Snapchat’s Dress Up feature turns your phone into an AR shopping mall

Image: Snap

It’s becoming a fundamental law of the internet: where people socialize, they must also shop. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and practically every other social network and messaging app on the planet has spent the last couple of years trying to make every pixel of your chats and pictures into a one-click purchasing possibility.

Snap’s plans on this front are more ambitious than most. It’s trying to take the whole shopping experience — you see a shirt you like on a stranger, figure out what it is and where to buy it, try it on, buy it, wear it, return it because everything looks better on Ryan Reynolds than you, rinse and repeat — and funnel it through Snap’s AR camera. Through Camera Kit, most of that tech can...

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Samsung’s noise-canceling Galaxy Buds 2 are an even better value now that they’re $50 off

The Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 and their inverted Orero-style wireless charging case. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

One of the best bang-for-the-buck values in the true wireless earbuds space is now even cheaper and available in the color that goes with everything. The black Samsung Galaxy Buds 2 are currently just $99.99 at Best Buy. The $50 discount on these noise-canceling earbuds makes them a no-brainer purchase if you’re an Android user looking for a great pair of earbuds on a budget. Sure, there are better-sounding options out there, like the Beats Fit Pro, but they’re twice the price. The Galaxy Buds 2 are small, affordable, and even come with a wireless charging case — something many other affordable earbuds skimp out on. Their biggest hangup may be that they don’t automatically pause when you remove them from your ear, but at this price, it...

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Valorant is getting proper pro leagues starting in 2023

Optic Gaming winning the Valorant Masters Finals in Reykjavik, Iceland. | Image: Riot Games

Riot Games is making some big changes to the Valorant esports scene. The shift is due to kick off in 2023 and will include the introduction of three regional leagues representing the Americas, Europe, and Asia; previously, professional Valorant operated on a tournament structure. The changes will bring Valorant more in line with Riot’s other popular competitive game, League of Legends.

It’s not clear yet which teams will participate in the new leagues, nor how they will be selected. But Riot says that “the new model will incorporate long-term partnerships with no entry fees to a select number of teams to ensure continued long-term stability for the world’s fastest-growing esport,” adding that “teams who meet the selection criteria will...

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Snap’s first drone, Pixy, fully revealed in FCC photos

Image via FCC

It appears Snap is working on a drone called Pixy, and the whole thing just leaked with a huge amount of details, including photos and a seemingly unfinished user manual, published by the FCC. It’s small: rulers in the photos indicate the drone is roughly 130 millimeters wide and 120 millimeters tall, which translates to approximately 5.1 inches by 4.7 inches.

In a user manual, Snap characterizes the drone as “a small smart drone with a camera and camera function.” The drone itself is a rounded rectangle in Snap’s characteristic yellow hue with translucent orange propellers. There’s a knob on the top that looks to offer a bunch of different settings — it looks like a camera mode dial, right down to a traditional “landscape picture mode”...

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Windows 11 basics: how to personalize your wallpaper and lock screen

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

If you’ve just bought a new laptop, one of the first things you’re probably going to want to do is personalize how it looks. Windows has plenty of options for customizing what you see when you open up your device. You can not only select a color, photo, or slideshow for your wallpaper, but you can choose a lock screen and pick a theme.

It’s simple and straightforward to do once you access your personalization settings. To do that:

• Click on the Start button
• Click on Settings
• Select Personalization in the left-hand menu

From here, you can make a variety of design changes to the interface of your PC.

Change your wallpaper

• Click on the Background bar

You can personalize your background in a variety of ways.

• At the...

