Meta is changing course on its controversial requirement for users of its virtual reality headsets to log in with a Facebook account. Instead, they'll need a new Meta account, which won't need to be linked to Facebook. The company will start rolling out the new account next month for existing and new Meta Quest users. Those with a legacy Oculus account will need to have a Meta account to keep using their headset after January 1st, 2023.

The company stressed that a Meta account is not a social media profile, saying that it "lets you log into your VR devices and view and manage your purchased apps in one place." It noted that future devices will require Meta accounts too.

There is a social aspect to the new account type though, at least for VR headsets. When you create a Meta account, you'll need to create a Meta Horizon profile with the username, avatar, profile photo and so on that you'll use in the company's vision of the metaverse.

Oculus friends will become your followers and you'll automatically follow them back. You can, of course, unfollow people and stop others from following you. You'll still have the option of linking your Meta account to Facebook and Instagram, so you'll be able to chat with friends in the VR version of Messenger or find some buds to play games with. 

While Facebook has a one-account-per-person rule, the company is fine with you having multiple Meta accounts. Perhaps you'll have one for virtual meetings and another for hanging out with friends.

The new accounts will offer privacy controls, including the option to make your profile private and manually approve follower requests. Users aged between 13 and 17 will have private profiles by default.

This is an important shift for Meta as it continues to place more focus on its vision of the metaverse. However, Meta is said to have scaled back its metaverse ambitions in the last few months, having reportedly killed off some Reality Labs projects and put a planned dual-camera smartwatch on hold. 

Still, there are at least some positives of Meta divorcing VR from its social media apps. Folks who are interested in Meta Quest but want nothing to do with Facebook will no longer need an account for the latter.

Twitter is experimenting with a new feature that allows two accounts to co-author a tweet. The company is calling it a “CoTweet,” which it’s now testing with “select” accounts in the United States, Canada and Korea.

With a CoTweet, two accounts can be linked as the author of a single tweet, which will appear on both accounts’ timelines. Much like the collabs feature introduced by Instagram last year, CoTweets seem to be geared more toward brands and creators than the typical Twitter users.

“CoTweets help authors share the spotlight, unlock opportunities for engaging new audiences, and enhance their established partnerships,” Twitter explains on its website. The feature was first spotted earlier this year by reverse engineer and developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who shared some details about it back in February.

Now, Twitter has expanded the test, at least for now. A Twitter spokesperson said that CoTweets is currently a “temporary experiment,” but didn’t indicate if, or when, the feature may be more widely available. “We’re testing CoTweets for a limited time to learn how people and brands may use this feature to grow and reach new audiences, and strengthen their collaborations with other accounts,” the spokesperson said.

With supply chains still in disarray and the war in Ukraine wreaking havoc on EV battery component commodity prices, many forward-thinking automakers are scrambling to secure not only stocks of the valuable metals like cobalt, lithium and nickel that go into EV batteries, but also the means of of building the batteries themselves. On Thursday, Volkswagen Group held a groundbreaking at the site of its forthcoming EV battery cell plant in Salzgitter Germany and announced the formation of a new company, PowerCo, which will be responsible for handling the VW Group's burgeoning battery business. 

"Today is a good day for the automotive industry in Germany and Europe," German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during the event. "Volkswagen is showing how the future of sustainable, climate-compatible mobility could look. Together, we are laying the foundation for shaping this future to a significant extent in Salzgitter."

PowerCo will handle the Group's global battery activities, from producing the batteries themselves to conducting R&D on new battery technologies to "products such as major storage systems for the energy grid," per the announcement. Once the Salzgitter plant is operational, PowerCo will begin work on a second factory in Valencia, Spain with an eye on three further cell factories in Europe and potentially North America as well. Each of the European factories will reportedly operate using 100 percent renewable energy. In all, PowerCo aims to open a total of six battery factories in Europe producing a total of 240 GWh capacity every year (~6 million electric vehicles worth).

Stefan Warter

Operations across the various production facilities will be highly standardized. Everything from "equipment, buildings and infrastructure" to "products, processes and IT" will conform so that the entire production process can be more readily adapted to future "product and production innovations," per the release.

