Video calls from a huge in-game Minecraft cell phone (Tomorrow Daily 282)

[MUSIC] Greetings citizens of the Internet. Welcome to Tomorrow Daily, the best geek talk show in the known universe. You're watching one of our many episodes. And on Thursday, Jeff Cannata and I are going to assemble Sort of like Voltron. And we're gonna talk to Jessica Chovat. She's gonna be in studio. And we're gonna talk a little bit about the headlines we talk about during the week during the mini-episode. So let's do the headlines. [MUSIC] If you've ever had Trouble making video call, imagine making a video call from the inside of Minecraft. Verizon teamed up with an ad agency and a design agency to come up with a plan for the massive under taking, and then got major Minecraft builder Capitan Sparkles to live stream building this Magnificent design in game. This is a gigantic cell phone that required a four level high cell tower to connect which also had to be built in game and it had the ability to load in websites and make phone and video calls. The websites are pretty crudely rendered on the block endgame phone but when Captains Sparkles holds up an actual YouTube page to compare you might be able to Sort of get an idea of what's being shown on this blocky screen. As for video calls, we think, honestly, that is the coolest part of the demo. Verizon created a custom application called Boxul that made it so websites and video could be translated into blocks. Subsequently, opening a path to this in game cell phone, and it works hilariously well for what it is. The person you're calling shows up as a very pixellated version of themselves inside the game, and they actually see your end-game avatar on their end. I'm expecting a brilliant horror movie to come out of this. The call is coming from inside the game, you guys. All right, so, from one game to another, you're probably really going to dig this NES 360 degree, eight player experience. Disney Research and ETH Durec founded the ETH Game Technology Center earlier this year, and they're showing off a concept that brought gamer nostalgia and group gaming together. They took a real Nintendo Entertainment System and game cartridges, and then created hardware and software To augment the console to transform Super Mario Brother's into an 8 player experience that is projected in 360 degree video around a room. So how exactly do you adjust a game so that 8 people can play cooperatively when originally it's a single player game? The designers have two modes of operation that makes this possible. Gamers lose control after a set amount of time and then move on to the next player, or a tracking PC connected to the Arduino board swaps the players and controls After the main character moves a certain distance within a level. Of course, the resulting play is kind of crazy with people swapping control mid-flight and mid-jump here and there. But it does kind of look like an amazing party game. Am I right? This setup isn't around anymore, since it was created specifically for a conference event. But if you have the means, ETH published a paper detailing all of the technical specs, and how you might be able to recreate one in your own home. Okay, so our very last thing isn't video games related, it's Just a bandage that glows when you have an infection. University of Bath chemistry professor Toby Jenkins came up with this idea, and it will potentially help future doctors detect even the smallest levels of bacterial infection early. The idea is to treat these infections As they happen as opposed to either treating too early and developing antibiotic resistant bacteria or treating an infection too late which is obviously a problem for everybody involved. The bandage has a gooey material infused with flourescent green dye capsules. If those capsules meet any bad bacteria, they're punctured and release their contents, spilling out a bright green indicator to show healing isn't quite happening right. In testing the bandages glowed green for pathogenic biofilm, but not for healthy bacteria, so it's a good, Sign that they are in fact working of intended. Over prescribing antibiotics is a real problem in treating patients and these bandages could help prevent that from happening. Which will in turn hopefully prevent antibiotic resistant bacteria From developing. Well let's hope all of the testing goes well because if it does we could see clinical trials start happening before the end of this decade. Alright, that's it for our headlines, let's check out some crowd funding. Fleye is a flying robot that hopes to be the future of drones by being safer, simpler, and sturdier than products on the market today. It's about the same size of a soccer ball and kind of reminds me of a really, really simple version of Wheatley from Portal 2. There's a camera on board, the propellers are protected by a grid and there are seven sensors to play around with. Developers have access to the API and SDK which Fleye hopes will make it an attractive option for programmers and the design means spectators can interact with Fleye without harming themselves or the drone. I mean look at him. The guy just pushes it around. Yeah sure it's super simple but it also looks kind of fun. However, you'll have to shell out a pretty penny for this one. Six hundred and ninety nine euros or seven hundred and thirty eight U.S. dollars will get you a fly sphere With a delivery window of September next year. So I guess you could pick one of these up honestly 738$ could go a long way towards a lot of little tiny drones that you could fly around that also won't hurt people. All right guys let's close out the show with our phonetographer of the day. [MUSIC] Our phonetographer of the day today is Jeff not Cannata who took this picture with his Nexus 5X and he wrote to us and said hello Ashley and Jeff. The other day my 10 and a half month old son figured our cat would make a nice pillow. I was able to snap this shot with my Nexus 5X before he decided the cat needed to be fluffed for a little extra comfort. I chatted with the two of them, they wanted to share their cuteness. So you have our permission to use their photo on the show. Take it easy, Jack. This is 100% adorable and really the only way I was able to get through a Monday this week, so thank you so much, Jeff, for sending in this cute, cute, cute little cat pillow picture with your ten and a half month old baby. If you guys want to send in your phonetography, please do. You can send it to tomorrow@cnet.com. Make sure you give us permission to use the photo on the show. Tell us a little big about it, and let us know what device you took your photo with. If you want to find us online, it's super-duper easy. You can always send your feed back for any of the stories you hear on the show to heytd, #HEYTD, and then we might read them on our long shows on Thursday. You can find us on Facebook or Twitter, @TomorrowDaily there. I'm at @AshleyEsqueda there. Jeff's @JeffKennauto with two n's and one t. And producer Logan is over @LoganMoy. Share the gift of Tomorrow Daily at tomorrowdaily.com. That's it for today's show. We'll see you tomorrow with a brand new docket of wonderful science facts meeting science fiction. Getting all awesome up in our lives. But until then, be a good human. We'll see you next time. Bye! [SOUND]