We Need More Science

15 Futuristic Gifts for the Super-Early Adopter

3D Robotics Iris+ Early adopters are hard to keep up with, but the Iris+ quadcopter is on it. The drone comes with a "Follow Me" mode and an optional GoPro/mount configuration, so it can tag along behind people while shooting floaty and fascinating video selfies. The base hardware goes for $750, but you can get a configuration with a GoPro Hero 3+ and a gyroscopic stabilization gimbal mount for $1,260. 3D Robotics

3D Robotics

Cirrus Vision SF50 This gets props because it doesn't have any. Cirrus' V-tail private jet is essentially a flying car. It's designed to be flown without a copilot and has a range of about 1000 miles. In case of calamity, a parachute system brings the entire plane softly back to terra firma. You can buy the $2-million SF50 and get one in 2015. Cirrus Aircraft

Cirrus Aircraft

Samsung Gear VR and Samsung Galaxy Note 4 While everyone else waits for the official Oculus Rift facetainment system to roll out, you can spend $500 to get a slice of the future. Samsung's hardware ($200 for the Gear VR facemask and $300 for the Galaxy Note 4 inside it) has an Oculus store on the system that lets you download content directly to your face. Samsung

Samsung

Jaunt VR Camera Why not bring your own movies to the VR revolution? The Jaunt VR is built for capturing footage to view on an Oculus Rift. It packs 28 cameras—20 around its perimeter, four on the top, and four on the bottom—capturing 3.5 gigapixels per second. A four-capsule microphone rig captures a sphere of sound. You have to "know somebody" to get one (pricing and availability aren't final) but it does exist. Work that Rolodex. Jaunt

Jaunt

Alienware Area-51 The latest Alienware desktop gaming PC looks like it was designed by Johnny Five, not Jony Ive. It can be spec'd up to an eight-core 4GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, three AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with 12GB RAM, and a 4TB hard drive/512GB SSD storage combo. That full-tilt config costs just under $6,000. If you just like its funky box, get the most modest selection of components for $1,700. Alienware

Alienware

Choc Creator V2 Consider the sand mandala. A team of Tibetan monks painstakingly create a delicate work of art over the course of weeks. Then, as soon as it's complete, they ritualistically destroy it. This $6,200 chocolate-squirting 3D printer is sort of like that. You spend weeks designing the perfect work of edible art on your computer, a few minutes printing it out, and then immediately shove the creation into your piehole. Choc Edge

Choc Edge

LG 77-Inch 4K Curved OLED Mr. Loudmouth down the block keeps boasting about his 4K TV, and Johnny Bragalot at work won't shut up about his OLED. Trump them both by buying a combination of the two. This curvy 77-incher combines the flawless contrast and fast response of an OLED panel with the razor-sharp resolution of Ultra HD. Translation: It's the best TV ever. It'll only set you back $25 grand. LG

Wonder Workshop Dash & Dot Robots The Dash & Dot ($228 as a two-pack) are little cyclops robots that grow along with a child's brain. Younger kids can control them with an app or just watch them zip around on the floor, avoiding objects with their built-in sensors. Older kids can control them with "Blockly," a puzzle-like programming interface. Kids who know Java and Objective-C can code complex commands. Wonder Workshop

Wonder Workshop

Sharp Wireless High-Resolution Audio Player Using a phone to play music over Bluetooth is fine, but you'll need something special to pipe uncompressed audio wirelessly to your surround-sound system. This $4,000 wireless player takes 24-bit/96kHz FLACs, WAVs, DSDs, Blu-rays, and SACDs and cranks out pristine audio to WiSA-compliant speakers on the uncluttered 5.2-5.8 GHz band. Sharp USA

Sharp USA

Sen.se Mother You could buy a basic fitness tracker, a sleep tracker, plus door and window sensors. Or you could just buy Sen.se's Mother, which tracks all those things. This odd little $300 matryoshka doll plugs into a router via an Ethernet cable, analyzes data from its user-configurable "Cookie" sensors, and tracks all the lifestyle stats in your home. You can reprogram each Cookie to do a different task, making it super versatile. Sen.se

Sen.se

Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector $50,000 isn't that much money. But if you've got the cash to drop on your loved one, opt for this short-throw 4K projector from Sony. It casts 4096 x 2160-pixel images that look tack-sharp at sizes up to 150 inches. Toss a 4K Media Player ($700) into the lucky recipient's stocking so they have something to watch. Sony

