Column For the past six months I've been staring at the backside of my iPhone 13 Pro wondering what possessed Apple to build a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) camera into its flagship smartphone.

It's not as though you need a time-of-flight depth camera, sensitive enough to chart the reflection time of individual photons, to create a great portrait. That's like swatting a fly with a flamethrower – fun, but ridiculous overkill. There are more than enough cameras on the back of my mobile to be able to map the depth of a scene – that's how Google does it on its Pixel phones. So what is Apple's intention here? Why go to all this trouble?

The answer lies beyond the iPhone, and points to what comes next.

In the earliest days of virtual reality, thirty years ago, the biggest barrier to entry was compute capacity necessary to render real-time three-dimensional graphics. Back in 1992, systems capable of real-time 3D looked like supercomputers and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then two British software engineers – one at Canon Research, another at startup RenderMorphics, both raised on the famed BBC Micro and its outré graphics capabilities – created tight, highly performant libraries to do real-time 3D rendering in software. When the first announcement of Canon's Renderware made it onto the usegroup sci.virtual-worlds it was greeted with disbelief and disdain. Someone even quipped that a Canon researcher must have accidentally remained logged in over the weekend, so someone could send off an obviously prank post.

But Renderware was real. Along with Rendermorphics RealityLab (which hundreds of millions use today under its other name: Direct3D) it transformed the entire landscape of real-time 3D graphics. No-one needed a half-million dollar Silicon Graphics workstation for virtual reality anymore – a body blow from which the firm never recovered. Reflecting on SGI's unexpected collapse, one of my colleagues – who'd seen the future coming – delivered a quick eulogy: "Rendering happens," he said, "get used to it."

Yet it took virtual reality twenty years to catch up to the quantum leap in real-time 3D, because virtual reality is more than just drawing pretty pictures at thirty frames a second. It deeply involves the body – head and hand tracking are table stakes for any VR system. Tracking the body thirty years ago required expensive and fiddly sensors moving within a magnetic field. (For that reason, installing VR tracking systems in a building with a lot of metal components – such as a convention center held up by steel beams – was always a nightmare.)

An obvious solution for tracking was to point a camera at a person, then use computer vision techniques to calculate the orientation and position of the various body parts. While that sounds straightforward, computers in the 1990s were about a hundred times too slow to take on that task. Fortunately, by the mid 2010s, Moore's Law gave us computers a thousand times faster – more than enough horsepower to track a body, with plenty left over to run a decent VR simulation.

That's why I found myself in Intel's private demo suite at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, wearing what was effectively a PC strapped to my forehead. This VR system had a pair outward-facing cameras that digested a continuous stream of video data, using it to track the position and orientation of my head as I moved through a virtual world – and through the demo suite. Although not yet quite perfect, the device proved that a PC had more than enough horsepower to enable sourceless, self-contained tracking. I emerged from that demo convinced that I'd seen the next great leap forward in virtual reality, which I summarized in two words: "Tracking happens."

Half a decade later, with multiple trillion-dollar companies working hard on augmented reality spectacles, we're ready to breach the next barrier. Yes, we can render any object in real time, and yes, we can track our heads and hands and bodies. But what about the world? It needs to be seen, interpreted and understood in order to be meaningfully incorporated into augmented reality. Otherwise, the augmented and the real will interpenetrate in ways reminiscent of a bad transporter accident from Star Trek.

For the computer to see the world, it must be able to capture the world. This has always been hard and expensive. It requires supercomputer-class capabilities, and sensors that cost tens of thousands of dollars … Wait a minute. This is sounding oddly familiar, isn't it?

Until just two years ago, LIDAR systems cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. Then Apple added a LIDAR camera to the back of its iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro. Suddenly a technology that had been rare and expensive became cheap and almost commonplace. The component cost for LIDAR suddenly dropped by two orders of magnitude – from hundreds of dollars per unit to a few dollars apiece.

Apple needed to do this because the company's much-rumored AR spectacles will necessarily sport several LIDAR cameras, feeding their M1-class SoC with a continuous stream of depth data so that the mixed reality environment managed by the device maps neatly and precisely onto the real world. As far as Apple is concerned, the LIDAR on my iPhone doesn't need to do much beyond drive component costs down for its next generation of hardware devices.

Capturing the real world is essential for augmented reality. We can't augment the real world until we've mapped it. That has always been both difficult and expensive. Today, I can look at the back of my iPhone and hear it whisper words I've long waited to hear: "Capture happens." ®

RSA Conference An ambitious project spearheaded by the World Economic Forum (WEF) is working to develop a map of the cybercrime ecosystem using open source information.

The Atlas initiative, whose contributors include Fortinet and Microsoft and other private-sector firms, involves mapping the relationships between criminal groups and their infrastructure with the end goal of helping both industry and the public sector — law enforcement and government agencies — disrupt these nefarious ecosystems.  

This kind of visibility into the connections between the gang members can help security researchers identify vulnerabilities in the criminals' supply chain to develop better mitigation strategies and security controls for their customers. 

