Google is adding new ways for users to plan and book trips through AI Mode, its conversational search experience, the company announced on Thursday. Users will now be able to ask AI Mode to track flight prices, book hotels, and see the cost of flights and hotels in points or miles.

The updates indicate that Google is looking to position AI Mode as an AI travel agent of sorts, as it’s moving beyond simply helping users find information to actually handling parts of the trip-planning and booking process itself. 

Users can now describe to AI Mode when and where they want to fly, and the tool will display the best options available with the latest prices from more than 300 airlines and travel sites. If they’re ready to book, they can go ahead and build their itinerary in AI Mode. If they want to wait and see if prices drop, they can ask something like “track these flight prices for me.”

They’ll then get an email if prices change for the destination and dates they entered. Flight price tracking in AI Mode is now available in more than 180 countries.

As for hotel booking, users will be able to discover and book their next hotel through a conversation with AI Mode. Users can tell AI Mode about their upcoming trip and their hotel preferences to get a list of options alongside reviews and key factors.

Once they’ve found a hotel they like, they can ask AI Mode to help complete the booking. Then, they need to select the “Continue on Google” option that will appear alongside Google’s integrated partners, which includes hotel chains and travel sites.

From there, they can choose their room, review details such as the cancellation policy, and complete the booking with Google Pay. The tech giant notes that the hotel or booking platform will handle the booking and any customer service.

Hotel booking in AI Mode has started rolling out in the U.S. in English and will be available over the coming weeks with offerings from Booking.com, Choice Hotels International, Expedia, Hilton, Hotels.com, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International, Priceline, Trip.com, and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

Google also announced that AI Mode can now display the cost in points or miles for flights and hotels by asking something like “I want to travel from Atlanta to Miami using my AA miles. Help me find some options for nonstop flights departing Oct 9 and returning on Oct 12”.

Users will then see how many miles they need to book matching flights. The update is now available globally.

I never intended to join the cutting edge of electromechanical television. I just wanted to make a nice clock. But sometimes you have to go where the engineering takes you, and in my case it took me to the Scanwheel, a pocket-size wide-screen electromechanical TV with a resolution of 4,096 by 20 pixels. Yup, that’s 4K by 20.

The 3D-printed drum [top] is spun by a motor controlled by a driver board [second row, from top]. The driver board, in turn, is controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico [middle], which also controls the LEDs [second row, from bottom], which are mounted in the 3D-printed casing [bottom] so that the holes pass over them as the drum turns.James Provost

Electromechanical television was the first form of practical television, developed by John Logie Baird in the 1920s. He used a so-called Nipkow disk, which has a spiral of holes punched through it. As the disk rotates, the holes pass one by one in front of a light source. By varying the brightness of the light as a hole travels across it, you can draw one scan line of a video frame. Spin the disk fast enough, and persistence of vision makes it look like an entire frame is being displayed simultaneously. Commercial electromechanical TV sets were produced in the United Kingdom, with regular broadcasts provided by the BBC in the 1930s.

Although cathode-ray tubes replaced electromechanical televisions in the 1940s, hobbyists have continued to build them and even improve on the original technology. For example, in the June 2022 installment of IEEE Spectrum’s Hands On, Markus Mierse presented a desktop-size 3D-printed color version.

I built an electromechanical display myself some years ago, but it had a traditional design with a Nipkow disk made from a vinyl record with holes drilled in it. Recently I started tinkering with electromechanical TV again as an outgrowth of my YouTube channel. There I’ve been focusing on developing volumetric displays, which create 3D pixels floating within a volume of space. In particular, I was interested in borrowing some ideas from plenoptic cameras, which use pinholes and lenses to capture multidimensional light fields of samples.

I wondered if I could run the process in reverse, to create light fields rather than capture them. I often explore ideas in two dimensions before expanding to the third, so I thought I’d first demonstrate a 2D display. I decided to make an electromechanical device into a clock. After all, you don’t need high resolution to display digits.

How Does the Scanwheel Display Work?

Thinking about the display as a clockface pushed me toward some key ideas. First, instead of having just one display area, I would use five light sources to create multiple areas—four to represent hours and minutes, and a central area for a separator that would blink each second. Second, to align the digits in a readable row rather than have them spread around an arc, I swapped the Nipkow disk for an established alternative: a Nipkow drum.

With a drum, the holes run along the curved cylindrical surface in a stair-step pattern. This means they always trace a straight line from the perspective of a viewer looking from the side, so the clock’s digits would be horizontally aligned.

“In tests, I’ve pushed the horizontal resolution to more than 8,000 pixels.”

These two decisions turned out to be key to achieving both miniaturization and high horizontal resolution. A disk needs a fairly wide diameter so that the scan lines aren’t ridiculously curved. But curvature isn’t a problem with a drum. A drum can be much smaller than a disk that has the same number of scan lines. (And unlike in the 1920s, packing multiple light sources close together inside a small drum isn’t a problem with modern LEDs.) I settled on a 6-centimeter-wide drum, turning the device from desktop-size to something you could carry in your pocket.

I then realized my five display zones could work in concert to create one single wide screen. Because it’s possible to modulate the brightness of an LED at very high rates, the horizontal resolution can also be very high. My system currently has 4K horizontal resolution, and this is primarily limited by the amount of onboard memory I have available. This memory holds the buffer that stores pixel data for each frame before it is read out to the LEDs and displayed. In tests, I’ve pushed the horizontal resolution to more than 8,000 pixels.