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The Verge’s 2022 Mother’s Day Gift Guide

Illustration by Harry Bhalerao / The Verge

Gifts for moms of all kinds

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Netflix anime Bubble turns post-apocalyptic Tokyo into a colorful playground

Bubble. | Image: Netflix

In Bubble, a new anime film on Netflix, there are plenty of the typical hallmarks of a dystopic city. The movie takes place in a version of Tokyo that’s been almost entirely abandoned, and there are lots of rusted cars, crumbling buildings, and greenery reclaiming its place amongst the urban sprawl. But there’s also a vibrancy to the city — something that was very important to director Tetsuro Araki. “We wanted to make it light and colorful because we wanted to present this dystopian landscape almost as a utopia,” he tells The Verge.

The reason for that tone might have to do with Bubble’s rather unique premise. It’s not a typical end of the world story. Instead of a planet beset by war or natural disasters, in Bubble, the earth is...

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Microsoft is holding an Xbox and Bethesda games showcase in June

Starfield concept art. | Image: Bethesda

E3 2022 may be canceled, but it looks like we’re still getting at least one big gaming event in June. Today, Microsoft announced the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase, which will take place on June 12th at 1PM ET.

There aren’t many details about the event itself just yet, but the company says that it “will include everything you need to know about the diverse lineup of games coming soon to the Xbox ecosystem, including upcoming releases to Game Pass on Xbox and PC.” The teaser art, which features the Xbox logo floating among the stars, suggests we’ll see more of Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield, which is due to launch in November for Xbox and PC.

Last year’s June showcase featured news like the reveal of vampire shooter Redfall, a...

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A VR company is using an artificial patient group to test its chronic pain treatment

Applied VR

Virtual reality company AppliedVR is taking an innovative approach to a new trial for its chronic pain treatment. Rather than try to find a group of people with chronic back pain to sign up for the trial and not get the treatment, they’ll pull data from an existing database of chronic pain patients to use as a comparison group — a strategy that has the potential to make clinical trials more efficient.

AppliedVR got Food and Drug Administration approval for its virtual reality system that treats chronic back pain back in November. Now, the company is collecting more information about how the treatment works in different groups in the real world. They’re partnering with healthcare data company Komodo Health on the trial. Komodo offers its...

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OnePlus Nord N20 5G review: a better budget phone

An inexpensive phone that feels like it should cost more than $300

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Twitter miscounted its daily users for three years straight

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Twitter overstated the number of daily users on its service for three years straight, overcounting by up to 1.9 million users each quarter. The error was due to Twitter inadvertently counting multiple accounts as active when they were all tied to a single user, even if they weren’t all in use. These incorrect usage numbers were given for Q1 2019 through Q4 2021.

This is, somehow, not the first time Twitter has done this. In 2017, Twitter also realized it had been overstating its user figures by about 1 million to 2 million users for three years. The repeat mistake was revealed today in Twitter’s earnings release for the first quarter of 2022.

The updated figures aren’t exactly a game-changer: Twitter now has 229 million daily users,...

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Leftist gimmick accounts want their tweets to influence politics, too

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The rapid rise of the Twitter account Accidentally Based surprised even the person who created it. One of many so-called gimmick accounts, Accidentally Based was started as a left-wing response to conservative meme accounts that the creator noticed tended to grow quickly. Just a month after making Accidentally Based, the account had 100,000 followers, the owner estimates, and was getting retweeted by Twitter users with hundreds of thousands of followers themselves. What began as an experiment soon proved to be a reliable way to get content in front of millions.

“I figured it was worth a shot, and maybe I’d be able to have some influence on the left,” the account creator says about starting Accidentally Based. “It didn’t feel like there...

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Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 (15-inch) review: a light and bright convertible

This lightweight is worth a look

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Google will let you request fewer ads about weight loss and dating

More choices about the ads you see. | Image: Google

Google is expanding its sensitive ad categories options, letting users limit how many ads they see about dating, pregnancy, parenting, and weight loss, and making those settings apply to more places. The feature was introduced as a way to let people see fewer ads on YouTube about potentially addictive gambling or alcoholic products, but now it seems that Google is expanding it to cover other potentially uncomfortable or traumatic subjects.

