Technology

HTC may be teasing new modules and attachments for its Vive virtual reality headsets, including a lip tracker, UploadVR reports. HTC’s been building up to some kind of announcement on its Vive Twitter account over the last week. Yesterday, it posted an image of a hinge, which savvy Twitter users matched to an experimental lip tracking module HTC announced at the Game Developers Conference in 2019. You can see a picture of the hinged product HTC is teasing and a matching photo of its lip tracking device below. At the time, the company said it was using the module for research and experimentation, according to Road to VR. Combined with the eye tracking HTC’s already integrated into the Vive Pro Eye, it offers an early picture of what full face tracking looks like in VR. Some developers have ...

There wasn’t much left that we didn’t already know, but today, Sonos has officially announced its latest speaker, the Sonos Roam. Just as The Verge reported last week, the Roam is a portable battery-powered speaker priced at $169. Preorders start today, and it will go on sale on April 20th. The Sonos Move was the company’s first try at a portable product, but it’s quite large and hefty to actually travel with. The Roam, however, is a true “bring it anywhere” speaker. It’s the smallest speaker that Sonos has ever made, though the measurements I gave you last week were a hair off. It’s actually 6.61 x 2.44 x 2.36 inches and weighs 0.95 pounds. Sonos told me it considered “hundreds” of different sizes and prototypes before landing on this design. With dimensions like that, the big question is...

A new bill to bring back net neutrality is on its way, supported by one of the open internet’s most fervent advocates. At an advocacy event last month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he would be introducing a measure in the next few “weeks” that would engrave the no throttling, block, or paid fast lanes rules into law. Reached by The Verge on Monday, Markey reaffirmed his commitment to introducing a bill soon. “The coronavirus pandemic has proven that broadband is as essential as electricity and other utilities. We need to restore net neutrality protections to ensure that our internet remains open and free and that consumers can continue to benefit from this critical infrastructure,” Markey told The Verge. Legislation like Markey plans to introduce could finally put the debate over n...

Twitter is actively working on a “big overhaul” of its TweetDeck platform, which lets you arrange lists and feeds into easy-to-read vertical rows, and it plans to share more about the project publicly later this year, product chief Kayvon Beykpour said in an interview with The Verge published Tuesday. TweetDeck, as one of the oldest and originally third-party account management apps for the platform, hasn’t seen much in the way of design or major feature changes in years. The app launched 12 years ago and was acquired by Twitter in 2011, and it’s more or less still the same vertical grid viewer for your various Twitter feeds it started as. Mostly, Twitter has ported over new functions added to its main website and mobile apps while keeping the core TweetDeck design relatively static. That ...

Cybersecurity researcher Daylam Tayari has found evidence in Twitch’s internal API that the site plans to implement something called a “brand safety score” for its streamers. That score would depend on a number of criteria: the streamer’s age, a rating given by Twitch staff, their ban history, the relationship the streamer has with Twitch, their automod settings, their partnership status, the ESRB rating of the game being played, and whether the stream is set to mature. Twitch has added an automatic Brand Safety Score which grades how brand friendly every streamer is based on things like chat behavior, ban history, manual ratings by Twitch staff, games played, age, automod and more (See below).1/5 pic.twitter.com/VBl4HjGv7t — Daylam ‘tayari’ Tayari (@tayariCS) March 9, 2021 Twi...

Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey now plans to convert the proceeds from the NFT auction of his first tweet to bitcoin and donate them to charity. The highest bid for the tweet is currently $2.5 million. The auction will end on March 21st, and he plans to donate the bitcoin to Give Directly, a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to people living in poverty. He’ll be giving the bitcoin to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund for COVID-19 relief. Dorsey put up his famous first tweet as an NFT (which stands for “non-fungible token”) on Friday evening, and bids quickly poured in, even though Dorsey hadn’t announced when the auction would end or that proceeds would be going to charity. The current highest bid was made Saturday evening. The winner will get a “digital certificate ...

