Folks who are attending the FIFA World Cup in Qatar don't have to miss out on all the player stats they'd see while watching games on TV. The FIFA+ app has an augmented reality feature that allows fans to view the likes of VAR replays and alternate camera angles.

FIFA says that only people who are attending matches in person can access the FIFA+ Stadium Experience. According to a video that has gained traction, users can point their phone's camera at the pitch. An overlay will pop up that enables them to tap on a player to see things like their movement speed and individual heatmap.

The VAR replays could come in handy for those who are in the stadium but aren't clear about why the referee made a certain decision. In the buildup to Japan's winning goal against Spain on Thursday, it appeared as though the ball went out of play (as shown in the image above). The referee initially disallowed the goal but overturned the decision after VAR showed a sliver of the ball remained in bounds. Having the option to see the VAR replay on their phone might have helped fans in attendance understand the call, especially if they missed it on the big screen.

The AR overlay looks neat and it could add to the experience of being at a game for some folks. On the other hand, it's the World Cup and possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Sometimes, it's okay to keep your phone away and be truly immersed in what's going on around you.

Cadillac Racing says its first electric race car is almost ready for the 24 Hours of Daytona event in January after passing critical testing and development milestones. Since July, the V-LMDh has gone through nearly 12,000 miles (19,000 km) of on-track testing, including a 24-hour test at Sebring International Raceway.

Cadillac collected data on nighttime operation and durability on the bumpy 3.7-mile circuit. Program manager Laura Wontrop Klauser claimed Sebring was the perfect testing ground for the V-LMDh ahead of its competitive debut at Daytona. “To complete that endurance test was extra motivation for our team and provided a sense of accomplishment,” Klauser said in a statement. “We still have a lot to do in a short time, but we are at the point where we are fine-tuning many things.”

The car is also slated to take part in the 24-hour race at Le Mans in June. Cadillac plans to run it in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the FIA World Endurance Championship. A final test will take place next week at Daytona as part of mandatory evaluations for all manufacturers intending to take part in the IMSA’s new Grand Touring Prototype class. Cadillac Racing will reveal the final competition version of the three V-LMDh race cars, including liveries (and hopefully a new name), in mid-January.

Geoff Keighley and his team might be focused on The Game Awards, but they're also looking ahead to their next gaming event. The fourth edition of Summer Game Fest's live kickoff show, which will have a live audience for the first time, will take place on June 8th. 

Keighley was involved with E3 for 25 years, though he backed out in early 2020 (before the Entertainment Software Association canceled that year's edition). Three years later, the two events are set to go toe-to-toe.

The long-running expo hasn't held an in-person event since 2019. The 2020 and 2022 editions of E3 were called off, though it went ahead as an online-only event in 2021. E3's partner showcases start on June 11th with the in-person component of the show (which PAX operator ReedPop will run) slated for June 13th to 16th.

The Summer Game Fest showcase will take place at the 6,000-capacity YouTube Theater, a 20-minute drive from E3's Los Angeles Convention Center home base. As ever, the former will feature world premieres, gameplay demos and other announcements. Unless you want to attend Summer Game Fest in person, you won't need to buy a ticket as you can watch the event live on the likes of YouTube and Twitch. It's not yet clear if publishers and studios will offer hands-on demos, as is the case at E3.

Sony's PlayStation Tournaments are finally available to play on PS5, and the biggest upgrade may simply be the greater chance of joining an event. The eSports-for-everyone feature now centers around shorter tourneys at regular intervals — it should be easier to find a competition that fits your life. Sony will even create multiple brackets to keep the duration in check. You can sign up directly from your console, too, so you won't have to head to another device just to get started.

The new PlayStation Tournaments system also boasts a revamped interface that takes advantage of PS5 activity cards and notifications to help you find events, track (automatically updated) results, and let you know when it's time to play. You can locate competitions from games' home screen sections. And if you'd like to do more than just compete, a Discord community hub promises both chat as well as hosted interviews and game sessions.

