Tabla de contenidos para July / August 2022 en WIRED UK

THIS MAN IS AN ISLAND Winni Wintermeyer photographs Oleg Savitsky in Berlin this issue—but not without first getting some inspiration from the Endel founder’s trippy audio app: “I’ve tried a few mediation and relaxation apps before, but the ambient soundscapes the Endel app created sent me off in no time. It got me thinking about how Savitsky’s app works‚ creating an island of sound around you, so I decided to shoot him near some noisy highway off-ramps I know, but having him looking totally unperturbed, because he’s in a calm, chilled-out world of his own.” THE REAL DEAL Sam Chick got special access to shoot in eBay’s super-secure authentication facility this issue, where goods from luxury watches to hyped kicks come under expert scrutiny: “Besides the piles of sneakers, I…

Celestial White Noise, a video consisting of ten hours of droning sound playing over a still image of a nebula, has been watched—well, listened to—over 56 million times since April 2015. An identically named track on Spotify, also featuring hours of humming, was a chart-topper in 2020. Blame it on the pressures of modern life, the pandemic, or good old weltschmerz: people cannot do without listening to buzzing sounds with supposedly mind-clearing effects. A cottage industry has sprung up, claims tech blog OneZero, with dubious noise-producers recording the sound of air conditioners, car engines, or data centers, sure that they will be listened to by millions, and rapidly monetized. This phenomenon was the inspiration for Oleg Stavitsky, co-founder and CEO of Endel, an app that creates personalized soundtracks to increase…

The skin is the body’s largest organ, and also its most complex. Peer at it under a microscope and you’ll see thousands of nerve endings that keep the brain connected to the outside world and allow us to feel touch, pressure and pain. But Zhenan Bao sees something else. For Bao, a chemical engineer focused on making polymers, the skin is not only a sensory organ, but a flexible, stretchable, self-healing and biodegradable material. Bao works in the emerging field of electronic skin, and has made it her mission to recreate the many functions of human skin for use in prosthetics and robotics. For those who wear artificial limbs, a sense of touch would immeasurably improve their quality of life. When Bao joined Stanford University in 2004, few researchers were…

Is Twitter a blockchain? Consider this: the microblogging website is often used as a permanent record of what happened when: whether documenting Trump’s rants, wartime atrocities, or foreign propaganda, journalists and researchers have long clung onto tweets to bolster their chronicles. Now, a blockchain—the decentralized digital ledger underpinning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether—is supposed to be an immutable log of all crypto transactions, making sure that no one tries to lie about who paid whom. The two iconic technologies appear to share some kind of philosophical ethos—at least if you ask Tess Rinearson, the blockchain engineer who leads Twitter’s fledgling crypto unit. “I saw a lot of aesthetic alignment between how Twitter exists in the world and the way that crypto exists in the world,” she says. That is not…

When Stray begins, the player is wounded, separated from their family and tasked with untangling the mystery of a metropolis populated by robots. And they’re also an adorable ginger cat. The third-person adventure title from French developers BlueTwelve Studio gives the player a realistic, fully controllable feline that can scratch sofas, cozy up to robot civilians, and nonchalantly swipe things off shelves as it roams around a city that is part Blade Runner, part feline playground, exploring and solving puzzles. “The game is all about living the fantasy of being a cat,” says Swann Martin-Raget, a producer at BlueTwelve Studio, and part of a small team based in Montpellier. “Obviously, being a cat involves sleeping. A lot.” Creating a playable cat came with some unique problems, though. “We spent a lot of…

Hill HX50 private helicopter Helipad one-upmanship is a very serious matter—so foment those envious glances with a personally-specced helicopter. Beyond merely upgrading the seat trim, owners of a Hill HX50 can specify handling, power and ease-of-flight, should you tire of gazing through the low, passenger-friendly windowline and decide to grasp the control stick. £tbc hillhelicopters.com…

BMW i7 BMW’s seventh-generation 7 series certainly implies there’s magic afoot in its latest executive-level offering, with plenty of new tricks that might trickle down to more mid-range rides. VIPs can enjoy automatic-opening doors, heated armrests (nobody likes cold arms) and a biggest-in-class panoramic roof, plus an Amazon-powered 31-inch widescreen 8K “cinema” display that unfolds from the cabin ceiling, with 5G streaming and Bowers & Wilkins sound in the oversize passenger seats. Pick from all-electric i7, plug-in hybrid, and petrol powertrains, with “M” versions in 2023 that promise a sportier experience, should you prefer to do the driving. £tbc bmw.co.uk Totem GT Electric Years in development but finally hitting roads in 2022, the Totem GT Electric channels the classic Alfa Romeo Giulia GTA in a carbon fiber do-over that contains…

