Kleiner Lawyer Says Pao Twisted Facts to Get a Big Payout

Ellen Pao. Christie Hemm Klok/WIRED

Early on in her closing argument, defense attorney Lynne Hermle showed the jury a picture of the plaintiff, Ellen Pao, surrounded by photos of 13 colleagues she had clashed with during her time at Kleiner Perkins, the legendary venture capital firm she’s suing for gender discrimination. The pictures ranged from Pao’s own assistant to her ex-boss and mentor, John Doerr. The slide on the projector was titled, “Pao’s Numerous Conflicts: What Is the Common Denominator?”

According to Hermle, what they all had in common was Pao. Pao had conflicts with virtually everyone she worked with closely, Hermle argued as she began recapping the defense’s case late yesterday. Closing arguments continued this morning. The crux of Kleiner’s defense is that Pao herself was the problem at the firm, not her gender. The only people who she didn’t have issues with, Hermle argued in San Francisco Superior Court, were employees with whom she didn’t work closely in the first place.

Pao is suing her former employer, whose full name is Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for gender discrimination and retaliation. She claims she was unfairly passed over while men were promoted; when she complained about her issues, she says, she was penalized and eventually terminated. The trial, now in its fifth week, has sparked soul-searching about the lack of diversity in a tech industry where the workforce is dominated by men.

The case is expected to go the jury for deliberations later today after Pao’s team presents its rebuttal. Pao attorney Alan Exelrod summed up her case yesterday in a three-and-a-half-hour argument that Pao brought in the returns while men got the promotions.

Nothing to Do with Gender

Hermle argued that Pao’s failure to succeed at Kleiner Perkins had nothing to do with gender or retaliation. On the contrary, she said, Pao saw an opportunity for a big payout. And, when she saw the writing on the wall that she would probably be fired, Hermle said, she went on the defensive. “Her complaints did not cause the lack of promotion,” said Hermle. “The lack of promotion caused Ellen Pao’s complaints.”

Throughout her closing argument, Hermle sought to show that Pao blamed others for her own failings and that she was simply not cut out to be a venture capitalist. Pao twisted facts to support her allegations, Hermle said, and she never intended to support other women. ‘The circumstances show you the complaints for Ellen Pao were made for one purpose,” Hermle said. “A huge payout for Team Ellen.”

Pao Was Ahead of the Game From the Start

In 2005, her first year at the firm, Pao had already started ahead of her peers, Hermle argued. She had famed VC John Doerr’s support and mentorship from the beginning, but she did not succeed because she had her own advancement in mind rather than the good of the group, Hermle said. “She was not a fit for the team-based culture at the heart of venture capital, and she wanted credit,” Hermle said. “She was dismissive of colleagues over and over.”

On the other hand, Hermle said, Pao’s peers did what they could to overcome the criticisms they met early on in their careers. Pao, meanwhile, “refused to deepen her expertise to a thought-leader level,” Hermle said, intimating that because Pao had already minted a sterling academic record, she may have thought she was a success “in her own mind, and didn’t need to fix anything.”

But when Pao started to work closely with others in a team setting, she argued, her negative traits emerged. Hermle pointed to accusatory messages, unpleasant emails, constant complaints about colleagues—even a complaint about a peer “while his mother was dying of brain cancer in China,” Hermle said.

Twisting Facts

As soon as Pao realized she wasn’t doing well for the firm, Hermle said, she began to collect evidence for the suit against Kleiner. She sent emails to herself, kept text messages of an affair between her and a married colleague “only when things were going badly,” and got a lawyer to represent her during an internal investigation in which the firm looked into her claims of gender bias.

One by one, Hermle sought to poke holes in Pao’s version of events at Kleiner that allegedly showed gender bias No one but Pao could back up her claim that a male partner had said “women kill the buzz,” she said. Many men were asked to sit in the back and take notes during off-sites. And a senior colleague’s Valentine’s Day gift of a Buddhist-themed poetry book that Pao called inappropriately erotic had a perfectly innocent explantation. Events that allegedly showed bias lacked context, or may not have even occurred, Hermle said.

Finally, Hermle implored the jury, consider the highly successful women at Kleiner who declined to join Pao’s suit. Not only did they refuse to join, Hermle said, but they testified had seen no discrimination at the firm.

