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In May of 1995, the video game industry hosted its first major trade show. Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was designed to shine a spotlight on games, and every major player wanted to stand in it. Sega believed it had figured out how to command that spotlight. Riding high on the success of the Sega Genesis, the company unveiled the Sega Saturn at its press conference. After a quirky segment that resembled one of Sega’s off-the-wall commercials, Tom Kalinske, CEO of Sega of America, delivered a bombshell announcement. “Since I began my remarks with an announcement, I might as well finish with another: We started our rollout of the Sega Saturn yesterday,” he said. “We’re at retail today in 1,800 Toys “R” Us, Software Etc., and Electronics Boutique stores around the U.S. and Canada.” Sega hoped it would be a mic drop moment. Instead, it marked the beginning of the end for the companys hardware business. What the press conference audience didnt know was that Kalinske had strongly opposed the early launch. He had argued fiercely with Segas Japanese leadership, pointing to his past success with the Genesis in the U.S. and warning that a surprise launch without a proper marketing ramp-up wouldn’t work. But his objections were overruled. This story is part of 1995 Week, where well revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago. “[I] didnt understand why this was occurring,” he told TimeExtension in 2022. “I was forced to introduce it. We didnt have enough hardware. We didnt have enough software. And then, to make matters worse, we were forced to introduce it five months earlier than we wanted.” Segas announcement turned headsbut they quickly turned again when Sony held its own press conference later that day. After showcasing the PlayStation and a long list of development partners, Olaf Olafsson, head of Sony America, invited Steve Race (formerly Segas own marketing chief) to the stage. Race approached the podium, put down his notes, and simply said: “299,” then walked away. That one number undercut the Saturn and every other console on the market by $100. By the time Sega abandoned the Saturn just three years later, it had sold fewer than 2 million units in the U.S. The company would release one final systemthe Dreamcastin 1998 in Japan and 1999 in the U.S. But the Saturns mishandled launch had already altered Segas trajectory forever. A Doomed Launch “The Saturn was dead before it came out because of the poor decision-making Sega had made,” says Chris Kohler, a video game historian and editorial director at Digital Eclipse Entertainment Partners. When it came out in Japan, Sega was also launching 32X, an add-on for the Sega Genesis. . . . All it ended up doing was completely confusing consumers. They had no idea what to buy.” Despite that confusion, the Saturn had a decent launch in Japan. Its game lineup appealed to local tastes, especially with a home version of Virtua Fighter, a massive arcade hit. But American gamers were harder to win over. While titles like Panzer Dragoon and Clockwork Knight have dedicated fanbases today, they werent enough to justify a $399 console (about $842 in todays dollars). I tried and tried to get the launch pushed back so that we had some actual software to support it, Kalinske told TimeExtension. I was not successful. I had four glorious years where Sega Japan pretty much let me do whatever I felt was right, and then that stopped. One of the Saturns most glaring missteps was the lack of a Sonic the Hedgehog gamenot just at launch, but throughout its entire lifespan. At the time, Sonic was at the height of his popularity. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 had sold 4 million copies the year prior. He also starred in a Saturday morning cartoon and the CGI-animated series Sonic Boom on Cartoon Network. Launching a Sega console without Sonic was like launching a Nintendo console without Mario. The surprise launch strategy also backfired on Sega in another way. “Essentially, they kneecapped themselves,” says Kohler. “They can only ship it to certain retailers, so the retailers that don’t get those early shipments get burned and they don’t want to stock Sega products anymore. . . . Consumers didn’t have the ability to get excited or put down preorders. It hit the market without any buildup.” An Unexpected Fight Sega knew Sony would bring the PlayStation to the U.S., but didnt initially view it as a serious threat. By the mid-1990s, lots of big, non-gaming focused companies had tried to step into the videogame world. Magnavox had released several versions of the Odyssey in the 1970s. Philips had released the CD-i a few years prior to the Saturn’s introduction. The Neo Geo was already on the market and the TurboGrafx-16 had just been discontinued. But Sony was different. Aggressive and well-prepared, its $299 price point stunned the industry. “We didnt know they were going to do it, and when they did, we were like: ‘We are screwed here,'” said Kalinske. “We werent making money at $399, so we had a problem. Consumers responded immediately. Retailers increased orders, and developers rushed to work with the PlayStation. “All of these big hardware makers were coming into the video game industry and falling on their face,” says Kohler. “Sony, of all of them, comes in and is