(c) Sebastian Dorbrietz

The Salzgitter plant is expected to create 5,000 new jobs when it begins operations in 2025 with an annual capacity of 40 GWh (~500,000 electric vehicles worth). Some 20,000 positions are will need to be filled once the other European factories open, Daniela Cavallo, Chairwoman of the General and Group Works Council of Volkswagen AG, said. 

Inscryption, one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2021, is coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. So far, it's only been available on Windows, macOS and Linux but publisher Devolver Digital is bringing it to consoles.

At its core, Inscryption is a card game that's dripping with horror. You'll sacrifice certain animal-based cards to play more powerful ones against your opponent. There's so much more to it than that, though this is definitely one of those games where the less you know about it going in, the better. It's not too much of a spoiler to say things get pretty strange. Inscryption will absolutely mess with your expectations.

The roguelike deckbuilder scooped up game of the year honors from a few publications and it received some Game Awards nominations. Inscryption has been a hit with players too. It sold more than a million copies in less than three months.

Developer Daniel Mullins is adding some extra features to the PlayStation versions, particularly for the PS5's DualSense controller. There'll be haptic feedback and you'll hear audio from your companion, a talking stoat card, through your controller's speaker. Mullins also promises to bring atmospheric lighting to the controller through the light bar. There's no release date for PS4 and PS5 as yet, but here's hoping it's not too far away.

Chinese electric vehicle maker Human Horizons unveiled its second EV model on Wednesday, dubbed the GT HiPhi Z. This four-door grand touring sedan comes packed with gadgets and intelligent systems including the world's only "vehicle-grade" high-speed robotic arm, which HH claims "can move back and forth in place in less than a second and features control accuracy of up to 0.001mm."

The HiPhi Z features a hybrid steel-aluminum construction as well as the "world's first wrap-around Star-Ring ISD light curtain," a series of over 4000 LEDs that "interact with passengers, drivers, and the world around it." What's more UWB sensors embedded in the doors will allow for "automatic detection of people, keys, and other vehicles, resulting in a smart adjusted door opening in terms of both speed and angle."

It comes equipped with a 120 kWh high-performance battery pack that the company claims hits 100 kmh from a standstill in 3.8 seconds while offering a range of over 700 km on a full charge. An all-aluminum double wishbone front suspension and a five-link rear suspension keep the ride smooth and responsive. The rear wheels can turn as well, like the Hummer EV, drastically shortening the vehicle's turning radius to nearly that of a much shorter Mini Cooper, per the company. 

Human Horizons

The interior is akin to stepping into a Jetsons episode, if the company's PR is to be believed. Its "ultra-futuristic spaceship-like digital setup" centers around the HiPhi Bot, an on-board AI companion that can adjust virtually every aspect of the driving experience. You know, like HAL did. Still, you'll go out in style if HiPhi Bot ever does go rogue — the racing bucket seats are covered in vegan Ultrasuede, the Meridian sound system boasts 23 speakers, and the occupants can dictate their preferences for not just lighting, touch, and sound, but even the vehicle's fragrance too. 

But for as fantastical as this vehicle's loadout appears, Human Horizons is very much intent of actually bringing them the to Chinese market. "The HiPhi Z is a testament to the company's dedication to technological advancement, sparing no expense in testing the boundaries of creation," Ding Lei, CEO and chairman of HiPhi, said in Wednesday's release. "Through rigorous testing and development, the HiPhi Z has retained more than 95 percent of its production intents revealed previously."

The company expects the HiPhi Z to retail for $89,000 - $129,000 US. It will announce official rollout dates at the Chengdu Auto Show in August. 

Sennheiser has developed an approach to spatial audio that doesn’t require a surround sound system. The tech, called Ambeo 2-Channel Spatial Audio, will work on standard stereo speakers, Sennheiser says. The company says Ambeo will deliver “an improved audio experience wherever stereo is delivered today, be it standard TV sets, stereo systems, headphones, tablets or laptops.”

