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Apple is reportedly readying a wide array of apps and services for its upcoming mixed reality headset, according toBloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The company appears to be moving forward with plans to announce its first VR / AR headset at its Worldwide Developers’ Conference in June.

The Apple mixed reality headset (rumored to be named “Reality One” or “Reality Pro”) can allegedly switch between virtual and augmented reality. It will focus heavily on gaming, fitness, sports and collaboration tools. Customers who buy the device can use “millions” of existing apps in the headset’s 3D interface “with slight modifications” from developers. Additionally, Apple has reportedly been working with “a small number of developers” for months to optimize apps for the new product. Announcing the device months before its launch should also give other developers time to create new apps or adapt existing ones for its futuristic interface.

Although many of the product’s details have leaked before, a new morsel in this report is its ability to run Apple Fitness+ workouts in VR. (Imagine a virtual workout where you feel like you’re in the same space as the instructor.) In addition, it will allegedly support immersive sports viewing, leveraging the company’s streaming rights for Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball, as well as its 2020 purchase of VR sports startup NextVR. Likewise, the Apple TV app will let you watch videos in virtual environments like a desert or the sky.

The report says the headset will have a productivity focus, similar to the Meta Quest Pro. “The platform will support its Pages word processing, Numbers spreadsheet and Keynote slide deck apps, as well as iMovie and GarageBand for video and music production,” writes Gurman. It would also prioritize communication and remote collaboration, letting users see full-body 3D avatars of people they're talking with in FaceTime calls. Gaming will also be a primary focus. However, that wasn't always the case, as today's report says that Apple previously wasn't putting as much attention into that space.

Gurman also reiterates earlier reporting about the headset, including a Digital Crown like the one on the Apple Watch and AirPods Max headphones that lets you switch between VR (fully immersive, no real-world view) and AR (using cameras to combine your real environment and virtual elements). It would support running multiple apps simultaneously, “floating within the mixed-reality interface.” It could also remember where you were in your physical environment, leaving virtual elements in the same spot you left them. (We saw that feature as far back as the first HoloLens developer kit in 2016.)

The headset would also let you control it with eye gestures that determine where you’re looking and hand gestures like finger pinches to select items and navigate menus. In addition, it will have an in-air virtual keyboard and support physical keyboards for a more tactile typing experience. Its home screen could appear similar to the iPad’s with Apple’s familiar Control Center for toggling things like WiFi, Bluetooth and volume. Finally, it will support Siri voice control and use eye scans for security, acting as the device’s equivalent to Face ID and Touch ID.

Although the product will supply a robust feature set that will elicit curiosity, other companies have tried similar things but have yet to succeed. For example, although the cheaper Meta Quest VR headsets have done reasonably well as gaming devices, the more expensive Meta Quest Pro — with a similar mixed reality focus and productivity apps — has been a tougher sell to consumers. And Apple’s version will reportedly cost around three times as much — a staggering $3,000. On the other hand, Apple’s history requires us to keep a somewhat open mind: There were MP3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone and smartwatches before the Apple Watch. Those competing devices all had similar features but failed to capture the public’s imagination in the same way as Apple’s stylish and user-friendly variants.

Even if the product targets a niche audience, it could serve a purpose as a consumer-facing transition product pointing toward an eventual pair of AR glasses that passes for a regular pair of prescription frames. Seen by many in the industry as the holy grail of mixed reality, such a device could be worn all day out in the world, while the upcoming mixed reality headset expected in June would not.

When it comes to sustainability, cities represent both the problem and the solution. Sprawling slabs of concrete and asphalt create heat islands, resulting in significantly higher temperatures than non-urbanized areas, while city populations are only growing as the planet becomes more populous. Already, more than 60 percent of humans live in urban areas.

Framlab is a research and design studio based in Bergen, Norway, and Brooklyn, New York, and architects there are focused on rethinking the way we build city spaces. Framlab founder Andreas Tjeldflaat believes there’s a need to overhaul conventional urban planning with an eye on inclusion, adaptability and regeneration. His concepts address micro- and macro-level societal issues, from feelings of personal isolation to the consequences of human-driven climate change. They also end up looking extremely sleek.

