Waze is rolling out a new update on Android and iOS which brings support for showing your navigation map and other details via the heads-up display (instrument cluster) in some vehicles.
moreβ¦Earlier this week Apple shipped new firmware for AirPods Max models with Lightning. Today, the company has followed that up by releasing a beta version of new firmware for all models. Here are the details.
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Adult Swim announced that it would air the next anime from ShinichirΕ Watanabe, the creator of Cowboy Bebop, way back in 2023, and as of today, we finally have a release date. Lazarus is set to premiere on April 5 at midnight on Adult Swim, and will be available to stream on Max the day after.
Lazarus follows a task force of agents, also called Lazarus, who are hunting a mad scientist that developed a miracle drug called "Hapna." The drug was created to be a painkiller, but was also secretly designed to kill whoever takes it, three years after it's first taken. Lazarus are trying to find the creator of Hapna to create a vaccine that prevents the drug's negative side effects, and save the world in the process.
Based on the trailer, the series' sci-fi setting, jazzy music (provided by Bonobo, Floating Points and Kamasi Washington) and shaggy-haired protagonist Axel all recall Watanabe's previous series Cowboy Bebop, but Lazarus looks like it'll have its own charms, too. The series' action sequences are choreographed by by John Wick director Chad Stahelski and the story takes inspiration from the opioid crisis and climate change, according to a Polygon interview with Watanabe from October 2024.
Watanabe's last series Carole & Tuesday premiered on Netflix in the US in 2019 and Netflix's less-than-stellar live action remake of Cowboy Bebop came and went in 2021. The world is more than ready for some original strength ShinichirΕ Watanabe anime, and now it won't have to wait much longer to get it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/lazarus-the-new-anime-from-the-creator-of-cowboy-bebop-premieres-april-5-192314801.html?src=rss
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I tell Amazonβs Alexa to shut up on a near daily basis. I have almost zero interest in speaking to Gemini after our first awkward chat. The hitches, misunderstandings, and lag in any given AI βconversationβ mean Iβm always wasting time speaking when I could be texting instead.Β
But speaking to βMaya,β one of two voices from a new startup headed by the man who built Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook, is the first time Iβve been left wanting more. Like I could just talk to it, or at least play a genuinely fun game of testing its limits, like I did with Bing before Microsoft decided to tame down its unhinged persona.
I donβt have to describe it to you: you can try it, and you can listen to my first conversation yourself just below. Fair warning: I am a nerd! Confronted with a new voice assistant, I will ask it to dream up a Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure and quiz it about small Android phones.Β
But here you go:
While I could absolutely still hear some chatbot nonsense coming through the cracks, I could easily interject β I asked Maya to inject βherselfβ into the adventure βsheβ was describing, and it did so without a hitch, immediately coming up with a Gnome engineer named Maya cobbling together deathtraps to protect my castle from incoming Orc invaders. Combined with the AIβs natural-sounding pauses, it felt more like a real conversation than anything Iβve had so far. Compared to my colleague Kylie Robinsonβs conversation with ChatGPTβs Advanced Voice Mode last year, it feels like weβre somewhere much more compelling.Β
The company behind this is called Sesame, and itβs coming out of stealth today with an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Matrix Partners β- all of which were big Oculus VR investors β with Oculus co-founder and former CEO Brendan Iribe, former Ubiquity6 CTO and co-founder Ankit Kumar, and former Meta Reality Labs research engineering director Ryan Brown in charge.
And the company says itβs building AI glasses to go along with its new voice assistant, too, ones βdesigned to be worn all day, giving you high-quality audio and convenient access to your companion who can observe the world alongside you.β So far, itβs only sharing a few small images of what look like early prototypes:
Sesame has a mini white paper you can read on its website, describing the model and its dataset of around one million hours of βpublicly available audio.β It says it plans to both open source its models, and expand from just English to over 20 languages βin the coming months.β
Is this βcrossing the uncanny valley of conversational voice,β as Sesame titles its blog post? Perhaps check it out and decide for yourself.
Meta has fired Γ’ΒΒroughly 20Γ’ΒΒ employees who leaked Γ’ΒΒconfidential information outside the company,Γ’ΒΒ according to a spokesperson.
