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Hi-Fi Rush. | Image: Tango Gameworks Director John Johanas explains how the rhythm action game was inspired by everything from Radiohead to the Dreamcast. Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The first Nintendo Direct of the year is almost upon us — and it sounds like it might be a big one. While Nintendo hasn’t provided any real details, the company did say to expect “roughly 40 minutes of information” about games coming out in the first half of 2023.It’s important to note that this year is shaping up to be a big one for Nintendo. The Super Mario Bros. Movie comes out in April, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is coming to the Switch in May, and next week will see Super Nintendo World open up at Universal Studios Hollywood. We could get updates on all of those, and there’s also a possibility we’ll hear about Pikmin 4 or the long-dormant Advance Wars reboot. If we’re really lucky, maybe there’ll even be some kind of... Continue reading…

Google demoed new generative AI features that summarize search results but didn’t say when they’d be available. | Image: Google Google demoed its latest advances in AI search at a live event in Paris on Wednesday — but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “new Bing,” which the company has demoed extensively to the press and offered limited public access to.In perhaps the most interesting demo, Google showed off how it will use generative AI in the future to summarize information from the web. In the demo, the company showed a search for the question “what are the best constellations to look for while stargazing?” with an AI-generated response highlighting a few key options and how to spot them.“New generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints right in search results,” said... Continue reading…

The new Immersive View will be rolled out to Amsterdam, Dublin, Florence, and Venice in the coming months. | Image: Google Immersive View is now rolling out for Google Maps in five global cities after the feature was first introduced across hundreds of notable landmarks last year. It combines billions of Street View and aerial images, allowing users to scope out neighborhoods as if they’re flying overhead and then drop down to street level for a closer look at areas of interest. The experience essentially resembles Google Earth but with Street View’s freedom to explore in more detail.Immersive View was first announced in May 2021 and expanded in September last year to cover 250 global landmarks, including Tokyo Tower and the Acropolis of Athens. Today, the feature is rolling out to cover London, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo, with the... Continue reading…

The Volvo EX90 is an electric vehicle that includes Google Maps built-in. | Image: Volvo Along with other AI-powered search upgrades, Google announced a slate of new Google Maps features for owners of electric vehicles that have the company’s navigation tool built-in. The aim is to improve the experience of finding the right EV charging station and to plan trips when charging might be necessary.Before we get to the new features, a fair warning: only a handful of EVs come with Google Maps built-in, including vehicles from Polestar, Volvo, certain General Motors vehicles, and Renault. (Honda and Ford electric vehicles with Google built-in are coming soon.) EV owners who use Google Maps on their mobile device, or through Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, will not be able to use these new features.For EV owners with Google Maps... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google announced a bunch of AI-enabled search, Maps, and Translate updates as part of its Google presents: Live from Paris event on Wednesday.While it showed off a brief demo of “Bard,” the ChatGPT-rivaling AI chatbot-style search powered by its LaMDA technology, most of the features focused on features we've already seen, like “visual search” implementations that expand Google Lens, a more immersive version of Google Maps, and a Google Translate that is better at understanding context.Of course, you can kinda, sorta mess around with Microsoft’s new ChatGPT-powered Bing already and access the already-available ChatGPT itself, which has been enough to raise a “code red” about AI features within Mountain View.Some of the features are... Continue reading…

Photo by Jacquelyn Martin-Pool/Getty Images President Joe Biden threw his support behind tougher rules regulating Silicon Valley during his Second State of the Union speech Tuesday night.The president attempted to rally bipartisan support to finally resolve a number of long-standing privacy, safety, and competition issues facing the tech industry. Over the more than hourlong address, Biden called on Congress to pass new rules protecting user data privacy and boosting competition in the tech industry.“Pass bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement”“Pass bipartisan legislation to strengthen antitrust enforcement and prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage,” Biden said. “It’s time to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Google, the company ubiquitous to online web searches, is set to reveal news on how it’ll use AI to help find what you’re looking for in a more “natural and intuitive” way. Google’s been using AI and machine learning models to achieve things like removing unwanted objects in your photos with Magic Eraser and building step-by-step directions in Google Maps’ Street View. And more experimentally, Google used AI to let you generate images from text and figure out scribbly doctors’ notes.Google just announced this week it’s working on a conversational AI system called Bard, which is powered by its internal LaMDA AI model. Now, based on its many years of researching AI, Google sounds like it’s ready to take on AI systems like DALL-E and, more... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Tinder now allows you to browse through profiles while staying hidden — but you’ll have to pay for it. In a post on Tinder’s newsroom, the dating app announced a new incognito mode that you can use to swipe through profiles without showing up in their recommendations feed unless you “like” them (via TechCrunch).Currently, Tinder’s algorithm surfaces your profile in other members’ recommendations, whether you swipe right or left on them. Incognito mode, on the other hand, will hide your profile from other users unless you’ve expressed interest, which should help ensure you’re profile’s viewed by the people you want to see it.The downside is that you can only access the new feature if you pay for Tinder Plus, Gold, and Platinum, which... Continue reading…

