Fortnite’s Unreal editor adds powerful new creative tools and launches Wednesday

Image: Epic Games

Epic Games finally showed off the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at its State of Unreal 2023 presentation on Wednesday. It’s a new PC application that’s set to launch Wednesday on the Epic Games Store as a public beta, and it will also feature a new scripting language called “Verse.”

UEFN has “many of the same features” Epic uses to make Fortnite proper, the company said in a video demo. You’ll be able to import custom assets to create worlds that may end up looking nothing like Fortnite’s usual cartoony vibe. In a live demo onstage, Epic showed a gritty, largely brown world, which significantly contrasts with the brightly-colored Fortnite player characters. Epic also wants interoperability between Fortnite and Unreal Engine assets so...

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Epic’s hyperrealistic MetaHumans can soon be animated using an iPhone

Image: Epic Games

Epic will soon let you animate your MetaHumans. The company first launched the MetaHuman creator tools in 2021 as a way of streamlining the process of making more realistic human characters. During its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023, the company showed off new animation tools that make it possible to create realistic facial animations using only video captured from an iPhone.

Epic showed this off with a live demonstration featuring the actor behind the upcoming game Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. It was a short clip, with the actor speaking directly into the camera, but it appeared to be rendered both quickly and accurately. Even more impressive, the company then showed off the same animations captured onstage used to bring another...

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Microsoft inks another deal to capture and store its carbon emissions underground

A rendering of CarbonCapture’s container-sized carbon removal modules. | Image: CarbonCapture via Business Wire

Microsoft, an early backer of emerging technologies that take carbon dioxide emissions out of the atmosphere, has agreed to purchase carbon removal credits from Los Angeles-based startup CarbonCapture.

CarbonCapture has a massive facility called a direct air capture (DAC) plant in the works in Wyoming. Named Project Bison, the facility is projected to start running sometime in the latter half of 2024. The startup has developed modular technology that draws in CO2 from the ambient air so it can be stored underground, preventing the greenhouse gas from contributing to climate change.

The startup has developed modular technology that draws in CO2 from the ambient air so it can be stored underground

Microsoft has a goal of becoming “carbon...

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Valve announces Counter-Strike 2, a free replacement for CS:GO

Image: Valve

Counter-Strike 2 is official, and for some, it’s coming today. In a post on Twitter, Valve writes that a limited test for CS2 is starting today, which it describes as an “overhaul to every system, every piece of content, and every part of the C-S experience.” A website for the game describes it as “the largest technical leap forward in Counter-Strike’s history” and promises years of updates and new features.

The full game is expected to release in summer 2023, according to the game’s FAQ. It will be free to play.

CS2 is based on Valve’s Source 2 engine and includes updates to some of the game’s core mechanics, including improved smoke grenades and “sub-tick updates” that Valve says will let “servers know the exact instant that motion...

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MSCHF made a free dating simulator that can prepare your federal taxes

Image: MSCHF

If you still haven’t filed your taxes (tax day is April 18th!), MSCHF’s free dating simulator that’s launching soon might be able to help. The art collective’s latest stunt is Tax Heaven 3000, a “visual novel dating game that actually prepares your 2022 US federal tax return,” according to the game’s Steam page.

The game’s description, which seems to be written from the point of view of the game’s anime waifu, Iris, is largely a rant against the infuriatingly complex tax filing process in the US, and Tax Heaven 3000 seems like it could make the process easier. When I used to use TurboTax, the experience was largely just answering a series of questions about my finances. Preparing taxes could be a lot more fun in the context of a dating...

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Panera Bread will let you pay using Amazon’s palm-scanning tech

Customers can link their MyPanera membership to the Amazone One service to collect rewards and pay for purchases in a single action. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon has announced that Amazon One — the e-commerce giant’s palm-reading payment technology — will be deployed at Panera Bread locations around the US. The restaurant chain will be the first to leverage Amazon One’s new loyalty card linking capabilities, allowing customers to connect a MyPanera loyalty membership to their Amazon One account and collect rewards when paying for purchases with their palm.

Linking the two accounts is completely optional. Customers can decide to use Amazon One just for payments, just for loyalty rewards, or for both, though Amazon claims that linking a MyPanera membership will allow restaurant staff to greet customers by name and provide a “highly personalized experience.” Some folks (like myself) would...