βWe tell employees when they join the company, and we offer periodic reminders, that it is against our policies to leak internal information, no matter the intent,Γ’ΒΒ Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold tells The Verge exclusively. Γ’ΒΒWe recently conducted an investigation that resulted in roughly 20 employees being terminated for sharing confidential information outside the company, and we expect there will be more. We take this seriously, and will continue to take action when we identify leaks.β
Meta has ramped up its efforts to find leakers due to a recent influx of stories detailing unannounced product plans and internal meetings, including a recent all-hands led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. After we and other outlets reported on what Zuckerberg said during that meeting, employees were warned not to leak. In comments that were subsequently leaked, CTO Andrew Bosworth then told them that the company was Γ’ΒΒmaking progress on catching people.Γ’ΒΒΒ
Morale inside Meta has suffered since Zuckerberg announced drastic changes to content moderation policies, end …
PlayerUnknown Productions, the studio from PUBG creator Brendan Greene (aka PlayerUnknown), has shared a gameplay trailer for Prologue: Go Wayback!, a single-player survival game thatβs launching in early access on Steam this year.
The studio previously shared that the game would be built with βmachine-learning-driven terrain generation technology,β and in this new trailer, you can see some gorgeous, wooded areas on display. In the game, youβll also have to deal with various types of weather, including pouring rain and heavy snow. The point of the game, according to a fact sheet, is to explore and survive so that you can find a weather station to call for help.
Prologue is just one of three games in the works from PlayerUnknown Productions. The βultimate project,β dubbed Project Artemis, is going to be βa massive multiplayer sandbox experienceβ that builds on the technology featured in Prologue and a tech demo, Preface: Undiscovered World, thatβs available on Steam.
Sony's first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR's biggest hits. The PlayStation 5's PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform, or both, Sony has announced it's dropping the price of the headset significantly.
Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain will also drop to the same exact price. (That's welcome, but it's also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to clear unsold inventory more than anything else.)
The headset launched in early 2023Β but has suffered from weak software support ever sinceβa far cry from the first PSVR, which had one of the strongest libraries of its time. It didn't help that unlike the regular PlayStation 5, the PSVR2 was not backward-compatible with games released for its predecessor.
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Itβs becoming much more common for Samsung to offer these boosted trade-in deals for devices, but the key is waiting until these deals are live, considering theyβre actually very good. Right now, Samsung is making it possible to grab the Galaxy Watch Ultra for as little as $250.
moreβ¦Appleβs new iPhone 16e pitches itself as an iPhone 16, but with some small losses to achieve a lower $599 entry price. But depending on what model youβre upgrading from, some of those losses might seem significant. Hereβs a full iPhone 16e vs iPhone 14 Pro comparison that aims to answer the question: is the 16e an upgrade or downgrade?
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As TikTok's fate in the US sits in limbo, the ByteDance-owned company figured now's as good a time as any to spruce up the platform's (previously lackluster) desktop experience. New features include a repositioned navigation bar, an Explore tab, a floating player for Chrome and β in a move that should catch Twitch's attention β live game streaming in landscape orientation.
Before Thursday's changes, TikTok's web app layout included a search bar and shortcuts running across the top of the screen alongside links down the left side. Now, all of them have been consolidated into the vertical navigation bar to the left. The idea is to reduce distractions for more immersive viewing as the platform moves to compete with the likes of YouTube and Twitch.
Speaking of Twitch, TikTok now supports full-screen live game streaming in portrait and landscape modes. Before today, you could only do the latter using TikTok's Live Studio app. When you stream live in landscape, desktop users will see that view by default, while mobile users can rotate their devices to watch in widescreen (like everyone did before TikTok came along).
Meanwhile, a floating player that keeps TikTok visible above your other windows is exclusive to Chrome for desktop.
There's also a new Collections feature (similar to YouTube's playlists), where you can organize your favorite videos in custom categories, making it easier to return to them later. Mobile app features moving to the desktop include the For You feed, where you'll find algorithmically chosen content based on your interests, and the Explore page, which shows trending hashtags and popular content.
The changes to the desktop browser version are now available globally.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/tiktoks-revamped-desktop-version-lets-you-livestream-games-in-landscape-view-185638187.html?src=rss
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