A number of Sennheiser’s partners have worked with the company to fine-tune Ambeo. One of those is Netflix, which is the first streaming service to employ the tech. The first title that used Ambeo is season four of Stranger Things. Others include Red Notice, The Witcher and the upcoming live-action Resident Evil series.

As long as your device's audio output is set to stereo audio, you won't have to adjust any settings to try Ambeo. Netflix is making it the default setting for two-channel setups for certain titles (you can find those by searching for "spatial audio" on Netflix). 

Ambeo renders the full immersive audio mix into two channels. It uses existing industry standard file types and it doesn't need a separate mix. Sennheiser says the renderer offers granular control over spatialization.

​“What sets Sennheiser apart from other solutions is that the Ambeo rendering respects the original mix, tonal balance and dialog integrity, which is exactly what the re-recording mixer is looking for,” Dr Renato Pellegrini of the Ambeo team said in a statement. “The processing is in line with Sennheiser’s reputation to deliver tools that are ‘transparent’ and do not interfere with the original sound. In a nutshell: Sennheiser 2-Channel Spatial Audio seeks to translate mixer intent, not to overpower it.”

If Ambeo works as well as promised, this could be a solid solution for folks who don’t have sufficient equipment to take advantage of Dolby Atmos and other spatial audio tech.

CD Projekt Red has released another entry in its series of The Witcher games. The studio is billingGwent: Rogue Mage as a single-player expansion for Gwent, but it's sold separately. It's out today on PC, iOS and Android for $10. A $20 premium edition comes with perks for Gwent.

Rogue Mage was announced earlier this year under the working title of Project Golden Nekker. It takes place hundreds of years before the birth of Witcher protagonist Geralt of Rivia. You'll play as the mage Alzur, who is attempting to create the very first witcher to protect humanity from an onslaught of monsters.

Don't go into it expecting a ton of details that will play into the next mainline Witcher game, though. "While we have a story to tell about Alzur's obsession to create the first witcher, we do not treat this expansion as an official addition to The Witcher lore," game director Vladimir Tortsov told IGN. "We hope that players will get enough immersion to complement the gameplay-first formula, but we do not expect the story to be the main reason for players to appreciate this release."

The game is a roguelike deckbuilder. You'll move around a procedurally generated map and take part in card battles based on mechanics from the original Gwent. You'll be able to upgrade your army by collecting more cards and gear. There are dozens of difficulty modifiers too.

Tortsov says it will likely take players north of 30 hours to do and find everything in Rogue Mage, which is designed for gameplay sessions that take up to an hour. The game can be played entirely offline, though there are online features like leaderboards and cross-saves, so you can continue playing where you left off on other devices.

CDPR debuted the original Gwent in 2016. It's a free-to-play multiplayer title based on a minigame in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Rogue Mage isn't the first single-player take on Gwent, though. CDPR previously released a single-player campaign called Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales.

NBA 2K23 will arrive on September 9th, and it comes with a solid perk for those who plump for the premium $150 Championship Edition. Among other things, the package includes a year of access to NBA League Pass. If you're an avid NBA viewer who plays each year's NBA 2K game, it's actually a solid deal, given that League Pass costs $15 per month.

The Championship Edition will have limited availability and it comes with some in-game extras, including XP boosts, all the bonuses from the other versions and an exclusive Michael Jordan-themed go-kart. Speaking of Jordan, he features on the cover of another higher-end version of the game (he is the sport's most famous number 23, after all). The $100 Michael Jordan Edition comes with 100,000 Virtual Currency, as well as perks that are available in the $80 Digital Deluxe Edition.

2K Sports

All of those editions offer access to the game on both current and previous generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles. There's also a Standard Edition of NBA 2K23, which costs $60 for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC, and $70 on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Devin Booker is the cover star on the standard and digital deluxe versions.

Fans in the US and Canada can purchase a WNBA Edition of NBA 2K23 as well. The Gamestop exclusive version will feature Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird on the cover. And that's not all. A special version of the Standard Edition will be available this fall and it will seemingly highlight the connection between basketball culture and music. More details will be revealed later. In all, there will be six (6) editions of NBA 2K23.