Despite the Scanwheel’s low vertical resolution—at 20 pixels, it has fewer scan lines than Baird’s 30-line televisions—its high horizontal resolution makes the legibility of the display surprisingly good: I can display not just crude digits but video streamed into the frame buffer.

Using the RP2040 Chip’s Special Silicon

That frame buffer lives on a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board, based around the RP2040 microcontroller. The RP2040 is ideal for this project because of the chip’s dedicated PIO silicon. PIO stands for programmable input/output, and it’s a block of four coprocessors that uses a very limited instruction set. Each coprocessor can be set up to chew through input/output streams completely independently of the RP2040’s two CPU cores.

The first mechanical TVs used disks, which had to be wide to minimize image distortion but allowed bulky light sources. With small, modern light sources, a smaller drum can create images with minimal distortion.James Provost

It’s thanks to the PIO that I’m able to keep up with the spinning drum and modulate each of the five LEDs simultaneously as holes pass over them, a task complicated by the fact that the center LED is not a monochrome LED, but a color LED with separate red, green, and blue channels. In fact, the PIO does nearly all the work, pulling data from the frame buffer and controlling the LEDs and the spinning of the drum. The code running on the CPU (written in MicroPython) is primarily responsible for setting up the PIO and then leaving well enough alone.

A stepper motor connected to a driver board spins the drum, with power provided by the USB jack on the Pi Pico. All the Pi Pico has to do controlwise is send the board a pulse to incrementally advance the drum’s position once every millisecond. Video data is streamed into the Pi Pico via a network interface. You can set up the Scanwheel to mirror a portion of your computer’s screen, or to act as a separate display.

The casing, including the drum, is 3D printed. Now for a neat bit: In the Scanwheel’s GitHub repository at https://github.com/AncientJames/Scanwheel/tree/main, alongside all the other files you’ll need to make this project yourself, there’s an OpenSCAD file that generates the 3D-print file for the drum based on adjustable parameters. This means you can easily make a taller drum and add more scan lines, or try other customizations for your very own portable electromechanical display. You can even use it as a clock!

Josh Mackanic left a 10-year engineering career at Pacific Gas and Electric because he kept thinking about what the utility company doesn’t know about what’s buried underground.

“I had a job that got shut down because a pipe was in the excavation [that] we didn’t know about. Fortunately, we saw it before we impacted it,” he told TechCrunch. “But then there was this three-day ordeal of running around [asking] like: ‘Whose pipe is this? Can we tap it? Can we not? What’s in it?’”

Mackanic eventually got the answer, but it took three days, a delay that cost $60,000.

Despite being one of the largest utility companies in the United States, PG&E (and companies like it) only has visibility into the many miles of electric and gas lines it owns and operates. Pipes carrying sewage or water belong to other companies, and so does the information about where exactly they are. This leads to around 200,000 so-called “utility strikes” every year.

So in 2020, Mackanic founded a startup called CivilGrid designed to solve this problem. The company gathers disparate data regarding utility assets, property ownership, and environmental regulations and bundles it into what Mackanic cheekily refers to as “Google Maps for what’s underground.” It then sells access to governments, civil engineering firms, and utilities — including his former employer.

Now, Mackanic has raised a $26 million Series A to grow CivilGrid into something bigger. The round was led by Spark Capital, with additional investment coming from early-stage funds Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures, and SNR. CivilGrid also received investment from Energy Impact Partners, a fund with a number of utility companies serving as LPs, which Mackanic pointed to as another vote of confidence from the industry.

“California’s energy needs are growing rapidly, and our customers expect us to deliver the infrastructure they need safely, reliably, and affordably,” Christine Cowsert, senior vice president of enterprise business and technology modernization at PG&E, said in a statement. “That means planning smarter from the start with tools like CivilGrid, which help our teams identify risks earlier, build more efficiently, and avoid unnecessary costs while keeping safety front and center.”

A case study performed by PG&E has already identified $60 million in avoidable paving costs across 1,600 planned gas distribution projects by using CivilGrid. Mackanic said he wants to bring on more customers and, eventually, start tackling other red tape problems that make it so hard to build things in the U.S.

“Right now, we’re providing engineers the data to be able to make a decision” about where to place infrastructure, he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. But “once I’ve given them the constraints, it’s not too hard for me to say, ‘Well, I would recommend that you put the pipe down right here, and oh, by the way, here are the permits you need in order to move to construction on this pipe. Would you like me to file those permits? Okay, let me file those permits.’”

Mackanic said there’s a “lot more” CivilGrid could start to automate “now that we have built this dataset and kind of captured the core user who’s at the very early stages of making decisions about what’s going to be built.”

Creating better visibility into the country’s subterranean infrastructure is not a novel idea, Mackanic told TechCrunch. But he said nobody had found a way to solve the problem of collecting, sorting, and securing the data, and striking up relationships with the partners most likely to pay for that information.

“One of the reasons I left PG&E to start CivilGrid was because I felt like this was a problem that was going to be better solved from the outside in than the inside out, and not because there’s [a] lack of awareness of the problem or even interest in solving it,” he said. “Utilities, they run relatively lean, right? Nobody wants to pay more for their gas bill than they have to.”

Like many kids, Mackanic said he spent much of his childhood dreaming of sending rockets into space. But even though he studied mechanical engineering in college and graduate school, he said he never expected to work for or with utility companies, digging into his own planet.

“I was like, aren’t these places boring?” he remembered thinking.

But working at PG&E made him realize just how high-stakes utility work can be — all so people can turn on their lights or start a pot of coffee every day without worrying that those things will work.

“The reality is, unfortunately, we do ourselves a disservice in not championing the extent to which they work wonders every day,” he said.