Devil Dinosaur and Moon Girl dancing together. | Disney ‘When I watched cartoons as a kid, there was a lot of serious orchestration. A lot of funk, a lot of R&B, and a lot of soul — all kinds of different styles of music. I wanted that for Moon Girl, too.’ Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Meta is adding several new features to WhatsApp status, which lets you post disappearing pictures and other media. Once the features roll out over the coming weeks, you’ll be able to react to people’s posts with an emoji, limit who can see your status, and post voice messages.According to an announcement post, the status emoji reactions work similar to how they do on Instagram; when you swipe up on the post, you get the option to choose from one of eight emoji. (The options are , , , , , , , and .)While a WhatsApp blog post calls emoji reactions the No. 1 requested feature after it launched the ability to react to messages last year, I personally feel like the Private Audience Selector is the most useful addition announced today.... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge Search engines are about to change in a very important way: when you type in a query and get an official-looking answer, it might be wrong — because an AI chatbot created it.Today, Microsoft announced a new version of its Bing search engine that will provide “complete answers” to your questions by tapping into the power of ChatGPT. You can already try some canned sample searches and sign up for more.But though Microsoft is taking many precautions compared to its 2016 failure with Tay — a chatbot that Twitter taught to be racist and misogynist in less than a day — the company’s still proactively warning that some of the new Bing’s results might be bad.Here are a couple key passages from Microsoft’s new Bing FAQ:

The pulled episode references “forced labor camps where children make smartphones.” | Image: Disney / 20th Television Animation A fairly recent episode of The Simpsons that contains a reference to China’s use of forced labor camps has vanished from the Disney Plus streaming service in Hong Kong. First spotted by the Financial Times and later confirmed by Axios, the episode titled “One Angry Lisa” is not available to stream on Disney Plus, even though the rest of The Simpsons’ 34th season is. The episode contains a line critical of the country — “Behold the wonders of China: Bitcoin mines, forced labor camps where children make smartphones.”Though it is a punchline in The Simpsons, China has been repeatedly criticized by external governments and human rights organizations for allegedly detaining millions of its native Uyghur population and other Muslim minorities... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Plus two new Eras for Sonos Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Zoom is laying off about 15 percent of its staff, which means about 1,300 people will lose their jobs, according to a memo from Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that the company posted on its blog. “Each organization” at the company will be affected by the cuts, Yuan said.The company scaled up rapidly as people shifted to remote work during the pandemic, and Zoom grew three times in size within 24 months. However, “we didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyze our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities,” Yuan wrote. “The uncertainty of the global economy, and its effect on our customers, means we need to take a hard — yet important — look inward to reset ourselves so we can weather the... Continue reading…

Illustration: The Verge Is this the rise of ChatGPT-powered Bing? Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Microsoft is holding a surprise event at its Redmond headquarters today, where it’s expected to focus on its OpenAI partnership and introduce a version of Bing with ChatGPT. Unlike most of Microsoft’s events over the past few years, this special press event will be held in person and not livestreamed at all. You’ll need to follow The Verge’s live blog below for all the announcements as they happen.Microsoft invited media to this event last week before making the details public just minutes after Google announced its own ChatGPT rival. That should tell you how important this event is for Microsoft and what’s on the agenda. While Microsoft is keeping details thin, the invite says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will “share some progress on a... Continue reading…

The book is split into two volumes, roughly one for typewriters and one for keyboards. | Image: Marcin Wichary / Shift Happens A wide-ranging interview with Marcin Wichary, author of Shift Happens, which launches today on Kickstarter. Continue reading…

