1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support

Writer pens a $5M seed round for its AI style guide that flags bias and tone

Anyone who writes online or in a word processor has likely gotten used to the inevitable squiggly line denoting a misspelled word or clumsy phrase. But what if you use a word that’s loaded, a phrase that’s too formal or not formal enough, or refer to a group of people in an outdated way? Writer is a service that watches as you type, flagging language that doesn’t match up with your style guide and values, and it just raised $5 million to scale up.

Both people and the companies they work for want to improve the way they write, but not just in terms of grammar and spelling. If a company says it’s inclusive, but the language in its press releases or internal blogs are peppered with anachronisms and bias, it suggests their concern only goes so far.

“Companies are hungry to put actions behind their words,” said Writer founder and CEO May Habib. “They want to be able to tell a consistent story to their users everywhere that they’re interacting with them. What Writer does is let people know when they’re using insensitive language, or things that could be considered negative, and let companies set brand guidelines.”

Right off the bat let us admit that there is a whiff of the sinister about the idea of a company dictating how its employees speak, though that’s nothing new when it comes to content and official communications. But this isn’t about controlling speech for power — it’s about recognizing that we are all flawed communicators and could use a hand keeping ourselves honest. Less thought police and more a well-informed angel sitting on your shoulder whispering things like, “Hey. Are you sure you want to describe that lawyer as ‘exotic’?”

Examples of things Writer checks for. Image Credits: Writer

There are tons of slip-ups we all make along those lines; less obvious, but no less potentially offensive. It’s important in public communications, among other things, to refer to a group by the term they prefer, not the first one that pops into your head; Writer has up-to-date libraries of this information sourced from the communities themselves. Some phrases may have become politically loaded in the last couple of years, but you’re not aware; no problem, it has alternatives. You want to avoid unnecessarily gendered language, great, but everyone slips up now and then; Writer can spot it — or make the connection with previous pronouns to make sure you don’t, for example, gender an anonymous source.

Accusations of “political correctness” will dog the service, but as Habib put it: “This is beyond politics; this is about respect for people who live a certain way, or are a certain way, and prefer to use certain terms. We’re trying to help companies create communities of belonging.” And as we’ve seen over and over again in tech, there is often a serious disconnect between the stated aspiration of a company and how people are treated within them. Just using the right words is a pretty low bar to start with, honestly.

Image Credits: Writer

Writer isn’t just a growing blacklist of words you should think twice about using, though. The natural language processing engine at the heart of it is also very concerned with things like sentence complexity, paragraph length and tone. It has to have this deeper understanding, Habib explained, because “it’s not enough to underline — you need to know what to replace it with, and when you replace it, you need to fit it into the sentence. These are actually hard NLP problems.”

That lets it fit into a variety of roles in addition to promoting inclusive language. It can watch for the usual spelling and grammar mistakes, as well as things like formality, active voice, “liveliness” (whatever that is, I don’t have it) and other metrics that help define a brand.

And of course you can bring in your own style guide so your editors don’t have to roll their eyes at serial commas in headlines, double dashes instead of em dashes, e-mail instead of email and all the rest of the little nips and tucks that keep a brand’s writing in a generally recognizable shape.

Image Credits: Writer

The service can also switch between style guides or adjust or disable itself in different apps and sites — so internal emails aren’t given the same guidelines as press releases, or a blog post’s style can be differentiated from a newsletter’s.

Obviously Grammarly is a big competitor here, but Habib feels that it and the growing number of in-browser or in-app checking services are very focused on the technical piece. Writer is less about preventing an individual writer’s errors, and more about creating consistency among groups of writers and making sure they are working from the same high-level linguistic standards.

Of course security is also a concern — no one wants a keylogger running on their machine, however helpful it may be. Habib was careful to emphasize that Writer runs locally in the browser as a plug-in, integrating with Word or Chrome for now but with other apps and services on the way. “None of that data ever hits a writer server, and no metadata — all the processing is done in the text area,” she said. The only data that’s sent back is the fact that a given suggestion was used, such as changing “should of” to “should have” or “illegal aliens” to “undocumented immigrants.” No user data is used to train the models and no content apart from the correction itself is sent or stored on Writer’s servers.

