Fully Charged: Elon Musk setting up self-driving Tesla cars, Disney releases Infinity app, and Samsung creates its own Hunger Games contest
Get clued-up on new tech with this morning’s dose of stories
Elon Musk seeking engineers for self-driven Tesla cars
Tesla Motors founder and real-life Tony Stark Elon Musk has revealed more details about an upcoming project to create autonomously-driven Tesla cars.
In a couple of tweets yesterday, Musk first asked engineers interested in working on the project to get in touch via email, saying that the team would be reporting directly to him. The email address is “autopilot@teslamotors.com”, suggesting that this could be the name of the final self-driving system.
He then followed that up with a tweet explaining that the system would be based on a 360-degree camera and radar, with image processing being handled by both hardware and software. With Google also working on bringing self-driving cars to our streets, it seems like this sci-fi dream could become a reality sooner rather than later.
iPad gets Disney Infinity: Toy Box app
We rather liked Disney Infinity (you can read our review here), and now the game has got its own companion app for the iPad.
Disney Infinity: Toy Box lets you create you own “Toy Boxes”, much like in the console game. In fact, you can transfer these Toy Boxes into the console game if you wish, and carry on developing them where you left off. There are 60 free items to use in the app, with others available via the dreaded in-app purchasing (a bummer, but what do you expect given that the app itself is free, or at least will be until 15th October).
The app is available now from the App Store.
Samsung running high-stakes survival contest
Samsung’s SOS Island competition may be just another way for the company to promote its products (in this case the Galaxy S4 Zoom and Galaxy NX cameras), but we applaud it for being more intriguing than most. The prize itself sounds amazing – it’s a “private island experience” worth about £60,000 – and the contest is a little more taxing than scribbling the answer to “Which country is Samsung based in?” on a postcard.
The 16 finalists will be sent to Puerto Rico on 28th September to spend a week training with survival expert Les Stroud, after which they’ll be whittled down to a final eight. This lot’ll be dropped onto an uninhabited island and forced to partake in a series of challenges and games to find a winner. It all sounds a bit Hunger Games, albeit somewhat less lethal and with a distinct absence of Lenny Kravitz. Hopefully.
You’ll be able to follow via YouTube and Facebook live streams, and viewers can vote for their favourite contestants online. Tune in on 30th September on Samsung Camera’s Facebook page to start taking part.
Sam Kieldsen
Contributor 
