VR Meets Nanotech to Make `80s Cyberpunk Dreams Come True

Nanotechnology and virtual reality were two of the most overhyped technologies of the 1980s and `90s. But neither really lived up to our expectations. Thanks to new headsets like the Oculus Rift, however, virtual reality is finally becoming an actual reality. And now a startup is trying to use VR to make the nanotech fantasies of `80s cyberpunks come true.

The difference with the VR is it puts you inside the failure. You see something that's not just a collection of rainbow colors---it tells you a little bit more on what is really going on. Joe Walker, Freudenberg Sealing Technologies

Nanotronics Imaging, an Ohio-based company backed by PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, makes atomic-scale microscopes that both researchers and industrial manufacturers can use in the production of nanoscale materials. Today at the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards the company announced a new endeavor: the ability to view the microscopes’ output using virtual reality headsets like the Rift.

The new product, nVisible, will enable Nanotronics users to do virtual walk-throughs of nano-structures, which the company says will enable them to better visualize and understand the materials they’re working with. But most importantly, it could help manufacturers create more reliable processes for building nanoscale products—which has historically been a huge hurdle in working with such incredibly small materials.

Nanotronics Imaging

Inside the Failure

Nanotronics co-founder and CEO Matthew Putman says the idea of using virtual reality to visualize nanoscale materials was first proposed by the company’s creative director, Mari Kussman. Putman admits that at first he thought virtual reality visualizations would just be a novelty. “Until I saw it myself I wouldn’t have believed it,” he says.

It turns out VR is helpful because although some nano-scale materials are essentially flat — such as semiconductors — many others aren’t. And in those cases, even 3-D images on a traditional flat screen can be cumbersome, says Joe Walker, global director of advanced materials development at Freudenberg Sealing Technologies.

Walker and his team are in charge of developing new materials that help keep everything from industrial valves to automobile crankshafts from leaking. When test parts leak, his team must determine whether that’s because the material has cracked or if there’s a leak between the material and the surface. Walker plans to use Nanotronics microscopes to automate part of the company’s testing process, and he believes the nVisible visualizations will help his team troubleshoot production problems more quickly.

“The difference with the VR is it puts you inside the failure,” he says. “You see something that’s not just a collection of rainbow colors—it tells you a little bit more on what is really going on.”

Way Up Close

Putman co-founded Nanotronics with his father, John Putman, in 2010. Before that he was an executive at an industrial systems software company called Tech Pro, a company founded by his father, and a professor of materials science at Columbia University. He knew nanoscale engineering was useful in a whole range of fields, including the creation of small medical devices, better photovoltaics, and flexible electronics. But the promise of nanotechnology simply wasn’t being fulfilled.

“I would go to the biology department, the chemistry department, and every one had the same problem,” he says. “You couldn’t put these things into industry because there was no type of process control that could be used for that.”

He came up with the idea to combine cutting-edge machine vision technology—such as the deep learning algorithms that are helping Facebook and Google recognize images with remarkable accuracy—with nanoscale microscopy. The result is a line of nano-microscopes that can be used to not only see very tiny objects, but to automate industrial testing processes that rely on such up-close visibility.

Putman hopes these new microscopes could help scientists will spawn a whole new generation of nanotechnology startups. “I have this idea that the next Facebook could be a materials science innovation,” he says.

Review: Asus ZenBook UX305

8/10

Wired

Thin and light, solid and sexy, and quiet as a mouse. Twice the RAM and storage of competing models from Apple and Dell, but for less money. Gorgeous screen, comfy keyboard, all-day battery.

Tired

My kingdom for backlit keys. Lacks the sex appeal of Dell's only-slightly-pricier XPS 13. Oddball screen-hinge design can cause some slippage while you type. Weak built-in speakers are an affront to ears everywhere.

How We Rate

1/10A complete failure in every way

2/10Barely functional; don’t buy it

3/10Serious flaws; proceed with caution

4/10Downsides outweigh upsides

5/10Recommended with reservations

6/10A solid product with some issues

7/10Very good, but not quite great

8/10Excellent, with room to kvetch

9/10Nearly flawless, buy it now

10/10Metaphysical product perfection

From the moment Intel coined the term Ultrabook with a capital “U,” the Windows-powered MacBook Air wannabe category has been synonymous with one word: pricey. Good luck finding an Ultrabook for less than $1,000. And if you can, expect some serious corner-cutting: smallish screen, paltry storage, anemic processor and, wait a sec, you call this thin and light? So when Asus trotted out the ZenBook UX305, all sleek and shiny and Air-apparent at a mere $700, I figured, sure, pretty on the outside, but mostly Ford Pinto under the hood.

