The greatest Star Wars lightsabers in the world are built by fans

I’m in a suburb 30 miles outside of Sacramento, California, and Yoda’s teaching me how to fight with a lightsaber.

In this particular case, Yoda is the online nickname for Michael Murphy, a 43-year-old artist that makes his living building high-end custom lightsabers — including the ones we’re using — but that doesn’t make the lesson any less intense. I step forward, my blue blade cutting through the air with an unmistakeable thrumm. My blow is easily parried, our sabers clashing hot white. He pivots, blade twirling behind his back as he executes a 360-degree spin that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Ewan McGregor pull off.

He swings straight for my head, and as I bring my saber up to block I can’t help but think two things: This is probably what Daisy Ridley felt like, and I have to get me one of these.

"I guess somewhere deep down I always wanted to be a toymaker," Murphy tells me across the island in his kitchen. Except for the rack of lightsabers by the couch and the detailed blueprints and sample materials sitting on the counter, it feels like any suburban home in America. "Even though I originally wanted to build cars, those are just big toys. More dangerous. More money." His eyes shift mischievously, and he laughs. "This is something that’s much more unique."

Unique doesn’t even begin to cover it. For the past 10 years, Murphy’s made his living building LED-powered lightsabers, and the internal chassis that make them tick. The forums on his website, FX Sabers, are part of a thriving custom lightsaber scene, where designers, engineers, "sabersmiths," and DIY tinkerers all collaborate in the name of building the ultimate Star Wars movie prop.

For Murphy it started in 2005, when he was hit with back-to-back medical injuries and found himself unable to work, couch-ridden for more than a year. "One of the things I coulddo was get online," he tells me. At the time, the internet was still obsessed with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and a company called Master Replicas had set a new standard for collectible sabers with primitive light-up blades and sound. "My son had found some pictures of the Master Replica things online, in this little dinky discussion forum where people were talking about stuff."

Michael Murphy of FX Sabers.

That "dinky discussion forum" was FX Sabers, and as Murphy and son bonded over lightsabers, he joined a community that was initially focused on helping owners repair and upgrade the licensed collectables. He quickly took on a more active role, eventually taking over the site entirely — that’s when he started going by "Master Yoda" — just as the community’s ambitions were beginning to grow.

At the time, hardcore fans had already been taking matters into their own hands for years. Connecting through sites like The Replica Prop Forum, people would break down precisely how movie props were built so they could recreate screen-accurate items for everything from Star Trek to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The same thing was happening with lightsabers, with some pioneering individuals going so far as to sell their own inspired-by designs or build replicas that were even more accurate than the licensed products. Murphy’s personal obsession, however, was the original Luke Skywalker saber, referred to in the community as The Graflex.

Three eras of Graflex lightsabers.

It’s important to remember that when George Lucas made Star Wars back in the ‘70s, it was a fairly low-budget film, and everything from the X-wings to the blasters were made from cannibalized model kits and other found parts. One of the items that the production had the hardest time nailing down were the lightsabers, until set decorator Roger Christian came across a box of camera flashes from the 1930s and ‘40s. The company that made them? Graflex.

The flash’s odd combination of metal swoops, curves, and clips instantly called to mind the retro-future aesthetic the film was going for. Christian stuck a strip of bubbles pilfered from an old Texas Instruments calculator into the flash’s clamp, added a D-ring at the bottom, and topped it off with some grips. That was the original lightsaber.

'STAR WARS' FANS HAVE BECOME NOTORIOUS IN THE CAMERA-COLLECTING WORLD

By the early 2000s, Star Wars disciples were tracking down old Graflex flashes to such a degree that they’d become notorious in the camera-collecting community, but those mostly ended up as bladeless hilts that would just sit on a shelf and look pretty. Murphy, however, was interested in taking the electronics from the latest toys and putting them inside the vintage flash for a replica that could be used for dueling or cosplay. Creating a screen-accurate vintage lightsaber complete with light-up blade and interactive effects demanded an internal system custom-designed for the 70-year-old antiques.

"It was something that was born out of my previous radio control car experience, where you need to have a chassis that can house your electronics," he says. "One night, about 3 o’clock in the morning, I was coming up with what I wanted to put in the hilt, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa was on The History Channel. And I said, ‘Well that’s what I need to do. I need to take all of my flattened [RC car chassis] ideas, and turn them into a cylindrical [system].’" The resulting combination of aluminum poles and plastic discs provided a rigid structure that protected and cushioned the electronics in the sabers — but most importantly for Murphy’s own contributions to the hobby, it would provide room for what is known as a crystal chamber.