To See the Birth of an Atlantic Hurricane, Look to Africa

The winter crushed the East Coast of the US. So let us crush your dreams of spring with a gentle reminder: Hurricane season is right around the corner. And the hurricanes that will slam into the Atlantic seaboard in just a couple of months are already glints in the eyes of storms-yet-to-be-born in Africa.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially kicks off in June, but it starts over the Sahara. In the Sudanese highlands—the same place the Nile begins—sun-heated air bubbles upward and condenses into mushroom-shaped thunderheads thousands of miles high. At the same time, enormous waves of air in the upper atmosphere push those storms west, toward the Atlantic. Most of these tempests will die on the coast. But some get second lives—as tropical storms or hurricanes. That turns out to be an important connection if you’re trying to predict hurricanes. New research shows that the temperature of clouds in those African storms could help meteorologists figure out which will mutate into coast-and-island-pummeling monsters on the other side of the ocean.

While these tall clouds are growing out of the high desert, a massive, oscillating atmospheric pattern called the Africa Easterly Wave is settling in thousands of feet above. It’s a vast, sine wave-shaped air flow that carries weather across the Sahara, east to west. When those Sudanese thunderstorms rise, they get caught up in the flow, off to drench Africa’s west coast. And there they stop; the Atlantic Ocean is cold, and thunderstorms thrive on heat.

But the Africa Easterly Wave persists, and sometimes so does the energy that used to be a thunderstorm. “And when the wave reaches the central part of the Atlantic basin, then some of the thunderstorms will start to develop again,” says Robert Rogers, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. Out in the mid-Atlantic, the water is warmer, the air more humid, and the wind stronger. And the Africa Easterly Wave’s undulations spin all those conditions into a nice cyclonic spiral.

Only about one in 10 of the African storms re-emerge, though. “That’s the million dollar question: What causes some of the storms in these Africa Easterly Waves to develop into a tropical cyclone?” says Jim Kossin, a climate researcher with the National Centers for Environmental Information. Even with a perfect accounting of environmental conditions in the mid-Atlantic, scientists still can’t predict which storms will complete the transition.

The fate might be written in the clouds of the thunderstorms. In new research, meteorologists from Tel Aviv University used geostationary satellites to look at the thunderstorms right before they disappeared off the coast of Africa into the Atlantic. Specifically, the scientists were looking at the temperatures at the very tops of each storm’s cumulonimbus clouds. Temperature is a proxy for height—clouds grow predictably colder as they rise. And the taller a cloud, the more energy it contains.

And surprise: These tall, cold clouds often prefigured later tropical storms. If the temperature of about 5 percent of the clouds in a thunderstorm drops to -58˚F mark—corresponding roughly to the maximum altitude for cumulonimbus clouds—the odds jump that it’ll resurrect as a cyclone.

And when does that happen? Well, 2015 is an El Niño year, so this season could be another dud. “Then again, it only takes one hurricane to make for an awful year,” says Kossin. Hurricane Andrew (the 1992 monster that flattened Miami) struck during an El Niño. No amount of prediction will ever stop a storm like Andrew (or any storm, for that matter), but right now meteorologists start tracking storms about a week before they look likely to make landfall. Looking at the cloud heights of African thunderstorms could double that lead time—and every added bit of foresight helps more people get out of the way.

Decades on, Ray-Ban Wayfarers Remain the Pinnacle of Cool

Decades on, Ray-Ban Wayfarers Remain the Pinnacle of Cool

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With 80-year-old glare-cutting science and 60-year-old hipster-cool chic, these iconic sunglasses have ridden the waves of fashion in timeless style. Ray-ban Wayfarers | $155 and up Peden + Munk

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The times, they may have changed. But the Wayfarers’ design is still beloved—and widely imitated. Getty Images

With 80-year-old glare-cutting science and 60-year-old hipster-cool chic, these iconic sunglasses have ridden the waves of fashion in timeless style. Ray-ban Wayfarers | $155 and up Peden + Munk

The times, they may have changed. But the Wayfarers’ design is still beloved—and widely imitated.