I was wrong. While you can’t judge a laptop on specs alone, you also can’t ignore certain specs. At this price point, I fully expected 4GB of RAM—enough to get by, but hardly a power user’s quota. Except, hang on, the ZenBook has 8GB. Likewise, while most other budget Ultrabooks serve you maybe 64GB of storage (I’m looking your way, entry-level Surface Pro 3), the ZenBook comes with 256GB of local solid-state goodness. Screw you, cloud!

Then there’s the screen, which hits the 13.3-inch sweet spot for modern mobile computing. But instead of running at a what-did-you-expect-for-$700 resolution of 1,366 x 768, it runs at 1920 x 1080, and looks damn nice doing it. (I always believed that kind of pixel count was overkill at this screen size, but I realize now that was cheapskate justification talking. I’m forthwith forever spoiled by higher resolutions.) Plus, no glare: Asus wisely went with a matte finish. Stop it, Asus, you’re blowing my mind!

I'm pretty sure I've found my next laptop.

Battery life? A solid 9-10 hours. Ports? Three USB, all of them 3.0, one of them designed to rapid-charge your phone—even when the ZenBook is powered down. Audio? Oh, just a little subsystem from freakin’ Bang & Olufsen. OK, yeah, the barely-there built-in speakers suck (not uncommon for crêpe-tall laptops), but plug in some headphones and it’s all good.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the processor. It’s gotta be the big “but,” right? Eh, more of a medium but. Intel’s Core M-5Y10 brain runs at an alarmingly low 800MHz, but clock speed ain’t everything (and the side benefit, a fanless chassis, allows for blissfully silent operation). The system cruised through every real-world test I threw at it. In one of them, I opened a dozen Chrome tabs, loaded Windows apps like OneNote and Zinio, then started streaming some Netflix. Not so much as a single stutter. Indeed, for garden-variety computing, the ZenBook offers sufficient horsepower. If you’re planning to edit video or roam the streets of GTA V, well, duh: no.

Asus

On the usability side, the 2.6-pound UX305 is mostly solid. The keyboard feels spacious and responsive, and the oversize touchpad delivers smooth glides and many gesture options. The system boots and shut downs in seconds.

Alas, a few design oddities mar an otherwise glorious experience. First, the power button is the same size as the Delete key, and right next to the Delete key—and right above the Backspace key. Until you train your pinky to steer clear, hitting it by accident is a foregone conclusion. Somewhere, engineer is laughing hysterically—or maniacally.

Weirder still, the ZenBook’s hinge is designed so that when you lift the lid, the bottom edge of the screen panel actually raises the rear of the system by about two millimeters. If there’s a value to this, it escapes me, but the consequence is that the laptop’s two rear rubber feet don’t touch your desk, meaning the system slides around a little too easily.

Finally, and this will sound strange, I can’t quite put my finger on the color of the system. The lid has a cool, silverish concentric-circle pattern Asus describes as Obsidian Stone, but the bezels surrounding the keyboard and screen are… what? Not black, because the keyboard keys are black. It’s sort of brownish, even sort of little purplish, and I can’t say I care for it.

I can certainly live with it, though. From a price perspective alone, the ZenBook UX305 easily trounces the 13.3-inch likes of Apple’s MacBook Air, which starts at $999 for 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD; and Dell’s XPS 13, which starts at $799 with the same key specs. They have faster processors, yes, and some nicer design flourishes. But for any laptop shopper even remotely trying to stick to a budget, it’s hard to argue with the ZenBook’s bang/buck ratio.

Let me sum up with a quick anecdote: I’ve been looking to replace a similar two-year-old Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook, one that cost considerably more than the UX305. It has half the RAM, half the storage, lower screen resolution, and a battery that was never good for more than about four hours. (Lately it’s been crapping out at three.)

The UX305 represents an upgrade in every way except one: no backlit keys. That’s a feature I’ve found useful, and I’ll be a little sad without it. But not sad enough to part with several hundred more dollars.

