When premium e-bike maker Cowboy introduced its Adaptive Power update earlier this year, Engadget’s Mat Smith wondered when a new model would arrive. We have the answer today as the company announced the Cowboy Cruiser. The new variant encourages a more upright design for a relaxed Dutch riding position. It also includes a wider saddle — a feature that was at the top of our wish list for the Belgian company’s latest iteration.

The Cowboy Cruiser weighs 19.3 kg (42.5 lbs) and includes comfort grips and a “distinctive raised and curved handlebar to facilitate a natural hand position.” Its saddle is wider and has an increased gear ratio compared to previous models. The e-bike has a wireless charging phone mount, and, like with all of its models, its companion app integrates with Google Maps. In addition, it has a removable battery, carbon belt, mudguards and “puncture-resistant” 47mm tires. Of course, all of the company’s models have crash detection.

Cowboy

With its lineup getting more crowded, Cowboy renamed its existing e-bikes, “making it easier for customers to find the e-bike which best suits their personal needs.” The original C4 model is now called the Cowboy Classic, and the C4ST becomes the Cruiser ST.

The Cowboy Cruiser is available starting today for an “introductory price” of £2,690 ($3,393.43). You can buy it in black and sand colorways from the company website or any of its 300 retail partners across Europe.

Sony blocked Roblox from PlayStation consoles because it was worried about inappropriate content reaching children. The revelation comes from a 2022 document, first reported byAxios, uncovered in the FTC’s Microsoft trial. However, Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan said at the time that the company’s stance was softening, leaving the door open to an eventual PlayStation port for the viral user-generated platform.

Ryan explained the decision to withhold Roblox to investors early last year. “Historically, because of the large number of children that play on the PlayStation, we have been very careful with regards to opening them up to anything that could potentially exploit them,” he said at the time. But he struck an optimistic tone for investors eager to see Roblox on Sony consoles. “Over the last couple of years, however, we have reviewed those policies and relaxed a little on this. We have been conservative for too long, and now we are currently engaging with people at Roblox. We hope that the situation will change.”

Despite making the comments over a year ago, Roblox still isn’t on PlayStation consoles. The beloved title, which lets users create, share and play user-created content, is available for Xbox, iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. Nintendo hasn’t commented on Roblox’s lack of availability for Switch, but the console maker has also historically erred on the side of caution in keeping inappropriate content away from kids.

Roblox introduced a content rating system in 2021 to help parents better control the user-created games their children play. More than half of the platform’s daily users are under 13. Although it forbids content displaying sexual activity, illegal substances and swearing, occasional rule-breaking content can slip past moderation in user-created titles. In addition, Roblox is working to hang onto its users as they grow, now allowing content for players 17 and older. It says the 17 to 24 age range is its fastest-growing segment.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) plans to perform an in-depth probe into Adobe’s acquisition of Figma, the agency announced today (viaThe Wall Street Journal). Citing concerns about “a substantial lessening of competition” for screen design software, it plans to move into a “phase two” investigation. However, it’s giving the companies five business days to “offer legally binding proposals” to address the concerns; if their response doesn’t satisfy the CMA, the probe will begin. Adobe announced its plans last year to buy its smaller rival for $20 billion.

“The CMA found that Figma has established a substantial share of the market for screen design software and that Adobe has been continuously investing in and competing in this segment,” the UK agency, which recently rejected Microsoft’s proposed $75 billion purchase of Activision, wrote today. “The CMA found that competition between Figma and Adobe has driven investment in updating and developing screen design software, and this important rivalry could be lost if the deal goes ahead.” It described Figma as “an emerging competitive threat” to the Photoshop maker, expressing concerns about the reduced innovation that could come from Adobe scooping up an upstart competitor. The agency said it’s concerned the acquisition could lead to higher costs and fewer / less innovative products.

Adobe’s purchase of San Francisco-based Figma, founded in 2012, would be the largest-ever acquisition for the 41-year-old design behemoth. In Sigma’s 11 years on the market, it has established itself as a popular tool for vector-based design. The cloud-based software specializes in remote collaboration and is a direct competitor to Adobe’s XD and Illustrator products. At the time of the acquisition, Adobe said it wanted to bring features from its Creative Cloud suite into the collaborative software while incorporating more of Figma’s team-focused features into its core products — predictably framing it as a win-win for customers. The company added it was “deeply committed” to keeping Figma an independent company while insisting there was “no plan” to change its pricing — including its free tier.

“We’re worried this deal could stifle innovation and lead to higher costs for companies that rely on Figma and Adobe’s digital tools — as they cease to compete to provide customers with new and better products,” said Sorcha O’Carroll, the CMA’s Senior Mergers Director. “Unless Adobe can put forward viable solutions to our concerns in the coming days, we will move to a more in-depth investigation.”