Writer is available now, for $11/person/month (with the obligatory free trial period, of course) for a basic version and some unspecified amount for enterprise deals with multiple style guides, plagiarism detection, and so on. It’s only available in English, and although there is of course demand for the service in other languages, the depth of the NLP model and the specificity of what it recognizes to the language mean it does not generalize well. To take on Spanish or Korean would be to develop an entirely new product. So English it is for now.

The company is new, and has been developing its NLP engine (on the back of a previous effort, which monitored user-facing language in GitHub repos) for 18 months in something like stealth. The $5 million seed round, led by Upfront Ventures, Aspect Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, and Broadway Angels should help the company scale, though it already has some top-tier, household-name customers, so with that and the money, its immediate future seems to be secure.

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Coinbase lets you withdraw funds to your debit card

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is adding a new way to withdraw funds from your Coinbase account. If you’ve added a compatible debit card to your account, you can transfer USD, EUR or GBP to your bank account nearly instantly.

There are some drawbacks, and the main one is that you’ll pay a lot of fees. In the U.S., Coinbase deducts 1.5% from the transaction, or a minimum $0.55 if it’s a small transaction. In the U.K. and Europe, you pay 2% in fees or a minimum fee of £0.45/€0.52, respectively.

You also need to have a compatible card. Not all debit cards support incoming transfers. You need to have a Visa card that supports Visa Fast Funds. In the U.S., you can also use a Mastercard card with Mastercard Send.

It’s hard to know whether your bank or card issuer support those features. The best way to figure it out is probably by adding your card to Coinbase and seeing what Coinbase says.

Coinbase isn’t removing other withdrawal methods. For instance, if you’re looking for a cheaper way to withdraw your funds in Europe, a SEPA bank transfer costs €0.15 per transfer. And Coinbase supports instant SEPA transfers if your bank has enabled that.

The company also lets you link your PayPal account with your Coinbase account. Your funds should hit your PayPal account within a few seconds, and there are no fees on Coinbase’s side.

As you can see, there are many ways to move money from your bank account to your Coinbase account. Some of them are slower than others, some of them are more expensive than others. Crypto-to-crypto transactions are a bit simpler by comparison, as you only need your recipient’s wallet address to send tokens.

Image Credits: Coinbase

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With $2.7M in fresh funding, Sora hopes to bring virtual high school to the mainstream

Long before the coronavirus, Sora, a startup run by a team of Atlanta entrepreneurs, was toying with the idea of live, virtual high school. The program would focus on student autonomy and organize its curriculum around projects that learners wanted to work on, such as finding ways to reduce the impact of climate change on the world. Students and teachers would use Zoom and Slack to communicate with each other, with standups everyday to pulse-check progress.

The pandemic has both undermined and underscored Sora’s focus. On one end, the millions of students that flocked home have shown how hard it is to effectively and accessibly teach in virtual settings. On the other end, the pandemic isn’t going away any time soon. Parents and students are desperate for better options.

Sora co-founder Garrett Smiley thinks he can convince parents to approach virtual high school with optimism, their kids and their checkbooks. It all starts with green algae farms.

Smiley said students turn to Sora so they can “start running instead of walking” in their education. He added how the first students in the program spent time building algae farms in their backyards, working with SpaceX engineers and taking college-level math classes upon entrance.

Smiley, who co-founded the company with Indra Sofian and Wesley Samples, says that Sora sells best to students who feel stifled or “held back” from traditional educational institutions. Sora’s product, thus, feels more apt for educationally gifted students than students who might need extra help or support.