Your settings will now apply to all of Google’s Display network, not just YouTube ads, according to Elijah Lawal, a spokesperson for the company. Google says the network is “a group of more than 2 million websites, videos, and apps” that advertisers can target users across.

To access the feature, go...

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Twitter reassures advertisers Musk won’t make the platform more of a toxic hell-hole than it already is

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has reportedly contacted advertising agencies to reassure them that Elon Musk’s plans for the platform won’t make it an inhospitable place for brands.

Musk has promised that under his watch, Twitter will take a maximalist approach to “free speech” — perhaps only removing content that is actively illegal. However, as experts have pointed out, this would mean easing restrictions on a variety of unpleasant but legal forms of speech: from Nazi propaganda to ISIS beheading videos to medical misinformation. This is content that corporations do not want to be associated with, even indirectly.

According to an email seen by The Financial Times, Twitter has reached out to ad agencies to preempt such fears, telling them that the...

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Call of Duty anti-cheat system makes legit players invisible to cheaters

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In a new blog post, the developers behind Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat system have outlined a new “cloaking” measure which makes legitimate players invisible to cheaters. It effectively makes it impossible for cheaters to be competitive during a match, regardless of any illicit software they might be using.

“Characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to cheaters,” the blog post reads. “Legitimate players, however, can see cheaters impacted by cloaking… and can dole out in-game punishment.” The new cloaking feature is offered alongside a previous anti-cheat measure called Damage Shield, which means a cheater’s bullets won’t do any damage to other players.

Although Team Ricochet is only detailing...

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A warming world gives viruses more chances to hitchhike from species to species

Straw-coloured fruit bats at their daytime roosts in ‘Mushitu’ or ever-green swamp forest in April, 2014, Kasanka National Park, Zambia. | Photo credit should read Nick Garbutt/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Climate change is pushing mammals into new territory, increasing the number of opportunities for viruses to jump from species to species — including humans. By 2070, if global temperatures continue to rise as predicted, there could be a total of 15,000 new cross-species “viral sharing events,” according to new research published today in the journal Nature.

Of the at least 10,000 virus species in mammals capable of infecting humans, most are still only circulating among animals in the wild. The worry is that more of those viruses could eventually make the leap to humans, potentiallysparking a health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Ultimately, this work provides us with more incontrovertible evidence that the coming decades will not...

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PlayStation Plus’s upcoming game trials will reportedly be at least 2 hours long

Image: Sony

New details have emerged about the time-limited game trials that Sony previously announced would be part of its new PlayStation Plus Premium subscription tier. According to sources speaking to Game Developer these free trials will be required for any game with a wholesale cost of $34 (€33) or above, and must be at least two hours long. They won’t be required for previously released games, or PlayStation VR titles.

Game Developer’s initial report raised concerns that requiring developers to offer these time-limited trials could place a significant burden on smaller teams. However, Kotaku’s Ethan Gach reports that the PlayStation Store team will create the trials, suggesting developers shouldn’t have to put any extra work in.

Source...

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Dell’s new-look XPS 13 Plus is now available, starting at $1,299

The XPS 13 Plus is available in silver or graphite.

Dell announced that the bold XPS 13 Plus it debuted back at CES 2022 is now available for purchase. It starts at $1,299, and while Dell didn’t detail the exact specifications for this configuration, it’ll likely get the lowest specs listed in a spec sheet shared by the company. Those include a 13.4-inch 1920 x 1200 16:10 aspect ratio display with 500 nits of peak brightness, Intel’s 12th Gen Core i5-1240P processor (28W, 12-core, 4.4GHz boost clock), 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM clocked at 5,200MHz, and a 256GB SSD.

Each model includes a 60W USB-C AC adapter and features two Thunderbolt 4 ports (but no headphone jack), a Windows Hello 720p webcam, as well as a fingerprint reader embedded in the power button.

there will also be a Developer Edition...