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Pebble might be coming back — as a small Android phone

Hugo Herrera / The Verge

Alumni have been leading a community project to design, crowdfund, and build a phone to fill the iPhone Mini’s shoes. All right under our noses.

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Hipstamatic’s new social network looks like an Instagram throwback

Hipstamatic’s social network recaptures the experience of using early versions of Instagram (better late than never). | Image: Hipstamatic

Back in 2010, Hipstamatic was one of the most popular apps for early smartphone photography before it was superseded by Instagram’s vibrant social network. Now, over a decade later, Hipstamatic is attempting a comeback, relaunching with new networking features similar to those that originally drove Instagram’s success.

In fact, the new Hipstamatic social network looks very similar to early versions of Instagram — allowing photographers to publish images to a chronological feed and share their snaps with friends or like-minded users. It’s a simple format that Instagram itself has long since abandoned in favor of stuffing its platform with algorithms and features like Reels. Hipstamatic seemingly has little interest in any of that, which...

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Apple’s Friday Night Baseball streams now require a subscription

Image: Apple

Apple is making users pay to watch Friday Night Baseball this year. The company announced on Wednesday that only those who subscribe to its $6.99 per month Apple TV Plus subscription can watch the Major League Baseball games, which kick off on April 7th.

When Apple first announced Friday Night Baseball last year, the company let everyone watch the games for free on Apple TV Plus and only required that they sign up for an account. However, Apple did hint that it wouldn’t stream the games for free forever, as an archived version of Apple’s Friday Night Baseball support page notes that “for a limited time, you can watch without a subscription.” This line is now absent from the support page that’s currently live on Apple’s website.

Just like...

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Sleep gadgets to help you catch those Zzzs

Sleep trackers, earbuds, and smart beds | Kristen Radtke / The Verge

Sleep tech runs the gamut from trackers and apps to expensive smart beds, but it doesn’t all address the same issues. Are you trying to see how your sleep impacts your athletic performance? Hoping to mask the sound of a snoring partner? Before you pull out your wallet, you should know how a gadget will help you achieve your specific sleep goals.

One factor to keep in mind is how well a device fits your lifestyle. There’s no point in wrist-based sleep trackers if you wake up in the middle of the night to take them off. If you can’t wear a watch, earbuds, or a ring to bed, you may want to look into non-invasive options like the Withings Sleep, Amazon Halo Rise, or the Google Nest Hub.

Excellent battery life will also make sleep tracking a...

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The Nothing Ear 2 are a capable $149 update to the company’s debut earbuds

At a glance, it’s hard to tell the Ear 2 earbuds from the original Ear 1s. | Photo by Jon Porter / The Verge

Nothing has announced an updated pair of noise-canceling true wireless earbuds called the Nothing Ear 2. They’re the successor to the company’s debut product, the Ear 1 earbuds, and both earbuds and charging cases feature an almost identical design, complete with the company’s signature mix of transparent plastic combined with a white, black, and red color scheme. You can read my complete impressions over in my review of the Nothing Ear 2 earbuds.

On paper, the Ear 2s don’t look like a huge upgrade over their predecessors. There are a couple of additional nice-to-have features, like multipoint connectivity, which lets you connect to two devices (like a phone and laptop) simultaneously, and a fit test feature to help you find the right...

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Nothing Ear 2 review: it’s what’s on the inside that counts

The second-generation earbuds might look almost identical to the Ear 1s but with a $50 higher asking price. Lucky for Nothing, their sound quality is in a different league.

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GDC 2023: all the latest from the Game Developers Conference

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Expect plenty of insights on how games get made as we cover the conference live from San Francisco.

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You can now try Microsoft Loop, a Notion competitor with futuristic Office documents

Microsoft’s Notion competitor is ready for everyone to try. | Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is now letting anyone preview Microsoft Loop, a collaborative hub offering a new way of working across Office apps and managing tasks and projects. Much like Notion, Microsoft Loop includes workspaces and pages where you can import and organize tasks, projects, and documents. But what sets the two apart is Loop’s shareable components that let you turn any page into a real-time block of content that can be pasted into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word on the web, and Whiteboard.

Loop components are constantly updated and editable for whoever they’re shared with. Imagine a table that you’re working on with colleagues; you can drop that as a Loop component into a Teams message or Outlook email, and any edits to the table will be...