2K Sports

As for what's new in the game itself, the Jordan Challenges from NBA 2K11 are returning. The 10 missions tasked players with replicating some of the most significant moments of Jordan's career, including scoring 69 points in a game. 2K Sports is rebuilding the original challenges from scratch and adding five more, including moments from Jordan's Team USA career. 2K Sports will announce more information about NBA 2K23, including the Jordan Challenges, in August.

When it debuted back in 2019, Hydrow’s creators said that they were looking to build the Peloton of smart rowing machines. Now, four years later, the company is unveiling its second-generation ergometer, Hydrow Wave, with a lower price and a smaller footprint. What hasn't changed, however, is the computer controlled resistance that's designed to make your rowing feel as close to being in the water as possible. 

The first and most obvious difference is the size, since Wave is about 30 percent smaller than its predecessor. In order to shrink the hardware, the Hydrow’s 22-inch screen has been slimmed down to a 16-inch HD fixed position display. Hydrow has also responded to feedback that the first model was too big to store in a small apartment by enabling this model to be wall-mounted. Granted, you’ll need to invest in a Vertical Anchor kit, but the company says the unit will occupy a 27-inch by 30-inch space when stored. 

The other benefit of all this size-reduction, is that the unit can now be shipped via UPS rather than with a dedicated delivery service. That might be one of the factors that's helped shave some weight from the price, which is significantly cheaper than the first-generation Hydrow. Whereas the first model was an eye-watering $2,495, its replacement is an easier-to-swallow $1,495. 

The following article contains really significant spoilers for ‘A Quality of Mercy.’

We’re living in the age of the prequel, with studios exploiting every scrap of existing material where there’s an audience already in place to enjoy it. But the low-hanging fruit and easy cash a prequel promises severely limits the storytelling opportunities for those properties. Obi-Wan Kenobi can’t die (or do anything of consequence) during his own prestige miniseries since his fate was preordained in 1977. Ewan McGregor has to age into Sir Alec Guinness and die at Darth Vader’s hand, and that’s that. Sure, there are some things creative teams can play fast and loose with, but the big things – the ones that permeate the culture at large – are set in stone.

Ever since Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was announced, it was blighted by this same hard stop, one dictated back in November 1966. Movies aside, until 2018, Christopher Pike was little more than a pub trivia answer to the question “Who was the first captain of the Enterprise?” (It’ll provoke an argument between the folks who just about remember Jeffrey Hunter was there before William Shatner, while the folks who know Robert April was first sit smugly on the sidelines.) But Pike’s fate wasn’t necessarily immutable until the second season of Discovery reaffirmed that he was going to get his radiation dose. But that didn’t matter until the fans, production team and executives found that they liked Anson Mount, and could easily watch a whole series of pre-Kirk adventures with him on the Enterprise.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the creative team looked for a way to prolong the series beyond its narrative end point. The show has already dangled a few ways that Pike could survive the incident, and made it clear that there are still seven years left to go. Seven years being the old-fashioned point where a TV show could make it in syndication, and the duration that all three Silver Age Trek series reached. Strange New Worlds could just as easily slow its timeline down and spend five, seven, ten or seventeen seasons filling the next six years of Pike’s life or find a way to remove such an arbitrary deadline.

And yet, the show’s season finale “A Quality of Mercy” decides to take advantage of the limits imposed upon it, making it clear to both Pike, and us, that there are no get outs. We begin at a base on the edge of the Romulan neutral zone, where the son of Commander Hansen will, when he grows up, be one of the cadets who dies in the radiation leak. Pike decides that it’s only logical to dissuade the kid from joining Starfleet and, therefore, save his life, but as he’s writing a letter to the boy to warn him of his fate, an older Pike appears in his quarters. And we know he’s older, because he’s wearing one of Robert Fletcher’s gorgeous 2278-era Starfleet uniforms, albeit restyled to suit the nu-Trek era.

