South by Southwest is taking place online this year, and one of the things attendees can check out is an interactive HBO Max experience. HBO Max Orbit aims to show off the depth of the streaming service's catalog in a novel way.

Through facial movement recognition and voice commands, HBO Max Orbit will allow you to interact with moments, stories and characters from the library, according to WarnerMedia. HBO Max has packed more than 150,000 clips into Orbit, including ones from Game of Thrones, Lovecraft Country, The Big Bang Theory, Tom and Jerry and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. The scenes are drawn from titles from HBO, Warner Bros., DC, Cartoon Network and other WarnerMedia brands.

The experience will dig up clips of characters that match your movements in real time. Certain clips will activate a challenge, through which you'll need to move your face to look for clips that match a title. You might also be asked to say a phrase from a specific show within a time limit. Completing a challenge will unlock parts of an exclusive clip from Godzilla vs. Kong, which arrives on HBO Max and in theaters at the end of the month.

You'll be able to check out HBO Max Orbit starting on March 19th. Starting in April, an in-person version will be available at some flagship AT&T stores. WarnerMedia says that will take place in an immersive 360-degree chamber designed to "optimize the feeling of a vast audio-visual space." It will match clips to your body movements and voice.

Facebook is offering creators more options to make money from their audiences. One method it’s testing is a way to make bank from Stories. Some creators will be able to plug ads that look similar to stickers into their Stories and they'll get a cut of ad revenue. For instance, creators might plug local businesses with a sticker while they're on trips.

Only a small number of creators have access to this option during the initial test, but Facebook hopes to roll out the feature in the near future. It also plans to enable the feature for all short-form videos.

Elsewhere, Facebook is bringing mid-roll ads to shorter videos. Until now, ads were only present in videos that were at least three minutes long. You may start to see ads in videos that run for only a minute. Videos lasting between one and three minutes can have ads 30 seconds in. Ads can appear in longer videos after 45 seconds, down from one minute.

Pages will only be able to run ads on shorter videos if they meet certain requirements, like having 600,000 minutes of total watch time in the previous 60 days and at least five active video uploads. Live video creators additionally need to have at least 60,000 minutes of live watch time over the same period to qualify for ads in their streams.

Facebook

Facebook is also expanding paid live events to another 24 countries and switching on fan subscriptions in 10 more regions. In addition, it's spending $7 million to promote the Stars virtual tipping currency. As with Twitch Bits, users can send these to creators. Facebook will be giving away Stars during certain live streams. Comments that users send with Stars will be more prominently displayed on streams. You'll be able to send virtual gifts to creators too.

Stars will be available in more markets, and you can check on a creator support site whether your Page is eligible. Soon, Facebook will expand Stars beyond live streams by testing them in on-demand videos. Meanwhile, Facebook has updated the minimum eligibility criteria for gaming creators to become partners and unlock more features and monetization options.

If you've had your fill of single player slogs — or tedious multiplayer modes that require you to grind for virtual riches that otherwise cost real money — then The Magnificent Trufflepigs should feel like a breath of fresh air. The new offering from Andrew Crawshaw, the lead designer of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, is an indie title that you can play from start to finish in one sitting. Coming to the Nintendo Switch and PC this summer, the pastoral game has you traipsing through the British countryside looking for buried treasure using a metal detector, with just a walkie talkie for companionship. 

You play the role of Adam (voiced by Arthur Darvill of Doctor Who fame), who upon returning to his childhood village joins up with a local woman named Beth (Luci Fish of Safe House and Another Eden) to track down the missing half of a set of earrings. Along the way, you'll do a fair bit of walking and digging as you unearth rubbish and snap pics of your finds to show Beth, who shares her innermost thoughts with you over the two-way radio.

The setup should sound immediately familiar to anyone who has played Rapture, which arrived to near unanimous praise back in 2016. Described as a visual novel or radio play, that game rewarded patience by slowly unfurling its apocalyptic sci-fi mystery of a small town depleted of its inhabitants. The comms element in Trufflepigs also recalls Firewatch, another acclaimed indie that made its way to the Switch in 2018.

The new game marks the first outing for Crawshaw's video game studio Thunk'd. It's also backed by AMC Games, the video game publishing division of Mad Men and Breaking Bad producer AMC Networks, along with its subsidiary Sundance TV.