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Boeing CEO calls Trump’s Air Force One deal a risk it ‘probably shouldn’t have taken’

Boeing is still working on the next generation Air Force One (the current one is pictured here). | Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Boeing’s CEO, Dave Calhoun, says that the company’s deal with Trump to build Air Force One was a risk the company “probably shouldn’t have taken.” The comment was made on Wednesday during a conference call to discuss the company’s Q1 results for 2022, which show that the Air Force One program went $660 million over its expected budget in the past few months. In a financial filing (PDF), Boeing reports that it’s now lost $1.1 billion on the contract.

“Air Force One I’m just gonna call a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn’t have taken, but we are where we are and we’re going to deliver great airplanes. And we’re gonna recognize the cost associated with it,” says Calhoun.

Q...

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Mark Zuckerberg wants to spend big on the metaverse, but investors are skeptical

Meta

Mark Zuckerberg told the world last October that he was all in on the metaverse, and that the endeavor that would only get more expensive over time. Now that his company’s stock price has been hammered in recent months, he is dialing back that rhetoric.

Meta will “slow the pace of some of our investments” due to “our current business growth levels,” Zuckerberg said during the company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday. Meta’s profits for the first quarter were $7.5 billion, down 21 percent from the year-ago period. Revenue rose 7 percent to $27.9 billion, the slowest growth rate since the company went public a decade ago. Its target expense range for 2022 was lowered by $3 billion.

Make no mistake: Zuckerberg is still spending...

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1Password syncing went down for a few hours today during a database upgrade

1Password

Whenever we talk about password managers, especially ones that sync their data to the cloud, there’s always discussion about whether or not your information is secure and what happens if the servers go down. The second thing is exactly what 1Password users in the US experienced earlier today, as a problem affecting 1Password.com kept mobile, desktop, and browser clients from syncing.

A status page first noted the problem at 10:42AM ET and listed it as stabilized, with clients able to connect again by 2:42PM ET. During the outage, the status page noted that the issue didn’t affect any offline data stored in clients, and other domains like 1password.ca, 1password.eu, or ent.1password.com were operational.

Before I knew there was an...

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Ubisoft axes online support for 91 games

91 games and counting... | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

In the past year, Ubisoft has ceased online support for a list of games that has grown to 91 titles. This means that any multiplayer components associated with these games will no longer be accessible, along with any achievements or unlockables attached to the online aspect of the game. It’s worth mentioning, however, that the support for these games wasn’t cut off all at once and doesn’t necessarily impact all platforms.

Many of the titles are remarkably old and no longer playable on modern hardware, with some reaching back to the Wii era. However, at the risk of aging myself, a good portion of the list reads like a rap sheet of my wasted hours in college. Some of the standouts include Tom Clancy’s Endwar, Splinter Cell, and World in...

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Motorola launches Edge 30 in Europe, tells US to sit tight

The midrange Edge 30 includes a Snapdragon 778 chipset and a lower price tag than the premium 30 Pro. | Image: Motorola

Motorola has announced the Edge 30, a pared-down version of its pricier Edge 30 Pro, coming to Europe for €449 (about $475) before reaching other markets in Asia and the Middle East later this year. North America is not on that list, but Motorola says the region will get another (unspecified) Edge family device later in the year.

The Motorola Edge 30 offers a smaller screen and thinner build than the Edge 30 Pro — also known as the Edge Plus in North America. Its 6.5-inch 1080p OLED supports a fast 144Hz refresh rate, like the 30 Pro, but uses a Snapdragon 778 chipset that’s a step down from the 8 Gen 1 processor in the flagship. Rear cameras appear to be the same configuration of a stabilized 50-megapixel f/1.8 wide, 50-megapixel f/2.2...

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Belkin denies report that it’s launching a truly wireless charger

This morning, we heard some news that would be exciting if true — that Belkin is working on what could be the very first consumer gadget with truly wireless charging, the kind that actually beams a small amount of power through the air and across a room.

