- Hey, what's up?
MKBHD here.
Welcome back to "Dope Tech."
We already know tech and production value
is already some of the most fun stuff we do here,
and I remember one of my favorite episodes
of this we ever did
was playing with the cinema robots in Portland
and by the end thinking,
this is crazy,
but I think we might have to get one of these things.
And I have a sneaky feeling
that might be happening again on this shoot,
because, well,
this isn't my normal studio, as you may have thought.
It's gonna get interesting.
(dramatic music)
(music relaxes)
All right, welcome back to another episode of "Dope Tech."
I've got three really interesting things
I wanna show you guys for this one.
The first one, as you could probably already tell,
is a piece of video production tech.
I get unnecessarily excited
about the bleeding edge of production, video stuff.
But this, this is a whole different kind of production.
This would be what's referred to as virtual production.
So let's rewind for a second.
I'm gonna oversimplify,
but I think there's basically three different types,
three different levels of production.
Level one being everything is practical.
Everything is real, it's exactly how you see it.
The background, everything you see in this frame,
a YouTube video for example,
might be totally practical.
That's level one.
Level two is where some of the things
you're seeing in the video are virtual.
Maybe it's a blue screen, a green screen,
maybe it's a virtual animal
or some magical video animation
or some motion graphics or things like that.
But then number three, the top level,
would be fully virtual,
completely unreal, as I would say.
Think like "The Lion King" or "Avatar."
So I recently got to visit
a studio space in Brooklyn, New York called ZeroSpace
that has something called an xR Stage.
And this thing is somewhere right on the border,
blurring the line between level two and level three.
It's kind of real, but technically not real.
So there are a whole bunch of shows
and things you probably watch right now,
"The Mandalorian" being probably the most famous among them,
that use this version of virtual production.
So I mentioned the green screens or blue screens earlier.
These are obviously cool,
because in the edit,
you can replace anything that's the color green
with whatever you want,
maybe a new background or environment.
And then if the actors are good enough,
they can act like that environment is really around them.
But this is next level.
So this is the xR Stage.
What you're looking at is a 50-plus foot 8K video wall,
very expensive, but absolutely loaded with tech
when you point cameras at them,
and the advantages are very real.
So number one, the actors or anyone in front of the screen
can actually have an easier time
interacting with their environment
because they can actually see it
instead of imagining, you know,
a totally different environment
when there's just like a bunch of green and some trackers.
Then number two, the camera's position in space
is actually tracked with this little piece here
from RedSpy on top of the camera,
and that information is relayed in real time
back to the display,
so the background actually moves when the camera moves.
Now, this is huge.
So if you build a volumetric environment,
a 3D environment in something like Unreal Engine,
the camera movement maintains this parallax effect
and looks super realistic,
like you're actually in a new space,
unlike what I did in the intro
which was just sort of like a taste
of what it's capable of with a flat image.
So then number three,
and this is actually a huge one if you're an editor,
there's no green spill.
Like if you've ever tried to edit a green screen video,
you already know it takes a lot of talent and editing
to fully remove the background green,
and even still there's occasional green light
spilling onto fabric and skin
and like glass and reflections and things like that,
the last 2% of green.
But with the video wall, there is no green spill.
Well, actually, there is spill, but it isn't green.
It's just light that perfectly matches your environment.
There's actually all kinds of extra lights
and things like that around the set as well,
even a ceiling display to make this happen.
So all of the lights and all of the colors of light
hitting the person in the environment
will look just exactly like they're supposed to
as if they were actually in that space.
So all of that is awesome,
but the most impressive thing
that I learned while I was there,
and this really blew my mind,
is you already know you can have a camera
and then a person and then a background video wall,
and then as the camera's moving around
the parallax effect matches
to show what the camera should see in real time.
But this setup can actually do
more than one camera at the same time.
And if you're thinking, wait a second,
how can two different cameras,
how can that background moving effect work
with two different camera angles at the same time?
Won't one of them always be wrong?
Or what happens if they overlap?
And this is where it gets crazy.
So this giant 8K video wall
is refreshing at 120 frames per second.
And so as there are two different cameras pointed at it,
each camera is shooting 60 fps,
but they're synced up
so that they're actually each shooting alternating frames.
I'm gonna say that again.
Each camera is shooting 60 fps,
but they're not shooting the same 60 fps.
So it's almost as if like one blinks
while the other shoots a frame
and then the other blinks while the other shoots a frame,
and they go back and forth.
And so both cameras can be pointed
at the same wall at the same time
and see completely different things.
So that solves the problem for two different video cameras
both motion tracking correctly at the same time.
Matter of fact, this particular display that ZeroSpace has
can go up to 180 frames per second,
which can accommodate six different motion-tracked cameras
all shooting 30 fps, the correct frame rate,
all at the same time
and all seeing six different things!
So I got to explore the space
with fellow creator Cleo Abram,
and she's put together an awesome video
on her channel, Huge If True.