The 77-inch S95C starts shipping this month. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Samsung announced its second-generation QD-OLED TV lineup back at CES, with a new 77-inch model joining the 55-inch and 65-inch sizes that were offered with last year’s S95B. Regardless of what size you prefer, these TVs utilize the very latest quantum dot OLED panels from Samsung Display, which promise significant brightness gains — potentially crossing 2,000 nits — and the S95B was already among the brightest OLEDs on the market. Now we know how much the 77-inch S95C will cost: it’s priced at $4,499.99.That’s more expensive than LG’s 77-inch G2 (the company hasn’t yet announced pricing for its 2023 series yet), but not outlandishly so: the G2 originally had an MSRP of $4,199.99. And I’m sure we’ll see discounts on Samsung’s OLEDs... Continue reading…

The Mega Sg is a compact version of the Sega Genesis, complete with HDMI out and wireless controllers. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Analogue is offering one more chance to buy its premium modern-retro consoles before they’re gone. The Analogue Mega Sg and Super Nt, the company’s modern takes on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, are once again available for preorder as they go on their final production run. Each console costs $199.99 (controllers not included) and can be preordered in various color options on Analogue’s site, with estimated shipments to arrive in the second quarter of 2023.These final units are no different than previous production runs, so if you already own one, you don’t have to get too much FOMO over not owning some sort of special edition — though that may not stop these from becoming quite the collector’s item. Image:... Continue reading…

Image: Meta Meta’s planning to open up Horizon Worlds to users aged 13 to 17, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. In an internal memo viewed by the outlet, Meta says it wants to make the virtual reality-based social platform available to younger users as early as next month.The company first opened Horizon Worlds to users 18 and up in 2021 but has since been struggling to keep users coming back to the platform. Last October, the WSJ reported that Meta lowered its goal of reaching 500,000 monthly active users by the end of the year to just 280,000 and that most users don’t return after one month of using it. Even the employees working on the service don’t find themselves using it very much, as reported by The Verge’s Alex Heath last... Continue reading…

The keyboard features an Eye of Sauron illustration above its arrow keys. | Image: Drop Drop is back with a third Lord of the Rings-themed keyboard. But unlike its first two, which drew their language and iconography from the good guy Elves and Dwarves, the third is all about celebrating darkness. The keyboard pairs the Black Speech keycap set — a black-on-grey twist on the Elven set that evokes the language of Mordor (which I will not utter here) — with a special version of Drop’s ENTR keyboard. It’s available to preorder now, with shipping expected mid-April.Tolkien’s Black Speech didn’t have a written form, and the one example in the Lord of the Rings — the inscription on the One Ring, found here on the space bar — used an Elven script. The Black Speech keycaps use the same Tengwar lettering and Sindarin modifiers as... Continue reading…

Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Volkswagen issued a recall notice for nearly 21,000 of its ID.4 electric SUVs, citing faulty battery software that could lead to a “loss of propulsion” without warning. The recall affects model year 2021 vehicles that were produced between May 26th, 2020, and January 20th, 2022.The automaker said it first received reports from Europe of a potential “software issue” with its high-voltage battery management system back in July 2021. Some owners in the US alleged that the battery software issue could lead to the vehicle stalling out.After an analysis, VW determined that the software’s programming “may cause the high voltage (HV) battery management control module to reset or the pulse inverter to deactivate.”A potential reset of the... Continue reading…

Image: Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz announced that it would start producing an all-electric version of its popular Sprinter van in North America and Europe starting in the second half of 2023.The Mercedes eSprinter will have a large 113kWh battery resting under the floor between its axel, which is estimated to propel the van to a range of 248.5 miles (400 km) on highways and 311 miles (500 km) in the city, based on Europe’s WLTP standard. (The US Environmental Protection Agency is more conservative in projecting EV range.) No word yet on a suggested retail price for the van.The van will start production at Mercedes’ Charleston, South Carolina plant later this year, which could make the eSprinter eligible for the $7,500 EV tax credit. The van will also go... Continue reading…

Image: Google Google is introducing a new online safety feature to help users avoid inadvertently seeing graphically violent or pornographic images while using its search engine. Announced as part of the company’s Safer Internet Day event on Tuesday, the new default setting enabled for everyone will automatically blur explicit images that appear in search results, even for users that don’t have SafeSearch enabled. Google has confirmed to The Verge that, should they wish, signed-in users over 18 will be able to disable the blur setting entirely after it launches in “the coming months.”SafeSearch is already the default for signed-in users under the age of 18, as it helps to filter out explicit content such as pornography, violence, and gore when using... Continue reading…

