AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Music flooded into the streets around Austin’s convention center as South by Southwest’s music festival kicked off and the interactive portion wrapped up. The head of Google’s (X) division talked about testing driverless cars and delivery drones, gender bias in tech was a hot topic and event-goers checked out the latest products and companies on the trade show floor.
Here are some highlights as South by Southwest Interactive draws to a close.
GOOGLE X
Some of Google’s most secretive projects like Google Glass and driverless cars have come out of its five-year-old (X) division, so attendees flooded in Tuesday to hear Astro Teller, head of the division, talk about how the most ambitious projects require a lot of failure before succeeding. Testing products in the real world is key, he said. The company drives thousands of miles on city streets every day to test how its driverless cars function in every imaginable situation. “Nothing beats going out into the real world and seeing if what a simulator says will work is actually possible,” he said.
Working on creating unmanned delivery drones, Teller’s team came up with a type of vehicle that sits upright and launches vertically, but there were some problems with it (Teller didn’t say exactly what). Google co-founder Sergey Brin gave the team five months to be able to make deliveries by drone. They did it successfully in Queensland, Australia, but decided to go in a different direction with the drone project. Still, having the deadline helped the process advance, he said, and predicted there will be news about the drones later this year.