He’s been on boats and he’s been in caves. He’s been on planes, trains, rafts, tanks, bikes, and more. But one place fans had never seen Indiana Jones was underwater, which is why director James Mangold made that a priority in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Epic Games is trying to secure more exclusive titles for its PC storefront with its latest proposals to third-party developers. The company is offering the makers of eligible games and apps 100 percent of net revenue for six months. After the exclusivity window ends, developers and publishers will still take away 88 percent of their projects’ revenue, with Epic receiving a cut of 12 percent.
The company, which says its launcher and store has 68 million monthly active users, will also give participants of the Epic First Run program extra exposure to get their wares in front of more eyes. The games and apps will receive “exclusive” badging and spots on the homepage. Epic will include them in various collections and promotions too.
The program will be open to developers and publishers who are releasing eligible products on or after October 16th. A product will be eligible if it hasn’t appeared on another third-party PC store or subscription services on said storefronts. Games and apps that already have exclusivity deals with Epic aren’t eligible.
Developers and publishers will still be able to sell games and apps that are included in the program directly to users via their own launchers and websites. They can also list their products on stores such as Green Man Gaming and Humble Store via the Epic Games Store’s keyless redemption program.
Epic already offered developers and publishers a more generous split of game and app sales than the likes of Valve, which takes a 30 percent cut of Steam sales. The promise of vacuuming up all net revenue for six months and getting extra promotion on the Epic Games Store might be compelling enough for more developers and publishers to take the exclusivity plunge there.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/epic-offers-devs-100-percent-of-net-revenue-for-six-months-of-egs-exclusivity-171021764.html?src=rss
WhatsApp will now let you create small groups without first naming them. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new feature in a Facebook post (viaTechCrunch). You previously had to choose your group’s name when setting it up.
TechCrunch reports that unnamed groups have a cap of six members instead of the named groups’ limit of 1,024 participants. In addition, WhatsApp will reportedly auto-generate placeholder names for unnamed groups based on their members. (For example, “Rocco & Li-Chen” for a chat between them in Zuckerberg’s sample image below.) Depending on how they’ve saved members’ contacts, the group name will also appear differently for each member.
When joining an unnamed group that includes people who haven’t saved your contacts, it will reportedly display your phone number to the group. This suggests the feature is designed more for established friends, family or colleagues and less for strangers.
TechCrunch reports that the feature will roll out globally “over the next few weeks.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/whatsapp-lets-you-create-groups-without-naming-them-174420165.html?src=rss
Mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list, officials said, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he was on board.
Sony’s big DualSense controller with a screen, originally dubbed “Project Q,” wasn’t the next-gen handheld console we originally hoped for, but new details on what’s now being called the “PlayStation Portal” show the device is going to be a Wi-Fi streaming-only device used to remote play your PlayStation 5, and you…
The Walking Dead was on TV for so long, most viewers knew what to expect from it. Lots of zombies, humans betraying each other, everyone coming together, a few people dying, then a happy ending and it all starts up again. So with the show’s spinoffs, each needs to be something different and Norman Reedus thinks his…
On Tuesday, Hawaiian officials urged family members to provide DNA samples that might help identify relatives missing from the wildfires. There are still more than 1,000 people missing after the United States deadliest wildfire in more than a century swept through Maui.
Dr. Mario did not prepare us for this. In a pioneering effort, researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, in partnership with Edinburgh-based Speech Graphics, have devised a groundbreaking communications system that allows a woman, paralyzed by stroke, to speak freely through a digital avatar she controls with a brain-computer interface.
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are devices that monitor the analog signals produced by your gray matter and convert them into the digital signals that computers understand — like a mixing soundboard’s DAC unit but what fits inside your skull. For this study, researchers led by Dr. Edward Chang, chair of neurological surgery at UCSF, first implanted a 253-pin electrode array into speech center of the patient’s brain. Those probes monitored and captured the electrical signals that would have otherwise driven the muscles in her jaw, lips and tongue, and instead, transmitted them through a cabled port in her skull to a bank of processors. That computing stack housed a machine learning AI which, over the course of a few week’s training, came to recognize the patient’s electrical signal patterns for more than 1,000 words.
But that’s only the first half of the trick. Through that AI interface, the patient is now able to write out her responses, much in the same way Synchron’s system works for folks suffering from locked-in syndrome. But she can also speak, in a sense, using a synthesized voice trained on recordings of her natural voice from before she was paralyzed — same as we’re doing with our digitally undead celebrities.
What’s more, the researchers teamed up with Speech Graphics, the same company that developed the photorealistic facial animation technology from Halo Infinite and The Last of Us Part II, to create the patient’s avatar. SG’s tech “reverse engineers” the necessary musculoskeletal movements a face would make based on analysis of the audio input, then feeds that data in real-time to a game engine to be animated into a lagless avatar. And since the mental signals from the patient were mapped directly to the avatar, she could express emotion and communicate nonverbally as well.
“Creating a digital avatar that can speak, emote and articulate in real-time, connected directly to the subject’s brain, shows the potential for AI-driven faces well beyond video games,” Michael Berger, CTO and co-founder of Speech Graphics, said in a press statement Wednesday. “Restoring voice alone is impressive, but facial communication is so intrinsic to being human, and it restores a sense of embodiment and control to the patient who has lost that.“
BCI technology was pioneered in the early 1970s and has been slowly developing in the intervening decades. Exponential advancements with processing and computing systems have recently helped reinvigorate the field, with a handful of well-funded startups currently vying to be first through the FDA’s regulatory device approval process. Brooklyn-based Synchron made headlines last year when it was the first company to successfully implant a BCI in a human patient. Elon Musk’s Neuralink entered restricted FDA trials earlier this year after the company was found to have killed scores of porcine test subjects in earlier testing rounds.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/university-of-california-bci-study-enables-paralyzed-woman-to-speak-through-a-digital-avatar-172309051.html?src=rss
It is Kai vs. Ash in the next round for the “World’s Most Transgender Name.”
The company behind everyone’s favorite pandemic purchase, the Peloton, is facing subscriber and financial backlash. Subscribers are pausing their memberships with the cycling tech amidst a recall over bicycle seats. And now the company has to answer to Wall Street.
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