It really blew our minds that this worked so well
and that, you know,
even to our natural, our naked eye,
like, things could kind of blend
and you can kind of see
that two things are happening at once,
but absolutely nothing that one camera sees
bleeds into what the other camera sees.
We literally had them light up the display behind us
and it showed up
as a perfectly blue blue screen on one camera
and a perfectly green green screen
to a different camera at the same time.
And it just showed up
as like kind of bluish, greenish to our eyes.
So seeing this, then all the gears start turning
about all the ways you could use this.
I just imagine you have, you know,
the crazy desert background of "The Mandalorian,"
but the lines for the actors to read are on the wall
but the cameras can't see them,
or tracking points,
or just all kinds of...
It's just so many things you can do with it!
It really got me thinking
of if there's a way that we could use
some parts of this in our own space.
Obviously we build,
these are real sets, they're not virtual sets,
but I just, you know,
I want to think about ways
that maybe I could do something like this in our own space.
Anyway, do yourself a favor and watch Cleo's video,
which is also going live today.
We got even way more into the details
and some real-world examples of the xR Stage,
plus a bunch of other interesting examples
of virtual production techniques,
complete with animations and more mind-blowing video facts.
Literally as soon as you finish this video,
it'll be the first link below the like button.
Click that, watch hers.
It's so worth it.
And shout out again to ZeroSpace for letting us explore.
Again, I'm gonna probably be back in touch with you guys.
I'm gonna try to figure out a way
to make that happen here somehow, some way.
Okay, next one,
hard pivot to a piece of tech
that I've been using actually for a while.
It's a piece of home tech,
that's why I'm home for this one,
and sleeping tech.
Actually, when I was first told
about the existence of this piece of tech,
I was kind of surprised about it,
but then I had a lot of questions.
And so when Eight Sleep reached out
and wanted to sponsor this video
and they had all the answers,
well, I was very interested.
So you might have heard of Eight Sleep,
they're kind of blowing up recently.
But basically the main thing they make
is a temperature-controlled bed.
Actually it's a topper.
So what it does is it wraps around your current mattress.
It's called a Pod Cover.
And the main feature,
the idea is it completely controls
the temperature of the surface of your bed.
So it can be nice and crisp and cool
when you first climb into bed
and then nice and warm in the morning
and make it easier to get out of bed,
which is pretty awesome.
I feel like there's two types of people,
people that fall asleep instantly in like five minutes,
and then people who think it's like a superpower
to be able to fall asleep instantly,
and that's me.
I'm in the second group for sure.
I've historically took at least half an hour
to fall asleep anytime.
But science shows pretty definitively,
you've probably heard this before,
that cool temperatures are pretty ideal
for falling asleep quickly
and then staying asleep and being well rested.
Basically that temperature
is one of the absolute top factors for quality of sleep.
So the Eight Sleep, basically what it is
it's this box next to the bed
which has a bunch of stuff in it,
a compressor, a reservoir, and a whole computer,
it barely makes a whisper of noise,
and that connects to the bed via tubes.
And then the whole top of this bed,
this cover is lined with these capillaries
through the whole thing,
these veins for either the warm
or cooled water to flow through.
And importantly, there's two halves.
So if you sleep at a different temperature
from your partner,
which let's be honest, I feel like everyone says they do,
then you can have each side of the bed
be a different temperature.
And then the piece that brings it all together
is this app on the phone
that lets you basically turn a dial
to bring it between minus 10 and 10.
Those are the levels of temperature,
and that signifies basically 55 degrees Fahrenheit
all the way at the bottom,
which is pretty chill,
all the way up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit at plus 10,
which is straight up hot.
So I don't need nearly that much range,
but it's nice to have.
I go to sleep at minus four
and I warm up to plus two.
That's as warm as I really ever need it.
But yeah, I guess now I can say my bed,
this bed is literally water cooled,
so that's pretty sick.
So the thing is, once you've used it
for I think about a week,
basically it settles into a routine
where it cools down before you get into bed
and slowly adjusts temperature over the course of the night.
They call it Autopilot I think.
But there are different stages of sleep
where it'll slowly warm up overnight
until it's at the temperature that you wanna wake up at.
But then on top of that,
there's a host of other features
that are in the Eight Sleep membership,
which is a monthly subscription,
which I don't love,
but it actually has a bunch of really useful features.
So the first is Autopilot, which I talked about,
but then the second,
there are a bunch of these sleep tracking features.
I had typically worn the Apple Watch to sleep
for the past couple months,
and it's on your wrist
and it can read a bunch of things
about you from your wrist.
But clearly the best thing to measure your sleep
would be the thing you sleep on,
so the mattress itself.
So it can tell when you get into bed of course,
when you get up,
and it graphs out when you're in
these different stages of sleep through the night.
It even somehow measures your heart rate
and breathing rate if you want it to.
And then it does a good job in the UI
of highlighting with like little green or red markers
when things are going well
and when things are a little bit off.
So you can see here on this terrible night of sleep I had
that there are certain things clearly that I didn't do well.
