this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. the next train to arrive at platform one is the stopping service to the future of transport. we will call it at some incredible destinations and you can stop doing that city voice, by the way.

sorry, yes, we are on an augmented reality walking tour, then afterwards an oil rig where pets are allowed! as long as there are robots. it's spot the robot dog, sniffing after chris this time. i think you are right. and lara is preparing for her perfect night out. this time i'm going to magic forest! this time i'm going for magic forest! it's been a while since i've been in one of these. it hasn't been in action for 60 years so you must have been 12! we are at the riverside transport museum in glasgow and you can really see how things have changed over time. one thing that's changing is the way we pay for public transport. many of us are ditching paper money and tickets and instead using smartphones or, like you, smartwatches to pay for our journey. i never carry cash but one time i went to pay for this at a shop and i didn't have it on. it was a bare wrist,

so embarrassing. orfor the bus or london underground, it's easy. things might get easier with smart ticketing, which would spell the end for ticket barriers. instead, sensors will talk to an app which tracks your journey and automatically charges you. one system using bluetooth beacons is already active in genoa and paul carter has been to take a look. our cities are changing. and so the way we navigate them is changing too. in many major cities around the world, technology being used for integrated fares and ticketing across modes of transport are now commonplace. but making such multimodal systems truly frictionless by removing the need to buy tickets is taking things to the next level. and in the northern italian city of genoa,

they are doing just that. in some instances, quite literally. in partnership with hitachi rail, the city is piloting a new system to allow seamless, hands—free payment and ticketing. all from a smartphone. the system works across the city's very networks including buses, subways, public lifts, and water buses. it's a unique city when it comes to the geography. we have the sea and we have mountains. we have up and down hills, we have elevators, whatever, so inside of the offer of the main operator, at least seven or eight means of transportation. that's really something unique. normally you have either bus, tram underground, that's it. you have literally everything

from boats to elevators. so we thought that if we managed to connect the city, which is really complex geography and landscape, we can scale up as much as we want. it uses bluetooth beacons placed throughout the city which automatically detect the journey a passenger makes and what mode of transport they use. it's pretty easy. we cover all stops of buses, underground, elevators, furniculars, track rails of the city, we equip them with bluetooth sensors and each and every mobile telephone nowadays is fitted with a bluetooth antenna and this communicates throughout the app to the sensor and localises the position of the travellers in association with a particular stop or a means of transportation. what you have to do is literally know where you want to go and board the means of transportation you want, change intermodally between, i don't know,

underground and buses and furniculars and at the end of the day, it calculates the best possible fare for the segment you travelled on. in addition to public transport, the app is also integrated with genoa's car sharing service. e—scooters and parking can be booked for through the app. as well as benefits to passengers, systems like this benefit the transport providers. the data collected can be used to calculate congestion and even emissions, allowing companies to dynamically adapt their services. passengers also have access to arrival times and even how crowded a bus or subway train maybe. the man responsible for public transport in genoa thinks this isjust the beginning.

we only want to be on the leading edge of technology, trying to understand what will be happening not next year, by the next three years, because you need time to get ready for technology. i think that the future, the public will ask for a lot of transformation, technology will be much more important. so i think the future with public transport and new technology like electric, like driverless cars, so i think the future of transport will be a future of big technology change. the 360pass app and smart mobility system deployed in genoa is currently in trial but discussions are taking place with other cities around the world to expand its use further. perhaps one day hop on, hop off really will be the transport of the future. that was cool. it can be fun to hop on a train, head somewhere new to explore, and seeing

as we usually have our smartphones on us, well, we've got a map to hand, even maybe a tour. but one project is hoping to up the game. story trails uses augmented reality and virtual reality to let you see a little bit more of the cities you visit. it is available in 15 uk locations so laura goodwin has been to dundee to check it out. this is the tale of two sides to a city. the virtual and the physical, the well trodden, and hidden. now an immersive storytelling project called story trails allows people to see the sights for the first time to see beyond a city's geography and instead gaze into a 3—d map of its very soul. it's an exciting moment in cinema history within technology and a new form of 3—d filmmaking, we're so excited to see what sort of stories can be told if we gave it diverse creatives from the town and communities, who tell the stories important to them, that make that public