At Sora’s heart, it is a private school replacement with a project-based curriculum. How it works beyond that is a little bit more confusing to comprehend. Firstly, students upon enrollment embark on two-week learning expeditions, exploring the answers to broad questions like “how do we recreate an alien species.” As time progresses, students are prompted to create their own projects with check-in calls twice a day. Below is an example of a standup:

Beyond the self-directed study, Sora offers a series of Socratic seminars and workshops.

There’s no such thing as science class, but there are workshops such as “the Physics of Sharks.” Here’s an example schedule of a Sora student:

Image Credits: Sora

The organization is unconventional. Smiley is insistent on the fact that students complete core subjects and standards needed for high school transcript and graduation, including math, science, English and history. Students are also required to take the SAT or ACT, with practice resources provided by the school.

Sora also has an in-person, optional element. Cohorts will be designed by geography. Students are encouraged to meet up with each other outside of school, form sports teams and attend a Sora-sponsored meet-up.

Outside of learning, Sora created a network of more than 50 career mentors and has a suite of services, such as SAT prep and counselors to aid with the college admissions process.

Smiley says that Sora hasn’t yet graduated a class, so they do not have data on most common exit paths, but he added that the company does not promote college as the only option for students.

Sora is working on partnering with the “next generation of college and university replacements,” he says, such as boot camps or internships.

The goal of Sora is to create a community of self-directed and motivated learners.

“We don’t believe schools are in the business of content creation anymore, just typing in Google search engine search specifically you’ll probably find world-class resources to learn a subject,” Smiley said. “So for us, as to be a super successful school, we knew our role was creating this super high-quality community.”

The company had seven students in its inaugural class last year. Now, more than 39 students participate in Sora School, with three-full time faculty. Monthly tuition ranges from $300 to $800 per student.

Tuition is charged in relation to parent income by using a sliding scale, which Smiley says is part of their strategy in making sure Sora is an inclusive and diverse school.

The diversity breakdown of Sora is 67% white, 15% Hispanic, 13% African American and 5% Asian/Middle Eastern. The gender split male to female is 54% and 44%, respectively, with 2% of students identifying as non-binary.

From a mental diversity perspective, Sora lacks key resources needed to support students with special needs. Virtual high school as a product isn’t built for adoption en masse, but instead works best for students who can afford to partake in self-directed and independent learning. Similar to pandemic pods, it could exacerbate the widening inequalities between wealthy and low-income students.

Smiley says that they “definitely thought about” accessibility and are working on it. Still, he says that Sora is created for “students who perhaps don’t need the extreme structure of an in-person school,” which he estimates to be 95% of the world’s learners.

As Sora scales, a key aspect of its success will be if it is able to balance its hands-on, hands-off approach. The startup announced this week that it has raised a $2.7 million round, led by Union Square Ventures, to bring on more faculty, software engineers for back-end support and managers to work on curriculum development. Other participating investors in the round include Village Global, ReThink Education, Firebolt Ventures, Peak State Ventures, Contrary Capital and angel investor Taylor Greene.

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Announcing the TC Pitch-Off: Mobility startups

For the past two years, TechCrunch has brought together the best and brightest minds in mobility at our TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility event. This year, we are adding a little extra twist. On October 5, the day before Mobility 2020, TC is hosting a pitch-off — which only ticket holders can access — highlighting disruptive startups in the mobility space. Startups from all over the world applied, only 10 made the cut.

Founders will pitch on the virtual TC Stage for one minute, followed by an intense Q&A with our judges. After all 10 companies have pitched, the illustrious set of judges — Shahin Farshchi (Lux Capital), Natalia Quintero (Transit Tech Lab) and Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) — will select the top five companies that will go on to pitch at the main event on October 7 in front of investors, press and thousands of online viewers.

Check out the featured companies here:

Automotus
BuuPass Kenya Limited
DUCKT
fluctuo
HyPoint
Le Car
Movel AI Pte Ltd
ONO (ONOMOTION GmbH)
PreAct Technologies
Shelf.Network

To see the startups pitching on October 5, you can snag an exhibitor pass for just $25. It’ll get you access to the pitch-off, breakout sessions from ChargePoint and access to visit all of the early-stage mobility startups in the expo for all the days of TC Sessions: Mobility. But if you really want to take it to the next level, get an all-access General Admission ticket for $195 that gives you access to the main stage speakers, networking and a complementary Extra Crunch membership (worth $99). But you’ll need to grab your tickets before Monday, October 5th when prices increase!

