Geek News

Intel has released two ready-to-use RealSense depth cameras, the D415 and the D435, that can add 3D capabilities to any device or machine. They both come in a USB-powered form factor and are capable of processing depth in real time, thanks to the chipmaker's new RealSense vision processor D4. The models work indoors and outdoors in any lighting environment, so they can be used for almost any machine that needs a depth camera. Those include drones meant to soar the skies and robots with AR/VR features. Intel says the cameras' target audiences aren't just developers and manufacturers, but also makers and educators, since they're easy to use and will work as soon as you plug them in. Also, it comes with Intel's RealSense SDK 2.0, which is now a cross-platform, open source SDK. Intel RealSense VP Sagi Ben Moshe said in a statement: "Many of today's machines and devices use 2D image recognition-based computer vision, but with Intel RealSense's best-i...

Our first look at the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot was tonally all over the place, mixing the earlier Angelina Jolie films' goofy action with the more serious emotional heft of the critically-acclaimed newer Tomb Raider video games. Thankfully, the second trailer leans far more of the former, giving us some propelling motivation and backstory that raises the stakes (an evil organization is planning some evil! The unhinged villain has a grudge against her family!) so we can, y'know, care about the film. If you played the 2013 Tomb Raider game (itself a reboot of the series) and follow-up Rise of the Tomb Raider , you'll recognize their influence in the new trailer. Not just the extensive bow-and-arrow action, either: While Angelina Jolie played Lara Croft as a Jane Bond-meets-Indiana Jones globetrotting adventurer, Alicia Vikander embodies a much greener but determined heroine. Also a very durable one, as she endures nature's beatdown and emerges a bold yet grimy...

DICE and EA have shared much more of what Battlefield 1 's new "Apocalypse" DLC entails, and it's good news if you prefer to be a fighter ace than fight in the trenches. The expansion arrives in February, and its highlight is a new Air Assault mode where dogfights and airships rule. Appropriately, there are two air-only maps (London Calling and Razor's Edge). Think of it as you would the Starfighter Assault mode in Battlefront II -- it's about scratching the itch for players who jump into vehicles at every given opportunity. The add-on also brings a counter to those aircraft in conventional modes (the AA Rocket Gun) and a slew of new maps built around more of World War I's larger battles, such as Passchendaele, the Somme and Caporetto. Six more guns and two new aircraft also promise to add some variety. You'll need a Premium Pass to see what "Apocalypse" entails. That's a bit of a pain when some of Battlefield 1 's extras have ...

As dictated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC released its annual draft 2018 Broadband Deployment Report on Wednesday. In it, the commission made a surprising concession: that no, mobile data and wired broadband are not in fact suitable replacements for one another. This admission comes only a few months after FCC chair, Ajit Pai, filed a "Notice of Inquiry" ahead of proposing that mobile be counted as a form of broadband. Doing so, opponents warned at the time, would disproportionately harm poor and rural communities. In the 2018 report, Pai's office concedes that "Mobile services are not full substitutes for fixed services -- there are salient differences between the two technologies." Beyond the obvious difference that only one of the technologies is, you know, mobile the report points out that "there are clear variations in consumer preferences and demands for fixed and mobile services." In this context, what constit...

Facebook has been pushing into original television for a little while now. It launched the Watch section as a platform for TV shows last year, and has since teamed up with the creators of True Blood for a new drama called Sacred Lies . Now the company is apparently set to bring Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter Willow and her mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris to a new talkshow that will deal with social and other timely issues. According to Deadline , the intergenerational family talk show will be executive produced by Ellen Rakieten, Miguel Melendez and Pinkett Smith herself. It appears to be a follow up to 2012 YouTube channel called Red Table Talks , which brought the three women together to talk about "love, life, fame and family." Source: Deadline via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2mOQdhD"

Snap has just laid off 22 employees, a sign that the company is continuing to struggle with slow user growth. The staff cuts affected teams across the company, but the content team was particularly hard hit. According to The Information , Snap's content team has now consolidated operations in its Venice Beach, CA location, when it was previously headquartered in both Venice as well as New York City. While Snap has been heavily investing in original content and Snapchat shows, there's a high level uncertainty around how successful they actually are. NBC Universal claims its Stay Tuned show has over 29 million viewers The Rundown from the E! Entertainment Network makes over a $1 million in revenue from the app, but it's difficult to verify these numbers, as Snapchat doesn't disclose metrics and monthly active users. CNN , for example, has killed its Snapchat show because "there wasn't a clear enough path to make money." Snap has been struggling in ot...

