It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large. Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.
Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy. Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON.
(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)
© Walt Disney Studios
Microsoft unveiled its Xbox AI era earlier this year with a new Muse AI model that can generate gameplay. While it looked like Muse was still an early Microsoft Research project, the Xbox maker is now allowing Copilot users to try out Muse through an AI-generated version of Quake II.
The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.
While Microsoft originally demonstrated its Muse AI model at 10fps and a 300 x 180 resolution, this latest demo runs at a playable frame rate and at a slightly higher resolution of 640 x 360. It’s still a very limited experience though, and more of hint at what might be possible in the future.
Microsoft is still positioning Muse as an AI model that can help game developers prototype games. When Muse was unveiled in February, Microsoft also mentioned it was exploring how this AI model could help improve classic games, just like Quake II, and bring them to modern hardware.
“You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”
It’s clear that Microsoft is now training Muse on more games than just Bleeding Edge, and it’s likely we’ll see more short interactive AI game experiences in Copilot Labs soon. Microsoft is also working on turning Copilot into a coach for games, allowing the AI assistant to see what you’re playing and help with tips and guides. Part of that experience will be available to Windows Insiders through Copilot Vision soon.
A capitalization table, or “cap table,” is simply a spreadsheet that shows who owns what in a company. If you’re asking this question, you’re probably trying to figure out how startups keep track of shares, ownership percentages, and types of […]
The post What is a Cap Table? first appeared on Tech Startups.
Last month, Apple introduced a number of new products, including a for $599. While that iPad wasn’t exactly remarkable, it did bring something new to the table – another variant of .
This new Magic Keyboard brings function keys to the for the first time, which is a pretty big win, but it also includes a number of head-scratching compromises. Let’s discuss.
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Disney just released the first trailer for Tron: Ares, the long-planned Tron: Legacy sequel. The minute-and-a-half trailer doesn’t say much about the story but shows plenty of the movie’s visuals, which look dark, moody, and filled with the series’ signature light trails.
The trailer opens in the physical world at night, as Jared Leto’s Ares, a Program made physical, flees from police on a light cycle, slicing one in half using his light trail as a weapon. The shots that follow show a massive airship hovering over the real-world city, visible only by the red light strips on its outside. The rest has people looking on in horror at the airship, dogfights between human aircraft and fighters from the Tron digital world, and what looks like a clip of Ares being given his physical body.
All of that is set to the music of Nine Inch Nails, which is handling the soundtrack this time around. It ends with a voiceover from Jeff Bridges, reprising his role as Kevin Flynn and saying, “Ready? There’s no going back.” The movie hits theaters on October 10th.
Disney included the poster above in an email to The Verge announcing the trailer’s release. In a YouTube video from Thursday’s CinemaCon presentation about Ares, Leto said his character is “a highly advanced program” who has entered the real world on a “do-or-die mission to fulfill his directive,” and promised that the movie “will hit you right in the grid … wherever that is.” In addition to Leto and Bridges, Tron: Ares is directed by Joachim Rønning and its stars include Gillian Anderson, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, and Cameron Monaghan.
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Apple’s enterprise business is doing incredible, but not because of subscriptions or recurring revenue. The bulk of Apple’s enterprise comes from hardware sales, with Macs, iPhones, and iPads that are powering businesses worldwide. While Apple does offer services like AppleCare and Apple Business Essentials, their impact on recurring revenue is a rounding error. At Apple’s scale, it needs massive revenue to drive growth. If Apple wants to drive revenue growth in the enterprise, something has to change.
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Thereâs a famous two-decade-old Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami in which he, one of the worldâs most celebrated novelists, details his daily routine. He wakes up at 4AM, works for five hours, goes for a run, reads, goes to bed, and then repeats it all over again. The rigor and repetition are the point.
I am not Haruki Murakami.
In addition to my work at The Verge, I write novels â my second one is out today â and while I admire Murakamiâs commitment to an immovable schedule, Iâve found that I produce my best work when Iâm constantly rethinking routines, processes, and, mostly, how Iâm writing. In the modern age, that means what software Iâm using.
What I am about to describe will be a nightmare to anyone who likes all of their tools to work harmoniously. All of these apps are disconnected and do not interoperate with each other in any way. Many of the things they do are redundant and overlap. I suppose this process is quite the opposite of frictionless â but thatâs precisely the point. Iâm not sure I believe that ambitious creative work is borne from a perfectly efficient workflow.
This is, instead, a journey of moving the work through diffe …
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says it’s delaying shipments to the US this month while it works out how it will deal with the wide-ranging tariffs President Donald Trump announced this week, according to The Guardian.
“As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans,” JLR told The Guardian. The automaker is responding to a 25 percent Trump-ordered tariff on imported vehicles that went into effect Thursday and could add $5,000 to $10,000 or more to the price of a new car in the US.
JLR said this week that its business remains “resilient,” but those living in the town where its cars are made weren’t optimistic, with one telling The Guardian that the tariffs could lead to job losses. About a quarter of the 400,000 vehicles JLR sells every year go to US buyers, as The Sunday Times notes in its own story about the pause this morning. It’s thought that the automaker has enough existing US stock to last about two months, and it would take about 21 days for more to come once shipments resume, the Times writes.
JLR isn’t alone in its concerns. Earlier this week, Nintendo blamed Trump’s new tariffs as it delayed US preorders of the Switch 2, originally scheduled to start on April 9th. In the wake of the tariffs announcement, the US Stock market lost $6.6 trillion in two days — a record, according to The Wall Street Journal — and industries are bracing for negative impacts to the cost and availability of just about everything, including the high-powered GPUs used by AI companies, gadgets of all types, and even board games
Google’s Android Auto platform is constantly evolving, adding new features and changing others. For some users, a handy new option seems to have been made available with the option to press a readily available button to exit back to your car’s infotainment system.
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