Category: author_name|Will Shanklin
‘Overwatch 2’ director explains why hero missions were canceled
When Blizzard announced earlier this week that it had canceled Overwatch 2 hero missions, a central part of its player vs. environment (PvE) story mode, fans were none too pleased. So director Aaron Keller published a blog post today to ease the concerns and offer more transparency about the development…
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Amazon’s 2023 Echo Show is faster and offers improved audio
Amazon updated the standard and Kids variants of the Echo Show 5 in its string of Alexa hardware announcements today. The new model is faster and sounds better, but it otherwise could be mistaken for the previous version. The Echo Show 5 has a nearly (or exactly) identical design to…
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Amazon unveils the $40 Echo Pop, a semi-spherical smart speaker
Amazon updated its Echo speaker lineup today, including a new $40 model with a semi-spherical design, the Echo Pop. Additionally, Echo Auto is coming to more countries. The Echo Pop is Amazon’s newest entry-level Alexa-powered device. Its half-globe design uses a front-facing speaker with “full sound,” although it sounds like…
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YouTuber pleads guilty to intentionally crashing his plane for a wallet sponsorship
In the latest proof that satire is no match for today’s reality, The DOJ announced that a YouTuber pled guilty on Wednesday to obstructing a federal investigation by destroying the wreckage of an airplane he intentionally crashed for views and sponsorship money. Trevor Jacob, a 29-year-old former pro snowboarder turned…
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Meta’s open-source ImageBind AI aims to mimic human perception
Meta is open-sourcing an AI tool called ImageBind that predicts connections between data similar to how humans perceive or imagine an environment. While image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 pair words with images, allowing you to generate visual scenes based only on a text description, ImageBind casts…
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Artiphon’s Minibeats AR app creates music from movement and gestures
Artiphon, the company behind the Orba handheld synth and MIDI controller, launched a new AR music creation app today that you don’t need a musical background to enjoy. Minibeats for iOS uses gestures, dance moves and facial expressions to craft songs played on 12 virtual instruments with colorful visual effects.…
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