Hasta La Gadget!

Porsche is bringing augmented reality to U.S. car repairs for the first time at scale exclusively at its dealerships across the country. Porsche Cars North America will start rolling out the Tech Live Look to its 189 dealers in the country this week. The system is going to connect dealership technicians to remote experts through smartglasses for live interactions that the company says have the ability to reduce service resolution times by up to 40 percent.

The Tech Live Look system is based on the ODG (Osterhout Design Group) R-7 smartglasses and the AiR Enterprise software platform from Atheer, Inc. It fuses computerized eyewear and augmented reality software to enable remote experts hundreds of miles away to see what a service technician is seeing and provide feedback while the technician works on the problem completely hands-free.

Prior to this technology being in place, a complex technical issue would take a long time to resolve as the dealership technicians and the Porsche support team would go back and forth repeatedly through messages, phone calls, photos, and on-site visits by Porsche’s Field Technical Managers just to identify the issue before it could be fixed.

That chain of communication is substantially shortened by Tech Live Look. Porsche piloted the system last year and it will now go live at three of the company’s 189 dealers in the U.S. this week. Porsche aims to have the system live at 75 dealers by the end of this year with the remainder being covered next year.

Osterhout Design Group, the company that made these smartglasses, will be demonstrating its technology at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara. Attendees can stop by booth #319 to experience the R-7 smartglasses that Porsche is rolling out today as well as a multi-user and collaborative experience showcasing its R-8 and R-9 devices through a game of HORSE. The demo is meant to highlight the devices’ head tracking technology and other capabilities.

It will also showcase its innovative flight safety solution that is meant to help pilots in emergency landing situations if there’s smoke filled in the cockpit. The ‘Smoked Assured Vision Enhanced Display’ or SAVED smartglasses combine technology with an oxygen mask and connect the plane’s heads-up display and cameras mounted on the outside to the smartglasses to give pilots a clear line of sight even when the cockpit’s filled with smoke.

Porsche Brings AR To U.S. Car Repairs With ODG Smartglasses , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Rick and Morty fans will probably recall the episode called “Total Rickall.” During one scene,  Rick hatches a plan to buy limited-edition Legend of Zelda 3DS consoles from Walmart for $149, then get a $50 gift card, and sell them for $230 to get rich. I might have seemed like an obscure and odd joke in the episode, but there was a reason behind it.

Show creator Justin Roiland has recently stated that everything Rick said in that scene is exactly what he did back in the day. He allegedly has an entire guest room full of those handhelds, and now Roiland has put some of the consoles up for sale on Witchsy. Though he’s asking $1,000 for each one instead of $230.

Buyers will get the limited-edition console signed by Roiland with a Rick and Morty doodle. The box appears to be the only part signed because you certainly don’t open a limited-edition Legend of Zelda 3DS XL. The doodle in the one shown here has a 1/10 marking, hinting that nine more of the systems will available after this one sells.

Roiland said of the episode, “All the stuff Rick says in that scene in the episode was actually true. My plan was to sell them off here and there over the years but I just had so many that I still have them. It’s also important to know that I felt bad after I bought them all so I went and purchased 15 2DS systems and a bunch of games and donated them to the children’s hospital of Los Angeles. I became part of the problem that day. I became a scalper. CHA-CHING.”

[via AVClub]

Google Assistant users are getting first access to a YouTube Originals Drama called Impulse, the company has announced. The show won’t be premiering until June 6, however, Google Assistant users can get access to the first episode now using a special command and password. The episode is currently unlisted on YouTube for everyone else. Impulse is a YouTube Red series … Continue reading

Uber has added a panic button to its mobile app for US customers. We’ve known since the company’s April announcement that it was planning to add a new safety feature to the app this summer, one that directly dials emergency services for drivers who fear for their safety. This is one of multiple safety measures the company is taking to … Continue reading

Smartphone sales shrank year-over-year in the fall, leading some to wonder whether the category’s halcyon days were finally over. Well, not quite. Gartner has determined that smartphone sales bounced back ever so slightly in the first quarter of 20…