its unprecedented launch power.

“Each of these horns that you’re seeing is able to produce certain frequency ranges, sort of like a big band,” Hozman sad in the short. He notes that the volume of one 25-hertz RATF horn is equal to many thousands of household speakers, in order to produce those trademark supersonic rocketry grooves.

What’s more, to get a sense of the pristine acoustics of the chamber, here’s a video of a guitarist using the facility to achieve maximum easy listening resonance. It’s good to know that the world’s most powerful acoustic chamber doubles as a chill jam space.

How to Sound Check the World’s Most Powerful Rocket

Watch These Robot Alliances Destroy Each Other’s Forts

Saturday marked the conclusion of the 2016 FIRST Robotics Competition, which saw over 20,000 high school students from around the world descend on St. Louis, Missouri for the annual event. Now in its 25th year, the 2016 FIRST competition was held over four days during which 900 teams pitted their robots against one another in various games.

The teams had spent the last six months working on the robots which had to work their way up through regional and district competitions before making it to the championships in St. Louis. Here they put on an impressive show for the 40,000 spectators in attendance, which included some big names like will.i.am and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. The robots, which could weigh up to 120 pounds, had to be designed so they could complete a variety of tasks, such as throwing balls and discs through goals, hanging on bars, and balancing on balance beams.

The ultimate robotics test occurred in the championship round, known as the FIRST Stronghold, which involves two alliances composed of three robots each. At each end of a pitch are two towers, representing each alliance’s stronghold. The alliances must breach their opponent’s stronghold by throwing boulders to goals on the tower to weaken it.

This year’s winning alliance included teams from California, Illinois, Ohio and Virginia, which were mentored by employees at NASA-JPL, Boeing, Raytheon and other engineering giants. All the teams at the FIRST competition were competing for a number of different prizes, which ranged from lifetime admittance to the championship regardless of robot performance to a massive Möbius-strip trophy.

Watch These Robot Alliances Destroy Each Other’s Forts

How a Fan Found a Neo-Geo Fighting Game Nobody Knew Existed

Credit: Brian Hargrove

We’ve written before about the challenges of preserving rare games for obscure platforms, but what about games that are so obscure that they weren’t even announced to the public before being shelved? Such is the case of this mysterious, incomplete fighting game that was unearthed earlier this April.

SNK’s Neo-Geo console was an oddity of gaming history: a console system designed to be identical to their then high-end arcade hardware. Both the system and the games were premium priced, with cartridges selling for around $200 in 1990s money. The “elite” perception of the console, combined with some fantastic games and a cult of personality around manufacturer SNK, created a fervent Neo-Geo fanbase that thrives to this day. Neo-Geo fans are among the most devoted of game collectors, willing to drop a lot of cash on rare cartridges (some of which, it turns out, have been elaborate forgeries) and constantly scouring all ends of the internet for Neo-related paraphernalia.

Brian Hargrove is one such Neo devotee. He’s been keeping an eagle eye on Japan’s biggest auction site, Yahoo! Japan Auctions, for everything Neo-related, and using a proxy bidding service to purchase things that catch his eye. Hargrove caught a glimpse of one auction that looked like Neo-Geo development hardware and pulled the trigger to the tune of about $750. He’d seen similar boards in years past, so he had a vague idea of what he was getting, though there was still a lot of mystery surrounding the auction.

The board, up and running. Image credit: Brian Hargrove

“I had no idea what [the game data on the board] was,” Hargrove tells us. “There was nothing on the board indicating who had used it or where it came from.”

Hargrove had come across a few early prototypes of Neo-Geo games in his collecting adventures, and most of the data on those games was contained on EPROMs.“The one thing that gave me hope was the fact that this dev board contained flash cards and had a different layout than any other board I have come across… If anything, I assumed I’d have a cool piece of SNK history and possibly an early version of something we already knew about.” In fact, it took him a while before he went about trying to see what was on the boards. “The program EPROMs said that the game was Voltage Fighter Gowcaizer, an already known and released game. I assumed I had an early build of VFG and didn’t really put a lot of time into getting it working. I waited about a month before I really sat down with it, but it didn’t take too long once I focused.”

In order to read the flash cards, Hargrove also had to invest in special hardware. “I did a lot of testing on several different flash cards before I dared to try and read the proto’s flash cards. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t damage them.”

There were a few hurdles in the way of getting the data off of the board. Hargrove discovered that two of the memory cards were completely unreadable—they had used batteries that had long since given up the ghost. “One of the cards contained things like font information and overlay graphics like power and super bars. This also may have contained the game’s name and logo. The other card most likely contained the game’s sound effects.” The game wouldn’t load up without the font data, so Hargrove had to whip up a makeshift ROM to use as a replacement. “When I booted the game without a working font ROM, it was completely blank. Mainly because the game boots to a text menu first and you have to select “FIGHT!” to start playing. When I initially loaded the new font ROM the game still didn’t play. It wasn’t until I looked deeper at the graphics ROMs that I realized that the flash cards were mislabeled. So with the graphics cards in the right slots, and the new font rom loaded, I was able to play it.”

Here's the game running at Midwest Gaming Classic convention in Milwaukee.