Technology

Albert Marin has taken some very specific vacations. In Wales, he visited Raglan Castle to snap pictures of its stone wall. At the Palau Güell in Barcelona, he took meticulous photos, not of the building itself, but of the marble floor and its unique veins. His trips followed in the steps of Capcom, which put bits of real-world architecture found across Europe into Resident Evil 4, which was originally released over 16 years ago. “I collected a great number of locations the game’s developers use as source material,” Marin told The Verge. Fast forward to 2021, and Marin is now seven years into a project to remaster Resident Evil 4’s blurry GameCube-era graphics into crisp HD, in part using high-resolution photos he’s taken of everything from surfaces and doors to general architecture that s...

Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented reality and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The Information based on internal organizational data. The number means the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people working at Facebook worldwide. This suggests that Facebook has been significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts. As UploadVR noted in 2017, the Oculus VR division accounted for over a thousand employees at a time when Facebook’s headcount was 18,770 overall, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent. Since then, Facebook has shifted its VR focus away from Oculus Rift-style tethered headsets by releasing the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are standalone wireless devices that don’t require a PC. The $...

Google has detailed the efficiency improvements it made with Chrome 89, the latest version of its browser released earlier this month. Depending on whether you’re using the browser on Windows, macOS, or Android, Google says the browser should use less resources, launch quicker, and feel more responsive to use. There’s no mention of any improvements specifically for users on iOS. The exact benefits vary by OS. Across platforms, Google says Chrome is able to reclaim as much as 100MiB (or over 20 percent on some sites) by using foreground tab memory more efficiently, and on macOS it’s saving up to 8 percent of its memory usage based on how it handles background tabs (something which Chrome already does on other platforms). Google says these improvements on macOS have benefited the browser’s E...

Tenet, the latest film by director Christopher Nolan, arrived on Blu-ray in December 2020, but now it has been released in another physical format: Game Boy Advance cartridges. Via Engadget, YouTuber Bob Wulff managed to fit the two-hour, 30-minute time-bending film with a nearly incomprehensible plot on five cartridges, compressed down to a 192 x 128 resolution that looks blurry even on the GBA’s 240 x 160 display. The worst (best) part of the experience might be that it runs at six frames per second. They even made bespoke labels for each cartridge that are, actually, very well done. Now, before you ask aloud “why?” just say “thank you, Bob Wulff!” instead. This obviously doesn’t need to exist, but the promise of these little displays of technical prowess applied in strange, delightful w...

Gogo will be delaying the rollout of its 5G network, pushing it back from 2021 to 2022. According to LightReading, the global chip shortage is to blame for the delay, though Gogo didn’t provide any direct details about how the shortage was setting it back. Gogo isn’t the only one feeling the sting of the global chip shortage: graphics cards, CPUs, and game consoles have become infamous for being in short supply, and car manufacturers are having to slow down production lines because of the supply constraint. The situation has gotten to the point where President Joe Biden has signed an executive order calling for a review of the chip supply chain. The company, known for providing in-flight Wi-Fi, had a difficult 2020: it did several rounds of layoffs, pay cuts, and furloughs, as people stopp...

Microsoft released a new Xbox update earlier this week that brings toggles for Auto HDR and FPS Boost and improvements to better support the new Xbox Wireless Headset. But there was another big feature that wasn’t mentioned in the official release notes: the update also fixes “many” of the Xbox Series X controller disconnect issues that have cropped up, according to the Xbox team’s Jason Ronald. Lots of Xbox news this week, but in case you missed it we released our March Xbox System Update yesterday. In addition to the new features, this release also fixes many of the controller disconnects players have reported. Keep the feedback coming.https://t.co/bltTsL6Lty — Jason Ronald (@jronald) March 10, 2021 Players began reporting disconnect issues with the controllers just days after the consol...

A Black woman who interviewed at Facebook last year says she was told the company was “looking for a culture fit” before being rejected, according to The Intercept. She’s now one of four people who’ve recently complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) about allegedly racist hiring and promotion practices at the tech giant. The woman says she was well-suited to the managerial position on Facebook’s Global Impact Partnerships team due to her work experience and relevant doctoral degree, The Intercept reports. Yet she alleged that during in-person meetings, she “sensed that the interviewers were not prioritizing her interviews because all of the interviews seemed rushed after making her wait for several hours.” The Intercept agreed not to use the woman’s real name as a ...

President Joe Biden just announced that he will direct states to make all adults eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations by May 1st. He also said that the federal government will launch a website on May 1st that will let people check where they can get a vaccine near them. He made both announcements during his first prime-time televised address as President on Thursday evening. “All American adults will be eligible to get a vaccine no later than May 1st,” says Biden. “That doesn’t mean everyone’s going to have that shot immediately. But it means you’ll be able to get in line beginning on May 1.” The administration also plans to increase the number of places administering vaccinations and expand the group of medical professionals who can give the shots. All these steps should help states get sho...

Los Angeles theaters will be allowed to reopen at 25 percent capacity next week, according to the LA Department of Public Health (via Variety). The restrictions are being lifted, almost exactly a year after they were put in place, because Los Angeles County believes it will reach the number of vaccinations required by California to move into the next phase of reopening. The movie capitol’s theater re-opening comes a few weeks after New York’s, meaning that two of the biggest movie markets will once again be uncapping their projectors. As Variety notes, this doesn’t mean that the theaters will be able to open as soon as the ban lifts — they’ve been closed for so long that they’ll have to re-hire and train staff, which could take a week or two. The theaters will also have to ensure that they...

Pakistan has banned TikTok yet again, citing objectionable content on the shortform video app. This is the second time the ByteDance platform has been banned in Pakistan, following a brief 10-day shutdown in October of last year. Last fall, TikTok was banned for hosting “immoral” and “indecent” videos, but the company was able to assure the Pakistani government that videos would be moderated “in accordance with societal norms and the laws of Pakistan,” and the app resumed operations a week and a half later. In respectful compliance to the orders of the Peshawar High Court, PTA has issued directions to the service providers to immediately block access to the TikTok App. During the hearing of a case today, the PHC has ordered for the blocking of App. — PTA (@PTAofficialpk) March 11, 2021 The...

Spotify is making a podcast about its own history, and the first two episodes are well worth a listen for the details on the jump from piracy to streaming, how the company decided to build its business, and the technical details of how it did so. There are also some fun interviews included, with the podcast featuring stories from Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, and Lars Ulrich of Metallica. In the podcast, the Spotify founders discuss the history of piracy in Spotify’s home country, Sweden, to give context about its development environment. It goes into the existence of Sweden’s Pirate Party, an actual political party that once held several seats in the country’s parliament. The founders also discuss how they wanted to take the ease of pirating music but make it legitimate. If talk about...

At an analyst event on Thursday, T-Mobile revealed that its long-awaited 5G home broadband service will launch later this month, which it confirmed to The Verge. A 4G version of the service is currently in pilot testing with 100,000 households. By the end of the year, T-Mobile says it hopes to extend the service to 7–8 million customers within five years. There’s no confirmed launch date for the service yet, but we’ll know more later this month. The company has been promising 5G-based wireless broadband since before its acquisition of Sprint, saying that the merger would make it possible to offer service that would challenge the dominant cable companies. Before the deal was approved, T-Mobile went ahead and started testing out the service with a limited group of customers. The self-styled ...