Final Fantasy XV: Acquiring the Flying Version of Regalia won’t be Easy

If you've seen the latest "Final Fantasy XV" trailer, then you must have come across the flying car. At the end of the video, Regalia transforms into a flying car and takes off in the sky. A flying car would allow players to easily traverse through the vastness of the land, and also prevent them from getting into battles.

According to Game Informer, the car will work the same way as airships in the previous Final Fantasy titles. For the first time, you can actually control the car, and not only that, you'll also have to land it back on the ground in a specific way. This means you will have to master this feature as well, along with fishing and taking pictures.

Final Fantasy director, Hajime Tabata, said that there won't be any enemies in the sky, and the car will only be used for transportation. Airships were also used for the same purpose, but we could also roam around in them. Of course, we won't have enough room inside a car, now would we? Mr. Hajime also stated that it won't be easy to acquire this feature for the Regalia early in the game, which means it will unlock near the end, after completing certain challenges.

Let's not forget that the car's radio will offer tracks from previous Final Fantasy games as well. Some that we would certainly like to hear are The Promise from "Final Fantasy XIII," One Winged Angel from "Final Fantasy VII," and Eyes on Me from "Final Fantasy VIII."

Final Fantasy XV will release on both, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 30. You can get some bonus items if you pre-order the game right now. If you wish to get a glimpse of what the final build will offer in terms of gameplay, graphics, and environments, then you can give a shot to Platinum Demo – Final Fantasy XV.

Source: Final Fantasy XV: Acquiring the Flying Version of Regalia won't be Easy

Self-driving cars are coming; can flying be next?

As early as 1926, Henry Ford had conceived of a flying car. It was called the "Sky Flivver" but was abandoned when an early crash killed the pilot. "Mark my word," Ford said in 1940, "a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come."

If you Google "flying car," you will find dozens of examples of this future vision, including the Moller M400 Skycar.

The Skycar looks the part, with an aerodynamic fuselage, a large, "Jetsons"-like bubble window, and four massive ducted fans that rotate. Paul Moller has been working on the M400 car for more than 50 years, but the only demonstration of one came in 2003, and the product has largely appeared to be a $100 million bust.

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Why haven't these vehicles "taken off?"

Simply put, it is hard enough to guarantee the safety of your daily commute on the ground. It is difficult, if not frightening, to imagine hundreds, or even thousands, of personal flying vehicles traversing the skies without accidents occurring.

For all the press a single plane crash receives, there are many more highway deaths each year: 32,675, according to recent data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It's anybody's guess what would happen if cars went airborne.

There is one thing that makes the development of a flying car more than just wishful thinking, however; it's the autonomous car. As companies like Google work to create a car that drives itself, the possibility that such a car can achieve liftoff is far more likely than if such a vehicle were driven by mere mortals.

Cost and fuel efficiency are still among the largest hurdles to overcome to achieve a high-volume flying car, but if the public can accept autonomous cars, they might also accept autonomous flying commuter vehicles.

One technological challenge for autonomous cars is processing power. Modern cars may boast multiple sensors and cameras, but autonomous cars have a much more concentrated array of sensors, including radar and lidar, and multiple cameras. The simultaneous processing of all of their data is pushing current computational power to its limits.

In January of this year, at the Consumer Electronics Show, technology firm NVIDIA announced creation of the PX 2, an artificial intelligence supercar computer designed specifically for application in autonomous vehicles. The AI supercomputer is capable of 24 trillion computations a second. That kind of processing power can operate all the cameras on a car that will be looking for road lines, other cars, bicyclists, pedestrians, and anything else the average commute might throw in your path.

WHEEEE! Terrafugia, a Woburn-based company, is developing the tilt-rotor TF-X, which should be capable of traveling on land and in the air.

Terrafugia

It also means the car can respond as fast, or faster, than if a human were driving it. In fact, Volvo has announced that some of the autonomous XC90s being made for the public will feature the PX 2 supercomputer.

Another key component in autonomous vehicle safety is vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V, communications. This ability for vehicles to "talk" to one another means that numerous autonomous vehicles can be on the road at the same time. This same ability would be crucial for flying cars.

Woburn-based Terrafugia, a small, privately held corporation that is developing a flying car called the TF-X, understands these challenges completely. Founded by graduates from MIT, the firm's initial product, the Transition, was a folding-wing aircraft that was more of a drivable plane. One would have to drive the Transition to a local airport, convert it to flight mode, and take off from there.