Sony

Forza 100+ MP CAM A display that can natively show the Forza 100+ MP Cam's 200-megapixel, 60-fps video output doesn't yet exist. You're also going to need a zettabyte of storage to handle its massive video files. But those are minor grievances, as is the $35,000 ballpark price. After all, this camera can make those pipe dreams of solving capers by yelling "enhance" at your computer a reality. Forza Silicon

Forza Silicon

HI-MACS Kitchen Pod Replace your giftee's aging kitchen with an amorphous blob. This conceptual piece by Belgian designer Xavier Bonte has a remote-control pop-top that lifts to reveal a sink and an induction stovetop. Drawers for cutlery and flatware are built in. Unfortunately, there's no oven, fridge, or dishwasher, but at least the lid can be closed to hide away that pile of dirty dishes in the sink. HI-MACS

HI-MACS

HP Sprout The space in front of a computer is normally used for a keyboard. HP has a better idea. The $1,900 Sprout comes with a 20-inch-diagonal touch mat and a downward-facing projector/scanner/camera. It lets you get hands-on with any images beamed upon it. 3D scanning and modeling software for the system arrives in mid-2015. The touchscreen PC also comes with a keyboard and mouse if you want to kick it old-school. HP

Panasonic DMP-BD70V VHS/Blu-ray/Streamer Combo Even the most forward-thinking person has a closet full of VHS tapes, so it's no wonder this magical VHS/Blu-ray/CD/DVD/MP3 player, SD-card/USB reader, and (very limited) set-top streamer is going for between $1,000 and $2,000 on Amazon. The DMP-BD70V even up-converts VHS video to... slightly-better-than-VHS video. Finally, a way to deliver VHS tapes via HDMI to a 4K OLED. Panasonic

Panasonic

Not Dead Yet: How Some Video Stores Are Thriving in the Age of Netflix

Video Free Brooklyn in New York City is just one of the video stores that have managed to stay alive through engaging film lovers in the community. Jennifer Loeber

It was late April when the sole surviving location of Kim’s Video & Music announced that it was closing its doors for good. The beloved New York City video store minichain already had dwindled from four branches to one, but the First Avenue location managed to hang on for nearly five years after Kim’s flagship shop closed in 2009. The news was met with a fair amount of media attention, some nostalgic (Tom Roston’s piece in The New York Times ), while others (Cody Clarke’s to-the-point Smug Film post titled “I Don’t Care That Kim’s Is Closing, And You Shouldn’t Either”) were unmoved by the fact one of the city’s last vestiges of video store culture was calling it quits.

That the number of video stores around the world is on the decline isn’t exactly breaking news. For the past decade, a range of options—DVD-by-mail, video on demand, standalone rental boxes, and online streaming among them—have posed major challenges to the viability of video stores, rendering the phrase itself an anachronism. But just because Blockbuster couldn’t keep its iconic blue awnings hanging doesn’t mean there aren’t some intrepid entrepreneurs (and diehard cinephiles) taking a cue from their digital counterparts and finding ways to not just survive in the age of Netflix, but thrive.

Hop the F train from Kim’s final location to Brooklyn and you’ll find Video Free Brooklyn, a tiny storefront touting the tagline that “Video stores didn’t die, they just had to evolve.” Originally opened in 2002, the space was taken over by the husband-and-wife team of Aaron Hillis and Jennifer Loeber in 2012.

While the decision to purchase a video store at the height of streaming’s assault on the traditional rental industry seemed counterintuitive, Hillis calls it “a labor of love that, surprisingly, also made economic sense.” Part of that is location: Video Free Brooklyn resides on Smith Street, a main thoroughfare of the borough’s Cobble Hill neighborhood, which means steady walk-in traffic. And once people find it, they tend to come back. “The neighborhood tends to be more educated and media-savvy,” Hillis says, “which translates to more discerning tastes.”

Video Free Brooklyn co-owner Aaron Hillis. Jennifer Loeber

Though the store measures just 375 square feet, basement storage allows Hillis—a noted film critic in his own right—to keep approximately 10,000 discs on hand. But rather than compete against the same wide-release films and television series that one can watch with the click of a button and an $8.99 streaming subscription, Hillis is curating a library of hard-to-find fare. “After the floodgates of the Internet opened, we’re now drowning in content and especially mediocrity,” Hillis says. “Video Free Brooklyn’s model is almost a no-brainer: My inventory is heavily curated, but so is my staff, all of whom work in the film industry and have extensive, nerdy knowledge about cinema. Coming into the shop is about nostalgia, the joy of discovery, and getting catered recommendations from passionate cinephiles. It’s a hangout, like the record store in High Fidelity.”

