Technology

Developers who have apps or games on the Oculus Store can now sell recurring subscriptions to their titles, as opposed to offering them for a one-time fee or choosing to handle the subscription process independently. This should give developers an easier, more sustainable way to offer new content, features, and tools to paid subscribers over time. Oculus told The Verge that the approval process for apps with subscriptions is similar to apps that have in-app purchases and add-ons. Oculus shared on its blog that starting today, FitXR, the hugely successful Rec Room, Tribe XR, Tripp, vSpatial, and VZfit are the first to begin operating on a subscription model in the Oculus Store — specifically, for the Quest platform versions of the apps. If you’ve purchased or downloaded any of these apps, y...

Lyft launched a program that will let health care organizations send patients prepaid passes that they can use for rides to doctor’s appointments. “We’ve automated an important piece of health access that allows patients to be self-sufficient and in control, while allowing our partners to focus on the services they provide, rather than on administrative processes,” said Megan Callahan, vice president of Lyft Healthcare, in a statement. The program, called Lyft Pass for Healthcare, lets health care organizations or social services agencies create a budget and set approved pickup and drop-off locations. They can share the pass with patients, who can apply it to their ride. Non-emergency medical transportation is estimated to be a $3 billion market. Transportation is a major barrier to health...

Comcast’s wireless service, Xfinity Mobile, is changing the pricing structure on its unlimited plans. The company will now discount additional lines on its unlimited plan: a single-line plan will still cost $45 per month, but additional lines become cheaper the more you add. With four lines on a plan, you’ll pay $30 per month per line. That’s in contrast to a previous policy of charging the same fee per line, regardless of the number of lines on a plan — a practice touted on its website as recently as yesterday. The company points out that its $45 per month unlimited plan is still cheaper than single-line plans among the major wireless carriers, which is true: postpaid unlimited plans from the big three cost between $60 and $70 per month. Until recently, single-line customers on Xfinity Mo...

Google Earth is getting a new 3D time-lapse feature that lets you observe how Earth has changed from 1984 to 2020, allowing you to see just how much the devastating effects of climate change have already shaped the geography of the planet. “It’s best for a landscape view of our world,” Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth, Google Earth Engine, and Google Earth Outreach, said in a call with reporters this week. “It’s not about zooming in. It’s about zooming out. It’s about taking the big step back. We need to see how our only home is doing.” The feature (which Google calls “Timelapse,” one word) will be available in Google Earth starting Thursday. To access it, launch Google Earth and then click or tap on the Voyager tab (which has an icon that looks like a ship’s wheel). You can search ...

Despite it not even being a year old, DJI is already upgrading its mid-tier Mavic Air 2 drone. The new $999 Mavic Air 2S (yes, $200 more than the prior model) comes with some notable new features and upgrades, including a much larger image sensor. The new one-inch sensor is capable of shooting 20-megapixel photos, 5.4K video, and 4K up to 60fps. But hold your horses (or wallets), there are a few caveats to those impressive capabilities. Verge Score 8 out of 10 Good Stuff Bigger one-inch camera sensor Finally usable digital zoom Great for beginners and experts Bad Stuff There’s a significant crop in 4K 60fps No D-Log or HDR when zoomed in APAS still needs improvement It’s more expensive now The Mavic Air 2S’s camera sensor is the same size as what you get in the higher-end Mavic 2 Pro. It’s...

Bang and Olufsen’s latest connected speaker is the Emerge. Its thin form-factor should blend right in to most bookshelves, and that’s no accident. In a press release announcing the speaker, the company says its design was “inspired by the compact form factor of a book” with side panels that wrap around like a cover, and a logo on the front that’s meant to evoke a title printed on the spine. It’s a nice contrast from some of Bang and Olufsen’s previous speakers, which have had huge, hulking form-factors that are hard to imagine in any normal home. Instead, the Emerge takes a similar approach to Ikea’s Symfonisk speakers, which have pulled double duty as lamps or shelving to help them blend in with the rest of your furniture. Get it? Like a title on a book spine?Image: Bang & Olufsen B&a...

The nice thing about Coinbase going public today is that if you want to get involved with cryptocurrency without ever leaving the almighty dollar, now you can. On Tuesday, Nasdaq set $250 as a reference price for Coinbase, though no one necessarily bought at that price because this is a direct listing. Coinbase closed trading today at $328.28, giving it a market cap of $85.8 billion, more than that of the company behind the Nasdaq exchange. It’s yet another marker for how normal cryptocurrency has become — and how much easier it is for normies to get involved. Recall, if you can, the early 2000s: banking crisis, panicked market, excited cypherpunks. The idea behind bitcoin was relatively simple: it emerged from a specific distrust of financial institutions. That early ethos evaporated some...

Amazon, Apple, Google parent company Alphabet, and Facebook have joined hundreds of corporations, executives, and celebrities in signing a public letter today supporting voting rights and condemning legislation that would “restrict or prevent any eligible voter from having an equal and fair opportunity to cast a ballot,” The New York Times reports. The public letter appeared as a full-page ad in The New York Times and The Washington Post on Wednesday and was organized by former American Express credit card company executive Kenneth Chenault, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, and the Black Economic Alliance. You can see an image of the ad, shared by NYT reporter David Gelles, below: The letter as it appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Image: The New York Times The text reads: W...

Windows 10 is officially losing its once-ambitious Timeline feature, Microsoft announced today. Timeline, first launched in 2017, was designed to make it easier for users to swap between multiple devices — transitioning seamlessly from a Windows 10 PC to an Android or iOS phone and back again. It’s no surprise that Timeline is getting deprecated: it was a feature that heavily relied on Microsoft’s Cortana assistant, which would prompt users to resume tasks from device to device. Cortana was a particularly important part of building out the Timeline experience on iOS and Android devices, where Microsoft (obviously) had less control. Given that Cortana’s prevalence in Windows has been heavily diminished and the mobile apps completely discontinued, it makes sense that Microsoft would sunset T...

Use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine remains paused in the United States as officials gather more information about the rare clots reported in six people who got the shot. An independent advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it didn’t have enough information yet to say which groups might be at risk of the clots or to recommend who should get this vaccine. “I don’t think we have enough information today,” said Grace Lee, associate chief medical officer for practice innovation at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in California, during the committee’s meeting on Wednesday. The group will reconvene as rapidly as possible — likely next week — after gathering more data and evaluating that information. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Ce...

Spotify’s desktop app refresh seems to be rolling out to users, and it brings with it a very handy feature: album downloads. The app has supported downloading playlists to your computer for quite a while. The update should make it easier to keep your library managed if you want to keep the music going even when you’re offline. It is worth noting that this feature is limited to Premium subscribers — according to Spotify’s documentation, free users are only able to download podcasts. Downloading an album works similarly to downloading a playlist: just navigate to the album’s page and press the download button. It should then be available the next time you go into Offline mode. This should make it easier to manage your offline library if you’re the type of person who’s very particular about w...