Apple Arcade is expanding its game selection, and it once again includes a mix of brand new (if familiar) originals and well-established classics. The all-you-can-play service will "soon" add Tetris Beat, an Arcade original from N3twork that blends Alexei Pajitnov's line-clearng puzzles with rhythm game elements. The more you keep to the rhythm, the larger your combos get. The soundtrack includes well-known names like Alison Wonderland and Hannah Diamond, among others, so you might enjoy it just for the music.

The other upcoming title, Monster Hunter Stories (below), will be more than a little familiar — it's a years-old adaptation of the turn-based Capcom RPG that made its debut on the 3DS. The game flips the usual premise on its head by making you a "rider" that forms ties with some monsters rather than hunting them down.

Capcom

Two more veteran games will join the mix. Halfbrick's Jetpack Joyride makes the endless runner (flier?) available without worrying so much about in-app purchases, while Neko Atsume offers serene cat collecting as a foil to the other, more frantic games in the collection.

As before, Apple isn't counting on any one game to draw you to Arcade. Like past additions, these latest entries are more about making a stronger overall case for Apple's $5 per month service — you might be more likely to sign up (or get it as part of an Apple One bundle) if you know titles like Tetris Beat and Monster Hunter Stories are just a quick download away.

Casio has unveiled a new digital watch made in collaboration with Bandai Namco, paying homage to not one but two digital classics from the late '70s and early '80s. The A100WEPC Pac-Man edition has a design based on the Casio's F-100 digital watch from 1978, and celebrates one of the most famous games of all time: Pac-Man. 

The F-100 was one of the most advanced watches you could buy at the time, offering a stopwatch, digital alarm and calendar features. It was also the first watch with a resin case, as Casio notes in a press release. It's perhaps most famous for being the watch worn by Ripley and other characters from the 1979 movie Alien. 

The A100WEPC reprises that with the same four-button layout. At the same time, the watch face features the Pac-Man and ghost characters, with the center illuminator logo rendered with the Pac-Man font. The face replicates the Pac-Man game screen, while the top watch band is laser etched with a Pac-Man character being chased by ghosts, with the reverse on the bottom band. It comes with special packaging featuring the Pac-Man characters and game score screen. 

Casio's watch isn't the first with a Pac-Man theme, as the $79 Timex T80 x Pac-Man also fetes the retro title. However, since Casio pairs it with a watch design from the same period, it's perhaps a bit more desirable for fans of the game. 

The base AW100WE model, which came out last month, offers water resistance, a 1/10 second stopwatch, daily alarm, hourly time signal, auto-calendar and LED light. It's scheduled to be released in August in Japan for ¥12,100, or about $110 — a relative bargain for enthusiastic Pac-Man fans. 

With its 360 by Deezer app, Deezer decided to adopt Sony's 360 Reality audio format rather than Dolby Atmos. That format delivers surround sound not just on headphones but Chromecast-enabled speakers like, say, Sony's 360-enabled SRS-RA5000 and RA3000 models. Now, Deezer has announced that it is supporting those two very models with its new casting feature. 

If you subscribe to Deezer's premium HiFi tier and own either the Sony RA5000 or RA3000, you'll just need to get the latest 360 by Deezer app, pick a track and select the "cast" button in the top right hand corner. Though it's just a single speaker, you'll here different parts of the song as different independent sound "objects," Deezer said, with vocals and instruments "placed in positions in a virtual auditorium to create a truly immersive experience for the listener." 

Deezer originally launched the app in 2019 with 1,000 tracks, and said that library is growing with new albums from David Bowie, Doja Cat and Alicia Keyes. You can now find dedicated 360 editorial playlists in the app's recommendation page, including Deezer's "360 Sessions" playlist with live performances from Dua Lipa, Anne-Marie, Circa Waves and others. 

Sony's 360 Reality Audio was already available on the RA5000 and RA3000 speakers via Chromecast on Amazon Music and Tidal. Now that it's on Deezer as well, Sony has a pretty solid base of streaming services using its surround sound tech.

Are you more comfortable singing behind a virtual persona than you are on a real stage? Your reality TV show has arrived. Pitchfork and AV Club report that Fox is launching a "world's first" avatar singing competition series, Alter Ego, that will have celebrity judges gather in real life to gauge the performances of amateur singers who use avatars to "reinvent themselves."

