To you, a customer service rep is a voice on the phone, someone to sort out a billing error or missed delivery. To José Sarmento Matos, it’s a person, and he wants you to meet them. “We tend to forget that they’re people,” he says. “They’re making money to pay their bills and take care of their kids and their parents: they have feelings and they have lives.” More Photography Laura Mallonee Samsung Employees Vacation and Get Hitched Without Ever Leaving...
Come February, the thing on most people’s minds is Valentine’s Day. For some, it’s a chance to treat their most beloved to something special. For others, it’s an opportunity to hide away from all those happy couples and have a date with their TV. And orbiting both of those groups are people who are happy to just Hulu and Hang. (It’s like Netflix and Chill, but actually involves watching what’s on the screen.) And next month there are quite a...
If you’re a guitarist, you’ve probably heard your instrument go slightly out of tune every time you clamp a capo onto the fretboard. A capo is the simple spring-loaded mechanism that raises the pitch of a guitar by pushing down on the strings wherever you place it on the neck. Capos push harder than your fingers, which will usually make your entire guitar a little sharp. And the relative thickness of the low strings means they’re pulled a little harder...
The plants in Craig Burrows’ photos look like something plucked from an alien planet, sprouting wild shades of violet, pink and green. But the plants, and the colors are real. It’s the result of a cool trick of nature. All plants reflect light. Leaves reflect green, and flowers reflect red, or yellow, or whatever. But plants also fluoresce, which means when they reflect ultraviolet light, they emit longer wavelengths visible to the human eye. It’s the same thing that happens with...
We never take Shakespeare’s (and Star Trek’s) notion about the future being an undiscovered country as a scary proposition. “Undiscovered” just means you’re supposed to go find it. That has always been one of WIRED’s central animating philosophies—that you can figure out what’s to come by a close read of the here and now. This month we’re giving you a guide to our current thinking on that, to the outbreaks of tomorrow that we’re watching and tracking. I...
Marilyn Mugot’s Instagram feed teems with cinematic images of cluttered streets, slumbering high-rises, and empty shopping malls illuminated by the neon glow of city lights. Her photographs make mundane cityscapes look magical. Mugot, a fashion photographer and graphic designer in the Parisian suburb of Vincennes, found a new creative outlet when she joined Instagram in 2013. Soon after, she departed for the United States, eager to take eerie photographs inspired by the films of David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott and Stanley...
The Force, it seems, is with Los Angeles. After playing one of the greatest games of architectural musical chairs in US history, the board of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative art yesterday announced that it has decided to locate its MAD Architects-designed building in the city’s Exposition Park. If approved by LA officials, the sinuous new structure, floating over 6—7 acres of green space, would occupy the site of two parking lots, just west of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the...
One clear trend that’s emerged from CES this year is that many, many smart home products are using Amazon’s Alexa voice-assistance platform. Most of these devices are just spins on Amazon’s Echo, a static speaker that sits on a shelf. But a few of the products packing Amazon’s AI are really unique. Meet LG’s Hub robot. It takes Alexa’s smarts, adds a screen and a dash of personality. LG’s bot can dance along with music and display its own facial...
You can’t walk the sprawling floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center without tripping over a speaker, an appliance, or even a robot or two that supports Alexa. Amazon’s voice assistant is clearly the darling of CES 2017. This may well be the year you switch from tapping and typing on touchscreens to simply shouting commands. Many platforms, from Apple’s Siri and Micosoft’s Cortana to Google’s Assistant and Samsung’s Viv, want to be your conversational partner, but Alexa easily leads...