It’s Not Always About Profits

Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber know all about creating a community around cinema. In 1985, the childhood friends co-founded Vidiots in Santa Monica after realizing there was a need for a place that would celebrate cinema’s unsung genres by offering a range of independent, foreign, cult, and documentary films. Over the next two decades, they amassed a large following of cinephiles—Oscar-winning moviemakers included. But then the digital world began to encroach on their brick-and-mortar business, leading Polinger and Tauber to ask customers what to do next. They kept hearing the same suggestion: Go nonprofit!

“A lot of people were suggesting it to us and we didn’t really think we could do it,” says Tauber. “We just didn’t even know that it was an option.” Appropriately enough, they did know that one of their customers was in the business of helping organizations turn nonprofit. He confirmed that their status in the community and the fact they’d been hosting educational events since opening made them a perfect candidates. So in 2012, The Vidiots Foundation became official. The video store operation moved under the foundation’s umbrella in February.

An annex at Santa Monica store Vidiots allows the store to host community events. David Blattel

From the outside, one would hardly know the difference. But internally, merging these operations “simplified our lives, because we had three websites [and] two sets of books and it was very confusing,” laughs Polinger. Though The Vidiots Foundation is in its infancy, Polinger and Tauber are quick to credit five-time Oscar nominee David O. Russell—whom Polinger calls their “guardian angel” (and whose son was a Vidiots intern—with helping them to realize the new organization’s evolving potential by connecting the duo with corporate sponsors like Annapurna Pictures, Fox, and The Weinstein Company.

As for the ways in which streaming services like Netflix might impact their future, Tauber and Polinger don’t seem worried. “I feel like we have so many movies that you just can’t get on Netflix or streaming,” she says. The bigger problem, they believe, is television. “Sunday night has become our worst night—that’s when the best TV is on,” Polinger says. “The DVR has done more to hurt us than Netflix.” Still, she maintains, any digital option lacks one key component: “The human connection thing is still really important. People come in here to talk about films.”

A Foundation for the Future

Taking a page out of Vidiots’ book, Seattle’s Scarecrow Video—the country’s largest independent video store with a library of more than 120,000 DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes, laserdiscs, and VCDs—recently went the nonprofit route. Despite its impressive inventory, the Scarecrow team has learned it’s not always enough to just be a video store these days. In October, 2013, Scarecrow owners Carl Tostevin and Mickey McDonough penned an open letter to their customers in which they admitted “It is a difficult time to be a video store, and the past several years have not been kind. Our rental numbers have declined roughly 40 percent over the past six years. This isn’t a huge surprise—obviously technology has been moving this direction for some time—but the decline has been more dramatic than we had anticipated.” They reminded customers that they depend upon their patronage to stay afloat, then saw one of their best holiday seasons in years. But then January rolled around, and business slowed again.

Cue the all-staff meeting. “They said, ‘we are now open to accepting proposals from anyone for what to do with Scarecrow,'” says Kate Barr, a Scarecrow employee at the time. Barr and co-worker Joel Fisher proposed a nonprofit organization with the sole purpose of preserving and expanding the Scarecrow library and making it accessible to as many people as possible. The owners liked what they heard, and gave Barr and Fisher the go-ahead. Their first stop was Kickstarter, where they met their $100,000 fundraising goal within one week. “We were completely blown away by the amazing response,” admits Fisher. “We were not expecting it at all—especially not within hours.”

With more than 120,000 items, Seattle’s Scarecrow Video is the largest independent video store in the country. Scarecrow Video

Barr is now business manager and president of the board of The Scarecrow Project, as it’s known, and Fisher is Scarecrow’s operations manager and secretary of the board. With the first part of their funding in place, Barr and Fisher can begin attending to some of the items on their initial wish list: Scarecrow memberships, educational opportunities, and even more of parties, screenings, book signings, and guest visitors to The Screening Room. Though it wasn’t part of the initial plan, the number of calls they’ve received from fellow video store owners following the Kickstarter success makes Barr “wonder whether or not another piece of this puzzle is going to be acting as a lightning rod to bring all of the existing video stores that are able to survive together in some sort of coalition.”