I’m pretty sure I’ve found my next laptop.

Write the Perfect Email to Anyone With This Creepy Site

When my editor Joe told me to write this story, I knew with algorithmic certainty how to respond: “Done. Absolutely. It’s taken care of.”

I got this advice from Crystal, a site that promises to help you understand how best to talk to any particular person. All you have to do is pick the subject. Crystal will then slurp up public data from around the web, run it through “proprietary personality detection technology,” and spit out a detailed report on that person’s preferred style of communicating. It’s one part oppo research, one part algorithmic astrology. It’s definitely creepy, perhaps useful, and almost certainly a look at how we’ll communicate in the future.

In the case of my editor, Crystal’s dossier was surprisingly accurate: “Joe is an achiever: fast-paced, ambitious, and persuasive, so get to the bottom line and don’t feel insulted by a direct or blunt comment.” When speaking to him, it told me to use words like “done,” “absolutely,” and “it’s taken care of.” In email, it recommended limiting my message to three sentences and stating my purpose clearly in the first line. After all, Crystal informed me, “it does not come naturally to Joe to be accommodating and forgiving with his time.”

Sorry boss—Crystal said it, not me.

Crystal

Like anything that cultivates an association with magic, Crystal is slightly less impressive once you know how it works. If someone were looking you up, the site would start by examining things you’ve written publicly—social media profiles being a primary source—and analyzing factors like writing style and sentence structure. Then it processes what others have written about you. Using those data points, the site identifies you as one of 64 communicative types, which the company has adapted from well-known personality frameworks. Crystal doesn’t really know you, in other words, it just knows what you’re like.

According to co-founder Drew D’Agostino, that’s usually enough. “The beauty of these frameworks is that, if you know one bit of data about a person and you’re accurate about it, you can make really good assumptions about how they’re likely to communicate,” he says. Building the model required considerable experimentation, but given a certain volume of writing, “we figured out a few algorithms that really nailed it,” D’Agostino says.

It wasn’t immediately obvious what to do with the technology, but D’Agostino and company eventually arrived at an answer: email. Beyond letting you look up reports on individuals, paying customers get access to a Chrome extension that puts Crystal’s oracular advice right in your inbox. While emailing D’Agostino to arrange an interview, I noticed a new ochre button in my Gmail compose window. It bore an exhortation: “Be brief.” I was startled, then followed its instruction.
Crystal

There’s a lot of anxiety involved in sending email, D’Agostino says. It can be hard to know what sort of greeting to use, or whether to include a joke. Crystal tries to remove some of that ambiguity. Clicking the “Be brief” button pulled up more detailed suggestions, providing specific phrases to use and avoid in that particular scenario. Crystal even goes so far as to offer a fully-written email template, algorithmically derived for the recipient.

That of course is the dream implicit in all this: A button that sends the perfect email every time. Indeed, a number of artists have explored the contours of this queasy future in recent months. A browser extension by Joanne McNeil fills emails with exclamation points and smileys, automating the “emotional labor” required in today’s cheerful correspondence. Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald took these ideas a step further with Pplkpr, an app that uses biometric signals sort the real life acquaintances that invigorate you from those that aren’t worth your time.

Pplkpr is satire—it’s funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts—but it seems like an artifact from a plausible, perhaps even likely future. Marshall McLuhan once said artists are always the first to figure out how technology will change culture, and there are signs we’re headed in Pplkpr’s direction. Increasingly, we meet partners on dating sites, paired by algorithms. Our phones become ever more adept at parsing conversations and suggesting programmed replies.

D’Agostino says he built Crystal because he wanted to technologically enhance his emotional intelligence. And such a tool definitely could be helpful, say for knowing the person you’re sending a job application to hates wordy emails. But surely there’s a point at which algorithmically informed communication curls back around, mobius-strip style, and we end up even more remote and unknowable to each other than we were when we started.

Crowdfunded Science Is Here. But Is It Legit Science?

Skip to story The images represent the interconnectivity of the brain on placebo and psilocybin. Researchers expect similar results in their LSD-imaging studies. The Beckley Foundation/Walacea

A crowdfunding campaign for a brain imaging study closed Monday after raising almost $80,000 toward a unique goal: the first functional magnetic resonance images of the brain on LSD. The Beckley Foundation, a UK-based charitable trust that promotes research and awareness of psychoactive drugs, will use the money to scan volunteers who’ve dropped acid. Such are the sacrifices people will make for science.