Sony

Anyone in an eligible country with a PlayStation Plus membership can join, with the first PS5 tournaments focusing on FIFA 23, Guilty Gear Strive and NBA 2K23. Prizes range from in-game currency through to cash, PlayStation hardware and "experiences." To reel you in, Sony is running a "Win-A-Thon" leaderboard event between December 1st and January 31st that rewards you the better you fare in regional tournaments. The promo will also be available to PS4 owners.

As with Microsoft's Xbox Live tournaments, the PlayStation eSports offering is meant to keep you engaged and spending money. You might be more likely to buy the latest sports title if you know you can win real-world rewards. Even so, the PS5 expansion might be helpful by making eSports more accessible to current-gen console owners.

Two months after its chaotic launch, Overwatch 2 is in a much healthier place and Blizzard is gearing up for the game's second season. A gameplay trailer for the season, which starts on December 6th and will introduce another new tank character, provides a glimpse of an upcoming limited-time mode. It's called Battle for Olympus and it will run from January 5th until January 19th.

Blizzard only offered a brief look at Battle for Olympus in the trailer, but it takes place on a revamped version of the Ilios map and shows Roadhog firing rocks (instead of his usual scrap) and Junker Queen raining lightning down onto the battlefield. To wit, Blizzard says heroes will be "imbued with awesome god-like powers" in this mode.

Speaking of Junker Queen, the tank who joined the lineup when Overwatch 2 launched, she's the recipient of a mythic skin in season two, which (perhaps unsurprisingly) has a Greek mythology theme. The Zeus look has customizable parts and new weapon models, voice lines and special effects. That rad skin is the reward for reaching level 80 of the next battle pass.

The Winter Wonderland and Lunar New Year events will return during the season as well, and they'll feature fresh skins. During last month's Halloween event, there was no way for players to earn new event skins for free, which led to a backlash from players. However, Blizzard has said that, starting in season two, every event will have a skin that fans can unlock by simply playing the game — just like they could in the Overwatch 1 days.

The trailer also offered a look at the new escort map for season two, Shambali Monastery, where Zenyatta and the latest tank hero, Ramattra, used to live (a deeper dive into the map is coming later this week). Ramattra is the game's first so-called "tempo" tank. He can change forms and gain access to alternate abilities. He's all about closing the gap between his team and the enemy. Ramattra will initially be gated behind the season two battle pass. Buying the premium battle pass will unlock him instantly, but you'll need to grind through the ranks to claim him for free.

Elsewhere, Blizzard will rotate the map selection for the core game modes. Two maps, Oasis and Nepal, will be playable at different times of day. Balance changes for some heroes are on the way and those who miss out on unlocking Sojourn, Junker Queen and Kiriko in season one will be able to add them to their roster by winning a certain number of games.

Robots that can whack a golf ball down a fairway aren't exactly new, but building one that can play the nuanced short game is a more complex problem. Researchers at Paderborn University in Germany have done just that with Golfi, a machine that uses a neural network to figure out how to line up a putt and how hard to hit the ball to get it into the hole from anywhere on the green.

The robot takes a snapshot of the green with a Microsoft Kinect 3D camera and it simulates thousands of random shots taken from different positions. It takes factors like the turf's rolling resistance, the ball's weight and the starting velocity into account. Paderborn doctoral student Annika Junker told IEEE Research that training Golfi on simulated golf shots takes five minutes, compared with 30-40 hours were the team to feed data from real-life shots into the system.

Once Golfi has figured out the shot it should take, it rolls over to the ball and uses a belt-driven gear shaft with a putter attached to make the putt. The robot doesn't get the ball in the hole every time, though. Junker said the robot nailed the shot around 60-70 percent of the time. That's still a better accuracy rate than most amateur golfers and at least you won't see Golfi fly off the handle like Happy Gilmore if it misses.