XBOX: START TO CONTINUE

An exclusive look inside Microsoft’s plan to turn your Xbox into a PC

By Andrew Webster | Photography by Vjeran Pavic

It was a rare sunny day in Seattle and Phil Spencer seemed very pleased. Sitting across from me in a meeting room at Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond campus, the head of Xbox smiled as he talked, mixing serious discussion about the future of his business with jokes about how his employees dress. (He’s not a fan of cargo shorts in the office.)

It was 2PM, almost exactly a week before today’s E3 keynote in Los Angeles. I’d spent the day speaking with everyone from key members of the Xbox leadership team to the creative leads behind games like Gears of War and Forza, about what they’d present on stage in LA. I also checked out new pieces of hardware, including the much rumored and much smaller Xbox One S, and drove a few laps in the just-announced Forza Horizon 3.

Xbox’s presentation at E3 today points to a future in which the console in your living room behaves a lot like the PC in your office. Microsoft’s approach starts with hardware, where devices like the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio will fundamentally disrupt the tried-and-true console cycle by pushing continuous, periodic updates that take advantage of new technology like 4K and virtual reality. Then there are initiatives like Xbox Play Anywhere, which brings the Xbox One and Windows 10 closer together by letting customers buy a game once and play it seamlessly across both platforms. The vision also includes improvements to Xbox Live that add the kind of functionality PC gamers expect, like persistent chat, on consoles as well as on Windows 10.

Spencer says all these moves stem from a single goal: to merge the often disparate worlds of PC and console gaming, and use that to keep Xbox at the cutting edge. "I think there are things for us to learn and take from the [PC and Xbox] ecosystems to make gaming better. It’s our job as the platform holder to make the console experience feel like the console experience, to make the PC experience feel like the PC experience, and to bring the best from both when we can."

All of this sounds good on paper — and it also sounds very familiar. Last fall, Microsoft invited The Verge to Redmond for an exclusive look at the company’s Xbox strategy. A few years prior, Microsoft suffered a disastrous Xbox One debut. To the consternation of millions of fans, Microsoft had put games aside, instead positioning the Xbox One as the center of your living room entertainment experience. In 2014, Spencer and a new leadership came aboard to refocus Microsoft’s efforts in the console space, and put the emphasis back on the games themselves.

At the time, Spencer laid out an ambitious roadmap that involved putting serious effort and significant resources behind bringing hit games to the Xbox. The plan also included bringing some of those iconic Xbox franchises to the PC. "As we embrace [Windows users] as an active part of the Xbox community," he noted at the time, "it opens up opportunities for our first-party games.... I don’t want to dilute what the Xbox console customer feels," Spencer said. "I want to expand what we’re able to do for more customers."

That sentiment could easily be used to describe the brand-new Xbox Play Anywhere initiative. In effect, today’s E3 keynote indicates that the company is putting into action many of the ideas the company revealed toThe Verge last fall, and expanding on them.

At its keynote, the company unveiled two new iterations of the Xbox One, both slated to launch over the next two years. The first machine isn’t exactly surprising. The Xbox One S, which will debut in August, is a smaller version of the Xbox One, with a white color scheme and a slick, streamlined design. It’s typical of the "slim" refreshes of devices like the Nintendo DS Lite or PS One, though it does add some new functionality, most notably the addition of 4K Ultra HD video support and HDR capabilities. (When Microsoft showed me the One S last week, hardware lead Matt Lapsen hid the device under the shell of an original Xbox One then lifted it up to dramatically reveal just how small the new version was; Spencer called it the "cheesiest thing ever" later in the day.)

Next fall it will be joined by yet another Xbox One, codenamed Project Scorpio. More powerful than the One S, Scorpio will operate at six teraflops, powerful enough to play both 4K-native games and virtual reality experiences (with the addition of an as-of-yet-unknown VR headset). According to Spencer, the improvement between Scorpio and the current Xbox One will be immediately noticeable. "I actually think the upgrade to Scorpio in terms of visual fidelity will feel as dramatic of a change as we’re used to seeing in new generations," he said.