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Bolt Threads partners with Adidas, owners of Balenciaga and Gucci, and Stella McCartney on mushroom leather

Bolt Threads has brought together some new and existing partners, including Stella McCartney, Kering (the fashion house behind brands like Balenciaga, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta), Lululemon and Adidas to create a consortium that will explore the company’s use of its mushroom-based leather substitute in products, the company said.

These companies will be among the first to bring products made with Bolt Threads’ mushroom-based leather substitute to market in 2021, the company said.

“I have always been convinced that innovation is key to addressing the sustainability challenge that luxury is facing. Finding innovative, alternative materials and fabrics can potentially drastically reduce the environmental impact of our industry over the long term,” François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and chief executive of Kering, said in a statement.

The announcement is the culmination of at least two years of work from Bolt Threads, which first announced it would join the hunt for a leather substitute in 2018. The company announced its first product soon after — a $400 “Driver Bag” designed in conjunction with the Portland-based bag company, Chester Wallace.

The company, which has raised over $200 million since its launch nearly 11 years ago, faces some pretty tough competition. Companies like MycoWorks and Modern Meadow both have alternative leather products in the works. However, these partnerships may go a long way toward separating Bolt from the rest of the herd.

Swatches of Bolt Threads mushroom leather product, “Mylo.” Image Credit: Bolt Threads

Investors in Bolt Threads include Foundation Capital, Baillie Gifford, Founders Fund, Formation 8 and the Nan Fung Group, a privately held, Hong Kong-based conglomerate with significant holdings in the textile and fashion industry.

What the redoubled interest in leather goods means for the alternative spider silk that was the company’s original product is unclear. There hasn’t been much news on the silk front since the company debuted its $314 necktie back in 2017.

There’s clearly interest in the fashion industry’s ability to clean up. Consumers are demanding it, and new brands focused on sustainability are launching regularly.

As Reducetarian Foundation president and co-founder Brian Kateman wrote last year, “traditional fashion is killing the planet”:

Every year, the textile industry alone spits out 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases — more than all marine shipping vessels and international flights combined — and consumes 98 million tons of oil. Textile dyeing is the second-largest polluter of clean water, and on the whole, the apparel industry accounts for 10 percent of all greenhouse emissions worldwide. Worst of all, the clothes produced by this massive resource consumption produces clothes are rapidly discarded: In 2015, 73 percent of the total material used to make clothes ended up incinerated or landfilled, according to a study by the Ellen MacArthur foundation.

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Air quality monitoring service Airly raises $2 million as fires, pollution force consumers to take note

As smoke from fires chokes the skies in the western U.S. and pollution chokes much of the world, air quality has become yet another issue for civilization to address.

Industrialization and natural disasters wrought by climate change are spewing more toxic matter into the air, and governments around the world are racing to monitor what the combination of catastrophes and economic growth could mean for their citizens.

The ability to get an accurate measurement of the air quality in their home city of Krakow, Poland is what drove the team of engineers that launched Airly to start their business.

Founded by three engineering students, Michal Misiek, Wiktor Warchalowski and Aleksander Konior, the company combines sensing technologies and software to measure particulate matter and emissions like NOx, SOx, methane and carbon monoxide in the air.

“We are using software and calibration algorithms to provide the best data,” said Warchalowski, who serves as the company’s chief executive officer. The company is more than just collecting air quality. The three engineers have also developed an algorithm that they say can accurately predict air quality for up to 24 hours based on the data they gather.