Late last month, France's BEA-RI, or Bureau of Investigation and Analysis on industrial risks, issued its technical report on the March 10th, 2021 fire at the OVH datacenter in Strasbourg.

The French report [PDF] and summary [PDF] echo the findings of the Bas-Rhin fire service in March, 2022 that the lack of an automatic fire extinguisher system, the delay of electrical cutoff and the building design contributed to the spread of the blaze.

The BEA-RI findings also hint at a possible cause – a water leak on an inverter – while stating that the cause has not been conclusively determined.

Analysis For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding Apple's move to homegrown silicon for Macs, the tech giant has admitted that the new M2 chip isn't quite the slam dunk that its predecessor was when compared to the latest from Apple's former CPU supplier, Intel.

During its WWDC 2022 keynote Monday, Apple focused its high-level sales pitch for the M2 on claims that the chip is much more power efficient than Intel's latest laptop CPUs. But while doing so, the iPhone maker admitted that Intel has it beat, at least for now, when it comes to CPU performance.

Apple laid this out clearly during the presentation when Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies, said the M2's eight-core CPU will provide 87 percent of the peak performance of Intel's 12-core Core i7-1260P while using just a quarter of the rival chip's power.

Microsoft has forgotten to renew the certificate for the web page of its Windows Insider software testing program.

Attempting to visit the Windows Insider portal was returning the familiar "Your connection is not private" warning – as if webpages larded with scripts and trackers can truly be called "private." The problem has now been fixed, and someone's no doubt getting an earful.

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari will attempt to deter visitors from accessing the webpage, but will provide a link for those who ignore the warnings and persist on clicking through to advanced options.

RSA Conference For the first time in over two years the streets of San Francisco have been filled by attendees at the RSA Conference and it seems that the days of physical cons are back on.

The security conference trade has been more cautious than most when it comes to getting conferences back up to speed in the COVID years. Almost all cons were virtual with a very limited hybrid-conference season last year, including DEF CON, where masks were taken seriously. People still wanted to mingle and ShmooCon too went ahead, albeit later than usual in March.

The RSA conference has been going for over 30 years and many security folks love going. There are usually some good talks, it's a chance to meet old friends, and certain pubs host meetups where more constructive work gets done on hard security ideas than a month or so of Zoom calls.

As compelling as the leading large-scale language models may be, the fact remains that only the largest companies have the resources to actually deploy and train them at meaningful scale.

For enterprises eager to leverage AI to a competitive advantage, a cheaper, pared-down alternative may be a better fit, especially if it can be tuned to particular industries or domains.

That’s where an emerging set of AI startups hoping to carve out a niche: by building sparse, tailored models that, maybe not as powerful as GPT-3, are good enough for enterprise use cases and run on hardware that ditches expensive high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for commodity DDR.

Review The Reg FOSS desk took the latest update to openSUSE's stable distro for a spin around the block and returned pleasantly impressed.

As we reported earlier this week, SUSE said it was preparing version 15 SP4 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution at the company's annual conference, and a day later, openSUSE Leap version 15.4 followed.

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE project is comparable to that of Red Hat and Fedora. SUSE, with its range of enterprise Linux tools, is the commercial backer, among other sponsors.

Oracle is planning to build a national database of individuals' health records for the whole United States following its $28.3 billion acquisition of electronic health records specialist Cerner.

In a presentation, CTO and founder Larry Ellison said electronic health records for individual patients were stored by hospitals and physicians, and not replicated or shared between providers.

"We're going to solve this problem by putting a unified national health records database on top of all of these thousands of separate hospital databases," Ellison said.

Analysis The European Parliament this week voted to support what is effectively a ban on the sale of cars with combustion engines by 2035, and automakers are not happy.

MEPs backed a plenary vote on Wednesday for "zero-emission road mobility by 2035" – essentially meaning no more diesel and gasoline-fueled vehicles on the road.

The ambitious target means the automotive battery industry will have to service a much larger demand over the coming years, and electric carmakers stand to benefit hugely – that is, if they can source the requisite semiconductors and batteries.

Intezer security researcher Joakim Kennedy and the BlackBerry Threat Research and Intelligence Team have analyzed an unusual piece of Linux malware they say is unlike most seen before - it isn't a standalone executable file.

Dubbed Symbiote, the badware instead hijacks the environment variable (LD_PRELOAD) the dynamic linker uses to load a shared object library and soon infects every single running process.

The Intezer/BlackBerry team discovered Symbiote in November 2021, and said it appeared to have been written to target financial institutions in Latin America. Analysis of the Symbiote malware and its behavior suggest it may have been developed in Brazil. 

Microsoft has treated some of the courageous Dev Channel crew of Windows Insiders to the long-awaited tabbed File Explorer.

"We are beginning to roll this feature out, so it isn't available to all Insiders in the Dev Channel just yet," the software giant said.

The Register was one of the lucky ones and we have to commend Microsoft on the implementation (overdue as it is). The purpose of the functionality is to allow users to work on more than one location at a time in File Explorer via tabs in the title bar.

The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing

Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022