My studio setup, like many bedroom producers’, is a hodgepodge of random nonsense. Honestly there are a lot of pain points in my current workflow, but one of the biggest is mixing. I use a Tascam 424 Portastudio (yes the kind that records to cassette tapes) as a submixer, before moving over to Ableton where I do most of the heavy lifting. You can’t beat a modern DAW for its expansive set of controls and automation but, clicking and dragging knobs and sliders just feels disappointing. Solid State Logic’s (SSL) UF8 gives all those virtual controls a physical incarnation. It’s not the first mixing controller, nor is it the cheapest, but it’s definitely one of the more comprehensive and premium options on the market.

At $1,299 the UF8 is not for casual hobbyist musicians. You need to take your craft fairly seriously to drop that amount of money on something relatively niche. Remember, it’s just for mixing and transport controls, you’ll still need a separate controller to actually, you know, play music on. But I will say that, after a week with the UF8 on my desk, I get the appeal.

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

Physically this thing is nothing but pure pleasure. The entire device is encased in metal, and the top has a nice brushed texture. The motorized faders are smooth and quiet, and the encoders offer just a hint of resistance — they definitely make my Tascam feel like a toy. The faders definitely aren’t silent, but they’re not distracting as long as you’ve got the speakers at a reasonable volume. This is definitely a pricey luxury to have on a controller, but not a useless one. If you’re bouncing back and forth between your screen and the faders, you want the two to mirror each other.

The buttons also make it quick and easy to select and arm tracks for recording, to mute or solo them and even tackle things like send effects or control your various plugins. Training myself to stop relying on my mouse and keyboard has been hard, but when I remember to reach for the UF8 first it’s always an enjoyable experience from a tactile perspective.

The basics are pretty obvious if you’ve used a mixing console or DAW. There are eight faders (one for each channel); with select, mute and solo buttons next to them; eight encoders across the tops of the faders that default to controlling the pan of each track; and a small display that gives you information about each track, feedback about parameters and indicate what the encoders and soft keys along the top are controlling at any given time.

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

The problem is that some of the more advanced tools (like controlling plugins) might be a few button presses away, and it’s not always immediately clear how to get there. The eight screens give you a good amount of information, but the controls and labels are constantly changing. I’m sure I’d get used to it in time, and it’s an unavoidable byproduct of putting so much power in a relatively compact form factor, but it can be a bit disorienting.

For instance: Let’s say I have a simple session set up with drums, a soft synth and bass on tracks one, two and three respectively. All the tracks also have a compressor and an EQ plugin on them. If I want to tweak the settings for the EQ on track two, first I have to select the channel in normal mode, not record mode. Then, all of the indicators under each channel will change to list the various plugins on that channel. Meaning that, even though the large label on the screen over track one says “Drums” the small text underneath it will say “ANLG”, because Ableton’s Analog synth is the first plugin on track two which is currently selected. And while the fader on track one will still control the volume of the drums, the encoder that normally controls panning now won’t do anything when you turn it.

From here I’ll have to find the EQ plugin (which, for the sake of argument we’ll say is after the compressor and under track three) and press the encoder under it. At which point all the labels for the encoders will change again to reflect the controls of the EQ plugin. From here you’ll turn those knobs to find the settings you want. And you may even have to flip through multiple pages of parameters. Again, this puts comprehensive control at your fingertips, but it can be a bit confusing while you’re still finding your footing.

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

The depth of the controls is truly impressive, though. Out of the box the UF8 works pretty seamlessly with Ableton, Logic, Studio One, Cubase and Pro Tools. There are templates for each DAW that you can select and then customize to your needs. There are three “quick” keys on the top left that you can program to perform certain tasks, like switching between arrangement and session view in Ableton, or opening your plugin browser. On the top right corner are six softkeys which change what the row of eight buttons across the top do. The first spot is set in stone, but the other five banks of controls are user assignable, so they can start and stop playback, set punch in points, turn on looping or even trigger keyboard shortcuts.