Google is marking 10 years of Chromebooks by unveiling new features for Chrome OS today. The biggest addition is a new Phone Hub feature that connects an Android phone to a Chromebook. It allows Chrome OS users to respond to texts, check a phone’s battery life, enable its Wi-Fi hotspot, and locate a device easily. Phone Hub is packed into a taskbar widget that even expands to show you recent Chrome tabs that you have been browsing on your phone. It looks like it will be a super useful feature for Android and Chromebook owners. Google is also enabling its Wi-Fi Sync feature on more devices, allowing you to connect to Wi-Fi networks you’ve already configured and used on your Android phone and other Chrome OS devices. Chrome OS gets an AirDrop competitor.Image: Google Another significant addi...

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a bold shift for Sega’s long-running series, doing away with beloved protagonist Kazuma Kiryu and shifting to turn-based RPG-style combat. In Kiryu’s place is the wild-haired Ichiban Kasuga, who finds himself homeless in Yokohama after doing 18 years’ hard time for a murder he didn’t commit. The PlayStation 5 version of Like a Dragon was just released last week, a few months after the PS4, Xbox One, PC, and next-gen Xbox versions. Since then, I’ve played several dozens of hours of Like a Dragon on the Xbox Series X, and it’s become one of my favorite games in the series. I took the opportunity to ask Masayoshi Yokoyama, Sega’s chief producer and writer on the game, some questions about how the team approached Kasuga as a character and his story from beginning to en...

Jacob Pustilnik built his first electric bike when he was 17 because he was tired of showing up at school drenched in sweat. Texas is notoriously humid, but Pustilnik only lived a few miles from his school in Houston and was reluctant to abandon his trusty Trek mountain bike. At first, he thought putting a milk crate on the rear rack for his backpack would be enough to eliminate the dreaded back sweat, but it was only a half measure. Eventually he settled on a much more challenging solution: converting his whole bike to run on an electric motor. “I think I just knew about the idea of an electric bike, but not very much — just that they existed,” he said. Jacob Pustilnik on his e-bike that he built from a kit.Photo by Mary Kang for The Verge After mulling it over for a couple of months, Pus...

At 26.5 grams and the size of my thumb, Insta360’s latest action camera, the Go 2, looks like an oversized Tic Tac with an eyeball. It’s the second generation in the Go lineup, which is Insta360’s only non-360-degree camera line. Where the first-generation Go left a lot to be desired, particularly in the image quality department, the $299 Go 2 comes with a new charging case, larger sensor, and improved image quality, making a strong case for a mobile-first action camera. The case has a 1/4-inch thread for support mounting and a USB-C port for charging. The most noticeable changes to this tiny camera come in the hardware department. The Go 2’s camera component has a new removable lens cover and less slippery matte plastic housing. The case plays a more active role in the use of the camera, ...

Fitbit has introduced the third iteration of its Ace activity and sleep tracker for kids. The Fitbit Ace 3, designed for kids ages six and up, adds new animated clock faces, customizable accessories, and claims eight days of battery life in a “swim-proof” design with new color options, too. In addition to improved battery life, the Ace 3 has a 20 percent brighter screen and includes do not disturb and sleep modes. The new animated clock faces — including a bunny, a cat, a Martian, and spaceship designs — change and grow as kids make progress toward their fitness goals. Fitbit Ace 3 tracker for kids.Image: Fitbit The Fitbit Ace was designed to help kids build healthy habits and increase physical activity. It also allows parents to track a kid’s activity levels and how many hours they sleep....

Twitter recently announced that it’s going to be building a lot of new things into its product: there’s Twitter Spaces, which is a live audio feature very similar to the red-hot Clubhouse app. There are Twitter Fleets, which look like Snap and Instagram Stories. Twitter just acquired Revue, which is a newsletter product similar to Substack. And it also announced something called Super Follows, which will let people pay creators on Twitter for special content. It’s a lot, especially after Twitter spent so long seemingly not adding any features at all. On today’s episode of Decoder, I talk with Kayvon Beykpour, the head of consumer product at Twitter. He’s responsible for deciding what tools Twitter actually builds for people to express themselves. Twitter’s product is incredibly important —...