Новости за 01.03.2017

The PlayStation Vita is nearly impossible to find on store shelves as Sony lets its quirky handheld ride into the sunset. But an unexpected group isn’t ready to let go of the Vita just yet: indie game developers working on its new competitor, the Nintendo Switch.

As vain and manufactured as our online personas can be, Facebook is still a popular avenue for venting and rambling about our day-to-day struggles. Facebook recognizes this, and is now working on new ways to help troubled users with the use of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, in addition to expanding its suicide prevention tools.

If you’ve ever wondered how exactly car commercials get made — like how footage is captured of brand new, seemingly expensive vehicles driving dangerously fast — then visual effects studio The Mill would like to introduce you to the Cyclops. That’s the Grecian code name for a multi-purpose rig that combines a decked out off-roading dune buggy called the Blackbird with some cutting-edge camera, editing, and graphics rendering technology. The end result is a vehicle on the road that can be transformed... Читать дальше...

Prisma, makers of the deep learning-powered image app of the same name, is finally letting users create their own filters. Today, the company launched a new web application that lets people upload a sample image and create a Prisma filter based on its characteristics. At the moment, Prisma is only inviting “the most active users” to try it out, but says it’ll be opening it up to more people in the future, and porting it over to mobile too. The company has also launched an update for its iOS and... Читать дальше...

The original Street Fighter II was released in arcades in 1991. Since then, its developer Capcom released a truly breathtaking number of versions: Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, Super Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Hyper Street Fighter II, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and last but certainly not least, the upcoming Ultra Street Fighter II for the Nintendo Switch. Today, Capcom announced that Ultra Street Fighter II: The... Читать дальше...

I’ve finally figured out Sony’s mobile strategy. The proud Japanese company understands that its competitiveness in the mobile sector is over. It knows it will never again speak the same language as US carriers, and it’s aware that European consumers have shifted their preference over to devices from Samsung, Apple, and a bevy of cheaper and better Android rivals. Ergo, Sony no longer gives a fuck and has decided to just go out in a blaze of glory. And that’s how we arrive at the newly announced Xperia XZ Premium... Читать дальше...

Two rumors about Snap’s product lineup leaked today. The first: the company is building a drone. The second: it has also considered building a 360-degree camera. These products sound remarkably underwhelming and have me slightly concerned about the company’s future in hardware. Does Snap just want to be GoPro but better? (GoPro is floundering, by the way.)

For a few days now, rumors and reports have been circulating that the cartridges for the new Nintendo Switch taste really bad when you lick them or put them in your mouth. The Verge can now confirm that, yes, licking a Switch cart is the absolute worst. Don’t lick your Switch cartridges.

Microsoft is unveiling some changes to the way Windows Updates are applied to Windows 10 PCs with the upcoming Creators Update. The software giant has long been criticized by Windows 10 users for its aggressive approach to applying updates, and it’s introducing some new options to prevent annoying reboots. “What we heard back most explicitly was that you want more control over when Windows 10 installs updates,” admits John Cable, Microsoft’s Windows director of program management. “We also heard... Читать дальше...

Game developers who sell their games through Google’s app store will soon be able to give players a taste test of their products. The company announced “Playables” at GDC 2017, an ad format that acts as mini-games or teasers of gameplay.

I find it surreal to think that a company can be one of the top five smartphone vendors in the world while selling the overwhelming majority of its phones within just one country. But that’s Oppo and that’s the grand scale of the Chinese mobile market. For Mobile World Congress 2017, Oppo decided to announce not a new phone, but a new camera technology called 5X Dual Camera Zoom. I got to try it out at the show, and I must say it’s kind of awesome.

Snap, the maker of Snapchat, is developing a drone, according to a report from The New York Times. The drone could be used to take photos and video, though it is not yet clear whether it will be made available to consumers, the Times reports, citing people familiar with the plans.

Nvidia has announced its next monster graphics card: the $699 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the new card on stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where he promised that the GTX 1080 Ti not only offered “35 percent more performance” than its predecessor (the base GTX 1080), but that it was even faster than the current king of cards — the $1,200 Titan X.

Evan Blass, professional spoiler of well kept smartphone secrets, is back with another hit today, this time revealing the most-anticipated non-iPhone of 2017, Samsung’s Galaxy S8. His new image reveals a handset that agrees wholeheartedly with Samsung’s Mobile World Congress teaser of a device with utterly minimal front bezels. It also features Samsung’s confirmed date for the launch, March 29th, and gives us a good look at what’s presumably going to be the lock screen welcoming new users when the phone is released in April. Читать дальше...

Marvel released the final trailer for the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 on Jimmy Kimmel Live! tonight, giving fans a bit more of an idea of what to expect from the return of the galaxy’s favorite band of misfit heroes.

The last Alien: Covenant teaser was a subtle hint at the dangers the movie’s colonists would face on their new world, taking the time to make a reference to the iconic dinner scene in the original Alien. The new trailer, released today, has none of that subtlety — it seems like it’s basically the whole movie condensed into a two-minute clip.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has publicly apologized after a video showing him being rude to an Uber driver was published by Bloomberg. In a blog post titled “A profound apology,” Kalanick said that he was ashamed of his actions, and that he had now accepted that he needed help in leading his company.

On February 27th, Elon Musk announced SpaceX’s ambitious plan to send two private citizens on a trip around the Moon. The two space tourists have already put down a substantial deposit towards the trip, which Musk says could happen as soon as late 2018. We don’t know how much the mission will cost, or what its prospects are for success. But it could kick off the first public-private space race between the private company and NASA.

The NIO EP9 electric car lapped the Circuit of the Americas racetrack in Austin, Texas in 2 minutes and 40.33 seconds last week — without a driver at the wheel and with a top speed of 160 mph.

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every day I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this into something good.

Google says it’s shipped 10 million of its Cardboard virtual reality viewers since they first appeared in 2014. The company celebrated the number in a blog post today, along with a couple more statistics: people have made 160 million downloads of Cardboard apps on Google Play, and 30 Cardboard titles have over a million downloads apiece. The shipment numbers also presumably don’t include mobile VR viewers that aren’t official Cardboard headsets, but could still be used with Cardboard apps.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 hits theaters later this year, and part of the oncoming wave of toys and tie-ins that Disney will be launching is this truly spectacular Star-Lord replica helmet. For $100, you’ll get a light-up version of the glowing helm from the film complete with sound effects. Oh, and it’s also a fully functional Bluetooth headset. So you can not only look like Star-Lord, but rock out in true Peter Quill style.

Amazon has brought its hosting services back online after more than four hours of errors that took down sites and services across the web. Hosting services are now “operating normally,” Amazon says, and the errors that had been popping up throughout the day are supposed to have been resolved.

I keep hoping we’ve reached peak vulnerable gadgets, only to hear about another unsecured device. Toys in particular continue being exposed as privacy and security nightmares that anyone with a slight desire to investigate can uncover. This week in toy privacy nightmares, a company called Spiral Toys was found to have exposed 800,000 user account credentials online, as well as 2 million voice message recordings.

The Switch is days away from launch, and in preparation Nintendo announced a massive list of indie titles that will be coming to the console at some point in 2017. While many of the titles announced won’t be out until later on in the year, the huge amount of indie support is still a sign that Nintendo is taking indie developers seriously on the Switch. Additionally, despite the fact that many of these titles are ports from other consoles, hopefully Nintendo will be able to keep this momentum going with future indie games going forward. Читать дальше...