Now, it’s little surprise scientists studying the effects of illicit drugs must sometimes find unconventional benefactors—or that thousands of people would invest in seeing the brains of volunteers tripping balls. But in recent years, crowdfunding has grown increasingly popular among researchers in nearly every field. Successful campaigns have explored drought tolerance in Spanish and Indian oak species, attempted to explain jokes with math, and worked to discover exoplanets in the far reaches of space. The first crowdfunded experiments popped up on traditional platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo; now sites like Petridish, Experiment, and Walacea cater specifically to scientific fundraising.

In the US, most scientific funding comes from the government, distributed in grants awarded by an assortment of federal science, health, and defense agencies. So it’s a bit disconcerting that some scientists find it necessary to fund their research the same way dudebros raise money for a potato salad. Does that migration suggest the current grant system is broken? If it is, how can we ensure that funding goes to legitimate science working toward meaningful discoveries?

On its own, the fact that scientists are seeking new sources of funding isn’t so weird. In the view of David Kaiser, a science historian at MIT, crowdfunding is simply the latest “pendulum swing” in how scientists and research institutions fund their work. Once upon a time, research at MIT and other universities was funded primarily by student tuition and private philanthropists. In 1919, however, with philanthropic investment drying up, MIT launched an ambitious plan that allowed local companies to sponsor specific labs and projects.

Critics complained the university had allowed corporate interests to dig their claws into scientific endeavors and befoul intellectual autonomy. (Sound familiar?) But once WWII began, the US government became a force for funding, giving huge wartime grants to research groups nationwide. Federal patronage continued expanding in the decades after the war.

Seventy years later, that trend has reversed: As the federal budget shrinks, government investment in scientific research has reached new lows. The conventional models for federal grants, explains University of Iowa immunologist Gail Bishop, “were designed to work such that 25 to 30 percent of studies were funded. Now it’s around 10 percent.”

That’s part of the reason scientists like Bishop, who successfully funded a study of new nanoparticles to fight cancer cells on Experiment, have embraced crowdfunding. The grant-awarding process can feel arbitrary, says Bishop, and “the selection of those studies skews towards projects that take fewer risks.” In addition, most grants require scientists to provide proof-of-concept studies for their research, which makes it extremely difficult for more experimental projects to get off the ground. “It used to be that the grant money was there to do the experiment,” says Bishop. “Now the cynical joke is that you need to do the experiment first in order to be awarded a grant.”

Crowdfunding allows small-scale research to bypass the time and trouble required to draft and defend a grant proposal, and find money to cover the startup costs of a project. While most biomedical grants leave nine long months between submission and decision, Bishop was pleasantly surprised to see her campaign progress in real time toward its meager $1,500 goal.

But like all shortcuts, crowdfunding has its downsides. Government-funded institutions might be bogged down by tight regulations, but those rules can act as crucial checks on studies that might stand on shaky evidence or harm participants. (The Beckley Foundation’s LSD study is being run at Imperial College, so the researchers must follow institutional guidelines that are meant to protect participants.) Government grants also typically require a transparent accounting of how money is used, while money raised through crowdfunding doesn’t have those stipulations attached. There’s always the possibility—however rare—that a scientist or researcher may use funds in irresponsible or unethical ways.

One of the subjects being prepared to enter the MEG scanner. The Buckley Foundation/Walacea

The “crowd” part of crowdfunding also presents a significant problem. When scientists have to shill their ideas on social media like every other entrepreneur, there’s nothing to stop sexy, sensational campaigns from overshadowing more important or legitimate studies. “You want to go viral, but that’s not so easy to do,” says Aaron Seitz, a psychologist at UC Riverside who used a crowdfunded campaign to pay for his study on auditory dysfunction in veterans of war. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been given to Immunity Project, a company seeking to develop a vaccine for HIV, but whose scientific credentials are debatable at best. That’s money that could have instead gone toward campaigns to study autism, or measure toxic chemicals in local bodies of water.