Annapurna Interactive’s Thirsty Suitors trailer wraps with the tagline: “Battle Your Exes. Disappoint Your Parents. Find Yourself.” (If that doesn’t proclaim that the upcoming title is venturing off the beaten path, I’m unsure what would.) Annapurna and developer Outerloop Games announced today that the cross-platform RPG about returning home and trying to resolve the disarray of the past arrives on November 2nd.

Initially revealed in 2021, Thirsty Suitors places you in the world of Jala, who heads back to the small town of Timber Hills after a “brutal breakup.” There, she “has to face everything she left behind,” as narrative lead Meghna Jayanth explains. This includes “her immigrant parents’ tattered expectations, claustrophobic small-town gossip and a string of messily broken hearts she left in her wake.” The action unfolds through cooking with her parents, skating at the local park (but watch out for the no-good punk kids) and stylistically over-the-top turn-based battles against her “thirsty ex-suitors.”

The game’s creators say the ex showdowns force Jala to confront each forlorn lover’s perspective: You’re drawn into a world entirely of their subjective creation. For example, when fighting Sergio, her “overconfident, insecure, macho, needy and far far far too thirsty” childhood boyfriend, she sees her immediate environment from his vantage point: “a psychic landscape where he’s the man he imagines himself to be in reality.” In this projection of Sergio’s self-aggrandizement, he appears invincible — that is, until you summon his mother (a giant, foreboding appearance in his immature mind) to cut him down to size with a well-timed slipper smash.

Annapurna Interactive / Outerloop Games

If successful, battles end not with the bloody vanquishing of your opponent but with reconciliation: gaining a better understanding of each other’s perspective. Although the action appears rather busy in the game’s trailers, you can’t deny the apparent creativity and freshness of the development team’s approach to narrative, gameplay and art style.

Thirsty Suitors launches on November 2nd. It will be available on Steam, Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and Game Pass.

Niantic is joining the long list of companies laying off employees. The studio published an “organizational update” (after the internal memo was leaked toKotaku) announcing that it would let go of 230 employees. In addition, the company is shutting down its Los Angeles studio and canceling two licensed games: NBA All-World and Marvel: World of Heroes. The only good news for fans is that Pokémon Go, still its flagship product, will live to fight another day.

“I have made the decision to narrow our focus for mobile game investments, concentrating on first party games that most strongly embody our core values of location and local social communities,” wrote CEO John Hanke. “The mobile gaming market is very mature and only the best and most differentiated titles have a chance to succeed. We also want to increase our focus on building for the emerging class of MR devices and future AR glasses.”

Although nobody likes hearing about layoffs, Hanke’s letter seems forthcoming and candid about the company’s challenges and the mistakes he and the leadership team made. He attributes the downsizing to the studio growing its expenses faster than its revenue. “In the wake of the revenue surge we saw during Covid, we grew our headcount and related expenses in order to pursue growth more aggressively, expanding existing game teams, our AR platform work, new game projects and roles that support our products and our employees. Post Covid, our revenue returned to pre-Covid levels and new projects in games and platform have not delivered revenues commensurate with those investments.” The CEO expects the reductions to “bring expenses and revenue back into line” without shuttering its most valuable property.

On that topic, Hanke said, “The top priority is to keep Pokémon Go healthy and growing as a forever game. While we made some adjustments to the Pokémon Go team, our investment in the product and team continues to grow.” The phone-based AR game launched in the summer of 2016 and instantly became a viral sensation; it also enjoyed a resurgence in popularity during pandemic lockdowns as homebound gamers used the explorative game as an excuse to connect with a world beyond their overly familiar four walls. Just last year, the studio launched a social app for the game that lets players organize and chat.

The letter adds that the AR market “developing more slowly than anticipated” was another factor. Niantic’s games would be ideal for on-the-go AR, which the industry eventually expects to materialize as smart glasses that can pass for standard prescription specs. However, as Apple’s Vision Pro made clear, that future is still likely a ways off. Today’s wearable AR, also including the Meta Quest Pro, is home-based gear designed for work and entertainment in the comfort of your home or office. Although adaptations of Pokémon Go types of experiences may work there to some degree, the company’s trademark approach is tailor-made for AR that isn’t yet available. Niantic may well end up waiting five to 10 years to see consumer-friendly versions of that type of augmented reality — and apparently, that required some reconfiguring.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have turned eye reflections into (somewhat discernible) 3D scenes. The work builds on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), an AI technology that can reconstruct environments from 2D photos. Although the eye-reflection approach has a long way to go before it spawns any practical applications, the study (first reported byTech Xplore) provides a fascinating glimpse into a technology that could eventually reveal an environment from a series of simple portrait photos.

