Technology

Gran Turismo 7 developer Polyphony Digital is apologizing for the changes recently introduced to the game’s economy and is promising improvements, along with a million free credits. These changes come after the game had a massive outage last week, which was the result of an update that also made changes to how players could earn credits by actually playing the game rather than through microtransactions. In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Polyphony president Kazunori Yamauchi apologized for “the frustration and confusion caused last week with our patch updates which resulted in, not only a server outage but also adjustments to the in-game economy which were made without a clear explanation to our community.” As a “goodwill gesture,” the company promises to give players “a non-paid credit pa...

Nvidia’s latest AI demo is pretty impressive: a tool that quickly turns a “few dozen” 2D snapshots into a 3D-rendered scene. In the video below you can see the method in action, with a model dressed like Andy Warhol holding an old-fashioned Polaroid camera. (Don’t overthink the Warhol connection: it’s just a bit of PR scene dressing.) The tool is called Instant NeRF, referring to “neural radiance fields” — a technique developed by researchers from UC Berkeley, Google Research, and UC San Diego in 2020. If you want a detailed explainer of neural radiance fields, you can read one here, but in short, the method maps the color and light intensity of different 2D shots, then generates data to connect these images from different vantage points and render a finished 3D scene. In addition to image...

Overcast, a popular podcast player for Apple devices, is getting an update that brings a major design overhaul to its main screen, as well as a new theming system that lets you pick the colors used throughout the app. For Overcast users like me, the update is a fresh coat of paint to a well-made app, and power users will likely find plenty of new tweaks and settings they can use to make the app work even better for their use case. In a blog post, the app’s developer Marco Arment says that the 2022.2 update, available to download Friday, is “the largest redesign” the app’s ever gotten, and promises some exciting future updates. The changes are obvious from the moment you open the app — there’s a new Recent carousel, which lets you quickly resume episodes you were listening to and see which ...

Ukraine’s government is raising funds by selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) based on a timeline of Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country. Ukraine Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov announced the collection’s launch on Twitter, boasting that “while Russia uses tanks to destroy Ukraine, we rely on revolutionary blockchain tech.” All sales funds will go to the Ministry of Digital Transformation to support the “army and civilians” of Ukraine. The collection, titled “Meta History: Museum of War,” associates blockchain tokens with a news item about “every substantial event of the war” and an illustration from an artist. A total of 54 NFTs are currently listed, covering the first three days of the war in late February, with the first going up for sale early next week. The proj...

American government officials told The Washington Post that the Russian military was responsible for a cyberattack on a European satellite internet service that affected Ukrainian military communications in late February. The hack affected the KA-SAT satellite broadband network, owned by Viasat, an American satellite communications company. On February 24th, the day the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, the KA-SAT network was hit by outages that affected Ukraine and surrounding regions in Europe. A few days afterward, Viasat blamed outages on a “cyber event,” but did not release further details. Though Ukrainian officials have not fully disclosed the impact, the outage is believed to have caused significant communications disruptions at the beginning of the war. The NSA was reported to be...

Apple Maps’ more detailed, three-dimensional cities that launched with iOS 15 are coming to Canada, offering better driving navigation, transit directions, and an augmented reality walking experience. The company has announced that the new city experience is available in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The feature was previously available in a half a dozen US cities — Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — as well as London in the UK. It’s a welcome expansion. When we reviewed iOS 15 last year our only real issue with the enhanced mapping experience was its extremely limited availability. But, where available, it offers a sizable improvement to how cities look in Apple’s software, and even includes 3D models of major landmarks. From a functi...

For the latest installment of Essentials, we caught up with psychotherapist, sneaker addict, and founder of MENTL.SESH, Liz Beecroft. Based in New York City, Beecroft has a knack for combining jazzed-up outfits and an enduring love for Crocs with her day job as a licensed therapist specializing in working with athletes, creatives, millennials and Gen Z. It’s hard to knock her dedication to sneaker and streetwear culture: to date, she’s collaborated with the likes of Nike, LeBron James’ UNKNWN, Staple Pigeon, and Moleskine on limited-edition releases that place mental health front and center in an industry where it’s normally brushed under the carpet. To juggle these two very different sides to her life, Beecroft can’t go a day without the Predator Triton 500 SE gaming laptop. Featuring the...

For our latest Essentials installment, we speak with Brain Dead co-founder and avid gamer, Kyle Ng. Best known for being one-half of the talent behind the cult streetwear label along with Ed Davis, few are aware that Ng is also a bit of a nerd at heart. Yet, the self-professed scholar of subcultures has been collecting Magic: The Gathering cards way longer than he’s been collecting sneakers—a thread that continues today, albeit in the form of his top-of-the-line Predator Helios 300 gaming laptop and other gaming paraphernalia. Featuring the 12th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-12900HK processor, the Predator Helios 300 can deliver up to 28% faster gaming than the previous mobile gaming leader in the market; while content creators can enjoy up to 43% higher performance in 3D rendering over the l...