However, Golfi sometimes drove over the ball and moved it out of position. The researchers have only tested the robot in the lab, so real-world conditions, like greens with divots or steep slopes, may pose problems for a system that relies on a bird's-eye view.

In any case, the researchers didn't set out to build a robot capable of competing with PGA Tour pros. They hope that the techniques they used in Golfi could be used for other robotics applications. “You can also transfer that to other problems, where you have some knowledge about the system and could model parts of it to obtain some data, but you can’t model everything,” Niklas Fittkau, another Paderborn University doctoral student and co-lead author of a paper on Golfi, told IEEE Research.

Back in 2016, a different robot called LDRIC sank a hole-in-one at a PGA event (albeit on the fifth attempt). I wonder who footed the bill for a round of drinks at the clubhouse afterward.

A year after it was first announced, EA’s return to college football has a release window. In an interview with ESPN, Daryl Holt, the vice president and general manager of the company’s EA Sports division, said the publisher plans to release the game in the summer of 2024. If another year-and-a-half of development sounds like a lot for what will become an annual release for EA, it’s because the company says it wants to create a title fans will want to play.

"That's the best date for us to bring the game that we think is going to meet or exceed our player expectations," Holt told ESPN. "And cover the breadth and scale of what we want in the game. We're trying to build a very immersive college football experience."

Besides announcing a release window, Holt shared some details about what the final game will look like. He said the title would feature at least 120 schools, all 10 FBS conferences and the College Football Playoff. He added that EA was working on finding a way to include real-life student-athletes in the game. “Our intent is to work towards that and find a meaningful way to include them in the game,” he said. An EA source told ESPN athletes would be compensated if they end up in the game. The final product will also feature Dynasty and Road to Glory modes – the latter allowing you to create your own player and take them through the college football process.

2024 is a long time to wait for a new college football entry, but after nearly a decade since the release of NCAA Football 14, most fans are probably happy to wait if it means EA delivers a polished game. Holt promised EA Sports would share more information about the title ahead of release.

Nintendo Switch Sports is a fun package that modernizes the world-conquering Wii Sports, but it was missing a few of the 2006 classic's game modes at the jump. One of those will arrive very soon as a November 28th update will add golf to the game.

You'll have access to 21 holes from the Wii Sports series. Along with casual modes that you can enjoy with family and friends, you can check out a survival golf mode. Nintendo hasn't revealed too many details about the latter yet, other than the fact you'll need to "swing to avoid elimination." It may be similar to the 16-player bowling survival mode. 

No matter which modes you try, be sure to strap the Joy-Con to your wrist before you start swinging your hand around. You won't want the controller to fly out of your hand and smash your TV or monitor.

Nintendo previously said golf would be available in Switch Sports this fall, so it's showing up right on schedule. The company hasn't confirmed whether the likes of boxing or baseball are on the way, but fingers crossed that Nintendo will add those as surprise updates at some point down the line.

Machine learning systems have been mopping the floor with their human opponents for well over a decade now (seriously, that first Watson Jeopardy win was all the way back in 2011), though the types of games they excel at are rather limited. Typically competitive board or video games using a limited play field, sequential moves and at least one clearly-defined opponent, any game that requires the crunching of numbers is to their advantage. Diplomacy, however, requires very little computation, instead demanding players negotiate directly with their opponents and make respective plays simultaneously — things modern ML systems are generally not built to do. But that hasn't stopped Meta researchers from designing an AI agent that can negotiate global policy positions as well as any UN ambassador.

Diplomacy was first released in 1959 and works like a more refined version of RISK where between two and seven players assume the roles of a European power and attempt to win the game by conquering their opponents' territories. Unlike RISK where the outcome of conflicts are decided by a simple the roll of the dice, Diplomacy demands players first negotiate with one another — setting up alliances, backstabbing, all that good stuff — before everybody moves their pieces simultaneously during the following game phase. The abilities to read and manipulate opponents, convince players to form alliances and plan complex strategies, navigate delicate partnerships and know when to switch sides, are all a huge part of the game — and all skills that machine learning systems generally lack.

