Technology is moving fast today, bringing both self-driving cars to our streets and smarter tools to make our old videos look crystal clear.
This matters to you because these changes will shape what you see on your home television and how safe you feel when walking down the road.
To start, let us look at self-driving cars, which are also called robotaxis. Companies like Waymo now have 3,500 of these driverless cars running in 11 cities in the US. Some companies, like Zoox, are even starting paid rides in Las Vegas. However, many people are pushing back against them. In San Francisco, these cars have blocked traffic and got in the way of police and fire trucks. Because of this, states like New York have stopped plans to allow them, and cities are asking for tighter rules.
At the same time, tech companies are working on making old movies and home videos look better on modern screens. They do this by converting old videos into 4K, which is a very sharp screen resolution. To do this, computer software must upscale the video, which means blowing up the image to fit a larger screen. The software has to add a massive number of new pixels, which are the tiny dots of color that make up a picture. Because the software has to guess what the new dots should look like, the final video can sometimes look blurry or unnatural. To get a perfect picture, professionals still have to go back to original physical film reels, which can take 3 years and cost over $12 million.
Both of these new technologies show that while the future is exciting, it still has some bugs to work out. We will have to wait and see how these tools improve over the next few years.