But one of the most significant initiatives doesn’t revolve around a single console, Spencer said — it touches all of them. For decades console gamers have been faced with a persistent problem: when you finally upgrade to a new device, you’re essentially starting over from scratch, building up a new library of games. I can still play my dusty old copy of the first Diablo on my new PC, but apart from a few platforms that offer backwards compatibility, console games live in one console generation. Microsoft has slowly been adding Xbox 360-game support to the Xbox One, but now it plans to radically expand that initiative. Moving forward, Microsoft wants to bring the PC approach to consoles, treating all Xbox One games the same: they’ll all work no matter which iteration of the hardware you own. The next Halo will look better if you have Project Scorpio and a new 4K television to take advantage of all its capabilities, but it will still work on your current machine. "The idea is that wherever we are from the 360 generation on," Spencer says of the ability to carry over your library to new devices, "we’re investing in Xbox Live and content so that as you upgrade the experience moves with you.

WatchOS 3 is an admission that Apple's first attempt was all wrong

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Apple’s new Watch software, watchOS 3, isn’t just new software, it’s an admission that Apple had it all wrong when it came to interactions on the first-generation Apple Watch. It’s less of a revamp and more of a rescue of the Watch, an attempt to deconstruct the old software and to focus on the stuff that people actually care about.

It’s a rare thing for Apple to admit that it was wrong on something product-related, even subtly. But that’s what it did onstage yesterday during the company’s annual developer's conference: Kevin Lynch, a vice president of technology at Apple, actually used the previous version of Apple Watch software as a benchmark for how fast the new software is. Collectively, the crowd of 6,000 watched while Lynch opened a third-party soccer app on an Apple Watch running last year’s watchOS 2 software; the app took nearly seven seconds to load.

The next attempt, on an Apple Watch running the new software, was a don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it moment. The message was clear, and if it wasn’t, Apple bullet-pointed it for us: both native apps and third-party apps will load much faster on watchOS 3, since favorite apps will be kept on the device’s memory. But Apple first had to admit that the current software has been painfully slow. (So slow, in fact, that it once inspired The Verge's Nilay Patel to write an essay about life being too short for slow computers.)

The new software, which doesn’t fully launch until the fall, includes a bunch of new features and functions that are at once super obvious and incredibly thoughtful. Apple Pay will work in third-party apps, such as Lyft, on the Watch. There’s an SOS function, for making emergency calls. There will be shorter shortcuts to text message responses, and a new scribble-to-text function — which is not new, but new to Apple.

Other changes were around health and fitness, since that’s one of the most popular use cases for the Watch. There will be a watch face made up entirely of Apple’s colorful activity-tracking rings, and another that offers a shortcut to the Workout app. People can share their activity data with other Watch wearers, so there’s finally a social component. And the Watch will soon track activity levels for people confined to wheelchairs. "Time to stand!" becomes "Time to roll!"

But the bigger changes are around the user interface. (This is where Apple really tried to reinvent the wheel with the Watch's original interface, when the wheel was probably just fine.) Rather than having to press firmly on the watch face to change faces, you can now just swipe, edge to edge, to change a watch face. Apple is ditching the idea of app "glances" on the Watch in favor of something more familiar to iPhone users: an app dock, accessible by pressing the physical side button. Press the button, swipe through recent apps, and launch and interact with them from there. And now, when you swipe up from the bottom of the Watch’s face, you’ll see a mini control center — something, again, that is familiar to iPhone users.

APPLE TRIED TO CHANGE THE PARADIGM WITH APPLE WATCH; NOW IT'S GOING BACK TO SOMETHING MORE FAMILIAR

Based on what was shown in the demo, it looks... simpler. In this case, "shallow" has a positive connotation: it’s a smartwatch that requires fewer swipes and taps and less wait time just to get an app going. Why wasn’t it like this before? I do not know.

Maybe even more interestingly, the Watch’s Digital Crown was only briefly mentioned during yesterday’s demo of watchOS 3, when Apple said developers will be able to build apps that use it. So: "glances" are gone, and the Digital Crown wasn't showcased as a primary method of interaction. Even voice control took a backseat, although it was shown in still photos. What this all says to me is that Apple is no longer trying to totally change the paradigm of user-computer interaction with the Apple Watch. If anything, it’s stripping it down to something more familiar.

When the company announced the iPod, the brand-new click wheel came along with it. When it announced the iPhone, multi-touch touchscreens changed our interactions. And at the time it announced the Watch, the Digital Crown was front and center, as a new way to navigate menu options or a cluster of apps on a tiny display. Turns out that touch works pretty okay after all — provided that the user interface is designed well.

But here's the thing: Apple’s admission isn’t a bad thing. If anything the new software, which is being rolled out more than a year after the Watch’s initial launch in 2015, shows that Apple still believes in its wearable computing device. Even if new Watch hardware is soon on the way (which we can’t confirm at this point), Apple is promising that the new watchOS 3 software will run 100 percent as well on the current Watch.