But after several years of showing the vehicle, the company went back to the drawing board and announced the design of the TF-X.

Instead of wings, the TF-X features a pair of tilting rotors, much like the US Marines' V-22 Osprey. The TF-X, which is still years away from production, will be capable of autonomous flight, including auto takeoff and landing. Terrafugia claims the fully electric TF-X also will be capable of "automatically avoiding other air traffic," suggesting the presence of this V2V capability. The company appears to have added many redundancies, specifically with safety in mind.

Ultimately, road-worthy autonomous cars will have to pre-date the flying car if "winging it" is to gain any sort of real traction. The only way regulators—and the public—would be willing to accept flying cars, is if a reliable track record can be established among autonomous cars. At the rate we are going, that day isn't too far off.

Source: Self-driving cars are coming; can flying be next?

The Volocopter Is Our Flying Car

Often, our visions for the future don't come out look exactly like we pictured. The most futuristic technology I could dream up as a kid was a video phone, but it didn't end up looking like a television with a phone attached. It ended up looking like an iPhone.

So it goes with the flying car. Considering we're nowhere near close to even a hoverboard, the dream of a regular, car-shaped car zooming through the sky is still just a fantasy. Instead, our best bet is the Volocopter. It's kind of like a human-sized drone, or a helicopter that's as easy to fly as a car is to drive, and is designed to travel short distances. In other words, this is our flying car.

After six years of development and seeking flying permits, the German-designed Volocopter took its first manned flight and published the video this week. Check it out, and adjust your daydreams about picking up your sweetie for a date at the fly-in movie theater accordingly:

Source: The Volocopter Is Our Flying Car

Watch the first crewed flight of the world’s first “flying car”

Mirror, signal, lift-off. A crewed flight of what many are calling the world's first flying car took place on 30 March at an airfield in Germany, it emerged today (see video above).

The Volocopter is an electrically powered 18-rotor helicopter that looks more like an overgrown toy drone than a serious aircraft. But its makers, E-Volo in Karlsruhe, Germany, see it as the future of urban personal transport – a safer, cleaner alternative to the car.

The aircraft takes off vertically and is easy to fly. Its control system, developed by Intel-owned Ascending Technologies – also based in Germany – translates the complex controls of a helicopter into the simple up, down, backward and forward motions of a video-game joystick.

"I simply pushed the lever up and the Volocopter sprung upward in a single bound," says E-Volo director Alexander Zosel, who carried out the test flight. He was even able to let go of the joystick and have the vehicle hover on the spot – which is a key safety measure, he says.

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In its first flight, the Volocopter flew just a few metres up at 25 kilometres an hour. Future flights will test the vehicle at higher altitudes and speeds of up to 100 km per hour.

"This is a fantastic achievement," says aviation researcher Mike Jump at the University of Liverpool, UK. "It feels like a landmark moment for the creation of a personal aerial vehicle." Jump is part of the team behind a similar control system for personal flying vehicles called MyCopter, which New Scientist tested in 2014 (see video below).

Source: Watch the first crewed flight of the world's first "flying car"

Britain's Dyson Tech Introduces A New Electric Flying-Car

British firm Dyson has moved up to the auto industry ladder with its latest venture, that of their development of an electric car that could fly into the air in an announcement this week, much to the delight of the automotive community, according to StuffTv.

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Dubbed the DyFly, the news came as Google and Tesla have also been continuously developing technology for efficient and effective self-driving electric cars. While this kind of innovative approach isn't that new these days, Dyson's engineers thought a different approach was in order.

A bit more of Dyson technology is incorporated in the car, with steering guided via Dyson taps with Airblade side bits. Air filters from the company's Pure Cool Link fans further give the flying car an air purification capability.

According to TheConversation, news circuits have also gotten word that founder Sir James Dyson received UK government funding for the company's new invention. Details from the released document that defined the funding were edited on the final document, it was revealed.

Dyson clearly has gotten a long way in considerable expertise in the fields of charging protocols, electric motors, storage batteries, and energy management software for electric transport. The company's gradual transition from the manufacture of bagless vacuums to electric vehicles would clearly involve continued and persistent development of products and services, and most probably, new key players from known car supply manufacturers. In this case, the company could eventually play a significant role as a supplier of main and sub-components for other independent assemblers worldwide.