In the year 2018, nobody expected human society would need an intervention to stop people from eating (drinking?) laundry detergent. And yet, actual thinking people are recording themselves consuming Tide Pods, which inspires others to follow suit on camera, begetting an endless cycle of Darwinian consequences. According to CNN , YouTube and Facebook have committed to taking down this content, proving so many critics of the internet right. Normally, it's only small infants who mistake the detergent-filled pods for candy or whatever and chow down on the brightly-colored cleaning bombs. But thanks to the #TidePodChallenge, a colossal flow of idiots have willingly ingested these toxic unedibles because someone on the internet passively dared everyone to do it. Now it's a public health issue that might become an actual crisis, because apparently an unaddressed opioid epidemic isn't catastrophic enough. It's gotten so bad that in the first 15 days of 2018, the Americ...

Everyone from Elon Musk to Donald Trump wants to send a manned mission to Mars in the not too distant future, but there are quite a few problems that need to be solved before we can achieve that goal. A major one is the issue of energy. Long-term stays on Mars, or anywhere else for that matter, will require lots of energy, as will the trip back to Earth. However, loading a rocket up with all of the necessary fuel won't work -- we would need too much. So a way to create fuel on the go is a must and researchers at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Department of Energy announced today that they've conducted successful tests of a system that can do just that. Kilopower is a small nuclear reactor that can generate a reliable power supply. Versions range from 1 kilowatt -- enough to power a basic toaster -- to ten kilowatts and Kilopower project researchers said in a Space.com article that around four or five of the latter would be needed to power a habitat on Mars ...

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Virtual reality is still a relatively new format, and as such there's a huge need for compelling content to drive adoption. As such, Oculus today is announcing its new developer-focused program called Start. Oculus Start a free program that's meant to make it easier and more cost-efficient to get VR apps built and distributed to customers. For starters, the company is highlight three different facets of Start: access, support and savings. Perhaps the most important aspects of the program is "access," which providers registered developers development kits for "new and existing hardware," as well as early beta access to new tools and services. Specifically, developers can request a Rift or Oculus Go when they apply, and they'll be able to pick the wireless Santa Cruz kit when it is ready to go. Oculus did a survey of its developers and found that 50 percent are self-funded, so any access to hardware development kits for those will certainly be appreci...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and mobile security company Lookout released a report today detailing a major hacking campaign -- dubbed Dark Caracal -- that's believed to have originated from Lebanon's General Directorate of General Security (GDGS), one of the country's intelligence agencies. The companies found information gathered from thousands of victims from over 20 countries through espionage efforts extending back to 2012. Targets included military personnel, journalists, activists, financial institutions and manufacturing companies and some of the stolen data included documents, call records, texts, contact information and photos. Michael Flossman, a Lookout security researcher, told the Associated Press , "It was everything. Literally everything." The hackers used malicious apps that resembled legitimate communication platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to steal the trove of data, loading up the fake versions with malware that allowed them to tap...

Google may have taught an AI how to doodle , but drawing something more complex is tough for a computer. Imagine asking a computer to draw a "yellow bird with black wings and a short beak;" it sounds a little tricky. Researchers at Microsoft, though, have been developing an AI-based technology to do just that. It generates images from text descriptions with a surprising amount of accuracy, according to the most recent paper posted by the team. The system doesn't find an existing image based on your input, but creates real drawing. "If you go to Bing and you search for a bird, you get a bird picture. But here, the pictures are created by the computer, pixel by pixel, from scratch," said principal researcher Xiaodong He in a statement. "These birds may not exist in the real world — they are just an aspect of our computer's imagination of birds." While the current form of this drawing technology isn't perfect, it's not hard to imagine a ...

Last year, Oculus shut down its award-winning Story Studio , which was dedicated to creating bold new cinematic VR experiences. Rather than drifting apart, though, members of the team stuck together, and today they're announcing their new outfit, Fable Studio . It'll be making its debut at the Sundance Film Festival tomorrow with a VR adaptation of Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls. The studio has four additional projects in the works, but even more importantly, it's hoping to do something new with cinematic VR: Break even. Fable Studio plans to charge people $1 for every 10 minutes of its content. The company sees it as being a bit more fairly priced than existing VR experiences, which can range from $3 to $15 for relatively short experiences. (Call it the early adopter tax.) There are also a slew of free VR content on the market, but that's not sustainable in the long term. Edward Saatchi, Fable's co-creator and a former co-founder of Oculus Story Stud...