That’s the advantage of agency-funded research: At least in theory, there’s a body of intelligent, scientifically-informed individuals making the call about what research needs to get done. You can bet that the majority of funders of the Beckley LSD study didn’t do it because they believe in the scientific preeminence of the researchers behind it: They did it because they like the idea of sticking high people in an fMRI (and who wouldn’t?).

But that doesn’t mean that the science getting crowdfunded is crap. The researchers for the LSD study, for example, have been investigating the effects of psychedelics for years now, and their results have been published in several prestigious journals. The majority of people looking for funding on these platforms are credentialed scientists whose work will ultimately be subjected to peer review. As long as those checks and balances are still in place, any junk science that makes its way onto a crowdfunding platform still won’t get published. And the amount of money awarded to poorly-designed studies will remain quite low. Common funding goals rank in the single-digit thousands—only a fraction of the size of a typical federal grant.

“Crowdfunding won’t replace conventional means of funding,” says Kaiser. What it will do is offer a chance for smaller studies to take off when they would be denied the opportunity otherwise. Kaiser thinks small projects, especially theoretical research that perhaps doesn’t require as much in equipment and staff costs, will take advantage of crowdfunding more and more. That, and probably a few more high fMRI studies than you’d otherwise see the NIH fund.

An Ode to the Lost World of the Film Projection Booth

Skip to story Slide Show

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Avon Cinema's two 75-year old projectors, pictured here with their Brenkert Enarc lamp houses, worked continuously every night of the week, 365 days a year, before they were retired in 2013. Taylor Umphenour

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Projectionists refer to film on a reel as either "heads out" or "tails out." The former has the start of the film on the outside, and is ready to be threaded for projection. The latter needs to be rewound before it can be put away, which is what's happening here on the motorized rewind bench. Taylor Umphenour

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The film in this photo is polyester based. Before that, acetate was the standard film stock, which was preceded by nitrate-based film. As Cinema Paradiso fans know, nitrate stock was highly flammable, and could even spontaneously combust. Taylor Umphenour

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Looking at a piece of 35mm film, most people focus on the individual frames. But there are plenty of other goodies embedded in the strip. Here, you can see two of them: Waveforms for the left and right channels that together make up this movies's stereo soundtrack. Taylor Umphenour

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No, they're not called cigarette burns. We saw Fight Club too. Cue dots typically appear in the same spot on four consecutive film frames. When the frames are played normally, viewers see a single dot for 1/6th of a second. Taylor Umphenour

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Most cue dots you see in movies are inserted in the prints themselves by the film lab during the creation of a movie's release prints. Occasionally prints were made that did not have lab cues, and in those cases, projectionists used a cue marker like this one to create the dots. Taylor Umphenour

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Negative and positive carbon rods in their original National boxes. As a movie plays, the carbon steadily burns and the copper sheath melts and drips into a collection pan at the bottom of the lamp house where it is accumulated and resold. Each rod typically only lasts only a few reels. Taylor Umphenour

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It's carbon rods that produce the light moviegoers see onscreen. A negative and positive rod are electrified and struck together creating an arc of electricity (an arc light). As the movie plays, the projectionist adjusts the burning carbons (called trimming), keeping them at the perfect distance from each other. This is a negative carbon, still burning hot, as it's pulled from the lamp house after a changeover. Taylor Umphenour

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The film is threaded up and ready to go here. If one of these rollers gets skipped or left open, the film will bunch up in the head of the projector, which can be bad for both the moviegoers and the 35mm print. Taylor Umphenour

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When a film is photographed for the widescreen CinemaScope aspect ratio, the image is squeezed with a horizontal compression as it is captured on the camera negative. The result? Objects and people appear much taller and thinner than they should. Taylor Umphenour

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It's one of the most recognizable symbols in cinema, and one of the most misunderstood. The countdown film leader both protects the body of the film from being damaged by dirt and oil and also allows the film to be threaded up in a specific spot so that when the projector is started the images are projected on the screen precisely on cue. Taylor Umphenour

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This is what a take-up reel looks like just before a movie starts. The film leader is wrapped around the center; the entire reel will be full after about 20 minutes. At that point, a projectionist will change over to the next projector, and the take-up reel will be pulled from the machine and rewound. Taylor Umphenour

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Film bins were used to hold reels between performances. Each reel held 2,000 feet of film and could have a running time of up to 20 minutes. Most feature films were about six reels long, plus an additional reel of trailers. Taylor Umphenour

Working the projection booth at Avon Cinema was like a second film school for Taylor Umphenour. The single-screen theater on the east side of Providence, Rhode Island—a favorite among Brown and Rhode Island School of Design students—provided a sublime mix of unlimited free movies and a century’s worth of cinematic innovation.

