Hasta La Gadget!

Rockstar, Zynga and 2K owner Take-Two Interactive is shutting down Playdots, the New York-based studio behind the popular mobile game Two Dots, Bloomberg has reported. Sixty-five employees will lose their jobs, the company confirmed to Bloomberg. 

The company confirmed that the puzzle game “will continue at another Zynga studio and there will be no disruption of service.” It added that “everyone affected by this decision will have the opportunity to apply for other jobs at Zynga.”

Take-Two acquired Playdots in 2020 for $192 million, and specifically called out Two Dots in its Q1 2022 earnings report, saying it was “among the largest contributors to… net revenue.” While it might seem odd then to eliminate the studio behind the game, some reorganization was likely inevitable in the wake of its $12.7 billion Zynga acquisition. 

When Meta announced that its Horizon Worlds avatars were getting legs in the near future, we got to see VR Mark Zuckerberg lift his legs one after the after and then jump as if to demonstrate what the company has achieved. Apparently, though, what we saw wasn’t a real demonstration of how Meta was able to conquer the difficulties of creating full-body virtual reality avatars. According to UploadVR editor, Ian Hamilton, the event used animations that were created using motion capture:

The process, which is called mocap for short, is widely used in cinema and games and entails recording the movements of a real person or object so they can be turned into computer animated graphics. 

During the event, Meta said that “legs have been one of the most requested features on [its] roadmap, and it’s been a significant area of [the company’s] focus.” Indeed, the addition of legs to Horizon’s legless avatar would be a noteworthy achievement due to the technological constraints of the VR devices we have access to today. VR headsets as we know the weren’t made to track legs. As Meta CTO and Reality Labs team leader Andrew Bosworth had explained to CNN Business earlier this year: “Tracking your own legs accurately is super hard and basically not workable just from a physics standpoint with existing headsets.” Meta’s solution to that problem involves the use of an artificial intelligence model to predict where the user’s legs are supposed to be. 

We’ll have to wait a bit more to see these AI-powered VR legs in action, though, because Meta’s full-body avatars that don’t rely on mocaps won’t be coming out until 2023.

Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX has officially asked the Pentagon to pay for 100% of Ukraine’s access to Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire previously said he’d donated to the country, according to documents obtained by CNN. SpaceX also wants the U.S. government to pay for thousands of new…

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Connecticut authorities believe two police officers who were shot dead had been drawn into an ambush by an emergency call on Thursday.

“It must have been a super hard time for her, and she was thinking about the poor schmuck trying to do her late husband’s old job.”