The team used subtle reflections of light captured in human eyes (using consecutive images shot from a single sensor) to try to discern the person’s immediate environment. They began with several high-resolution images from a fixed camera position, capturing a moving individual looking toward the camera. They then zoomed in on the reflections, isolating them and calculating where the eyes were looking in the photos.

The results (here’s the entire set animated) show a decently discernible environmental reconstruction from human eyes in a controlled setting. A scene captured using a synthetic eye (below) produced a more impressive dreamlike scene. However, an attempt to model eye reflections from Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga music videos only produced vague blobs that the researchers could only guess were an LED grid and a camera on a tripod — illustrating how far the tech is from real-world use.

University of Maryland

The team overcame significant obstacles to reconstruct even crude and fuzzy scenes. For example, the cornea introduces “inherent noise” that makes it difficult to separate the reflected light from humans’ complex iris textures. To address that, they introduced cornea pose optimization (estimating the position and orientation of the cornea) and iris texture decomposition (extracting features unique to an individual’s iris) during training. Finally, radial texture regularization loss (a machine-learning technique that simulates smoother textures than the source material) helped further isolate and enhance the reflected scenery.

Despite the progress and clever workarounds, significant barriers remain. “Our current real-world results are from a ‘laboratory setup,’ such as a zoom-in capture of a person’s face, area lights to illuminate the scene, and deliberate person’s movement,” the authors wrote. “We believe more unconstrained settings remain challenging (e.g., video conferencing with natural head movement) due to lower sensor resolution, dynamic range, and motion blur.” Additionally, the team notes that its universal assumptions about iris texture may be too simplistic to apply broadly, especially when eyes typically rotate more widely than in this kind of controlled setting. 

Still, the team sees their progress as a milestone that can spur future breakthroughs. “With this work, we hope to inspire future explorations that leverage unexpected, accidental visual signals to reveal information about the world around us, broadening the horizons of 3D scene reconstruction.” Although more mature versions of this work could spawn some creepy and unwanted privacy intrusions, at least you can rest easy knowing that today’s version can only vaguely make out a Kirby doll even under the most ideal of conditions.

Sony announced the PlayStation Plus games lineup for July today. They include Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Alan Wake Remastered and Endling – Extinction is Forever. All three titles will be available on PS5 and PS4 for subscribers on the Essential, Extra and Premium tiers.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) is a controversial installment in the long-running military shooter franchise. Set in the early 1980s, its plot borrows from a well-known (and largely baseless) real-world conspiracy theory about a Soviet spy named Perseus who supposedly infiltrated the US atomic weapons program. If you can get past its questionable premise and (arguably tone-deaf) Vietnam War flashback missions, you can enjoy classic Call of Duty shoot-em-up fare as you blast your way across East Berlin, Turkey, Moscow and other Cold War hotspots. In addition to the story mission, it includes the title’s Multiplayer and Zombies modes.

Activision

Meanwhile, Alan Wake Remastered is the 2021 remake of the now 13-year-old adventure title that was initially an Xbox 360 exclusive. The game puts you in the shoes of the title character, a successful author on vacation in the (fictional) Washington state town of Bright Falls. But after his wife mysteriously vanishes, he sets out on a nightmarish investigation that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The remastered version includes the case game and (initially DLC) expansions “The Signal” and “The Writer.”

Finally, Endling – Extinction is Forever is a third-person survival-adventure title that puts you in the paws of the last surviving fox. Set in a future reality where humans have exhausted Earth’s resources, leaving it in ruin, you must guide your three cubs to safety and save the species. Aside from its obvious thematic commentary about climate change, nature preservation and human excess, it provides fun (and relatively short) stealth gameplay using 2D movement in shifting 3D environments.

Herobeat Studios

The three games will be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers from July 4th through the 31st. In addition, Sony says you’ll have until next Monday, July 3rd, to claim June’s games, including NBA 2K23, Jurassic World Evolution 2 and Trek to Yomi.

This summer, North America’s first hydrogen-powered train began traveling across the Canadian countryside. The French passenger train is a short-term demonstration, running through the end of September, that aims to spark adoption in Canada and the US. “I think the most important thing that’s going to come out of it is people’s awareness and comfort with the technology,” Robert Stasko, executive director of Ontario’s Hydrogen Business Council, toldCBC News.