Until now, Comcast's Xfinity Mobile service has meant buying one of its locked devices. But what if you already have a phone and want to switch? You now have that choice... if you're firmly in Apple's camp. Xfinity Mobile has enabled an in-store Bring Your Own Device option, but only for "select" unlocked iPhone models. Other manufacturers' phones will have to wait until later in 2018. You can receive a gift card if you trade in a phone that doesn't qualify, although that means settling for a locked handset (and likely getting less than your handset is worth). There probably won't be a surge of people signing up -- historically, Americans have tended to buy locked phones on contract. However, this could certainly help if Xfinity Mobile's bundled discounts and by-the-gig rates make sense for you. It could also help fuel the service's reported success by making it easier for people to switch from rival networks. Xfinity is unlikely to toppl...

Intel's science fairs are pressure cookers: imagine pitting some of the world's brightest students against each other while they're already grappling with teenage anxiety. And now, there's a documentary that illustrates just how rough it can be. Muck Media has released the first trailer for Science Fair , a doc that follows nine high schoolers as they strive for glory at Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair. The students aren't just worrying about their technical accomplishments, although those are notable by themselves (such as calculator that generates Shakespearean insults) -- they also have to deal with their confidence, socio-economic hardships, rivalries and raging hormones. The feature comes from Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster, veteran documentary producers who've worked together on projects like The Naked Truth: Death by Fentanyl . The documentary premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, which starts today (January 18th). T...

In mid-2016, A federal panel had greenlit the University of Pennsylvania to pursue the first trials using CRISPR gene-editing in the US. It seems the institution has quietly gotten the ball rolling and could theoretically start the study at any time: A posting was found on a directory of trials describing a yet-to-be-scheduled UPenn survey using CRISPR techniques to treat cancer patients. The study will collect up to 18 patients with multiple myeloma, melanoma and/or two types of sarcoma. Penn scientists will use CRISPR to delete two particular genes in patients' T cells: The first, PD-1, can be manipulated by cancer cells to impede the immune system, while the second is an alarm-sounding receptor that will be removed and replaced with one engineered to alert the body to specific tumors. The Penn scientists won't be injecting CRISPR directly into patients' bloodstreams; Instead, they'll use a method called ex vivo gene therapy, extracting blood and editing it with...

Last week, the US House of Representatives voted to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that lets the National Security Agency monitor communications of non-US citizens living outside of the US. Today, the Senate has also voted in favor of renewing the law for another six years. Section 702 is contentious, largely because it's so wide-reaching and doesn't require government agencies to get a warrant before conducting surveillance or searching through already collected communications. Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have spoken out about the law and many have called for more oversight as well as protections for US citizens whose communications might fall under the law's scope. Last year, groups of senators , both Republican and Democrat, attempted to introduce reforms to Section 702 and Senator Rand Paul said at the time, "The American people deserve better from their own government than to have their ...

Korg has been producing a ton of little synths in its Volca series over the last several years. Announced back in 2013 , the initial Volca Beat, Bass and Keys started a run that eventually included an OK Go sample box, an '80s-style FM synth and an oscillator-driven drum sequencer, the Volca Kick . Now the company wants you to be able to chain a few of these tiny devices together for live performance with a new four channel mixer, the Volca Mix , announced at NAMM this year. According to FactMag , the Mix will run $170 and will release later this month. The Volca Mix has two mono inputs and one stereo input, each a handy 1/8-inch size so you'll need fewer adaptors. That gives you three spots to connect Volca units via their individual headphone jacks. Each channel gets its own vertical fader, lo/hi cut filter and mute button to help you create the perfect analog mix on the fly. The Mix has RCA stereo outputs to connect to your sound system as well as a master LED meter to...

Weird Nintendo is often the best Nintendo, or so it is said. After all, two of its biggest successes (the Wii and the Switch) are far from ordinary consoles. Now, with a year of huge Switch sales behind it, Nintendo is getting even weirder with Labo -- cardboard accessories that kids can built themselves and use to immerse themselves in a game's world. So far, Nintendo has shown off a mini piano, fishing rod, robot fighting suit, remote-controlled robot walkers ... and what amounts to a cardboard house with your Switch screen built right into the middle. All of these are controlled in some way by the Switch Joy-Cons. It's incredibly unusual and rather inexpensive (the initial sets start at $70), but it's also the kind of thing that only Nintendo would dream up. Of course, the company's imagination sometimes takes it to places that don't work as well (Wii U, Virtual Boy, the list goes on). Many of Engadget's editors had immediate reactions to Nintendo's La...