Getty Images

Wayfarers were not the debut model in Bausch & Lomb's Ray-Ban line, but they're certainly the most famous. The shades that popularized antiglare eyewear were the company's Aviators, originally developed in the '30s for the Army Air Corps. They were as rationally designed as a B-17 bomber—the teardrop-shaped lenses shielded the full range of human vision. In contrast, the Wayfarers' flared trapezoidal shape of 1952 was a design flourish akin to the Cadillac tail fin.

Though the new green glass lenses were just as high tech—blocking 85 percent of sunlight without noticeable color distortion—these were among the first sunglasses made for both seeing and being seen. And the people seen in them? Everyone from Muhammad Ali to Marilyn Monroe. Even people who weren't wearing Wayfarers often are remembered as if they were, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Hers? Likely Oliver Goldsmith look-alikes.) Wayfarers are still widely imitated, their geometry copied by labels like Marc Jacobs and Forever 21. Seems kind of shady.

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WIRED Binge-Watching Guide: Veronica Mars

It only lasted three seasons, and the last one wasn’t very spectacular, but Veronica Mars is already a cultural touchstone. Smart, funny, and blessed with a female lead who could do anything her character required, Rob Thomas’s show would take its relatively short run and use it to build a show praised by critics and beloved by fans.

The story of a high school gumshoe digging into the criminal underbelly of her seaside southern California hometown, Veronica Mars also presaged the current string of cable television crime serials while also creating one of the few modern female detectives to truly make an impact. That’s no small feat, and it’s one made even more impressive when you remember it was a show about teenagers on UPN that managed to soldier on even as UPN and the WB merged and the great CW experiment began.

Its three-season stint also means that it’s easy for anyone to join Veronica’s legion of ardent followers. Yes, you too can become a Marshmallow. With less than 100 episodes, it’s possible to get through the entire show in the same amount of time it would take to read some of great detective novels, sure, but do those all have a wisecracking high school girl whose diminutive appearance allows her to get the drop on unassuming suspects? We didn’t think so.

Here’s how to spend a few glorious weeks on Neptune, California’s mystery-riddled shoreline.

Veronica Mars

Number of Seasons: 3 (64 episodes)

Time Requirements: The show’s total run comes out to just under 46 hours of television. Mystery shows tend to pick up as they go along, so while it’s possible to watch a few episodes a night and get through the show in a month, it’s more likely that as the clues start to come together you’ll want to speed along and finish a little sooner.

Where to Get Your Fix: Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play

Best Character to Follow: Veronica (Kristen Bell), duh. The show is named after her for a reason. Armed with the wit and sass of classic pulp detective characters, Veronica is what you’d get when crossing newshound Hildy Johnson from His Girl Friday and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, or Nancy Drew mixed with Buffy. She’s unafraid to walk alone, but vulnerable enough to reveal in voiceover just how lonely it gets to project a stoic, disaffected demeanor all the time.

But if you’re looking for someone other than the title character, the most interesting supporting roles still have strong ties back to Veronica. Her father Keith (Enrico Colantoni) oscillates between a stern and protective guy who to see his daughter to have a normal adolescence to a beaming proud dad-joke machine who perfectly complements Veronica’s repertoire of references. And Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring), try as he might to stay away, just can’t keep himself out of Veronica’s life. They’re like fire and gasoline: dangerous together, but the destructive havoc can sometimes be beautiful.

Seasons/Episodes (And One Movie) You Can Skip:

The final season of Veronica Mars is pretty spotty since at the time the show’s future at the fledgling CW hung in the balance. Instead of one dedicated season-long mystery like the first two years of the show, the final season sees Veronica handling a few multi-episode arcs while enrolled in her freshman year of college. Beyond that, here are a few episodes you can skip for sure.

Season 1: Episode 9, “Drinking The Kool-Aid” If there is a lowest point in the nearly impeccable debut season, it’s probably this episode, where Veronica infiltrates a potential cult called the Moon Calf Collective, only to find some mildly overeager hippies yearning for peace together.

Season 2: Episode 17, “Plan B” Veronica Mars goes out of its way in order to depict Neptune as a place where the haves and the have-nots come into conflict constantly, and those divisions often fall along racial lines. But when delving into something like a biker gang fighting with a big crime family, it loses the strong class struggle angle in a muddled turf war.