That’s what Wi-Charge founder and chief business officer Ori Mor told TechCrunch this morning — going so far as to claim that Belkin would launch a specific, “center-stage consumer product” with the tech later this year.

But Belkin is now denying much of that report, telling The Verge that not only is there no product as of today, but the two companies also haven’t even moved to the product concept phase yet.

Belkin spokesperson Jen Wei confirmed that Wi-Charge and Belkin do have a...

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Harley Quinn’s Kite Man is getting his own spinoff

Kite Man and another Gothamite knocking back a few beers at Noonan’s. | HBO Max

Between his lack of superpowers and proper fighting skills, the Kite Man of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn series is barely anyone in Gotham’s idea of a real supervillain, but that isn’t stopping him from starring in his own spinoff show.

Ahead of Harley Quinn’s upcoming third season, HBO Max announced today that Kite Man (Matt Oberg) will soon also feature in Noonan’s, a new 10-episode comedy from Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker, and Dean Lorey about Gotham’s seediest dive bar. Noonan’s will focus on Kite Man as he partners up with the villainous Golden Glider to make a new name for himself in the time after Poison Ivy dumps him for Harley. In a press release about the show, Warner Bros. Animation executive vice president of alternative...

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CNN Plus won’t make it to April 30th, will cease operations two days early

While CNN Plus already accelerated through the Go90 Scale of Doomed Streaming Services in record time, it has somehow managed to shave another two days off of its lifespan. Warner Bros. Discovery originally announced that the streaming video news service would close on April 30th, but Digital Trends reports that subscribers have received an email confirming the actual end date is April 28th.

That’s confirmed by this support page, and it appears to line up so that subscriptions, which started as early as March 28th before CNN Plus launched the next day, don’t run over a month and charge anyone a second time. This seems like something executives could’ve checked before announcing the end of CNN Plus, but these are unprecedented times.

The...

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Avatar 2 finally has a title, and the first trailer will debut with Doctor Strange

Avatar: The Way of Water is coming to theaters in December. | Image: 20th Century Fox

The first Avatar sequel will be called Avatar: The Way of Water, Disney announced Wednesday at CinemaCon, perhaps the biggest indication yet that the long-delayed movie is actually going to be released on December 16th. And we might have even more potential proof soon, as the first teaser trailer is set to debut alongside Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which premieres on May 6th.

Here is Disney’s synopsis of the film, which is quite vague:

Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, Avatar: The Way of Water begins to tell the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the...

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Lucasfilm is working on another animated Star Wars anthology

Characters from the first season of Star Wars Visions. | Lucasfilm/Disney Plus

In addition to being an anthology, Star Wars Visions was a brilliant testament to how refreshing and exhilarating the Star Wars franchise can still be when it dares to loosen up a bit and wander off the beaten path of its core saga. Though a second season of Visions is one of the big things fans have been hoping to hear about at this year’s Star Wars Celebration, it looks like there’s another anthology series to be on the watch for.

Though we’re still a few weeks out from this year’s Celebration event, a listing of the convention’s panels went up earlier today, along with descriptions of what attendees can expect to see. In what may have been a mistake given how the page was initially pulled, one listing for a panel hosted by The...

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Conservative Twitter accounts got boost in followers after Musk acquisition, data shows

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

It’s not your imagination: follower counts on Twitter really have been shifting wildly in response to news that Elon Musk had finalized a deal to acquire the platform.

Data compiled by The Verge from social media statistics site Social Blade shows that in the two days since the deal was completed, influential conservative accounts have increased their follower counts at roughly ten times the average daily rate for the month leading up to the acquisition.

Meanwhile, popular liberal accounts have suffered, collectively losing hundreds of thousands of followers on April 25th and 26th after a month of gains.

The shifts are unlikely to be the result of changes within Twitter’s management of the platform, as the deal will not close for months...

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