not only successful but outrageously successful.” Executive Departures Kalinskes frustrations continued after the Saturn launch, and in July of the following year, he resignedthough he remained on the board. Bernard Stolar, who had been instrumental in launching the PlayStation, took over at Sega. His first move was to abandon the Saturn. When I got to Sega I immediately said, We have to kill Saturn. We have to stop Saturn and start building the new technology. Thats what I did. I brought in a new team of people and cleaned house. . . . I took the company down to 90 employees to start rebuilding, Stolar, who died in 2022, once told GamesBeat. That team created the Dreamcast, which performed well in the U.S. but not well enough to restore Segas dominanceespecially as Microsoft prepared to enter the market. Lacking the resources to compete with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, Sega exited the hardware business. Today, Sega is part of Sammy Corp. and focuses solely on software, with franchises ranging from Angry Birds to Total Warand of course, Sonic, who now stars in a successful film series. Still, it’s hard not to ask, What if? What if Sega had waited until September to launch the Saturn, as originally planned? What if it had a stronger launch lineup for the U.S. market? There are no answers, only the reality that the Saturns missteps reshaped the industry. “In a lot of ways, it was Sega’s to lose and they just fumbled it,” says Kohler.
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The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo was one of the most distinctive buildings of the 20th century, both for its oddball form and for its tumultuous evolution. A space station stack of 140 prefabricated cabin-like capsule living spaces completed in 1972, the building went from high concept design to marketing triumph to architectural wonder to lamented demolition. Now, the building is taking on a new form inside the galleries of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, a year-long exhibition that opened July 10. The central piece of the exhibition is the roughly 100-square-foot capsule A1305, a complete and fully restored living chamber from the building that visitors will be able to step inside. [Photo: Noritaka Minami] “Especially for architecture exhibitions, sometimes we’re able to show actual pieces of buildings, or fragments,” says curator Evangelos Kotsioris. “But what is extremely rare here is that it’s a whole unit by itself.” That’s because the building had a wholly innovative design: two tower cores surrounded with individual rectangular living units, or capsules, that attached to the structure like appendages. Designed for the Nakagin Company by architect Kisho Kurokawa, the building came to epitomize the avant-garde Metabolist movement that developed in 1960s Japan as an effort to use adaptable architecture as an avenue for rebuilding postwar Japan and Japanese society. In the mind of Kurokawa, who died in 2007, the capsule tower was meant to evolve, with old capsules being swapped out for new ones as needs and times changed. This never happened, not exactly anyway. The building slowly decayed over the years and deferred maintenance doomed much of it to becoming uninhabitable before it was demolished in 2022. Some capsules and building parts were salvaged, though, and more than a dozen capsules have been fully restored. Capsule A1305 was acquired by MoMA in 2023. Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates, 1972 [Photo: Tomio Ohashi] But the Nakagin Capsule Tower exhibition is more than just a showcase of an architectural curio. It features 45 other objects relating to the building and its design, including the only surviving physical model from the early 1970s, the original architectural drawings of the building, historic marketing material from the Nakagin Company for the building’s original use as a businessman’s pied--terre, and a digital building walk-through created with 3D scanning technology just days before the building’s demolition. Kotsioris also interviewed the group of residents who lived in the capsule tower during its final decade, and the exhibition includes documentation on the varied ways they repurposed the capsules. “The capsule itself, if you just look at it from the outside, it’s not telling you much. You cannot fully comprehend the radicality of the proposition behind it,” Kotsioris says. “I thought it was really important for its first presentation in New York to contextualize it properly, with the ideas about the birth of the project, the drawing, the models, but also interviews with residents.” The capsule in the exhibition is a faithful recreation of the way the building was originally marketed, as a part-time residence for businessmen visiting Tokyo for work. One famous ad for the building shows a smiling businessman inside a capsule, seemingly after work, lounging on the bed while talking on the phone and smoking a Marlboro, with the capsule’s built-in Sony TV and audio electronics playing in the background. Kisho Kurokawa, Architect & Associates, 1970-1972; restored 2022-2023 [Photo: MOMA] Kurokawa intended the building to be more than just a space for businessmen, envisioning the building with multiple capsule sizes for offices, hotel rooms, and family residences. That vision narrowed, but also