Tjeldflaat outlined three conceptual projects for us, each one addressing a different problem in growing cities. Open House is a building designed to encourage interpersonal interaction through the use of soft edges and shared spaces, while Oversky places floating, cloud-like buildings above the city streets. Glasir takes advantage of leftover urban spaces like empty lots and streetside landscaping by establishing large glass treehouses with community gardens inside their branches. Watch the video for the below for the full story.

Horizon Forbidden West is a fantastic game. Along with upgraded gameplay and visuals and an even wilder story, it builds on the vast open world of Horizon Zero Dawn by introducing fresh environments to explore, including flooded areas and the open ocean. 

However, those who have a fear of deep bodies of water (thalassophobia) may not have found it easy to play the game, which requires players to explore underwater as part of the main story. Guerrilla is finally addressing that and other accessibility issues in the latest patch.

The update, which arrives alongside the Burning Shores expansion, adds a thalassophobia mode to Horizon Forbidden West. The studio wrote in an FAQ that this "aims to ease thalassophobia symptoms by improving underwater ambient visibility and allowing you to breathe indefinitely, regardless of story progression."

Other updates include additional color blindness settings and the option to make waypoints and quest icons larger. There's now a way to reorientate the camera in Focus mode to point it towards the current objective, along with an auto camera function that follows Aloy based on how you move the left thumbstick. In other words, you won't need to use the right stick to move the camera.

In addition, there are larger subtitles and the ability to darken the edges of the screen to boost the contrast. The update rolls in one more very welcome quality-of-life feature in the form of automatic pickups. So, Aloy can grab items without you having to press or hold a button every single time.

Sony has placed a greater focus on accessibility in its first-party games in recent years. The likes of The Last of Us Part II, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and God of War Ragnarok have extensive accessibility options. The company hasn't quite perfected accessibility — a review of The Last of Us Part I on PC criticized that version for not offering full control remapping. But, as this update to Horizon Forbidden West over a year after the game's debut shows, the company is willing to keep improving its games' accessibility over time.

Reddit has collected a treasure trove of human interactions and conversations throughout the past 18 years and this rich data pool has been the perfect spot for companies to train large language models, otherwise known as AI chatbots. Now, Reddit wants a piece of the AI pie and will begin charging companies for API access, which is necessary to train LLMs.

After all, these are not mom-and-pop companies using the API to train AI chatbots. Bigwigs like Google and OpenAI use Reddit to help provide initial guidance to burgeoning artificial intelligence services. To that end, Reddit is introducing a “new premium access point for third parties,” the company said in an official announcement.

The pricing is still up in the air, though Reddit has confirmed it'll be split into tiers of some kind, likely to support companies of different sizes. The social media platform mentions various usage limits and broader usage rights as points of distinction between tiers.

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, told The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”

Reddit is far from the only online depository of information used to train large language models, as data scrapers like Common Crawl are also frequent chatbot tutors. However, Common Crawl and related services trade in raw data, as in large pools of information sitting online, whereas Reddit consists of conversations between humans. A well-rounded AI requires access to both types of data to increase factual accuracy and person-like behavior.

Reddit’s application program interface (API) is also regularly used to create and maintain content moderation tools. Instead of charging content moderators to access the API, the company is creating dedicated moderation tools in the form of iOS and Android apps. The apps will feature a mod log, rules management tools, mod queue information and more.

Why make this change now? AI has gone from niche to big business seemingly overnight and rumors swirl that Reddit is looking to go public later this year. Setting up a new revenue stream is never a bad idea when introducing an IPO.

Twitter has, once again, quietly updated a significant policy without explanation. The company appears to have changed its hateful conduct policy to remove a section that protected transgender people from misgendering and deadnaming, in a move spotted by GLAAD.