space a new digital kind of public space. the story map of dundee focused on places that resonated with him, from skate parks to a quirky independent eyeglass store. i lives in dundee myself five years and absolutely loved the city. each of the stories are tied to a place. so sometimes it worked in the sense that we found the place first and we looked for an interesting story tied to that place. thejute mills, for instance, we were keen to get that in. and we found a folksinger that was carrying on the tradition of thejute mill song sung by the spinners. # warp weft and twine # tae feed an claith yer bairnie # after 10 and nine...# but what is the technology that allowed story trails mappers like neil to digitally capture these people and places in 3—d? strictly speaking, it's not that new. it's been used for years to conduct geological surveys in autonomous vehicles and,

yes, even robot vacuum cleaners. but what's new is this tech is now available on some smartphones. there has been such a huge advance in what is literally in your pockets at the moment. so using a high—end smartphone, you now have access to two key technologies. one is lidar and one is photogrammetry, both systems which are used to capture 3—dimensional space. lidar uses a laser to measure the distance between your camera and object and from that works out the 3—dimensionalform. photogrammetry is actually a technology which is over 100 years old. and it uses hundreds of photographic stills and compares them to also work out the 3—dimensional form. previously, technology like lidar couldn't be accessed byjust anyone. a traditional lidar hand—held scanner in construction, for example, cost more than £20,000.

it's once technology gets into the hands of the man and woman on the street, once they literally do end up on your pockets, that makes their accessibility and their creative potential much more real. what's nice about this is that although each location is recognisable, you put a little creative play or twist on each one. we wanted to reflect the city broadly. but we wanted the people whose stories we present to, in effect, shape what the city looks like. it's one of those worlds that is somebody�*s biography. it's not a literal map, we aren't building a literal model of dundee, we are building a model almost based on people's public memories. it's notjust dundee being emotionally mapped into animated film and standalone 3—d scenes. the free story trails exhibit moves and focuses on a new uk location every week ending with lewisham and london in mid—september. you can capture a huge amount of detail, can't you. yeah.

this is andrew, one of our designers. a full—length scan like that may take us less than a minute. we could maybe give you a try. 0k. try to be as still as possible. it helps if you focus something like in the background. and here we go. look at the detail! we can even see the individual strands of hair. i think if you're working in a world where you are constantly doing digital avatars and representations of people, you can lose that connection. we spend a lot of our time trying to actually remove the digital and reintroduce the human.

so there is 3—d mini me, all created using an app and ipad. what's really interesting about this project is how this technology is being used to capture a city's soul to tell its residents' untold stories, and that's a very interesting merging of humanity and the metaverse. time for a look at this week's tech news. first up, kim kardashian and kyliejenner are the latest celebs to join content creators in their criticism of instagram's new design. instagram boss adam mosseri admitted there had been a lot of changes to the app. the tempest jet demonstrator has been unveiled a few years ahead of its 2027 release. it'll use artificial intelligence to assist the pilot if they feel overwhelmed or extreme stress. procuring off—the—shelf gaming kit and trying ideas out quickly and cheaply.

the idea is fail fast, let's get stuff in, let's see if it works, what benefits it could give to the operator. sticking with aviation, airbus and vrm switzerland are developing a new, innovative virtual reality helicopter simulator. the training tool offers realistic flight behaviour and full—body immersion with high—resolution scenery. it is an advanced take on the two companies' previous collaboration on vr helicopter training. after soaring global temperatures, cities in the us are rolling out new measures to turn down the heat. cool pavements in locations, including la and phoenix, are coated to absorb and radiate heat, as temperatures there have caused blackout spells to reach up to 67 degrees celsius. there are lots of incredibly dangerous workplaces and a drilling rig is

probably one of them. we've just had a talk with the safety manager who has pointed out everything on board that could potentially explode, and the only way to get people in when you are hundreds of miles away at sea is via a helicopter to do an inspection. so using robotics to monitor the space and keep an eye on things could be a solution. this particular rig in norway has been parked up for refurbishment so the robots can be put through their paces and get some practice in. this robot, known as weik, is making a 3—d map of the whole rig, a bit like a google street view. why is it called weik? weik — weik is a norwegian word which means to wake and watch. wake and watch, ok, so it's like a waking watch. when no—one's on the rig, weik is going around? exactly. it is not producing live