Tweaking all of those settings too is super easy with the SSL 360 app. It even has its own dedicated button on the face of the UF8. So if you suddenly wish you had one-button access to save your project or go full screen, you can immediately hop into the configuration tool and do that. (Honestly, one-button save should be in the default selection of controls, but I digress.)

Terrence O'Brien / Engadget

If you take the time to learn the UF8 and customize it to your workflow, I could see it being a big asset. As much as I’m used to doing most of my mixing and such with a keyboard and mouse, having faders that I could push around in real time and control multiple tracks at once was amazing.

But price will be a limiting factor here. While SSL says the UF8 is designed with both the professional and the hobbyist in mind, I have a hard time seeing too many weekend warrior musicians picking one up. $1,299 is a lot to ask even for something this premium feeling. Instead I imagine this will fit better in the homestudios of professional producers and as an add-on to SSL’s massive professional consoles, like the $50,000 Origin (which the UF8 just happens to slot perfectly into the center of).

If you have any interest at all in electronic music, you owe it to yourself to check out Google’s latest Arts & Culture exhibit. Music, Makers and Machines celebrates the history of the genre, highlighting the people, sounds and technologies that helped make electronic music what it is today. Google got help on the project from more than 50 international institutions, record labels and industry experts, including the Moogseum.

One highlight is an entire section devoted to the early days of Dubstep. You’ll find short, written segments on artists like Burial and the subgenre's development complemented by photos and YouTube videos. You can even use Google Street View to explore the locations of long-closed but seminal clubs like Plastic People. Another compelling exhibit explores the role Black artists and musicians have played in pushing the boundaries of electronic music. That said, the highlight of the exhibit is an AR synth module that allows you to play around with five classic instruments, including the Roland CR-78 and Akai S900. Speaking of synths, Google has uploaded 3D models of some of the most iconic ones.

You can check out Music, Makers and Machines online, as well as through the Google Arts & Culture app on Android and iOS.

Fortnite players are accustomed to being thrust into massive season-ending events that bring together hordes of players to witness an epic set piece. But, this time round, developer Epic Games is switching things up. Instead of a multiplayer spectacle, it's launching into its new season with a solo mission that puts you in control of Agent Jones. 

In a blog post, Epic describes the story mode as a reality-altering "explosive" event that concludes Jonesy's mission in the Zero Crisis Finale. You'll be able to play through it when Chapter 2 Season 6 starts on March 16th or watch it online in cinematic form during a global premiere at a later date. 

Fortnite's previous season kicked off in December after a record-breaking finale event that saw Jonesy and a slew of Marvel superheroes teaming up against planet-ravaging villain, Galactus. Season 5 somehow managed to ramp up the movie and gaming tie-ins, with an exhaustive list of playable characters including The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda, the Terminator, Street Fighter's Ryu and Chun-Li and Ripley and the Xenomorph Queen from the Alien filmseries. To top that, Epic is promising its most "ambitious story cinematic" yet.

[Patrick] was looking for an easier way to control music and movies on his computer from across the room. There is a huge amount of remote control products that could be purchased to do this, but as a hacker [Patrick] wanted to make something himself. He calls his creation, “Dial” and it’s a simple but elegant solution to the problem.

Dial looks like a small cylindrical container that sits on a flat surface. It’s actually split into a top and bottom cylinder. The bottom acts as a base and stays stationary while the top acts as a dial and a push button. The case was designed in SOLIDWORKS and printed on a 3D printer.

The Dial runs on an Arduino Pro mini with a Bluetooth module. The original prototype used Bluetooth 2.0 and required a recharge after about a day. The latest version uses the Bluetooth low energy spec and can reportedly last several weeks on a single charge. Once the LiPo battery dies, it can be recharged easily once plugged into a USB port.

The mechanical component of the dial is actually an off-the-shelf rotary encoder. The encoder included a built-in push button to make things easier. The firmware is able to detect rotation in either direction, a button press, a double press, and a press-and-hold. This gives five different possible functions.

[Patrick] wrote two pieces of software to handle interaction with the Dial. The first is a C program to deal with the Bluetooth communication. The second is actually a set of Apple scripts to actually handle interaction between the Dial and the various media programs on his computer. This allows the user to more easily write their own scripts for whatever software they want. While this may have read like a product review, the Dial is actually open source!