Twitter had originally banned targeted deadnaming and misgendering in 2018. “We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category,” the policy stated. “This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”

That last sentence has now been removed. Twitter’s policy page indicates it was last updated in “April 2023.” But, as GLAAD points out, a look through the Wayback Machine suggests the change was made April 8th.

GLAAD and others have condemned the move. “Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” GLADD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement. “While the rules were sparsely enforced, this greenlights further targeting of trans users,” wrote Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic, who also flagged the change.

Twitter so far hasn’t publicly commented on the rule change or provided an explanation. Elon Musk disbanded the company’s communications team. 

However, Musk has previously signaled that he wanted to walk back the rules. One of his first moves as CEO was to restore a number of high profile users who had been banned under the previous policy. Around the same time, Bloomberg reported that Musk — who has repeatedly mocked people who specify their pronouns — had instructed staff to “review” that section of the company’s hateful conduct rules. 

A Galaxy Quest series is reportedly under development for Paramount+. A new show based on the 1999 cult-classic film — a spoof of Star Trek and its fandom — will land on the streaming home of five original Trek series, according toThe Hollywood Reporter.

The sci-fi comedy followed a cast of washed-up actors making a meager living from the convention circuit after their television series — also called Galaxy Quest — was canceled. The plot involves aliens who picked up transmissions of the show from Earth, believing it to be a real-life documentary. The socially awkward extraterrestrials, gelatinous creates who take on humanoid forms, seek the actors’ leadership as their planet faces extinction. The cast eventually finds itself transported to outer space, where they reluctantly face the threat and eventually learn to live up to their TV personas. Galaxy Quest was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $90 million at the box office and gaining cult-classic status.

Paramount

If the series brings back the film’s original cast, it will have to make do without star Alan Rickman, who died of cancer in 2016. In addition to his scene-stealing turn as Alexander Dane, the movie starred Tim Allen as narcissistic William Shatner equivalent Jason Nesmith, Sigourney Weaver as Gwen DeMarco, Tony Shalhoub as Fred Kawn, Daryl Mitchell as Tommy Webber and Sam Rockwell as Guy Fleegman (a spoof of Star Trek’s expendable “redshirts”).

The new Paramount+ series is in its “early development stages.” Mark Johnson, an executive producer of the movie, returns for the upcoming series. No casting or writing decisions have been reported. Paramount TV Studios will develop the film for its streaming counterpart.

The upcoming series isn’t the first attempt to revive the IP. It was reported in 2021 that Simon Pegg and Succession writer Georgia Pritchett were helming a new series; it’s unclear whether the new project includes them. Before that, in 2015, an adaptation with the original cast was also under development. However, that one never advanced beyond the development stage after Rickman’s death and scheduling conflicts with Allen. In a 2016 interview, Rockwell told the Hollywood Reporter, “We were ready to sign up, and [then] Alan Rickman passed away and Tim Allen wasn’t available — he has [Last Man Standing] — and everybody’s schedule was all weird. It was going to shoot, like, right now. And how do you fill that void of Alan Rickman? That’s a hard void to fill.”

It has been a year since Panic started shipping the Playdate, its charming handheld console. To mark the occasion, the company has revealed just how many units players have bought to date. Panic says it has sold 53,142 Playdates so far. That's more than two and a half times the number of units the company initially expected to make.

When Panic opened pre-orders in mid-2021, it wasn't certain whether it would sell the first batch of 20,000 consoles at a reasonable pace. Eager customers snapped all of those within 20 minutes.

While there is clearly a demand for the console with a crank, getting the Playdate into players' hands has been a tricker problem. Panic came across a "critical" battery issue while manufacturing the first batch, leading it to switch suppliers and delay the console from late 2021 into 2022.

Not only have parts shortages slowed down deliveries, manufacturing costs forced Panic to increase the price of the Playdate by $20 to $199 earlier this month. Panic has shipped more than 27,000 Playdates and it expects to fulfill all preorders by the end of 2023. After that, it hopes to make Playdate available on an ad-hoc basis and to finally start shipping the Playdate Stereo Dock.