On Wednesday, Meta AI researchers announced that they had surmounted those machine learning shortcomings with CICERO, the first AI to display human-level performance in Diplomacy. The team trained Cicero on 2.7 billion parameters over the course of 50,000 rounds at webDiplomacy.net, an online version of the game, where it ended up in second place (out of 19 participants) in a 5-game league tournament, all while doubling up the average score of its opponents.

The AI agent proved so adept "at using natural language to negotiate with people in Diplomacy that they often favored working with CICERO over other human participants," the Meta team noted in a press release Wednesday. "Diplomacy is a game about people rather than pieces. If an agent can't recognize that someone is likely bluffing or that another player would see a certain move as aggressive, it will quickly lose the game. Likewise, if it doesn't talk like a real person — showing empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game — it won't find other players willing to work with it."

Meta

Essentially, Cicero combines the strategic mindset from Pluribot or AlphaGO with the natural language processing (NLP) abilities of Blenderbot or GPT-3. The agent is even capable of forethought. "Cicero can deduce, for example, that later in the game it will need the support of one particular player, and then craft a strategy to win that person’s favor – and even recognize the risks and opportunities that that player sees from their particular point of view," the research team noted.

The agent does not train through a standard reinforcement learning scheme as similar systems do. The Meta team explains that doing so would lead to suboptimal performance as, "relying purely on supervised learning to choose actions based on past dialogue results in an agent that is relatively weak and highly exploitable."

Instead Cicero uses "iterative planning algorithm that balances dialogue consistency with rationality." It will first predict its opponents' plays based on what happened during the negotiation round, as well as what play it thinks its opponents think it will make before "iteratively improving these predictions by trying to choose new policies that have higher expected value given the other players' predicted policies, while also trying to keep the new predictions close to the original policy predictions." Easy, right?

The system is not yet fool-proof, as the agent will occasionally get too clever and wind up playing itself by taking contradictory negotiating positions. Still, its performance in these early trials is superior to that of many human politicians. Meta plans to continue developing the system to "serve as a safe sandbox to advance research in human-AI interaction."

Charging is usually one of the least exciting parts of driving an EV, but the FIA thinks it can make these pauses more engaging. As part of updated regulations, Formula E will trial a 30-second "Attack Charge" during some races in the ninth season. New battery technology will give cars 4kWh of energy from the half-minute session thanks to a 600kW booster. The charging stop will be mandatory at a specified point in the race, but drivers will receive two "enhanced" Attack Mode periods later in the race as compensation.

The quick charge is tied to the Gen3 cars making their debut in the new season. The current Attack Mode, where drivers can activate a momentary power boost, will still be available in those races where Attack Charge isn't in use. The modified Attack Mode isn't what was originally planned. According to The Race, the FIA had originally hoped to revive pit stops, but the necessary system wasn't ready in time. Those more conventional stops are expected to come, but not for a while yet.

The upcoming season also makes fundamental changes to the league's competitive format. Races now take place over a set number of laps, rather than a fixed amount of time. If there are safety car and full course yellow disruptions, organizers will add more laps. Teams will also have to complete a minimum of two Free Practice 1 sessions with rookie drivers to help them experience Formula E. And don't expect to play a role in your favorite driver's victory — the spectator-driven Fanboost is going away.

Season nine and Gen3 will launch in Mexico City this January. It's too soon to say if Attack Charge will spice up races in real-world conditions. However, it might point to the future of roadgoing EVs. Even the fastest-charging street models take at least a few minutes to get a meaningful amount of range from a charging session. Hyundai's Ioniq 5 needs five minutes on a 350kW charger for 53 miles of driving, for instance. While 600kW chargers won't become mainstream for a while (Geely's Viridi brand only unveiled its tech this September), Formula E's testing hints at a day when your EV might only need a brief stop to recover enough range for a long drive.