The current market for air quality assessment tools stands at roughly $4 billion today and will reach $6.5 billion by 2025. Already, Airly’s technology is being used by around 400 cities across Europe and Asia by several universities and corporations, including Philips, PwC, Motorola, Aviva, Veolia and Skanska. The company has also released an API so media, technology and finance companies can access live air quality data. There’s also an app for consumers who want to get a sense of the air out there.

Airparif, the French-based air quality assessment organization, awarded the company an honor for being the most accurate air quality device it had seen.

The company initially started because Warchalowski and his friends were training for a marathon and wanted to see when would be the best time to run so they wouldn’t be exposed to pollution. “When I wanted to run at 5PM and the data was from 2PM it was not up to date,” he said.

More than 2 million people are now using the company’s app. “There are more people like me that need that data,” Warchalowski said.

Airly makes money by selling its device, which is roughly the size of an iPhone, to consumers and communities, and by charging for access to its API. The device costs $300 and API access starts at $1,000, according to Warchalowski.

With revenue in hand and the imprimatur of leading air quality monitoring organizations, its little wonder that Airly was able to attract venture backing from Sir Richard Branson’s and Sir Ronald Cohen’s families; Pipedrive co-founder Martin Tajur; Cherry Ventures partner and former Spotify CMO Sophia Bendz; former Gojek CMO Piotr Jakubowski; and Henkel board member Konstantin von Unger, in a $2 million round led by the newly formed investment firm Giant Ventures .

“By building the leading source of air quality data globally, Airly is creating enormous social and economic value,” said Cameron McLain, a managing partner and co-founder of Giant Ventures.

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Indianapolis-based Malomo raises $2.8 million to turn order tracking into a branded customer experience

Yaw Aning named Malomo, the service he launched for small businesses to turn their order-tracking services into branded customer experiences, as a tribute to his mother, who was a small business owner herself.

Malomo” means flowers in Swahili and it was the name of Aning’s mother’s small soap-making business which she built over the years — even as she was battling the cancer to which she would eventually succumb.

The small Indianapolis startup has just raised $2.8 million to expand its services providing a new marketing channel for the Shopify retailers of the world who can always use more ways to reach new customers, Aning said.

The financing came from the San Francisco-based firm, Base 10, and New York’s Harlem Capital, along with commitments from previous investors Hyde Park and High Alpha.

Aning came to entrepreneurship as an Orr Fellow, an Indiana program that takes 10 graduates and places them in high-growth companies. While Aning worked in corporate finance, he was always interested in the startup world, and started is first company, Pocket Tales, an online reading game for children.

That business was followed by Sticks and Leaves, a web design agency that gave Aning his first view into the opportunity that order tracking presented as a space for a better customer experience.

Along with co-founder Anthony Smith, Aning built a service that connects with a single click to the Shopify platform and creates custom, branded tracking pages for each brand. “It’s a landing page for a brand. They use it like they would use any marketing asset,” Aning said. “The strategy is to build up integrations to the other tools merchants use to create rich experiences leveraging those tools.”

 

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Zynga completes its acquisition of hyper-casual game maker Rollic

Zynga announced in August that it would be acquiring Istanbul-based Rollic, developer and publisher of hyper-casual gaming hits like Go Knots 3D and Tangle Master 3D. Today, it says the deal has closed.

To be clear, Zynga doesn’t completely own Rollic yet. Instead, it has purchased 80% of the company for approximately $180 million in cash, with additional payments to acquire the remaining 20% over the next three years.

In anticipation of the deal closing, CEO Frank Gibeau told me that this represents Zynga’s first move into the world of hyper-casual games — games where, as their titles suggest, players perform simple tasks like throwing knives and untying knots.

Rollic, he argued, has succeeded in a field where “for the first three years, everybody kept calling it a fad.” He was particularly impressed by the company’s development process, where it releases games at a rapid clip by managing a network of hundreds of developers.

“They already had some scale and some velocity and hit the ground running, but we thought they could grow faster with us,” Gibeau said.

He was also impressed by the size of their audience — apparently the combined companies will reach a total of 160 million monthly active users, with 65 million coming from Rollic. And as Gibeau noted, the ability to reach a large audience and monetize that audience without ad tracking will be even more important after Apple’s looming change, which will require app developers to allow their users to opt out of tracking.