Every Playdate user gets access to a library of 24 games, while there are more than 400 titles available for the console on Itch.io. Panic says almost 40 percent of users have sideloaded at least one game or app. Meanwhile, the company recently rolled out Catalog, a built-in store. So far, users have installed Catalog games and apps more than 19,500 times.

No matter how you feel about it, Star Trek: Picardis a bonafide hit so you know what that means: more Star Trek. Paramount+ is finally making the long-rumored Section 31 project, starring recent Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. However, this is not a TV show, as previously surmised, but a feature-length movie.

A Yeoh-led Star Trek: Section 31 has been in development since 2019, transitioning from a series to an “event film” with this latest announcement, according to Variety. Production starts later this year, led by writer Craig Sweeny and frequent Star Trek: Discovery director Olatunde Osunsanmi. Producers include Alex Kurtzman, who is behind every iteration of modern Trek, and Rod Roddenberry, son of franchise creator Gene Roddenberry.

In this film, Yeoh reprises the character of Emperor Philippa Georgiou from Star Trek: Discovery, a sort-of evil, sort-of-lovable dictator from a parallel universe. (It’s a long story.) The official logline says that the movie starts when “Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets and faces the sins of her past.”

That brings us to the titular Section 31. The shadowy organization was introduced in the beloved 1990s series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as a foil for Starfleet, testing the boundaries of the idealism depicted in the future world of Star Trek. Since then, it has popped up in most modern Trek installments, including the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks and in movies like Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Star Trek: Section 31 joins multiple forthcoming Trek projects, such as that just-announced Starfleet Academy show and upcoming seasons of Star Trek: Prodigy, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Lower Decks. Star Trek: Picard finishes its three-season run this week and Star Trek: Discovery returns for a final season sometime next year. In other news, we only have 40 more years until we make first contact with the Vulcans, so there’s that to look forward to.

YouTube already bans videos that directly promote eating disorders, but now it's clamping down on content that may unintentionally encourage that behavior. To begin with, the service banning videos on eating disorders that feature "imitable" behavior or weight-oriented bullying. The company will also restrict informative and artistic videos containing disorders (such as someone discussing their recovery) to users 18 and older.

You'll also see crisis resource panels for eating disorders in more places. While they already appear in search results in nine countries (including the US, Canada and UK), you'll now see them underneath relevant videos in those areas. Viewers in the US may be encouraged to call or chat with the National Eating Disorder Association in the US.

The new approach will initially be viewable today and reach more people in the weeks ahead. YouTube says this is an "ongoing" effort.

The addition is an acknowledgment that videos can affect people in "different ways," YouTube says. Ideally, this will minimize the chances of helpful video creators inadvertently fostering eating disorders in at-risk viewers.

Whether or not this works as intended is another matter. YouTube's enforcement hasn't always been consistent, and it has occasionally had to reverse policies (such as one limiting profanity in monetized videos) that inadvertently punished certain creators. Gaming and LGBTQ video producers, for instance, have complained that YouTube has demonetized clips that aren't harmful. With that said, the updated policy is focused on limiting access to videos, not removing their money-making potential.

After years of resistance, Instagram is allowing users to add more than one link to their profile page. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the change on Tuesday through his broadcast channel. “You can now add up to five links in your Instagram bio,” he said. “Probably one of the most requested features we’ve had.”

As a refresher, you can add a link to your Instagram profile by tapping the “Edit profile” button that appears above your photo grid and highlights. With the change rolling out to users, Instagram will even prompt you to add multiple links. The interface Meta designed for displaying the links isn’t the most elegant thing the company has ever released but it’s functional. If you put more than one link on your profile, Instagram will truncate the first one and state how many more follow. Tapping the first link that appears brings up a selection screen that allows you to see all the links at once.

If I had to guess, those who were already using services like Linktree to direct people to their other social profiles will continue doing so because those platforms offer more customization and allow you to include more than five links. In filling out my profile page, I didn’t run into any restrictions where Instagram told me I could not add a specific link, though I only attempted to link to my Engadget page and Twitter profile. I’ve reached out to Meta for more information.