You'll likely recognize the judge panel. Canadian artists Grimes (pictured above) and Alanis Morrissette will join Will.i.am and Nick Lachey in critiquing the music, while Emmy winner Rocsi Diaz will host the affair. Alter Ego debuts sometime in the fall.

It's an unusual concept, but not necessarily a bad one. In theory, this could help budding talent overcome stage fright or self-esteem issues by using an avatar as a stand-in. It's certainly a fitting show for a tech-savvy artist like Grimes. It's just a question of whether or not audiences enjoy the concept. Anonymizing music shows like The Masked Singer have been hits, but they still involve a physical presence for the participants — there's a chance viewers might not be so thrilled about digital concerts.

Facebook isn't exactly enthusiastic about President Biden's claim that it and other social networks are "killing people" by allowing COVID-19 misinformation to spread. The social media firm posted a refutation of the allegations, using data to suggest that something other than Facebook was responsible for a slowdown in vaccination rates and a rise in cases.

The company noted that vaccine acceptance in user polling had risen from 70 percent in January 2021 to as high as 85 percent in July, and that cultural group disparities had declined "considerably" over the same period. This was ahead of Biden's goal of getting 70 percent of Americans vaccinated by July — to Facebook, this was a sign the company was "not the reason" the US fell short of that target.

Facebook added that Canada and the UK had higher vaccination percentages despite using the social network about as much as their American counterparts. There's "more than Facebook" to the US results, the company said. It also pointed to its efforts to both promote accurate claims and fight falsehoods, including the use of misinformation labels, reduced exposure and takedowns. 

The internet giant didn't attempt to find an alternate explanation for US troubles. Some observers have pointed to a possible link between political affiliation and vaccination rates, but Facebook didn't even hint at this in its refutal.

It's not a flawless argument. Facebook is trying to draw a link between its polling data and the entire US, which doesn't make for a neat and tidy comparison. The company also hasn't shared estimates of how much COVID-19 misinformation slips through the cracks. The social site has a strong incentive to downplay its possible contribution to the problem given past complaints that it hasn't done enough to stop misinformation campaigns. 

At the same time, the data shifts the attention back to the Biden administration — it may need to provide more substantial data if it's going to show that health misinformation on social networks like Facebook is a major threat, as the US Surgeon General recently said. If nothing else, it suggests the answer is a complicated one regardless of how much Facebook is responsible.

There are, for the most part, two types of Disney Parks fans. There are those who see it as a nice thing to do with your family once in a while, and there are those who take it… a little more seriously. The upcoming Behind the Attraction, hitting Disney+ on July 21st, is a show that’s aimed at turning more of those casual tourists into dedicated fans, by explaining the backstory behind famous attractions like Star Tours, the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain.

Each episode features lots of old footage, talking heads, conceptual art and snark. If you’re thinking that sounds like The Toys That Made Us, but for Disney Parks, you’d be absolutely correct. Behind the Attraction is produced and directed by Brian Volk-Weiss, the creative mind behind Netflix docuseries like TTTMU and The Movies That Made Us. He was specifically sought out by Disney+ for his style which, by his own description, is “focused more on fun” and doesn’t treat its subject like “the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.” He loves documentaries, but hates when they take silly topics too seriously.

Disney Parks

To wit, the series is narrated by comedy veteran Paget Brewster, an actress who has been in The Venture Bros., Community and Another Period. Disney fans will probably recognize her best as the voice of Della Duck on the 2017 DuckTales reboot. She adopts a light playful tone, as far from Morgan Freeman you can get. Also on board is executive producer Dwayne Johnson, who stars in Disney’s upcoming live action Jungle Cruise film. Is there an episode about the Jungle Cruise attraction? Of course there is.

Besides that, the other four episodes available this week focus on the Haunted Mansion, Star Tours, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror and Space Mountain. (Episodes about things like the castles and transportation systems, as well as famous rides like “It’s a Small World” and Pirates of the Caribbean are being held for later in the year.) They trace the history and development of each individual attraction with clips from shows like 1955’s Disneyland and The Wonderful World of Disney, news segments, and a mix of new and old interviews. Anyone who watched the docuseries The Imagineering Story (also on Disney+) will recognize a lot of reused footage from there. Which of course begs the question, why did we need another behind-the-scenes show?