This is Zynga’s fourth acquisition in Istanbul. In fact, it paid $1.8 billion for Peak Games just a of couple months before the Rollic deal. Asked whether it’s harder to bring new teams on-board when travel and in-person work is limited, Gibeau replied, “It requires a lot of Zoom time instead of face-to-face time.”

He added, “The good news about this is, it’s obviously a very tragic situation and the work-from-home environment is a big negative in a lot of ways, but for gaming companies, we’re in pretty good shape, right? We can build games in this environment.”

Gibeau also said that the company is interested in making more acquisitions, but the strategy is “not just being a roll-up.” And while Zynga has had its ups and downs since it first rode the wave of Facebook gaming, Gibeau noted that the company has beaten expectations with impressive revenue growth in recent quarters.

“I think we still have a lot to prove,” he said.

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Paired picks up $1M funding and launches its relationship app for couples

Paired, a new app for couples, is launching today and disclosing $1 million in funding. Backing the startup, which wants to support “happier and healthier” relationships, is Taavet Hinrikus of TransferWise, the co-founders of Runtastic (which was sold to Adidas), Ed Cooke of Memrise and Bernhard Niesner of Busuu.

Founded in September 2019 by Kevin Shanahan and Diego López, who previously worked together at language learning app Memrise, and joined shortly afterwards by Chief Relationships Officer Dr Jacqui Gabb, who is Professor of Sociology and Intimacy at The Open University, Paired combines audio tips from experts with “fun daily questions and quizzes” that partners answer together.

The app has been piloted (and iterated) in Australia for the last six months and is pitched as different to traditional couples therapy, which is often prescribed to couples in distress, in that it is targeting the “full spectrum” of couples who want help building intimacy and improving communication. The idea is that Paired can provide the steps needed by couples to improve their relationship each day.

Available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, Paired is free to download but requires a subscription to unlock the full library of content.

“Our relationship with our partner is one of the most important parts of our lives: it affects our physical health, our mental health, and the lives of our children,” says Kevin Shanahan, co-founder and CEO. “However, there aren’t many solutions to help couples keep their relationship healthy. Most are designed for couples in distress”.

Image Credits: Paired

Shanahan says that Paired prompts you and your partner to take “small, positive steps” to improve your relationship. To do this, the startup works with relationship academics and therapists to create quizzes, audio courses, and tips that “help you to learn more about each other, resolve conflict, and build intimacy”.

Experts collaborating with Paired include University of Washington Professor and Married at First Sight USA’s Dr. Pepper Schwartz, University of Exeter academics Mark Rivett and Hannah Sherbersky, and Oakland University Professor and Marriage and Family Therapist Dr. Terri Orbuch.

After downloading Paired, you’re asked if you’d like to pair with your partner to swap answers. To enable this, you’re given a unique code to share. Alternatively, you can choose to pair later or just use the app by yourself.

“Each day we then prompt you to answer either a question or quiz,” explains Shanahan. “These rotate between different areas of your relationship so you can learn which areas are strong and which have room for growth. If you’re paired with your partner, then when they answer the quiz or question you can unlock each other’s answer and discuss them together.

“In parallel, you begin listening to (and will soon be able to read) audio courses and tips that are presented by top relationship academics and therapists. These are on a range of topics — including sex and intimacy, managing conflict, and parenting — and include couple case studies to learn from and exercises to do outside of the app”.

Shanahan describes Paired’s user base as quite broad, made up of new couples, some who have been together for a long time, long-distance couples and people using the app individually. The majority are aged 30-50 and use the app with their partner.

“Each day they typically use the app for about 5 minutes and (based on anecdotal feedback) discuss their answers outside of the app for another 5 minutes or so,” says the Paired CEO.