IT is a jarring fact that more than half of all consumers say they consider sustainability a key factor when shopping for beauty products—yet the industry itself has long fallen short on ethical practices. The numbers here are decidedly unattractive: research has shown that the cosmetics industry produces more than 120 billion units of packaging every year—from plastic lipstick-tubes to palette containers—most of which isn’t easily recyclable due to the hard-to-scrub traces of lipstick, foundation, or mascara that tend to remain. The eco-unfriendly nature of these products means that throw-away beauty is responsible for 30 to 40 percent of all landfill waste, according to research from US-based luxury beauty brand Kjaer Weis, and most can take as long as 1,000 years to fully decompose. The cosmetics shipping industry, an integral…

IN 2020, London-based fashion designer Scarlett Yang created a garment made from algae extract that looked like glass, changed texture in response to temperature and weather, and dissolved if you left it in water. To bring this creation to life, Yang began by experimenting with virtual designs. She still made a physical dress, but also presented it digitally, inviting viewers to observe four different renders of the shimmering gown. Yang was among the participants in the first ever Metaverse Fashion Week, which took place in a virtual-world browser-based platform called Decentraland and featured shows from brands including Etro, Tommy Hilfiger, and Roberto Cavalli. Fashion houses such as The Fabricant, DressX and The Dematerialised don’t sell physical clothes—these stores specialize in the intangible: lilac puffer dresses that weightlessly float around the…

LASTFALL, IN THE STAGNATION OF PANDEMIC LIFE, I BECAME FASCINATED WITH VIDEOS OF INFLUNCERS STANDING IN THEIR BEDRROMS AND TRYING ON CLOTHES FROM A COMPANY CALLED SHEIN In the TikToks, hashtagged #sheinhaul, a young woman would hold up a big plastic bag and rip into it, releasing a cascade of smaller plastic bags, each containing a neatly folded item of clothing. The shot would then cut to the woman wearing one piece at a time, rapid-fire, interspersed with screenshots from Shein’s app showing the prices: an $8 dress, a $12 swimsuit. Down this rabbit hole were variations on the theme: #sheinkids, #sheincats, #sheincosplay. The videos invited the viewer to marvel at a surreal collision of low cost and abundance. The comments, in keeping with the mood, were performatively supportive (“BOD…

At the Antonio Pasqualino International Puppet Museum in Palermo, Italy, the 69cm-tall wooden figure of Carinda stares out at visitors from beneath her knight’s helmet. Dating from 1828, she is the oldest existing “pupo”—a traditional Sicilian puppet—but, sadly, her sword-swinging days are over. “We have many heritage items in the museum that are restricted by laws, so they cannot be touched,” explains museum director Rosario Perricone. “You can’t play with them, basically.” So, Perricone has been experimenting with augmented reality and VR. Carinda is now the star of an app—when visitors point their phone cameras at a disk next to the puppet, a virtual Carinda appears on their screen, and they can make her jump or lunge with her sword. In 2018, filmmaker and digital storyteller Alessandra Grassi brought a…

THE WATCH LIST TAG Heuer Carrera Plasma TAG’s sporty stalwart gets a glamorous upgrade—but these are no common diamonds that someone actually had to dig for. These carefully-curated carats were grown in a lab using a chemical vapor deposition process, and so neatly eschew the guilt of excavating hundreds of tonnes of earth. The technique also allowed the stones to be produced in a variety of brand new shapes, including the polycrystalline diamond dial, as well as diamond indexes, sections of the case, and a spectacular winding crown made from a single piece of lab diamond. Despite the manufactured nature of the precious stones in the Plasma, TAG Heuer will be producing the watch in extremely limited quantities. £poa tagheuer.com Omega Seamaster Planet Ultra Deep Based on its experimental, Mariana…

Early last year, Bollinger’s winemakers were able to get their first taste of La Grande Année 2014, a prestige fizz that had been aging in the Champagne house’s cellars since it was blended. La Grande Année, Bollinger’s flagship vintage champagne, is produced only in years when the broad quality is deemed sufficiently high, and enjoys seven years of aging under cork before it’s launched. Ahead of opening up the 2014 vintage, questions lingered over just how strong a year it really was, given a roller-coaster growing season that saw record-breaking heat in June followed by a cold, wet summer that slowed grape maturation. Moreover, for a Champagne house known for its forthright pinot noir character, it was a vintage that favored chardonnay. But for Denis Bunner, Bollinger’s deputy head winemaker…