footage of the rig, so what would someone want a street view of this kind of environment for? it can be used on shore, so if you plan to do maintenance. it can take images every hour, for instance. there's a lot of information to gather. of course, for a human, it is easy to make mistakes. the robot can handle it much more easily. all this data allows the company running at the robots, cognite, to build a digital twin, a full, virtual 3—d model of the rig. that map allows the robots to run autonomously, and the images taken can be compared over time to see if something has changed and might need repair. it's very different to how things currently work. at the moment, i think it is every two years that we do a complete ex inspection of all the explosion—proof electrical boxes on the drill floor or various parts of the rig. if you had a robot on board, you could be doing heat tracing each month. you could be doing ex

inspection whenever you choose, in fact. and doing a full inspection means looking very closely in some very hard—to—reach places. as you can see on this rig back here, we have a very high drilling tower. you typically need to inspect that pretty often to look for loose bolts and things like that. the drone can do that with a remote control. it is very easy to do that. we can automate them by using our software. we also get the images in precisely the same location as the last time so it is very easy to see things happening over time. mapping is one thing but the robots also provide important safety functions. in the case of an explosion in a given area, we may not want to put personnel in that area, so we could send in the robot in that case to take readings. and down into the depths of the rig, the star of the show is being put through its paces as a safety inspector.

what spot is doing is doing a mission autonomously, which means that it is navigating an inspection round and gathering the data we are basically most interested in. and this is one of the rooms that allen said could be explosive. how confident are you that spot is not going to bump into anything? we are quite confident about that because it has a really good track record. also, it also has sensors mounted to it so that it can sniff any potential explosive gas the area, and whenever it detects some gas, it will immediately shut off its motors. and spot has stopped here at this control panel. what is going on here? what we can see here is lots of valves and a lot of gauges. what spot is doing is taking images of this instrument panel so that we can digitise this highly kind of analogue instrument. we are comparing it, making sure that everything we see out here corresponds with what we have in the control system.

so, if one of these levers is in the wrong position, spot will know? yes. aren't there already digital sensors in a place like this? surely you can get digital readings from... yeah. not necessarily from everything. there is lots of analogue instruments, such as this instrumentation panel right here. why would you notjust install cctv in every room and have a fixed camera on this rig? so, typically, we are seeing that fixing all cctv cameras, fixing lots of sensors, it's actually really, really expensive, and if you were to mount hundreds of different high—quality sensors all around the facility that would be a waste when you can mount one piece of sensors on a mobile robot that can gather all the data you are interested in. i guess this is also a lot more fun. yeah, definitely is.

until i visited this rig, i did not really appreciate how dangerous a workplace like this really could be, and while oil rigs could be coming to the end of their lives, using robots could help reduce the human cost of working on industrial sites like this in the meantime, although it does make the place a little lonelier for the handful of humans left behind. that was chris. now, while facebook�*s owner meta has pinned its hopes on virtual reality, some other tech giants think augmented—reality glasses are set to change the way we interact with the world and each other. but they may not be ready just yet. i am about to test snapchat�*s latest spectacles. this is the fourth generation and currently it is only a developers kit, but there is one big difference. it is all about augmented reality. i scroll through the options

with my finger here. solar system. let's give that one a go. i think i need to stand up for this. i am in the midst of the solar system. i could see the images overlaid on my surroundings, but we weren't able to capture that, so these images are of someone from snapchat testing it outdoors. there is lots of stars. i am in space. chunky as they look, they did feel light enough to wear, but they were a bit tight, even on me. this time, i am going for magic forest. this app demonstrates how you can place things on any surface. there are some flowers growing out of chairs and butterflies are flying all around serheil, who's filming. if i hold my hand out, the camera should recognise it's there and a butterfly might land on my hand. come here! i am trying to reach for the butterfly, which is doing nothing. that is the first law of click. it all goes wrong.

much like the other snapchat spectacles, you can capture a picture. there is also a button here that provides the scan function which is the same as you get within the snapchat app, so you look at something and it can bring up relevant information or provide the lens that you might be after. but before i remove them, time for a spot of art. i am moving towards the sculpture and it seems to be telling me to do this with my hand. oh, wow. 0k. something is happening. oh, bits are growing out of it. flowers are growing. what happens next? on this prototype, the field of view is actually quite limited. there is just a section there that gives me the augmented reality and then i just see the room through there, all through there. but i like being able to use the hand gestures, and it is recognising my hands quite easily. this is about a lot more than just playing or art though.