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Nintendo’s new RC Mario Kart looks terrific

In a year, Nintendo would have demoed, in person, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit. The company would have invited select members of the press into some rented event space and let us experience the game first-hand, like it had with Labo and Ring Fit Adventures. It’s 2020, however, and that’s just not how we do things.

Watching someone else play an RC game over teleconference software is not ideal. But it’s nothing if not extremely of the moment. And more importantly, it’s probably a testament to what Nintendo has built here that it translates so well with a less than ideal setup. Granted, I won’t feel comfortable offering a proper review until I’ve played the game on my Switch, but I can confidently say that Mario Kart Live makes for one hell of an impressive demo.

Image Credits: Nintendo

Like the recently released Mario Lego sets, this is the kind of toy that makes me jealous of kids today. It also, frankly, bums me out that I don’t have more space at home to lay out a track. I’ve heard it was a buyer’s market, so maybe I’ll go buy a house. Whatever the case, bringing Mario to a real-world RC car is one of those no-brainer ideas, and the execution looks great.

The game also finds Nintendo embracing augmented reality in a really convincing and clever way. We’ve seen some AR from the company, most notably in the form of Pokémon GO — which, to be fair, was more of a Niantic joint and, as plenty will happily point out, not really proper AR. And like that title, Nintendo worked closely with a third party. In this case, it’s the New York-state based Velan Studios, which was started by brothers Guha and Karthik Bala who also founded Vicarious Visions, an Albany-based game developer now owned by Activision.

“It started as an experiment by a small team at Velan,” the startup said in a blog post today. “Like many prototypes, the main goal was to “find the fun”. We built an RC car by kitbashing together drone parts, cameras, and sensors to create a unique thirdperson view driving experience. It gave us the exhilaration of speed and allowed us to see the world from a totally different perspective.”

Image Credits: Nintendo

The execution of Mario Kart Live is a perfect bit of synergy in that it leverages the Switch to really bring the whole thing to life — in a manner similar to what the company has already done with Labo and Ring Fit. Of course, much or most of the real magic here comes courtesy of the racer. Currently limited to Mario and Luigi (no word yet on additional characters), the cars feature both a camera for FPV on the Switch and all of the requisite sensors.

Nintendo declined to answer specific questions about the on-board sensors and other hardware, but one assumes depth-sensing plays a big role here. There’s no calibration out of the box. You can pretty much start it up and start driving around. Once you actually unfold and set up the three gates to create the circular course, however, that will require some driving to generate the lay of the land. Nintendo’s employed a clever graphic for that, with Lakitu dropping a bucket of paint the character drives over and tracks with his wheels.

Image Credits: Nintendo

The game also employs some clever physics, with game action impacting speed and steering. There’s a range of top speeds, from 50 to 200 cc. A demo stripped of AR shows how in-game elements impact the actual kart speed. Other elements, like the sudden occasional sand storm, cause the kart to drift to the sides. The game will also react, if, say, you crash it into a table leg — sending coins flying just as it would in a Mario Kart game.

On that note, the company tells me that the karts are quite robust, with a bumper that’s essentially designed to run into stuff. That shouldn’t cause any damage, given the top speeds here. Though the company notes that if, say, a heavy book falls on top of the kart after it jostled it loose from a shelf, that could ultimately be an issue. Nintendo says there will be a way to repair the karts, but offered no specifics on warranty.

Image Credits: Nintendo

Races can be played with up to four, though a kart is required to play. In fact, the actual game will be free to download from the Nintendo store, but is essentially worthless without a kart. Until that’s set up, the only thing you’ll be able to access is a game trailer. At the moment, the in-game opponents are just the Koopalings.

Image Credits: Nintendo

Like the karts themselves, however, it seems likely — or even certain — that the company will introduce additional characters down the road. Perhaps we can look for expansions along the lines of what the company has done with Smash Bros. Also, like Mario Maker, you can customize both your character and car for the in-game FPV AR overlays (though these won’t be visible to other players).

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit arrives October 16, priced at $100 a kart. You’ll need either a Switch or Switch Lite to play.

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