OMA Museum Speaker Originally designed as part of Anthem, Wu Tsang’s 2021 “sonic sculptural space” commission for the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York, the Museum Speaker is now available to deep-pocketed audiophiles. The case is solid Pennsylvania ash wood and cold-rolled steel, while the sculptural grill and speaker rear-panel are carved from phenolic, a composite of paper and thermoset resin, which possesses excellent damping qualities. Inside, a pair of 15-inch subs feature an industry-first coaxial compression driver and high-frequency conical horn for staggering sound. £poa oswaldsmillaudio.com Bang & Olufsen Beosystem 72-22 Released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bang & Olufsen’s 1972 Beogram 4000 Series turntable, the limited-edition Beosystem 72-22 features an original, fully renovated turntable—part of the brand’s Recreated Classics Program—plus $11,000 Beolab 18 streaming stereo speakers…

What could go wrong? IT'S GETTING LATE ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN DENVER when I lean back and take in the full weirdness of what I’m doing. I’m seated at a long plastic folding table against the wall in a windowless room, a Discord server open on my laptop. Pizza crusts and empty potato chip bags are piled up around me, evidence of the feverish hours I’ve spent hacking together a project with a trio of blockchain developers. I’m not a programmer, just a journalist with a law degree. Yet somehow I’ve gotten swept up in creating my own DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization, a favorite concept among the starry-eyed proponents of Web3—and it’s supposed to launch tomorrow. No doubt you have questions. So do I. Like: What happened to me?…

Each human voice is unique, shaped by a multitude of factors, from height and weight to emotion and the environment. Then there are the many different components of speech: pitch, pace, pronunciation and more. Think of your voice as a sonic signature of sorts—one that’s as distinctive as your fingerprint. This idea is at the core of Voice Gems, a project that translates voices into one-of-a-kind digital and physical gemstone sculptures. It’s a collaboration between London-born beatboxer and vocal experimentalist Harry Yeff (aka Reeps100) and Vietnamese creative technologist Trung Bao, both of whom harbor a deep fascination with the human voice. “It’s quite strange to think that something so old and profound still has so many uncharted capacities,” Yeff says. “There are discoveries being made every day.” Visualizing the human…

IN January, observers of North Korea’s tightly restricted corner of the internet noticed something strange: The country seemed to be dealing with serious connectivity problems. On several different days, nearly all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation has only a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un’s government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country’s networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom’s digital connections to the outside world. Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out missile tests, implying that a foreign government might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to warn…

When I was at university in 2013, I took the Megabus coach down from Liverpool to London and queued outside the store for two days,” recalls self-confessed sneakerhead Wahaaj Shabbir. “I was only there to buy a wristband, but ended up buying two pairs of Yeezy 2s for £139 each.” Just one week later, Shabbir sold each of the Nikes on eBay for £5,500. Such is the influence of collaborator Kanye “Ye” West. “Yes—but also the power of eBay,” Shabbir says. His eBay admiration could well be linked to the fact that, as of April last year, Shabbir has been appointed manager of eBay UK’s Sneakers category. Hopping over from the company’s Sound & Vision division, where he’d been for nine months, this role not only plays into Shabbir’s fanboy…

If you’ve been fortunate enough to spec up a new car, you’ll know it’s possible to nigh-on double the car’s eventual price. Beyond boosting the rims or adding seat-warmers, the options list always includes an upgrade to the car’s audio system to involve big hitters from the world of hi-fi and home entertainment. It makes sense, given what an acoustic disaster your standard car cabin is—all that reflective glass, those resonant plastics, the utter lack of space in which to allow a speaker driver to function efficiently—why wouldn’t you want some specialist expertise? And that goes double for electric cars—the uncanny lack of EV cabin-noise gives a feeble audio system no excuses and nowhere to hide. An upgrade to your new car’s audio system isn’t quite a no-brainer, though. To…

Can a radical new approach to e-waste recycling and a famous jewelry designer help reinvent the world’s oldest company? Coins, in case you hadn’t heard, have had their day. In March 2020, the Royal Mint had 26 times as many £2 coins as it needed, and eight times as many 2p coins. The excess totaled close to £89 million, and the mint won’t need to produce any more £2 coins for at least a decade. There has been a staggering 59 percent decline in the volume of cash payments between 2008 and 2019, and a 65 percent forecast reduction in the use of cash between 2018 and 2028. The global pandemic has only exacerbated the problem; 10 years ago, six in 10 transactions were cash; in 2021 it was less…