In a previous CSMonitor post, Dyson CEO Max Conze commented on deciding nothing out when questioned on the possibility of a future electric-car idea last year. However, he slightly referred to Apple as being similar in the "unhealthily obsessive" notion on reinventing its products and transform them into something better.

 

 

 

Source: Britain's Dyson Tech Introduces A New Electric Flying-Car

More than 100 years of car evolution could reveal where the industry is going next

Unless you're a couple of crusty old white guys, the future of cars is looking pretty bright. Affordable electric cars are about to hit the market, self-driving cars are practicing their not-hitting-people skills, sleek 3D-printed cars are becoming a thing. And in a world that desperately needs to be more efficient and rely less on fossil fuels, this is all promising news.

But predicting the future of technology is always hard and often leads to egg-covered faces and tarnished reputations. The former chair of IBM, for example, once famously said that "there is a world market for maybe five computers." And boy does that guy have about a billion eggs on his face right now.

Fortunately, a new (yet to be peer-reviewed) study on arXiv.org offers a way to predict where our technologies are going by first looking at where they've been. The study, led by researchers at UCLA, presents an evolutionary model for technology, and with the automobile as a case study, suggests that "electric and hybrid cars may be experiencing the early stages of a radiation event, with dramatic diversification expected in the next three to four decades."

The model includes data on 3,575 cars made by 172 manufacturers between 1896 and 2014. It considers each car model a distinct species whose first and last years of production mark its origin and extinction, respectively. It thus offers a rate of "species" origination and extinction over time, allowing the researchers to analyze the effects of outside factors like GDP, oil prices, and market competition on the size and diversity of species types.

Not surprisingly, they found declines in origination in 1933, during the Great Depression. They also found declining extinction rates in 1935, again corresponding to the Great Depression, and in 1960, when the "Big Three" automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) hit their peak.

More surprising was that the model showed that the rate of new species hitting the market had decreased fourfold between 1980 and 2014 and that extinction rates slightly outpaced origination rates during that time, meaning the market has gotten less diverse. At the same time, the average lifespan of models increased.

This happened, the researchers speculate, because certain designs began to dominate, and experimenting with new ones became too costly. The resulting market consolidation increased brand loyalty, stabilized cost of production, and made for safe investing. And it showed that market competition is more strongly correlated with species diversity than other factors like GDP or the price of oil.

Which brings us back to today. Electric vehicles haven't gone through the decades of evolution that gas-powered cars have, which is perhaps why a relatively new brand like Tesla can come in with its shaky production schedules and unsteady financial standing and shake up the market. And in the coming decades, according to this research, we can expect more competitors to join Tesla's Model 3 and GM's Chevy Bolt before the market ultimately settles on dependable models and creativity in the industry declines once again.

By that point, though, we'll surely be in the midst of a flying car diversity boom. That's one tech prediction that will never die, no matter how many times it's blown up in people's faces.

Source: More than 100 years of car evolution could reveal where the industry is going next

Britain's Dyson Tech Introduces A New Electric Flying-Car

British firm Dyson has moved up to the auto industry ladder with its latest venture, that of their development of an electric car that could fly into the air in an announcement this week, much to the delight of the automotive community, according to StuffTv.

Like Us on Facebook

Dubbed the DyFly, the news came as Google and Tesla have also been continuously developing technology for efficient and effective self-driving electric cars. While this kind of innovative approach isn't that new these days, Dyson's engineers thought a different approach was in order.

A bit more of Dyson technology is incorporated in the car, with steering guided via Dyson taps with Airblade side bits. Air filters from the company's Pure Cool Link fans further give the flying car an air purification capability.

According to TheConversation, news circuits have also gotten word that founder Sir James Dyson received UK government funding for the company's new invention. Details from the released document that defined the funding were edited on the final document, it was revealed.

Dyson clearly has gotten a long way in considerable expertise in the fields of charging protocols, electric motors, storage batteries, and energy management software for electric transport. The company's gradual transition from the manufacture of bagless vacuums to electric vehicles would clearly involve continued and persistent development of products and services, and most probably, new key players from known car supply manufacturers. In this case, the company could eventually play a significant role as a supplier of main and sub-components for other independent assemblers worldwide.

In a previous CSMonitor post, Dyson CEO Max Conze commented on deciding nothing out when questioned on the possibility of a future electric-car idea last year. However, he slightly referred to Apple as being similar in the "unhealthily obsessive" notion on reinventing its products and transform them into something better.

 

 

 

Source: Britain's Dyson Tech Introduces A New Electric Flying-Car