Like I went to sleep late
despite waking up at a normal time,
and I fell asleep quickly,
but I took a while to get up.
So the next night of sleep you can see was much better.
Whole bunch of green here, basically flawless.
It also has a vibration alarm.
It will literally lightly vibrate
just your side of the bed to wake you up silently,
which is pretty sick.
And it also gets continuous software updates over time.
Honestly, this thing has been
pretty awesome for me personally
over the past couple of weeks that I've had it.
Like I said, I've had it for a while.
The one thing that I feel like
is pretty definitive proof, for me anyway,
that it's working or helping me sleep better,
the Apple Watch likes to tell me
when I have a low heart rate.
When I go below 40 beats per minute for a long time,
it gives me a low heart rate notification.
But that's actually potentially a good thing
if you're recovering well.
And the first week or two
after I started sleeping well with the cooled mattress,
I would wake up with like,
10 to 15 low heart rate notifications,
which meant that my heart rate was getting lower
and I was recovering better and sleeping better,
which is pretty cool.
So in an age where humans
are basically sleeping worse than ever before
with all the tech around us,
all the screens that are around us every night,
it's pretty cool to have a piece of tech
that actually helps us sleep better.
At least it helps me anyway.
You can try it too if you want to.
You can get $200 off by using the code MKBHD on their site.
I definitely think this qualifies as Dope Tech.
Okay, last but not least,
how about a little bit of an exclusive.
This is your first look at the Nothing Phone 2,
which looks a lot like the Nothing Phone 1.
But you guys have heard a lot of the hype,
you've seen some of the teasers,
so let me show you
what I am allowed to show you of what's new.
So this is the Phone 1 here
with the glyphs and the lights on the back,
and this is the Phone 2.
Slightly tweaked design.
Definitely nothing dramatic at first glance here,
since they're trying to establish
their visual design as a young company.
You know, you can't go dramatically changing it every time.
But same shapes, slightly lighter gray,
slightly more rounded glass actually on the back.
But we'll get to all that
in the full review video of this phone.
For now, in this exclusive,
I can show you what's actually new with the Glyph interface,
the actual lights on the back.
So first of all, Nothing Phone 1
had five strips of white LEDs with this pattern.
With this new one,
the shapes are in the same place,
but there are some tweaks.
You can see the arc around the camera
is split into two strips,
and the big one in the middle
is now separated out into six pieces.
These are all still white LEDs,
no color or RGB or anything crazy.
But the main improvement
is actually just that there are more
addressable LED zones inside of each of the strips,
which is kind of fun.
So you probably remember you could already use
the bottom exclamation mark
as a charging progress indicator.
That does still work.
So before the entire back of the phone
had a total of 12 different LED lighting zones
controllable by the software.
This new one has a total of 33 across the back,
and just this strip up here at the top gets 16 to itself.
So it's much more precise and granular,
and so they've designed some features actually
around using that as a progress indicator.
So there's a volume indicator now.
So when you have media playing,
it literally just shows your volume level,
and as you move it up and down
you can see that light go up and down with it.
There's a Glyph Timer built in.
So you can set a timer
to a predetermined length of time using the UI,
then flip the phone over to start the timer.
And you can see it slowly rolls down through the LEDs
to count down and give you a visual indicator
of when the timer will be over.
I kind of like this one for working.
Those of you who use the Pomodoro Technique
will probably find this useful.
And there's also plans
for this to be addressable by third parties.
So you can imagine,
so Uber and Zomato are the only two
that are signed up right now,
but kind of the same way
Apple had to get developers on board
with their Live Activities in iOS, same idea.
You can imagine waiting for an Uber
and turning the phone down
and sort of seeing the progress
of when the car gets closer and closer until it arrives.
Things like that.
Ideally they can get more on board
for things that just make sense for progress bar stuff.
Now, you might remember,
last time I was specifically asking
for more customization stuff
so I could tell what app I was getting a notification from
without flipping the phone over.
This is still all white LEDs,
so there's no colors or anything like that,
but there is one new feature called Essential Notifications,
where basically if you have a certain app
that's important to you that you get notifications from,
it'll stay lit up in this corner strip,
and this stays lit until that notification is addressed.
So it's not fully customizable,
like I can't assign a a different app
to each of the different lighting zones,
but for at least this one app
you'll always know when you've got a notification from it.
And then they also added this neat little Glyph Composer.
So if you wanna literally design your own ringtone,
you can go full DJ mode.
(phone beeping)
So that is your first look at the Glyph update
on the back of the new Nothing Phone 2.
Still sort of like on the borderline
between gimmick and useful for a lot of people,
but it is at least a little bit more customizable.
And you'll have to get subscribed
to see all the rest of the new stuff with this phone,
so that you'll know what I've been finding in my testing.
That's coming up.
The sub button is below, of course.
But that's been it.
Thanks for watching "Dope Tech."
Catch you guys in the next one.
Peace.
(groovy upbeat music)