Last week, Rivian assembled a group of engineers, executives, and a few lucky journalists in a Palo Alto conference room. On stage, surrounded by some very slick prototypes, CEO RJ Scaringe steps out to reveal the company’s own made-in-house processor for self-driving systems. This chip is the real deal, ready to take on Tesla’s FSD.
Fourteen years ago, Sony’s Xperia Play phone attempted to blur the line between phone calls and game controllers. It slid open to show a series of buttons that made each thumb swipe feel like crossing the finish line. The device soon disappeared from memory, but AYANEO has brought the concept back to the forefront with the Pocket Play, their first smartphone.
Blake Scholl founded Boom Supersonic with one single purpose in mind: to reintroduce commercial supersonic travel, which had been lost from our skies for decades. Ten years later, the Denver-based startup has quietly raised an eyebrow at that concept and moved it in a whole other direction.
Disney’s boardroom made a surprise announcement this morning of a three-year agreement with OpenAI. More specifically, a $1 billion investment for a chunk of OpenAI shares as well as the licensing rights to over 200 of their most iconic characters. The entire thing is being thrown into OpenAI’s video tool called Sora, which enables you generate short films with only a text prompt.
Microsoft knows how to time a release perfectly. With the second season of Prime Video’s Fallout series just around the corner, the company has released a pair of controllers that draw inspiration from the game’ most recognizable device: the Pip-Boy. The Xbox controllers are available in two versions: a normal Wireless model and a top-tier Elite Series 2 variant.
AMD has thrown a curveball at high-end gaming with the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) refresh. Redstone arrived today, along with a new driver for Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards. Redstone is a bundled system made up of four primary components: upscaling, frame creation, ray regeneration, and radiance caching. To improve speed and detail, all four of these employ machine learning models trained on real-world game data.
Soft robots have long been considered the underdogs of the robotics world. They’re comprised of flexible materials that bend and stretch in ways that seem startlingly similar to living flesh, allowing them to fit into tight areas and handle delicate goods with far more care than a stiff bot could. The only hitch is that without a good method to see where they’re going, these adaptable machines slog along, half-blind and relying on cumbersome add-ons that kind of contradict the idea of their pliable design.
Every Christmas season appears to bring the same old scramble to find thoughtful gifts that don’t require too much effort. Then along comes Amazon’s Echo Show 5, a handy little smart display that slides into a bedside or kitchen counter and immediately begins earning its keep. Currently, with a 33% discount, the price has dropped from $89.99 to $59.99, enabling Prime members snag one today for delivery by December 11th, just in time for the holidays.
OneXPlayer has always been about pushing the limits with its hardware, and the Super X takes that ‘we want to be the best’ attitude to a whole new level. This 2-in-1 device appears as a 14-inch device that can transition fluidly between tablet and full-fledged laptop mode, all powered by AMD’s latest Ryzen AI processors. Crowdfunding begins tomorrow on Kickstarter, with costs lowering to a relatively low $1,899 for a build that is roughly comparable to most laptops.
Engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia have activated their massive vacuum chamber to address one of the most pressing issues of landing on the Moon: what happens to the dusty surface when a spaceship touches down. They’re primarily looking at how engine exhaust stirs up the ground, or how all that dust, boulders, and soil gets kicked up high during those few frenetic minutes before landing. They want to sort everything out so that future missions won’t have to deal with the mess. This is especially crucial given that NASA is preparing to send people back to the Moon.