The nine-year education would prove invaluable to the aspiring filmmaker. But as much as Umphenour cherished the analog world of carbon rods, lenses, and aperture plates, by 2011 it was clear film was dying—or at least fading into a specialty medium. Despite the protests of high-profile directors like Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino, studios were shipping fewer and fewer 35mm prints, and hundreds of art-house theaters like Avon Cinema were folding. Owners faced two choices: adapt (which usually meant buying a $75,000 digital projector) or die.

The Avon adapted, going digital in 2013. But for two years the owner allowed Umphenour to photograph and film what has become a relic in most US movie theaters: the 35mm projection booth. “I saw that there was an opportunity to take people into this vanishing world,” he says, “a world that was also deliberately kept in the shadows, unseen for almost a century that it existed.”

The Avon Cinema projection booth Taylor Umphenour where worked on and off for 9 years. While no longer in use, the two projectors still sit in the booth today, surrounded by the exhaust systems, sound racks, wiring, and computer consoles needed to run the new digital projector. Taylor Umphenour

The result is The Cue Dot, a photographic time warp back to a place that existed for the better part of a century, but few of us ever saw. Taking its name from the small dot that flashes on screen for 1/6th of a second to signal an imminent reel changeover, the project began simply as a way to get people interested in what quickly was becoming a lost medium and artform. In addition to capturing and cataloging the archaic machines and instruments many theaters were throwing out, Umphenour wanted to also impart the magical feeling of being inside the projection booth.

To that end, he’s spent two years peppering his Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram feeds with samples from his trove of more than 500 images. He recently started selling archival prints as well.

There are shots of the copper-coated carbon rods that fuel the projectors, close-ups of input sprockets and lens cabinets, and of course the stars of the series: Two 75-year-old projectors that Umphenour ran about 20,000 reels of film through.

“For a piece of equipment to run daily, several times a day, for three quarters of a century, [it] speaks to the craftsmanship and incredible attention to detail invested by the designers of these machines,” Umphenour says. “To me, the film projectors are like a wondrous magic trick: thread them with a celluloid ribbon, strike the carbon arc, open the douser, and the stuff of dreams pours out.”

Finally: A Rolls-Royce for Fancy People

All Rolls-Royce motorcars are special. But some are more special than others. At least that’s what Rolls-Royce is telling us with the Phantom Limelight Collection.

Of course, every Rolls is for the one percent. But the Phantom Limelight is designed for those famous few—the half percent?—who never get any privacy, except when they’re in the car, moving from one meeting (or concert, or basketball game, or …) to the next. The idea of the Limelight, then, is to give those poor tortured souls a few minute’s peace and quiet to prepare for whatever’s coming next.

The Limelight is stunning, with a litany of handcrafted, bespoke additions that showcase the skills of the Rolls-Royce craftsmen and the size of an owner’s bank account. The already premium Phantom starts at more than $400,000, with the Limelight landing around $650,000.

This is not a car for the common folk, a point made abundantly clear in a press release that is so full of puffery and pretension that we’ve had it translated from Rolls into English.

RR: The Rolls-Royce Phantom Limelight Collection has been conceived for that select group of people who spend their lives in the public eye and on the world stage.

We’ve built a car for the rich and famous.

RR: Whilst mass-luxury car manufacturers simply offer a means of conspicuously getting from A to B in some luxury, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars seeks to understand and exceed the demands of super-luxury customers who are always on the move, preparing to arrive for their next big life moment.

Other luxury cars are crap. Especially Bentleys. Ours are not.

RR: Phantom Limelight has thus been conceived as the ultimate traveling companion.

We’ve built the most absurdly luxurious car we could think of, and the margins on it are insane.

RR: The Bespoke design team behind Limelight understood that a number of very human emotions and needs mattered: easy access to one’s favourite, personal possessions in order to prepare for the coming engagement; the opportunity to relax in ultimate luxury once ready and an impactful arrival.

