Technology

Vudu’s freemium streaming app is now supported on Facebook’s Oculus Quest 1 and Quest 2 VR devices, with a spokesperson telling The Verge more than a hundred 3D titles are available to buy or rent. The Fandango-owned streaming service — which was purchased from Walmart last year — supports both free, ad-supported movies and TV, as well as rentals and purchases. In addition to the 100-plus titles available on Vudu in 3D, the service additionally offers more than 200,000 titles to rent or buy to stream on other devices, as well as thousands of ad-supported titles. It’s the first time that the app is supported on VR devices, a spokesperson told The Verge. “We’re thrilled to be working with Oculus to help transport fans to new worlds in the most immersive formats available,” Fandango’s chief c...

Apple will host an event, titled Unleashed, at its Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California on October 18. In typical Apple style, little is known about the event beyond the space-themed invite showing the Apple logo traveling at hyperspeed. Given that Apple has already introduced the new iPhone 13 lineup, Watch Series 7, iPad mini and iPad, iMac, Airtags and Apple TV 4K at events earlier this year, updates to the MacBook lineup and AirPods are anticipated. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, tweeted about the upcoming event, saying that the days leading up to Unleashed “are going to speed by.” Unleashed! These next six days are going to speed by. #AppleEvent pic.twitter.com/0ops2bVPvl — Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) October 12, 2021 The event will stream live on Ap...

First announced at Apple’s WWDC earlier this year, Siri has now landed on Ecobee SmartThermostats. The Apple voice assistant arrives via a free software update allowing you to say “Hey Siri” to the thermostat to set the temperature, send an intercom message, and use all of Siri’s smart speaker features. This is the first third-party device to include Apple’s virtual assistant Siri, although the feature is not exclusive to Ecobee. Apple said that all HomeKit accessory makers will be able to integrate Siri voice control into their products starting this year. For any integration to work, you will need to have a HomePod or HomePod Mini on the same network, through which the device (in this case the SmartThermostat) will send the requests. The integration won’t work with just an Apple TV or iP...

Adobe is bringing Camera Raw to the iPad version of Photoshop, and has demonstrated how it works in a hands-on video. Ryan Dumlao, senior product manager for Photoshop on iPad, shows how Camera Raw can be used to edit RAW and DNG photos directly imported from a camera — in this case a Fujifilm — or ProRAW files from the iPhone 12 Pro and 13 Pro. Camera Raw is a long-standing plugin that allows for advanced RAW image editing within Photoshop, and it’s also the technical basis of Lightroom’s processing engine. Dumlao’s video shows how you can edit various settings and exposure parameters within Photoshop, including importing the RAW file as a smart object for non-destructive editing that can be carried over to the desktop version. In his demo, Dumlao uses Photoshop features to perform tasks ...

Apple’s next hardware event will take place on October 18th, according to invites it sent out today. The company is widely expected to use its second fall event to launch a pair of new MacBooks, a redesigned higher-end Mac Mini, and possibly a pair of third-generation AirPods. The invite video teases one word: Unleashed. As seen below in a tweet from Apple marketing exec Greg Joswiak, it appears in a dotted font that could hint at mini LED tech on the way. The “special” event will stream live on Apple.com at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. There have been reports for months that Apple is on the cusp of releasing new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. The new MacBooks would be the latest step in Apple’s transition away from Intel chips, replacing them with an Arm-based processor called the M1X that Appl...

Just 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming stands between Cuba’s Plaza de La Catedral looking typically dry or looking like something straight out of the myth of Atlantis. The iconic plaza in Old Havana is just one of many landmarks that could face a watery grave in the future if greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels continue unabated. Images: Climate Central You can see the potential future for more than 100 coastal cities across 39 countries thanks to a new image gallery and map published today by the nonprofit advocacy group Climate Central. The visualizations compare two scenarios: future sea level rise with 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming above preindustrial levels or sea level rise with 3 degrees of warming. As the planet heats up, warm ocean...

Amsterdam-based e-bike specialist VanMoof has announced plans for its first ever hyperbike, dubbed the VanMoof V. The company — popular with everyone from Frank Ocean and Tyler, The Creator to Simon Jacquemus and Stéphane Ashpool — claimed in a statement that the new, faster e-bike will “redefine city mobility for good,” and act as a car replacement. “We believe this new type of high speed e-bike can become the default for city travel and can replace cars and scooters by 2025,” VanMoof co-founder and CEO Ties Carlier tells HYPEBEAST. “The VanMoof V is dedicated to higher speed and longer distance. We’re not making this bike because of what the category is today, we’re doing this because of what we see the category can be tomorrow. With millions recently invested in new bike lanes, cities a...

The US PC market has declined during the recent quarter, due to pandemic-related supply issues. It’s the first time the US PC market has declined since the pandemic began causing lots of people to rush out and buy new PCs over the past 18 months. Overall, Gartner and IDC analysis both suggest the worldwide PC market grew in Q3, but at a slower rate than we’ve seen during the pandemic. Gartner says “consumer and educational spending began to shift away from PCs to other priorities,” during the quarter, leading to less demand for PCs. That’s illustrated best by a 17 percent drop in Chromebook shipments, which Gartner has included in its traditional PC shipments for the first time ever this quarter. Both IDC and Gartner report 84.1 million shipments of PCs in Q3, while IDC puts the number at ...

When it comes to judging how cool robots are, I deploy a simple but reliable heuristic: can I imagine this machine appearing in the Metal Gear Solid franchise? With LEONARDO, a bipedal robot with propellers for arms, I can not only imagine it, I’m pretty sure it is in MGSV. From the bubble head to the uncannily precise movements, it’s just a very cool robot, which I can also imagine being used to infiltrate mercenary basecamps. Just like a bird, LEONARDO can both walk and fly LEONARDO is a pleasingly choppy acronym for “LEgs ONboARD drOne” — the product of those linguistic geniuses in Caltech’s Aerospace Robotics and Control Lab. You may have seen an earlier iteration of the bot back in 2019 (when, amazingly, LEONARDO stood for “LEg ON Aerial Robotic DrOne” instead), but its design and cap...

I’m not the only one who hates the new Windows 11 taskbar, and now third-party developers are coming to the rescue with apps that bring back some of the features missing in Microsoft’s latest OS. Microsoft removed basic taskbar functionality in Windows 11, like displaying the time and date on multiple monitors, moving the taskbar to the top of the screen or sides, and even small things like altering its height and having small icons. It has angered many Windows users, and most of the top feedback in Microsoft’s Windows Insider program was related to the taskbar changes before Windows 11 debuted last week. Stardock’s new Start11 app primarily focuses on allowing you to change the Start menu back to classic styles, but there’s also a lot of taskbar customization, too. You can change the task...

Just when you were starting to think about upgrading to a Wi-Fi 6 router, Wi-Fi 6E is here. And it’s expensive. Netgear announced its newest entry into the 6E foray today, the Orbi Quad-B and Mesh WiFi 6E RBKE960 series. This is the first quad-band Wi-Fi 6E mesh offering, but not the first Wi-Fi 6E mesh router (the $1,200 Linksys Atlas Max 6E took that honor earlier this year). Featuring a 2.4 GHz band, two 5GHz, and a brand spanking new 6GHz band, this $1,500 system also supports four different networks out of the box, including one designed exclusively for your insecure smart home devices. And if that doesn’t get you excited, they’re also releasing a limited-edition color… black. The new Orbi router is larger than most of its mesh competitors and also a lot more expensive.Image: Netgear ...