Season 3: Episode 4, “Charlie Don’t Surf” Matt Czuchry has proven against all odds that he’s not as punchable as his face suggests, turning in great performances on Gilmore Girls and The Good Wife. But as a journalist attempting to get closer to Logan by posing as a long-lost half-brother, he’s a terribly written character without much of a purpose.

Season 3: Episode 6, “Hi, Infidelity” Starting to sense a pattern? Yeah, the third season struggled to make the transition to what the CW wanted in its first year as a network. Sometimes that meant riveting, terrifying stuff—like the end of the next episode, “Of Vice And Men.” Other times, it meant a clumsy ruse where a group of feminist activists fake a rape in order to urge college administrators to take action against fraternities. Veronica Mars never shied away from hot-button issues and significant conversation topics, but it didn’t always handle them gracefully.

Veronica Mars (2014) Here’s a bitter pill to swallow: One year removed from the crowdfunded film’s release, it’s a lot easier to look back and wish the show had just remained a show. It was great to see the Marshmallow fan base rally around the Kickstarter for a film revival, but that’s basically all it was—fan service. An endless parade of cameos from beloved characters—Dick Casablancas (Ryan Hansen) the best of them, obviously—dragged down what could’ve been the start of a mystery franchise. The series of pulp novels co-written by Jennifer Graham—which feel a lot like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book continuation of a great series—are more worthy of the show’s legacy.

Seasons/Episodes You Can’t Skip:

Season 1: Episode 1, “Pilot” Who killed Lilly Kane? That’s the question that lingers over the Veronica Mars pilot, and the mystery that begat one of the strongest debut seasons of the century so far. Introducing Veronica as the once-popular daughter of disgraced sheriff Keith Mars, and as the ex-girlfriend of Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn), her best friend’s brother. Most of the show takes place around Neptune High School, an area divided between the 09-ers, rich kids who can get away with anything, and the kids from outside that zip code, often represented by the PCHers, a Latino biker gang fronted by Eli “Weevil” Navarro (Francis Capra), who likes Veronica enough to help her out when she needs something on a case.

Season 1: Episode 18, “Weapons of Class Destruction” Like almost every other investigative show on television, Veronica Mars mixes the serialized mystery of Lilly Kane’s murder with individual cases that Veronica tackles each week. This time it’s about a string of bomb threats at Neptune High. But honestly, that’s not really as important as the episode’s romantic milestone: Veronica and Logan sharing their first volcanic kiss.

Season 1: Episode 21, “A Trip to the Dentist” Credited 17 times as a writer throughout the series, Diane Ruggiero is as important to the success of the show as Rob Thomas. The penultimate episode of the first season resolves the other season-long mystery surrounding Veronica being date-raped at a party. The information she uncovers is staggeringly heartbreaking, and the way in which the show handled the arc pays off with complex, difficult confrontations. Making Veronica a rape victim was contentious when UPN first picked up the series, but the critical acclaim for the plot line made it worth the dramatic risk.

Season 1: Episode 22, “Leave It to Beaver” Introducing a compelling mystery is easy. Finishing off those cases with an even better conclusion is incredibly hard (see: True Detective). But the initial season of Veronica Mars concludes with a grand twist and a deeply suspenseful climax, building to one helluva romantic cliffhanger. If the show had somehow been cancelled right after this, it would still rank as one of the best series in recent memory.

Season 2: Episode 11, “Donut Run” Duncan gets a bad rap because he just doesn’t have the chemistry with Veronica that Logan does. But that doesn’t mean the two don’t still care about each other. But the long con Veronica pulls to ensure that Duncan can flee the country with his child—even roping in the doofus private detective Vinnie Van Lowe (Ken Marino)—is nothing short of staggering.

Season 2: Episode 22, “Not Pictured” Cassidy Casablancas (Kyle Gallner) is the grand tragic villain of Neptune, California: Neglected by his family, derided by his brother’s friends, utterly forgotten by almost everyone but Veronica’s friend Mac. Season 2’s mysterious bus crash has a higher body count than the murder mystery in Season 1, but it’s not as focused as Veronica’s crusade to avenge her best friend. Still, the second season finale throws every bit of drama it can into the fold. In revealing a tangled web of child abuse perpetrated by Woody Goodman (Steve Guttenberg), Cassidy comes clean about his murderous plans for vengeance. Once foiled, in a rooftop confrontation that momentarily leaves Keith’s fate uncertain, Cassidy’s screams to Logan about what he has to live for equal the first-season’s memorable ending.