Your $650,000 car should carry all the stuff you might need or want, be supremely comfortable, and convey to all who see it that you are richer than the Vatican.

Rolls Royce

RR: A unique personalised rear door pannier has been designed to ensure cherished personal possessions fall easily to hand.

We put pockets on the doors for your stuff.

RR: The fragrance bottles, which ensure the passenger always has the right fragrance available to them whatever the time of day, are handmade in the famous Bresle Valley in North West France – home to 75% of the world’s luxury bottles for perfumes and spirits.

It comes with really nice bottles for your perfume.

RR: The bottom left pocket houses a universal vanity pouch made of the finest materials, with space for credit cards, business cards, spectacle storage or makeup, whilst Ladies’ and Gentleman’s Accessory Z-Boxes, constructed from carbon fibre, milled in aluminium and hand covered in the finest leathers, complete the door pannier.

You know those storage boxes in the beds of pickup trucks? It’s like that, but on the inside. And much, much nicer. (Yes, they spelled it “fibre” and “aluminium.”)

RR: Rolls-Royce Motor Cars engineers and ergonomists have worked closely with the medical profession to establish the optimum seat position that relaxes the body most whilst in motion. The result is the new rear seat to feature first in Phantom Limelight.

The seats in this thing are crazy comfortable. Doctors said so.

RR: Unique to this Collection and a first for Phantom, is a two-veneer finish that shows off the unique skills of the woodworkers at Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. Piano Seashell specific to this collection is applied to the door cappings, blending the veneer with the leather schemes. Smoked Chestnut completes the colour scheme, the first time that this veneer has been used in Phantom.

Holy shit, is this thing gorgeous.

RR: The Phantom Limelight Collection of 25 cars will be available to order immediately from Rolls-Royce Motor Car dealers around the world.

Have your accountant call us, ASAP.

Epic Photos Offer a God-Like View of EDM Festival Chaos

Electronic dance music festivals generally include massive crowds (sometimes a hundred thousand or more), never-ending beats, and lots of dancing. You don’t have to dive into the chaos to appreciate the insanity; Felix R. Cid takes you there with his mesmerizing photos of pulsing festivals in X.

Cid traveled the world for two years, attending enormous events in 10 countries on three continents. At home in his New York studio, he splices hundreds of images into a single photo of mass musical bliss. It’s a bit like seeing cells teeming in a Petri dish. Though the perspective is from afar, the feeling of being in the middle of vast horde is palpable, almost claustrophobic. Cid was fascinated by the elbow-to-elbow intimacy.

“I thought it was interesting that in this moment, where young people interact so much through social media that they wanted to then be in these spaces where things are very physical and touchy,” he says.

Cid, 38, grew up in Spain in the 1990s when electronic music was exploding in Europe. He worked in local nightclubs, an experience that prepared him to shoot events like the Movement Electronic Music Festival in Detroit and the Zurich Street Parade, where he bumped against sweaty bodies and dodged spilled beer. His favorite gear was a Canon 5D Mark II and a cheap lens that was easily replaced if lost to the mayhem.

The photographer always sought high ground, where he could more easily shoot into the crowd and get candid photos. As soon as someone posed for the camera, he moved along. “If you’re in an environment with 50,000 kids who are completely high on adrenaline, whenever they see a camera, they want to be noticed, and as soon as I’m noticed I move somewhere else,” he says. “It has to be organic.”

Each print is a mashup of some 600 photos from various locations (only a few prints show a single event). Cid would cut out groups and start grafting them together in Photoshop based on similar light quality or distance. He didn’t care about the layers blending perfectly, so you can see where different images meet. “If you showed this to any professional retoucher they would probably have a heart attack,” he jokes.

X—a reference to multiplication and ecstasy, among other things—is printed large, sometimes as big as eight feet tall. While most images are now displayed digitally, Cid wanted something tangible and it works. In his massive prints, you can pick out minuscule details, from screaming faces to navel piercings. “I wanted to have a clear reason for making a print,” he says.

Over time, Cid liked how his photos captured the intoxicating mood of the festival scene, not the reality. It’s more about getting lost in the experience than anything else. “[The dancers] are after a sort of parallel reality,” says Cid. “And what I’m trying to do in my work as well. There’s an accumulation of experiences that creates its own parallel reality.”