Britain to test driverless cars on motorways from next year

Britain said it will begin trialling driverless cars on motorways for the first time in 2017, as it moves towards its goal of allowing autonomous cars to take to the streets by 2020.

The government said last year there were no legal barriers to the technology being tested and gave the go-ahead for vehicle trials to start on some local roads.

Finance minister George Osborne will announce plans on Wednesday to test vehicles on motorways and say the government will bring forward proposals to remove regulatory barriers to the technology, the Treasury said.

"Naturally we need to ensure safety, and that's what the trials we are introducing will test," Osborne said in a statement ahead of his annual budget presentation.

"If successful, we could see driverless cars available for sale and on Britain's roads, boosting UK jobs and productivity."

The market for autonomous driving is worth 900 billion pounds ($1.29 trillion) worldwide, according to the government, but needs to overcome legal obstacles including determining who would be responsible in the event of an accident.

Driverless car testing will be restricted to vehicles with a person present and able to take control should the need arise, Britain's Department for Transport has previously said.

On Friday, the top U.S. safety agency said there were still significant legal hurdles to be cleared before self-driving cars without steering wheels and gas pedals could be sold in the United States.

Alphabet Inc unit Google wants to eventually be able to deploy fully autonomous vehicles without human controls, and major automakers are racing to develop vehicles that can drive themselves at least part of the time.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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