i think ar glasses have a huge role to play in the future, and these are hardware devices that we are asking people to wear on their faces, so they really need to provide value to the user almost every minute they are wearing them. i think a good example is you can imagine you are walking down the street and your friend has recommended you a sushi restaurant. with a mobile phone, you would have to pull your phone out, look at your friend's messages to be able to find that a sushi restaurant. if you are wearing ar glasses, we would love to provide you the most relevant information right then and there. if you are trying to catch a bus and you are walking past the bus stop, these glasses can provide you really useful information about the bus timetable, if there are delays, just by walking past the bus stop. this will be made possible via approved third—party apps, both within snapchat as well as snap camera kit features within theirs, but a consumer version will need some improvements.

they certainly felt intuitive to use, even though i did have to wear three different pairs for them to survive our filming as they kept getting overheated, but do i think that if we can overlay real—world things like maps and steps, the kind of data you want, they could be quite useful once the battery life is sorted. the thing is, right now, i have just looked at some games and stuff that is a little bit immersive, which was fun, but would i want to do it again? i don't know. i think they need a real—world purpose. so, you found the field of view disappointing? yes, there is a real trade—off between battery life, the weight of the glasses, and how much augmented reality you are going to get in them. but hopefully by the time they are a consumer device that will have balanced out a bit better. let's hope so. we have been talking about that for ages, haven't we? anyway, that is it from us from the riverside transport museum. thanks for watching, and which one do you fancy driving home? i will have the bus, please. bye for now.

hello. monday night and tuesday brought much—needed rainfall to parts of the uk but mostly the north while in the south it has been exceptionally dry through july, the driest on record for parts of southern and eastern england. as you can see from the browns year which denote below average rainfall it has been dry through many parts. as i say, we did see at least some rainfall during the course of monday night into tuesday. from then on it will be in the form of showers, the rain for the next few days mostly in the north and west. little is expected further south and

east. the dry theme is going to continue for many. as i said, at the moment we have some rain in the form of showers on this area of low pressure which brought windy weather through tuesday and that is a state at least in the north on wednesday. in the south, still is quite muggy feeling during the day on wednesday. temperatures in the high 20s. a few showers around on the weather front. few showers around on the weatherfront. slightly few showers around on the weather front. slightly less wind here but a breezy day in the north. plenty of showers into the north from the west of scotland in particular. we are back down into the mid—to low 20s for scotland, northern ireland and north of england. with the muggy air remaining in the south started thursday night. much fresher elsewhere. lowering the humidity. that will be noticed for the athletes at the commonwealth

games. and for the spectators as well. still low 20s. sunshine, dry but fresher. that is because we clear our cold weather front out of the way. we start to lose the humidity on thursday in the south as well. these weak weather fronts in the north will push the brains through wednesday night into thursday. quite a few showers following behind, even heavy once for parts of scotland and possibly the odd one per northern ireland and northern england, even the odd one further south but view and father tween. temperatures back down to where they should be for this time of year. similar story on friday. you are showers on friday for the north and west but there are weather fronts gathering. a little bit of fairweather cloudy will bubble up, tabbita is a little behind average. willing warm in the sunshine. the warm weather will keep the weather fronts and the dry weather going through the weekend. you may notice the weather fronts close to scotland in particular may just drag some drizzly rain

into the north of northern ireland and possibly north—west england. a cloudy feel on saturday. warm sunshine further south. by sunday the weather fronts have pushed northwards once again, just a few showers remaining. drierskies for scotland and northern ireland and much of england and wales. just a bit of fair weather cloud. bright and predominantly is sunny. potentially strong sunshine around because of that pattern continues into next week with this high and the jetstream normally dragging those low pressure going to the north of the uk pretty perhaps some rain to the north of scotland. later in the wind could be a south—easterly wind from france and the low countries which means temperatures are likely to lift again into the low 30s. something to watch, we will keep you posted.

welcome to bbc news. i'm david eades. our top stories: nancy pelosi, the us house speaker, is in taiwan, much to the annoyance of china. the white house tries to manage the mounting tensions. the united states will not and does not, will not seek and does not want a crisis. we are prepared to manage what beijing chooses to do. the killing of ayman al—zawahiri — washington says the taliban broke an agreement to keep foreign militants off afghan soil. the house that was targeted in the drone strike is just a few minutes away. but the taliban are not allowing anyone to film nearby, insisting there is nothing to see. one even pointing his gun threateningly towards us. the archbishop of canterbury reaffirms

a compromise over same—sex relationships