Season 3: Episode 20, “The Bitch Is Back” All the ups and downs of a college freshman season aside—and let’s leave any discussion of Logan-versus-Piz (Chris Lowell) out of this, since it’s not worth getting into how wrong people who favor the latter are—Rob Thomas found a way to end a tumultuous final season with a bookend that rewarded fans with one last glimpse of the sparks between Veronica and Logan, before finally settling on the father/daughter relationship that grounded so much of the series.

Why You Should Binge:

When Veronica Mars was on the air, it competed against California teenagers in The O.C. and Laguna Beach. It hit the air when the biggest police dramas still included the original Law & Order. And yet, it still feels fresh to watch a fiercely intelligent and uproariously funny female lead dominate scene after scene against any opponent because of how great the writing is and how natural Bell slips into the role.

Thomas would go on to create Party Down, another hilarious and astute series about a different aspect of southern California life. But the world he and his writing staff created in Neptune effortlessly combined messages with mysteries and romance in a way that never lost steam. It’s a near-impossible balancing act, and Veronica Mars pulled it off for three whole seasons.

Best Scene—Keith Saves Veronica:

Oh, this one is tough. There’s Logan and Veronica’s first kiss, the nearly silent coda of Beaver’s final scene in the second season finale, or any number of verbal tennis matches Veronica wins over various rubes.

But for sheer heart-pounding catharsis, there’s nothing like the climax of the first season finale, when Keith saves Veronica from burning to death. Sure, her father rescues her, and that’s a little disappointing—but even the best detectives need help once in a while.

The Takeaway:

Sometimes it’s OK to be a marshmallow.

If You Liked Veronica Mars You’ll Love:

For the same mystery-of-the-week-plus-serialized-overarching-plot format, look to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Or, for those not ready to let the tragicomic crime-solving sensibilities of Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero go, their new CW show iZombie premiered last week.

Fantastical 2 Is a Crazy-Powerful Calendar App for Your Mac

When Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland started building a calendar app for the Mac in 2010, their goal was simple: fix everything bad about iCal. The two-man team behind app developer Flexbits particularly hated how hard Apple’s calendar app made it to add events, so they built a natural-language parser that allowed you to type “Dinner with Kim 7PM next Thursday” and have the event automatically slot into exactly the right place. That became the core feature of Fantastical, the app Flexbits launched in 2011. It’s also about the only thing Flexbits hasn’t totally overhauled in Fantastical 2 for Mac, the brand-new, far more powerful app launching today.

Fantastical 2’s most important new feature is a full-size app window. The app previously existed only in the Mac’s menu bar, where a quick keyboard shortcut would drop your calendar down over whatever you were doing, so you could quickly add or check something. Now there’s a dedicated app window, which looks like, well, a calendar app. It has day, week, month, and year views, as well as a list of calendars on the left side. It’s pretty, and laid out similarly to most calendar apps you’ve seen.

That’s also, Simmons says, the best way to really dig in and get schedulin’. He says he’d noticed himself using apps other than his own whenever he needed to really organize his time, and thought, “why am I using another app? Why wouldn’t I want to make my experience better?” Fantastical set out to simplify the Mac calendar experience; Fantastical 2 is all about making it more powerful.

The Year View in Fantastical 2 for Mac. Fantastical

This is the part where I should say I’ve been a Fantastical user since the beginning. I’m a dangerous combination of forgetful enough to be totally reliant on my calendar, and lazy enough not to enter anything if it takes effort. Fantastical made creating events as easy as typing a sentence, and suddenly I stopped missing meetings. In the week or so I’ve been beta-testing Fantastical 2, I still mostly use it for quick, simple interactions—am I free at 2? Yes? Okay, “Check-in with Joe at 2.” Done. There’s a new, flatter, Yosemite-inspired design, and a lot more color, but for me, Fantastical is still Fantastical.