Image: Lego Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Aragon, plus Elrond, Arwen, Bilbo, and more — there’s room in Lego’s just-announced 6,167-piece elven sanctuary Rivendell for the entire Fellowship to debate The One Ring, and the shards of a particularly noteworthy sword. Image: Lego Click here for a nearly 5K-resolution image. Not a lot of room, mind you. The $500 set obviously has nothing on the legendary 200,000-piece recreation of Rivendell by Alice Finch and David Frank that’s been the centerpiece at multiple fan conventions.But back in 2013, the best Council of Elrond you could get from Lego was this: Image: Lego In 2013, four characters fought for three seats. It... Continue reading…

At their core, smartwatches and fitness trackers are ways to measure progress. | Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge No one is denying that fitness trackers and smartwatches can be helpful tools for building healthy habits. However, if you’re not careful, they can also become a major source of anxiety.You might be inclined to think that wearable-induced anxiety is something that happens to other people. However, it’s surprisingly easy to fall into toxic wearable habits. I’m a wearables reviewer, and although I should know better, even I have had to grapple with anxiety-inducing fitness tracking habits. A couple of years ago, I got so caught up chasing running streaks that I ignored body signals telling me to ease up. It landed me with a nasty case of shin splints. Not only was I unable to run for nearly eight weeks, but it also meant missing a 10K... Continue reading…

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge The tiny handheld was manufactured in Southeast Asia, but the realities of global shipping have kept it out of the hands of local gamers. Continue reading…

Mining units at a Bitcoin mining facility while under construction in Fort Stockton, Texas, on Friday, April 29th, 2022. | Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar / Bloomberg via Getty Images Federal agencies have the authority to force crypto mining companies to divulge how much energy they use and greenhouse gas emissions they create, according to letters between the agencies and Democratic lawmakers shared exclusively with The Verge.Bitcoin miners have flocked to the US over the past couple years, triggering concerns about electricity usage and greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the proliferation of crypto mines across the US, there hasn’t been solid data on what impact they each have on the power grid and national climate goals.That could soon change as Democratic lawmakers pressure federal agencies to speed up plans to require crypto mining companies to report their emissions and energy consumption. That kind of... Continue reading…

Photo by Dylan Buell / Getty Images Last year, Super Bowl LVI was effectively the crypto bowl for companies like FTX, Crypto.com, Coinbase, and others. Now, with only a week to go until the Eagles versus Chiefs matchup, Sports Business Journal reports that while FTX and other crypto businesses bought Super Bowl LVII ad spots from Fox, they’ve all backed out.As LA faced off with Cincinnati for the NFL’s championship trophy, big-name celebrities like Matt Damon and LeBron James greeted TV viewers and attempted to convince them all to join the movement and invest in crypto. At the time, Bitcoin was valued at over $42,197.52 — but even after a rally in recent weeks, its price is down to $23,013.87.Coinbase ran a “Less talk, more Bitcoin” ad that crashed its servers because... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge Luna, Amazon’s cloud game streaming service, is set to lose 53 games this month, including titles like Bridge Constructor Portal, No More Heroes, and classics like Pong and Missile Command, according to 9to5Google. It’s just the latest mass removal from the service.Amazon previously told 9to5Google that its goal for Luna “has always been to keep our selection as fresh as possible and to offer a wide array of high-quality, immersive games for our customers” and that it’s “refreshing” the service’s content with that in mind.It does seem like the number of games on Luna can fluctuate a lot — it also dropped over 40 games in December, according to Cloud Dosage.Currently, the Luna Plus subscription offers around 200 games, though the... Continue reading…

Image: Meta Last week, Meta announced that it would be shutting down the widely praised VR game Echo VR in August. Since then, Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth has shared some further details about the shutdown, and former Meta consulting CTO John Carmack has weighed in about the decision.In an Instagram AMA, Bosworth said that Echo VR’s playerbase, while “loyal as all get out,” had fallen into the “low ten thousands,” as transcribed by UploadVR. “Unfortunately, keeping things alive takes work,” Bosworth said. “This is not like a return on investment money standpoint; it’s just those resources could be put to other uses that I think will be useful to the now tens of millions of people who are in VR.” He also said Meta has some “regulatory... Continue reading…