Disney Parks

The biggest difference between the two is that The Imagineering Story takes a strict chronological approach, starting with the origin story behind Walt Disney’s desire to build a theme park, progressing through the opening of Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Epcot and so on. The later episodes focus less on a historical outlook and more on “look at what cool technology we built for this new thing.” Which leads to a sort of unbalanced feel to the program, as well as a greater sense that it’s one big travel brochure for the Disney Parks.

Which isn’t to say that Behind the Attraction isn’t one big advertisement. I certainly want to visit Disney Shanghai after getting a look at the development of its Storybook Castle and TRON Lightcycle Power Run. But because the new show takes a more topical approach, it’s a lot more “snackable,” with episodes that can be watched in any order according to what interests you the most. 

Each episode still follows its individual subject chronologically, like how the Hall of Presidents episode goes into the development of the original “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” show at the 1964 World’s Fair to the installation of the attraction at Disneyland, the creation of the full Hall of Presidents at Walt Disney World to today’s animatronics like the ones used on Avengers Campus at California Adventure. The Imagineering Story talks about the development of the “Stuntronics” as well, but it’s Behind the Attraction that draws a straight line for the viewer from Abraham Lincoln giving a speech to Spider-Man doing somersaults in the air. You actually understand how tech created in 1964 can still shape something built in 2020.

Disney Parks

While it's unlikely that Behind the Attraction will ever delve into the various faceplants the company has taken over the years the way YouTube shows like Yesterworld and Defunctland do, the new show is at least capable of admitting when certain things didn’t work. The Haunted Mansion had to be completely rethought for Shanghai, while Japan got a different backstory for its Tower of Terror. And the original Jungle Cruise had no dad jokes!

Of course, there are no Splash Mountain or Captain EO episodes, so we don’t know yet how the show will deal with some of the more unsavory or embarrassing bits of Disney Park history. Which is fine, since Behind the Attraction isn’t intended to be a complete history of Disney, just a quick half-hour show that will have you going “did you know?” to all your friends and family the next time you visit the Magic Kingdom.

Joe Biden said that Facebook and other social media platforms are “killing people” by allowing misinformation about COVID-19 to spread on their platforms.

Biden’s comments came in response to a reporter who asked the president what his message to “platforms like Facebook” was regarding misinformation about COVID-19. “They’re killing people,” Biden said. “I mean they’re really — look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.”

His remarks, one day after the Surgeon general issued an unusual health advisory on the dangers of vaccine misinformation, comes amid mounting pressure for Facebook and other platforms to do more to address misinformation about the coronavirus vaccines. But Facebook has come under particular scrutiny due to its size, and spotty history with countering vaccine falsehoods.

A widely cited reported from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that much of the vaccine misinformation that spreads online can be linked to just 12 individuals — many of whom remain active on Facebook despite the company’s attempts to crack down on vaccine misinformation in recent months. Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last month, Instagram held its first-ever Creator Week, a virtual event the company described as “a life-changing three days with new feature news and celeb drop-ins.” One of those drop-ins was CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who made a brief appearance to share a message with creators.

“I think that any good vision of the future has to involve a lot more people being able to make a living by expressing their creativity and by doing things they want to do, rather than things they have to — and having the tools and the economy around them to support their work is critical,” he said. “Our goal is to be the best platform for creators like you to make a living.”

This week, Zuckerberg went even farther, announcing that Facebook plans to invest $1 billion in creators by the end of 2022. The investment will fund bonus programs, creator funds and other monetization programs to boost all stripes of creators on its platform.

That Facebook is funneling so much money and resources toward creators is indicative of not just the opportunity the company sees, but how much ground it has to make up.

For years, Facebook simply didn’t do much for creators. While Instagram has long had its own influencer community, the company has at times tried to limit their reach. Instagram’s founders were reportedly uncomfortable with the rise of influencers, and introduced an algorithmic feed to ensure users would see more posts from friends and family than brands and businesses.

While YouTube has offered monetization features for more than a decade, Instagram didn’t offer any kind of revenue sharing feature until last year. And many creators often felt at odds with Instagram. The company’s ever-changing algorithm fueled suspicions that it “shadowbans” or otherwise penalizes users who post too much or about the “wrong” topics.

“Facebook has been late to the game in terms of supporting the creative community in a meaningful way,” says Qianna Smith Bruneteau, founder of the American Influencer Council, a trade group representing the creator industry.

But Facebook is now trying to reverse those perceptions. For the past year, the company has been steadily churning out new tools for creators to make money. Since last May alone, the company has introduced a dizzying number of money-making features.