This new iteration is capable of much, much more, though. Simmons says the bulk of his work with co-founder Sutherland was building a new CalDav engine—CalDav is the protocol used to send calendar information—so that they can send much richer information about alerts and recurring events, much more quickly. (He also cryptically hinted at using that engine to send more than just calendar events, but wouldn’t elaborate.) There are also new “Calendar Sets,” groups of calendars that you can toggle to quickly switch between different contexts. You can see eight (or however many you want) different calendars at work, and when you get home see up to eight others with just one click. It can even switch automatically, using your location to figure out when you get home or to the office.

In the full window view, seeing weeks and months at a glance is really simple: There’s a neat scrubber in the year view that pops up your events for whatever day you’ve hovered over, and days are color-coded by how busy you’ll be. Flexbits did clever work with a hard job: it maintained the app’s core simplicity by communicating a lot with just quick glances and interactions, but it also created powerful tools and features for those who really want to go to war with their schedule.

The “Mini Window” in Fantastical 2. Fantastical

The language-recognition tool is even better now, too. With just “alert 15″ at the end of your event title, you can program it to tell you 15 minutes ahead of your meeting to actually, you know, leave for the meeting. You can also specify time zones for your meeting, or use “float” to keep your morning routine the same no matter where in the world you are. (If you travel a lot, you’ll know how shifting time zones can ruin your schedule.) When you write, “Take out the trash every other Wednesday and Thursday at 8PM,” it’ll nail it. You can use these tools to quickly create either calendar events or reminders, which sync with iCloud and thus other Apple devices.

On one hand, the app is made to make keeping your calendar easier. On the other, it’s a crazy-powerful tool for hardcore calendar-keepers. At $49.99, however, it’s priced only for that second group. (It’s only $39.99 while it’s brand-new, though, so hurry!) The previous version sold well at $19.99, though, even that price rankled some potential purchasers. You also need to buy the app separately on iPhone, iPad, and Mac; being a Fantastical user on all three platforms will set you back a whopping $65.

Simmons says that the Mac App Store has lots of best-selling apps well above this price, and that’s certainly true, but the biggest reason for the increase seems to be Flexbits’ desire to communicate that Fantastical 2 is not an update. It is a bigger, better thing, a totally new experience. Beyond that, whether you need $50 worth of calendaring power in your life is between you and your next missed appointment.

New Headset Could Seamlessly Mash Up VR and Hand-Tracking

The world of virtual-reality enthusiasts is one of early adoption, but also of adaptation. In the absence of polished consumer units, the only real hardware language available to hobbyists is a pidgin of devkits and kludgy peripherals; VR meetups and developer jams are still a chaotic sea of cobbled-together controllers.

Now, though, it appears that some streamlining is finally on the horizon. This morning, Leap Motion and the OSVR open-source ecosystem announced a partnership that would allow Razer’s OSVR HDK (hacker development kit) to ship later this year with a Leap Motion sensor embedded in its faceplate.

The sensor, which allows for nearly latency-free hand- and finger-tracking in 3-D space, has been a longstanding favorite among VR developers for its elegant controller-free solution—so much so that last fall Leap Motion began shipping a $20 mount that could attach its sensor to the front of an Oculus Rift devkit.

Leap Motion’s sensor mounted externally to an HMD. Leap Motion

But by becoming an official partner of the OSVR’s modular headset, Leap Motion hopes to clear the playing field a bit. “Being embedded is just a better experience,” says Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald. “For developers, there’s no fragmentation, and it’s better for users. That’s always the end goal.”

Leap Motion’s sensor is already embedded in laptops and desktops from both Asus and HP; this is simply their first official partnership in the VR space, where input is still very much an open question. The virtual and augmented reality markets—together, let’s just call it “immersive tech”—has seemingly trifurcated into three primary categories: desktop PC, mobile, and console. On the console side, PlayStation has made its Project Morpheus prototype compatible with two of its existing controllers, the PlayStation Move and the Dualshock 4 gamepad. Things are muddier in the desktop segment; while Valve software is creating custom controllers for the Vive headset it produced in collaboration with HTC, Oculus still hasn’t announced any input solutions for the forthcoming consumer version of its Rift. (While Oculus purchased Leap Motion competitor Nimble Sense last year, it hasn’t yet confirmed whether the fruits of that acquisition would appear in the Rift.) And Samsung’s Gear VR—currently the most full-featured mobile solution, and one seeing a full consumer release this year–utilizes a small touchpad located on the headset, while also allowing the use of Bluetooth Android-friendly game controllers.