Elvis Mitchell (right) interviews David Mamet at Vidiots. David Blattel

Fisher admits that the convenience and on-demand nature of digital entertainment always will pose a challenge to physical retail outlets, but believes the issue goes beyond the idea of instant gratification. “There is room for all these things,” he says, “but it’s dangerous if people reach the mindset of, ‘If it’s not on Netflix it’s not worth watching.’ Because the selection is so small. It’s the same with cable television and on-demand services—even if you subscribe to all of these different avenues, you’re missing out.”

It’s not that streaming platforms aren’t being curated—it’s who’s doing the curating. “What’s passively happening, whether people realize it or not, is that corporations are deciding what we should watch,” adds Barr. “The thing that made VHS catch on in the ’80s was this great sense of emancipation; prior to that, the only way you were seeing a movie was just by going to a theater. With streaming we are regressing a little bit, because once again the sacrifice we are making in order to have the ease of streaming is that we are putting that decision-making process in the hands of Netflix, Amazon, or whatever service.” And more often than not, those decisions are financially motivated—which is fine for the company’s coffers, but can also lead to that all-too-familiar fatigue that comes with scrolling past endless straight-to-video schlock and movies you’ve already seen but keep getting recommendations for.

For Hillis, the issue is not so much a question of survival as it is an evolutionary concept. “I’m unconvinced that video stores are in direct competition with streaming services or Netflix any more so than a free concert in the park, the World Cup, a local film festival, or anything that distracts someone away from my shop on a Saturday night,” he says. “Video stores need to provide some form of market exclusivity to maintain relevance. I don’t foresee them rising again in the age of one-click accessibility—but then again, it’s not like Facebook friends replaced real-life friends.”

The True Story of the Kids Who Beat MIT’s Best Robots, Coming Soon to Theaters

Lorenzo Santillan, Luis Aranda (standing), Oscar Vazquez, and Crisitan Arcega. courtesy Luis Aranda

Ten years ago, contributing editor Joshua Davis received a press release that gave him pause. Clumsily formatted and full of typos, the email described an underwater robot competition, funded by NASA, in which four high school students in Phoenix, Arizona—three of them undocumented immigrants from Mexico—beat MIT to win gold. Davis picked up the phone to learn more.

“La Vida Robot” (issue 13.04)

That reportorial instinct turned into the WIRED story “La Vida Robot” (issue 13.04), which mentioned that three of the young men didn’t qualify for federal student loans because of their immigration status. WIRED readers eventually raised more than $90,000 in scholarships for Oscar Vazquez, Cristian Arcega, Luis Aranda, and Lorenzo Santillan.

Now the story of those robot-builders has a new chapter. Spare Parts, starring George Lopez and Carlos PenaVega, opens in January, and Davis is publishing a book by the same title updating the kids’ story. “What happened to these guys fascinates me,” Davis says. “It changed their lives.” How? Here’s a preview.

Davis’ new book, called Spare Parts, updates the four men’s story in the decade following their historic robotics competition win.

Lorenzo Santillan

Santillan, whom Davis describes as “the mechanical genius who also loved cooking, an out-of-the-box thinker,” used the WIRED scholarship money to attend culinary school. Now he and Luis Aranda run a catering firm in Phoenix. He’s also a line cook at a local restaurant and moonlights as a mechanic.

Luis Aranda

Aranda was a US citizen when the group won the contest; today he runs a catering company with Santillan and works as janitorial supervisor for the courts in Phoenix.

Oscar Vazquez

Thanks to the scholarship funds provided by WIRED readers, Vazquez graduated from Arizona State University—but afterward he couldn’t resolve his immigration status and returned to Mexico. Then Senator Dick Durban learned of Vazquez’s plight and helped him get amnesty. Vazquez returned to the US, enlisted in the Army, and saw combat in Afghanistan. Today he’s a mechanical foreman for BNSF railroad in Montana. The movie coming out is “pretty surreal and exciting,” he says. “I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

Cristian Arcega

“He was the genius kid, supersmart,” Davis says. Arcega couldn’t finish college, in part because of money; a ballot measure raised tuition for undocumented immigrants. For a time, Arcega worked at Home Depot and now helps with a neighbor’s business. Besides that, “most of my time is spent working on product ideas,” Arcega says.

A still from the new movie, also called Spare Parts, based on Joshua Davis’ 2005 WIRED story: David Del Rio as Arcega, José Julián as Santillan, Carlos PenaVega as Vazquez, and Oscar Gutierrez as Aranda.