The Canadian loaner runs from Montmorency Falls in Quebec City to Base-Saint-Paul — a two-and-a-half hour trip — on Wednesdays to Sundays through September 30th. The train has a top speed of 140 km/h (87 mph) and can carry up to 120 people in its two passenger cars. The French company Alstom, which makes the train, says its acceleration and braking performance is comparable to standard diesel-engine trains — sans the emissions. While much of Europe uses trains with electric rails or overhead wires, hydrogen trains are ideal for places like the Canadian countryside, with its long distances and relatively low commuter density. (Much of the US would fit that bill as well.)

The same model of train, the Coradia iLint, has already made runs in eight European countries. As many as 14 of the same model began running a route in Lower Saxony, Germany, last year. Alstom began testing the trains in 2018 and has additional contracts in Germany, Italy and France. The company says European clients have ordered 41 of the trainsets.

The Coradia iLint uses a ballpark of “about 50 kilograms of hydrogen a day,” says Serge Harnois, CEO of Hanois Énergies, the train’s hydrogen fuel supplier. The same journey using a standard engine would burn around 500 liters of diesel fuel. It only emits water vapor along its journey as a byproduct of combining hydrogen with oxygen in a fuel cell to generate its power.

There are some asterisks to attach to the three-month demo. First, it requires a diesel-powered truck to transport the hydrogen to the train every time it refuels. (Harnois says that, ideally, the hydrogen would eventually be produced onsite to avoid this step.) We also have to wonder about the emissions produced on its presumed voyage from Europe to Canada for its mere three-month demo. However, the train will move on to other North American cities after its summer residence. The long-term goal is for the tour to help promote widespread hydrogen-train adoption across different North American regions, which — if successful — could more than offset the carbon footprint from its diesel-truck top-offs and journey across the Atlantic.

Although Big Tech is still (sometimes clumsily) figuring out generative AI’s ethics and implications, the genie is out of the bottle, and the technology is already integrating into the workforce. From that perspective, Microsoft announced a new program today to train workers on AI. The initiative will offer free coursework through LinkedIn, including certification. It’s somewhat ironic since the appeal of generative AI is that it’s dead simple to use: It automates content creation using everyday language. But the courses could still provide tips for composing the most effective prompts while showing beginners the ropes, giving them a chance to keep pace with our rapidly changing world.

Microsoft’s AI Skills Initiative, part of the company’s Skills for Jobs program, will include free courses created by (Microsoft subsidiary) LinkedIn, offering learners “the first Professional Certificate on Generative AI in the online learning market.” Microsoft says the courses will cover introductory AI concepts and “responsible AI frameworks,” culminating in certification. It’s launching in English only, but the company says it will add Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese “over the coming months.”

In addition, the company is launching a trainer toolkit for educators with “downloadable, bite-sized content for trainers” and a separate AI course for teachers and other trainers.

Microsoft also announced an open grant program for AI with an eye on boosting historically marginalized populations. The Generative AI Skills Grant Challenge is a collaboration between data.org, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab and GitHub. It aims to “explore, develop, and implement how nonprofit, social enterprise and research or academic institutions can train and empower the workforce to use generative AI.” Grant recipients will receive financial support, group learning opportunities, data training / guidance and access to Microsoft events and cloud-computing resources. The grant program is accepting applications now with an August 15th deadline. You can learn more and apply here.

Stitcher is shutting down. The popular podcasting app and web service, which SiriusXM acquired in 2020 for $325 million, will close on August 29th, according to an FAQ on its website (viaVariety). The move appears geared toward drawing its user base into the broader SiriusXM platform.

“SiriusXM, the owner of Stitcher, is focused on incorporating podcasts into its flagship SiriusXM subscription business,” the closure note reads. “Subscribers can listen to podcasts within the SiriusXM app and will see an all-new listening experience later this year.” The notice added that Stitcher Studios and its Earwolf comedy network would continue making podcasts. Although Stitcher says its premium content may continue elsewhere, it adds that “hosts/creators will determine availability and accessibility of their shows.” The company recommends following your favorite podcast creators on social media to learn the fate of individual shows.

The platform has been a popular destination for exclusive and cross-platform podcasts. Stitcher’s original podcasts include Freakonomics Radio, The Video Archives Podcast with Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, LeVar Burton Reads and Science Rules! With Bill Nye (among others). The app is known for its user-friendly navigation, wide-spanning library and discovery recommendations.

The company began as a startup, focused on its listening app, in 2008. Deezer bought it in 2014 and sold it to Midroll Media two years later. Finally, Parent company E.W. Scripps Company then sold it to SiriusXM in 2020 — only for the satellite radio provider to shutter it later this summer.

Stitcher turned off automatic renewal for paid subscriptions today and detailed the refund process for premium customers. Those with existing subscriptions won’t need to take any action to cancel. Meanwhile, people with annual subscriptions scheduled to renew after August 29th will receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the paid year. (You can read the full terms here.)