On Instagram, creators can now make money from commercials in IGTV or open their own shops. They can sell badges and products in live streams. On Facebook, they can host paid virtual events, promote fan subscriptions, or sell in-app gifts in live streams or audio rooms. Soon, they’ll be able to start paid newsletters, earn affiliate commission from products their followers buy and participate in a branded content marketplace. The company is also launching several new bonus programs that will pay creators for signing up for IGTV ads, creating Reels or meeting live-streaming milestones.

Facebook

Zuckerberg and other top executives now regularly speak about creators and the opportunity they represent. The company is so eager to win over the creator community it’s promised it won’t take a cut of their earnings until 2023.

Li Jin, founder of Atelier Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in the creator economy, says surging interest in creators is because the industry has gotten so big it’s no longer something platforms can afford to ignore.

“I think for a long time there was no need to separately think of creators as a distinct segment that was in need of specialized features or funds,” Jin says. “I think what changed is the realization that … these creators’ content is driving a disproportionate amount of activity and engagement on the platforms.”

That Facebook is late to the creator economy also means the company is facing an incredible amount of competition. TikTok, which has a reputation for a creator-friendly algorithm, just passed 3 billion downloads, the first non-Facebook owned app to do so, according to analytics company Sensor Tower. Users of TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Duoyin, together spent more than a half billion dollars in the app during the second quarter of 2021, alone. In the United States in 2020, TikTok was significantly ahead of Facebook and Instagram in user engagement, according to App Annie.

App Annie

Meanwhile Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and other platforms are also pouring money into new initiatives for creators. “There's a limited number of creators and everyone is in competition for them,” Jin says.

Facebook has offered various explanations for its sudden interest in creators. Zuckerberg has said he wants to help more people “make a living” off Facebook’s services. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently said the company was responding to “the shift in power from institutions to individuals across industries.”

It’s also a major opportunity to shift Facebook’s business away from ads. Though Facebook has promised it won’t take a cut of creators’ earnings for more than a year, that will eventually change (the company hasn’t said what its cut will be, only that it will be “less” than Apple’s 30-percent commission).

Creators could also provide a massive boost to the company’s push into shopping. Commerce has also been a major focus for the social network, which has already crammed shopping features into nearly every corner of Instagram, and Zuckerberg has said he intends to create “a full-featured commerce platform” across Facebook’s services.

What’s less clear is just how much creators will be willing to buy-in to Facebook’s vision. While a $1 billion investment will almost certainly fuel more interest in the platform, it’s not clear if it will prompt the kind of content Facebook might be hoping for. Instagram’s Reels, for example, was meant to be the company’s chief TikTok competitor. Yet the company has at times had to push creators to post original content there.

And concerns about Facebook’s algorithms remain, says Bruneteau. “The algorithm should be favorable to creators like it is on TikTok,” she says. “You have these instant influencers on TikTok, who have been able to grow million-plus followings in less than a year. However those same instant influencers who have those accounts have a tendency to have less followers on Instagram.”

There are signs that Facebook might be willing to address these concerns. Mosseri recently raised eyebrows when he said that Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app, and that the company was working one ways to insert more recommended content in users’ feeds in order to compete with TikTok.

But even with a kinder algorithm, both Bruneteau and Jin caution that creators should be cautious in throwing too many resources into Facebook or any one platform.

“When creators are building their processes on top of these like centralized platforms, they're actually creating more value for the underlying platform than they're able to create for themselves,” Jin says. “At the end of the day you're strengthening Facebook's dominance because the more content you put there, the more it attracts consumer users and the more that translates into Facebook revenue and Facebook's network effects.”

Last April, Facebook’s AI research lab (FAIR) announced and released as open source its BlenderBot social chat app. While the neophyte AI immediately proved far less prone to racist outbursts than previous attempts, BlenderBot was not without its shortcomings. For one, the system had the recollection capacity of a goldfish — any subject or data point the AI wasn’t initially trained simply didn’t exist in its online reality, as evidenced by the OG BB’s continued insistence that Tom Brady still plays for the New England Patriots. For another, due to its limited knowledge of current events, the system had a strong tendency to hallucinate knowledge, like a digital Dunning-Kruger effect. But the advancements BlenderBot 2.0 displays, which FAIR debuted on Friday, should make the AI far more sociable, knowledgeable, and capable.