What all of these solutions are missing, of course, is Kinect-on-steroids experience of using your hands in VR—for navigation, selection, even control of three-dimensional objects in three-dimensional space. “We very much think the answer is going to be hands, and that we’re going to be providing that tracking,” Buckwald says. And because the sensor’s computational strength lies in its software rather than its hardware, the company can push frequent updates to keep its capabilities cutting-edge long after the headset goes home with you.

The OSVR HDK, which was first announced at CES and January and ships to developers in June, presents a much more modular approach than any other headset currently known about. While its resolution is just about identical to Oculus’ DK2 devkit, its open-source nature means it’s 3D-printable and allows for nearly unfettered modification and addons. (Even if developers buy a HDK without the optional Leap Motion embed, they can swap a different faceplate in later.) Yet, the OSVR HDK isn’t Leap Motion’s only partnership play. Far from it, in fact. Buckwald says the company has been talking to “pretty much all the major players” in the space. “Our goal is to be embedded everywhere,” he says. “This is not an experiment for us—we want to be the primary input for VR.”

OSVR

France Is Letting 14-Year-Olds Drive This Tiny Electric Car

The Renault Twizy city car. Ralph Richter/Renault

Being 14 sucks. You’re a freshman in high school, which puts you at the bottom of the social food chain. The opposite sex is endlessly confusing, you need to beg your parents and older siblings for rides, and (in the US at least) you’re half a lifetime away from the legal drinking age. Unless, that is, you live in France. Then you just need to beg your parents to buy you a Renault Twizy, a $7,600 “car” that 14-year-olds can now legally drive.

The Twizy is a quadricycle, a 1,000-pound, two-seat electric car meant for zipping around cramped European cities. It’s designed to be a safer alternative to bicycles and scooters for the urban set, sporting a 13-horsepower electric motor and enough batteries to take you 60 miles at a maximum speed of 50 mph. It won’t hold much cargo, but it’s got plenty of room for your baguettes, cigarettes, wine, and “On Strike” signs (because yes, French high schoolers love to faire la grève).

The Twizy has airbags, seat belts, two seats, headlights, turn signals—all those things that actual cars have. And, thanks to new legislation in France, youths as young as 14 can now drive the things legally.

Previously, 14-year olds in France with a road safety certificate (sort of a lightweight-version of a driver’s license) could only ride mopeds. Now, in order to comply with EU regulations, that same certificate now allows holders to drive “quadricycles”.

As regulated, quadricycles are four-wheeled cars that can’t exceed 28 mph, can’t have a battery pack bigger than 4 kWh (for electric engines, traditional gas and diesel versions can’t have an engine bigger than 50cc), and can’t exceed 770 pounds curb weight. To accommodate the new market, Renault is releasing a special, scaled down, slower version of the Twizy specifically for youngsters with a road safety certificate.

Renault says it’s sold some 15,000 Twizys in Europe since launching the thing half a decade ago, and we would love to see the automaker jump the pond and let American teens, or adults, climb in. Unlike other small European cars like the Smart, which is actually kind of expensive (base price is around $13,000), an $8,000 Twizy would be great for city-dwellers who want something faster and safer than a bicycle, and nearly as versatile. We could see it being popular for car-sharing services like Zipcar or as an alternative to bike sharing services in cities like New York and San Francisco.

There are reports that Renault, which left the US in 1987, is exploring the possibility of selling the car in Quebec, but entering an established market is risky business. Daimler, which owns Smart, has an established dealer and parts network in the United States already, making it easier to launch its sub-brand here, with modest success.

Renault has a strategic partnership with Nissan, so it’s possible the Twizy (or a variant) could make an appearance as a Nissan-badged product (might we suggest the Nissan Stem, to go along with the Leaf?). But this is America—where the little car has never flourished—so we’re not holding our collective breath, even if the Twizy would make for a badass little city car.