Sadly, Admiral Pike isn’t here to congratulate his younger self on a job well done, but warn him of the consequences of futzing with time. Thanks to a Klingon Time Crystal from Boreth, Pike gets All Good Things-ed into his own future, six months after the radiation leak. If your fan antennae started tingling at the date, it’s because Pike is running the Enterprise in 2266, during the first season of classic Star Trek. In fact, it’s worse than that, because he’s been thrust straight into the episode of “Balance of Terror”, except he has to win the way his way instead of Kirk’s. As Pike says, the only way to discover why this future is terrible, is to live it.

(“Balance of Terror” is widely regarded to be one of the top three best episodes from the classic series. It’s the one where the Enterprise plays a tense game of cat-and-mouse with a new Romulan warbird equipped with a cloaking device and a powerful weapon capable of shredding starships in one shot.)

Now, if there’s one thing this episode does better than, well, most of nu-Trek, it’s the fact that all of the characters make smart choices. Pike, thrown into the future, instantly confides in Spock and when he’s met with resistance, immediately recommends a mind-meld. Caught up to speed, Spock becomes Pike’s co-confidant in the altered future, helping him to work out what exactly he needs to do here.

Pike’s survival has caused plenty of things to change in the timeline: James Kirk is the captain of the USS Farragut, which has survived in this version of the future. And, mercifully, the ship is in the vicinity, meaning that Kirk and Pike get to work together to solve the problem of the rogue Romulan Warbird with its devastating new weapon. Meanwhile, the beats from “Balance of Terror” get replayed – with Ortegas replacing Lt. Stiles as the on-bridge racist with angry eyes pointed at Spock.

Understandably, given the conflicts between Pike’s folksy diplomacy and Kirk’s more action-y approach, nobody wins. The Romulans get a signal out to the fleet, who realize that the Federation is weak enough to wage total war upon. In many ways, this episode serves up its own indictment of Pike, showing that his don’t-shoot-first approach has a limit. (And it also puts some clearer water between Pike and Kirk, since one was the replacement for the other back in the ‘60s.) Naturally, the episode ends with Pike opting to return to his own time and understand that he can’t simply back out of his preordained fate.

This is the second episode of Strange New Worlds co-written by the polarizing Akiva Goldsman, and many of his hallmarks are on full show here. There’s the misplaced reverence for franchise iconography, Great Man Of History mythologizing (this time with Spock) and a face off between two copy-and-paste CGI space fleets. Even so, given the risk of what this episode could have been, especially threading a new narrative through one of the sacred texts of the original series, this worked pretty well. (Given Goldsman’s previous Trek work, I’m giving all of the credit to showrunner and co-writer Henry Alonso Myers here.)

I can’t really give much comment on Paul Wesley’s performance as Kirk here, since he’s handed the most poisoned of chalices. William Shatner, even at his worst, never played Kirk as big as the stereotype has become, and Chris Pine’s performance dialed down Kirk’s bookish, warrior-poet side. Go too far on either side and it’ll become an impression, especially since he’s only got around 10 minutes of screentime in the whole episode. That’s why he essentially plays Kirk as someone who is both stalwart but also endlessly looking for a third option, emphasizing his inventiveness.

The episode ends with a twist – somehow, Number One’s past has been revealed (like when she just told everyone who would listen in "Ghosts of Illyria"), and she’s arrested by Starfleet. Pike nearly breaks a security guard’s hand preventing the arrest but is talked down by Una on the pad before he declares that things aren’t over. I’ll be very curious to see how this particular storyline gets resolved, especially considering my perpetual wondering about Rebecca Romijn’s absence from the show. The fact that Paul Wesley was tipped to recur in season two might suggest Kirk’s coming on board as her replacement, but that feels a bit too excessive in its fan service. 

Fundamentally, however, Strange New Worlds wraps up its first season with something that’s better than it had any right to be. As I wrote back at the beginning, the first five episodes all have something good going on, but often trip over their own shoelaces. Ever since “Spock Amok”, however, the show has started to find its feet, with less awkward dialogue, a more relaxed groove and the courage to go for high camp and comedy just as regularly as it does high drama. Every episode in the back half of the first season has been better than its immediate predecessor, even if there’s some very obvious kinks that still need to be worked out. Whisper it, friends, but, Strange New Worlds might actually be good?