evolved, as Kurokawa later went on to design the first capsule hotel in Osaka in 1979. Even short of Kurokawa’s original intent, the Nakagin Capsule Tower has influenced generations of architects, while also pushing new ideas about urban living in Japan, impermanence in the built environment, and prefabricated housing. “Even though there was a lot of speculative projects about capsule living and prefabricated dwellings, even from the early 20th century,” Kotsioris says, “this was really the first realized prototype on the ground that said this is an idea that you can actually put into action.” Nakagin Co. promo, 1971 [Photo: Courtesy Tatsuyuki Maeda / The Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project] MoMA members will be able to step inside the capsule during several special events throughout the exhibition’s run, which Kotsioris says should be a treat. “I remember the first time I entered a capsule,” he says. “There’s something extremely magical about being inside it, because it’s very small, but at the same time it feels spacious.” The Nakagin Capsule Tower exhibition explores the ways the building played multiple roles in its five-decade lifespan. Despite the compact size of the capsules, they evolved over time from a kind of temporary living quarters to more of a permanent residence. And, Kotsioris found, the individualist nature of the capsules changed over time, too, as maintenance and structural issues began to plague the building. “The more the building started to break down over the years, the more it generated social interactions,” he says. Residents told him that frequent earthquake evacuation alarms in the aging structure turned into social gatherings in the lobby. When the hot water boiler stopped working, a group of residents would travel together to a nearby bathhouse to take showers, and when the air conditioning broke, they’d gather in one of the units with a working dehumidifier for drinks after work. [Photo: Jeremie Souteyrat] These unintended uses of the buildinga version of the Metabolist architecture idea Kurokawa was designing aroundhelped it remain useful up until the end. “Kurokawa had one idea of how this project could be metabolized or change over time,” Kotsioris says. “And it did metabolize, but maybe in a different way than he would ever have imagined.”
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You can now order an “Iron Dome” for mosquitoes. Its name is the Photon Matrix, a black box about the size of a smartphone that can detect, track, and eliminate mosquitoes mid-flight using an AI-guided laser system. According to its inventor, it can identify and zap up to 30 mosquitoes per second with calibrated laser pulses that will disintegrate these potentially lethaland always annoyingflying pests without harming people or pets. Just looking at the video of it in action makes me laugh like a supervillain. Chinese engineer Jim Wong built a working prototype that can “effectively identify and strike mosquitoes with a flight speed of no more than 1 meter per second and a characteristic size of 2 to 20 millimeters,” according to his Indiegogo crowdfunding page and the viral videos on TikTok and Instagram. The device can also target other flying insects within that range, like sand flies and fruit fliesbasically anything small, slow, and infuriating that you may want to vaporize. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Art Stine (@rokdog1) The timing couldn’t be better. Due to climate change, virus-carrying species like those that transmit Zika and dengue are creeping into nontropical latitudes. The United States, Europe, and other areas outside of the tropics are facing a growing threat. Take Europe: In 2024, the hottest year on record, the European Union documented more than 300 autochthonous dengue casesacquired within European territorysurpassing the 275 cases recorded during the previous 15 years combined. The tiger mosquito, which transmits dengue and Zika, has already established itself in 13 EU countries. And optimal temperatures for these bugs to thrivebetween 75 and 79 degrees Fahrenheitare becoming increasingly common during European summers. Pew, pew, pewyoure dead The idea of using laser beams to destroy mosquitoes dates back to 2007, during a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brainstorming session on eliminating malaria. Thats when astrophysicist Lowell Woodone of the architects of Reagan’s “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiativeproposed a laser system not to stop the Soviet Union from nuking the U.S., but to defend humans against mosquitoes. Many tried to fulfill Wood’s idea, but Wong’s project might be the first to achieve an affordable commercial solution (though at this first stage, each Photon Matrix costs nearly $500). The key that makes the device work lies in current hardware capabilities and computer visions ability to quickly recognize objects. The system, Wong explains, identifies targets through movement pattern analysis, distinguishing between mosquitoes and similar pixel signals like dust or sensor noise. Here is how it works: The insect dome uses a light-detection-and-ranging (LiDAR) module that fires thousands of laser pulses that bounce off any solid object, creating a real-time 3D map of its surroundings. When they hit something airborne, the photons bounce back, and