It’s still not a perfect smartwatch — if such a thing exists — but the demo of watchOS 3 offers a better explanation for why you might want to use an Apple Watch. It’s not just a third draft; it’s a total rewrite, and something insightful might finally emerge.

This USB adapter is Microsoft’s final admission that Kinect failed

Microsoft had a bold vision for its Xbox One console that involved its Kinect accessory. While the Kinect for Xbox 360 was one of the most popular game console accessories of all time, a bundled Kinect with the Xbox One introduced a $100 price premium over the PS4 competition. Despite switching course and unbundling the Kinect, Microsoft hasn't recovered yet in the games console battle, with reports suggesting it has sold 20 million Xbox One consoles vs. Sony's 40 million PS4 shipments.

Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox One S console yesterday, and it's 40 percent smaller with a Bluetooth controller. It looks great, and it's arguably the console Microsoft should have shipped originally. While it looks Surface-inspired, sources familiar with Microsoft's Xbox work tell us that Mike Angiulo's team helped build the new Xbox ahead of Surface chief Panos Panay's rise to leader of Microsoft's hardware efforts.

Hardware planning takes years, and it's clear Microsoft quickly realized that bundling Kinect was a mistake. The new Xbox One S doesn't even include a Kinect port, and Microsoft has created a USB adapter that you'll need to use if you want Kinect support. It's a free adapter if you already own an Xbox One and Kinect. "In order to make the Xbox One S as compact as possible and make all of these updates, we removed the dedicated Kinect port from the back," explains Matt Lapsen, general manager of marketing for Xbox devices. Perhaps surprisingly, the HDMI-in ports for Microsoft's Xbox TV controls are still there, alongside an IR blaster to control set-top boxes.

YOU DON'T EVEN NEED KINECT FOR CORTANA

Microsoft is now working to bring Cortana to the Xbox One in an update this summer. While it was originally supposed to debut last year, Microsoft announced Cortana would require Kinect at E3 last year, before mysteriously delaying the feature. It's clear part of that delay was related to getting headsets working with Cortana, and you won't need a Kinect to use the digital assistant this summer.

The removal of the Kinect port on the Xbox One S is the final admission that Microsoft's accessory is dead. It's hard to imagine that the Project Scorpio console will re-introduce a Kinect port next year, and the accessory wasn't even mentioned during any of Microsoft's demos on stage. Microsoft claimed at E3 last year that "there are games actually that are coming out for Kinect," but at E3 this year the only mention is a USB adapter that admits Kinect failed.

Xbox One Bluetooth controllers pave the way for iOS and Android game streaming

Microsoft's switch to Bluetooth Xbox One controllers is more significant than just improved range with its new Xbox One S console. While the software maker has only mentioned compatibility with Windows 10 for the new Bluetooth-enabled controllers, it's clear Microsoft has greater ambitions to bring Xbox One games to platforms other than just Windows. Speaking to The Verge last week, Mike Ybarra, director of program management at Xbox, detailed Microsoft's new Xbox apps for iOS and Android.

"We want to be on any device that a gamer has," says Ybarra, "whether that's a competing platform or our platform." That sounds like Microsoft's approach to mobile and Windows Phone, build apps and services for rival platforms to ensure Xbox is everywhere. Microsoft is bringing a number of features to its iOS and Android apps, and the most intriguing is the new Clubs option. Clubs are a collection of Xbox Live members who are interested in a particular game. Club members can chat, set up parties, and play games together through the Xbox apps for Windows 10, iOS, and Android.

GAME STREAMING ON IOS AND ANDROID SUDDENLY MAKES SENSE WITH A BLUETOOTH CONTROLLER

While Microsoft isn't commenting on its plans for Bluetooth controller support, it's easy to imagine that Xbox One game streaming will arrive on rival platforms like iOS and Android. There are clearly challenges to address controller support, especially on the iOS controller API side, but if Microsoft's intention is to be everywhere then this is a logical step. Equally, party chat between an iPhone or Android device to Xbox Live friends is another logical next step.

Microsoft is currently working on a summer update to the Xbox One that introduces Cortana, new universal Windows 10 apps, and some improved UI and features throughout. The new Clubs feature isn't slated to arrive until an October update to the Xbox dashboard, so it's clear Microsoft hasn't detailed all of its plans for the Xbox One software this year. With Gamescom scheduled in August, we'd expect to hear a lot more about the Xbox One October update in a couple of months time.