While BlenderBot 1.0 could only maintain its memory for a single discussion, its successor can remember topics of conversation over the course of multiple talks that can take days, weeks or even months to complete thanks to the implementation of a long-term memory module. What’s more, the AI can actively update its knowledge base by searching the internet for the latest news and details on any subject that the user wishes to speak about.

“BlenderBot 2 queries the Bing API for search results based on a generated search query, and conditions its response on the top few results,” Kurt Shuster, Research Engineer at Facebook AI, told Engadget. “We rely on Bing to provide high quality search results.” As such, BlenderBot 2.0 is now capable of speaking coherently about breaking news and new media, not just the data it was trained upon.

FAIR

“BlenderBot 2 is limited only by what a powerful search engine can provide,” Jason Weston, Research Scientist at Facebook AI, added. So for example, if you are more interested in learning about Tom Yewcic (the Patriot’s combo QB/Punter from the 1962 season) than you are about Tom Brady, BB 2.0 has you covered. It’s the same with more scholarly subjects, like photosynthesis or redox reactions, Weston continued. So long as the information is available on the web, “there is no reason BlenderBot 2 cannot discuss this.”

By actively searching the internet for information, BlenderBot 2.0 can also reduce the instances in which it hallucinates knowledge. “Providing the system with more commonsense reasoning will allow BlenderBot to make sure it does not confuse subtle concepts,” Weston explained, “such as a movie director versus a producer or a pitching coach versus a hitting coach.”

FAIR

The only wrinkle really occurs when discussing non-english based media, such as Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. “It is reasonable to conclude Bing will surface information about it and BlenderBot 2 can use that information accordingly,” he said. “We currently focus on english-based search results, so non-english references may not be fully covered.” The system will, however, recognize that Demon Slayer is of interest to you and will be more likely to bring up manga-centric subjects in future discussions.

FAIR has taken multiple steps to ensure that BlenderBot does not become the next Tay. “BlenderBot 2 does not learn directly from user input, as Tay did,” Shuster said. “We have taken extensive safety steps to ensure that BlenderBot 2 can handle adversarial users. Specifically, we employ both baked-in and two-stage techniques. BlenderBot 2 can detect itself if the incoming context will result in an offensive response, and additional safety layers where a safety classifier can detect if either the user input or the bot's output is offensive. Each handles the response appropriately.”

And while the system is currently focused on chewing its way through the English language corpus, FAIR does see BlenderBot does eventually extend to other languages as well. “While not in our immediate plans, the goal of our team is to build a superhuman conversationalist,” Shuster said. “This kind of agent requires multilingual understanding.”

Recent internal benchmarking processes found that BlenderBot 2.0 outperformed its predecessor by 17 percent in its engagingness score and 55 percent in its use of previous conversation sessions according to human evaluators, per a Friday blog from FAIR. What’s more, BlenderBot's rate of knowledge hallucinations dropped from 9 percent (!) in BB 1.0 down to just 3 percent in the current iteration.

Looking ahead, “humans interacting with AI systems via discourse is the future of AI,” Weston asserted, “and ensuring that humans have an engaging, informative experience is critical to that future. BlenderBot 2 combines the engagingness of BlenderBot 1.0 with the knowledge capabilities of a system with access to the entire internet, so ostensibly we are on the right track.”

Twitter rolled out voice tweets over a year ago now and has taken a lot of heat for the lack of accessibility features. Now, it's finally rolling out automatically generated captions that appear when you click on the "CC" button. The new feature is only available on iOS, as voice tweets have yet to arrive on Android. 

Captions are available in English, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, French, Indonesian, korean and Italian. They will only appear on new voice tweets, as they need to be generated when the tweet is created, Twitter told The Verge. 

When voice tweets were first being tested last June, critics immediately pointed out that they should have had captions from the start as required in the US by Federal Law. Twitter then admitted that it didn't have a dedicated accessibility team and relied on employees to donate additional time for those features. Since then, however, the company has launched teams dedicated to accessibility. The company originally promised to add automated captions by early 2021, but that date obviously slipped a bit. 

Twitter promised to improve and expand the service across its products. “Though it’s still early and we know it won’t be perfect at first, it’s one of many steps we’re taking to expand and strengthen accessibility across our service, and we look forward to continuing our journey to create a truly inclusive service," said Twitter's global accessibility head Gurpreet Kaur.