the system detects how long it takes for the light to return. When it spots a mosquito, the system calculates its distance, orientation, and body size in just three milliseconds, Wong claims, marking the target for destruction. At that moment, a second laser fires, this one capable of instantly hitting the mosquito with a pulse that’s lethal to the bug but harmless to humans. Right now, the technology only works with insects flying slower than 1 meter per seconda speed that includes mosquitoes (which fly between 0.6 and 0.9 mph) and some small flies like sand flies and fruit flies, but excludes much faster houseflies. The Photon Matrix also employs millimeter-wave radar to constantly scan its field of view for larger objects. If it detects people or pets, the laser won’t fire. When an object significantly larger than a mosquito enters the detection range, the system can quickly and precisely identify it and refrain from laser activation, Wong says. He claims that this prototype not only effectively eliminates mosquitoes using laser technology, but also prioritizes safety as its core feature. The design incorporates “mandatory safety certification requirements”though it doesn’t specify which standards it meets or whether they’re Chinese or international. The basic version offers a 90-degree surveillance and elimination range, with a 10-foot reach. The professional version extends that range to 20 feet. Both models can operate in completely dark rooms and can withstand water immersion up to 5 feet for 30 minutes, thanks to their IP68 (dust-tight and waterproof) certification. The system draws power from wall outlets using a USB adapter or from portable batteries that provide between eight and 16 hours of autonomy, depending on the model. The laser system isn’t perfect. The Photon Matrix’s limited range means it can’t protect extensive areas like large patios or public spaces. Its effectiveness also decreases with rain, which can interfere with optical sensors. World war against mosquitoes The Photon Matrix is just the latest invention that is trying to defend humans against mosquitoes. Other people have been trying to find solutions for ages, most of them using genetic modifications to stop their reproduction. Some scientists also went low-cost, like with “ovillantas,” a term combining the words “ovi” (a prefix in biology for “egg”) with “llantas” (Spanish for “tires”). Developed by Canadian chemistry professor Gérard Ulíbarri of Laurentian University in Ontario, this device exploits mosquitoes’ strange attraction to old tires. Ulíbarri discovered that these insects are attracted to some chemical compound in rubber that drives them to lay eggs inside the hollow interior of tires. In fact, scientists have determined that this type of “nest” can produce up to one-third of all mosquitoes in an area. The traps are built inside a section of a tire that’s fitted with a drainage valve at the bottom. Next, it’s filled with water and pieces of paper that float like landing strips for mosquitoeson which they lay their eggs in the stagnant water. The water is drained once or twice a week and filtered through a cloth to remove the larvae. That filtered water preserves the pheromones carried by the eggs and is reused, indicating to other mosquitoes that this is a good place to lay more eggs. Results from the pilot project in the Guatemalan town of Sayaxché were promising: Ovillantas destroyed seven times more mosquitoes than traditional traps, eliminating nearly 18,000 larvae per month. In fact, the project claims no new dengue cases were recorded in the areawhere nomally there would be two or three dozen cases a month. Ulíbarri estimates that two ovillantas per acre are sufficient to impact a local mosquito population, although “the more you have, the better,” he says. Perhaps in the future, scientists and engineers will come up with a 100% effective solution. But for now, the ideal approach is combining multiple systemshome laser beams, reproductive traps, epidemiological surveillance, repellents, and physical barriers like nettingwhich can provide a layered defense against a present and growing threat. Multilayered defense Neither ovillantas nor this domestic “Iron Dome” can completely eliminate the threat of mosquitoes, although plenty of people seem swayed by the latter. The crowdfunding campaign seeks $20,000which it has far exceeded, at more than $758,000 right nowwith a presale pricing of $497 for the basic version and $598 for the professional model. (The usual Indiegogo/Kickstarter might never reach market caveat applies.) Wong acknowledges that price is the systems biggest problem. The production and selling costs of this product are relatively high, he says, and the only way to solve it is by manufacturing scale. He says that third parties have already approached him to build the Photon Matrix in large numbers. The big question is, of course: Will it really work? If the videos are true, then one day we could see them at much lower prices. Let’s hope it all goes well. Not only because these viruses could soon become endemicbut also because I want to sit in my garden on a hot summer night and watch hundreds of these insects go down in flames after saying, You may fire when ready, in my best Peter Cushing voice (from Star Wars: A New Hope).
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