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TikTok ban: all the news on the US’s crackdown on the video platform

Illustration: Nick Barclay / The Verge

Here’s a roundup of all the essential development as US lawmakers weigh a potential ban on the ByteDance-owned social media platform.

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Apple Music bug adds other people’s playlists to users’ libraries

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple Music users have started noticing a strange issue that’s causing other people’s playlists and songs to show up in their libraries, as reported earlier by 9to5Mac. Several users on Reddit have reported this problem over the span of several weeks, with some saying that they have even lost some of their songs or entire playlists as a result.

In some cases, these random playlists and songs are actually replacing the ones already in users’ libraries, leaving them unable to access the music they once had. Meanwhile, others say unknown music was simply added to their library without erasing any of their content.

As noted by 9to5Mac, it seems that this issue is only affecting the Apple Music app on iOS. We still don’t know why this is...

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Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow

Bard prominently tells users it’s an experiment, but that doesn’t mean they’ll listen. | Image: Google

If you don’t believe the rushed launch of AI chatbots by Big Tech has an extremely strong chance of degrading the web’s information ecosystem, consider the following:

Right now,* if you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing as evidence a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.

(*I say “right now” because in the time between starting and finishing writing this story, Bing changed its answer and now correctly replies that Bard is still live. You...

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Amazon is flooding the zone with new TVs as it crosses 200 million Fire TV devices sold

The budget Fire TV 2-Series sticks to HD resolution. | Image: Amazon

Amazon announced today that it has sold a total of over 200 million Fire TV devices. That number is a combination of Fire TV streamers, third-party TVs that run Fire TV software, and the company’s own televisions that debuted in 2021 (with new models introduced last year). The last update came at CES 2022, when Amazon said it had crossed 150 million sales.

Alongside that news, Amazon is introducing new TVs at the top and bottom of its lineup. It’s adding new sizes of the flagship Fire TV Omni QLED series and launching a new cheaper TV lineup called the 2-Series. These smaller-size budget sets are limited to HD resolution, but the entire pitch here is that you’re getting the Fire TV experience built in for prices that start at just $199....

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GitHub Copilot X is a new ChatGPT-like assistant to help developers write and fix code

Image: GitHub

Microsoft-owned GitHub is overhauling its Copilot system today to integrate OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and bring chat and voice support to its AI pair programmer. GitHub Copilot X is a giant upgrade that includes a new ChatGPT-like experience inside code editors, allowing the chatbot to recognize and explain code and recommend changes and fix bugs.

“With Copilot X we’re laying out our future vision of Copilot, which means AI is at every step of the developer lifecycle,” explains GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in an interview with The Verge. “It will fundamentally influence the developer experience.”

GitHub Copilot X, which enters technical preview today, goes beyond Copilot’s basic auto-complete comments and coding. It’s closer to a true coding...

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Nanoleaf’s new Matter-compatible lights are a great upgrade for your smart home

Nanoleaf’s low-cost LED smart bulbs have been reengineered to work with Matter. | Image: Nanoleaf

After a slow rollout of devices that support Matter, the first Matter-over-Thread light bulbs are finally here. You can preorder Nanoleaf’s Essentials Matter smart lighting line starting today at Nanoleaf’s site. Its new A19 smart bulb ($19.99) and light strip ($49.99) feature full-color and tunable white light and will ship in early April. A BR30 bulb ($49.99 for a three-pack) will be available next month, and a GU10 bulb ($49.99 for a three-pack) and recessed downlight ($34.99) will join the lineup later this year.

Anyone looking to add Matter and Thread devices to their smart home will be excited by the launch of these inexpensive smart lights. Thread is a wireless protocol that promises faster response times and a stronger local...

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Mozilla is creating a startup to build more open and trustworthy AI

Image: Mozilla.ai

Mozilla is creating a new startup called Mozilla.ai, which the company hopes “will build a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem.” Moez Draief, a longtime AI researcher and scientist, is leading the new startup, and Mozilla is investing $30 million to get it started.

As products like ChatGPT, Bing, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion have become hugely popular, they’re also encountering huge problems with misinformation and are being put to use creating deepfakes and copyright problems. Plus, they’re already beginning to change the way the internet works. If chatbots become our primary interface to information and inspiration, that has huge ramifications for user privacy, copyright, and much more. Mozilla has been tracking this...

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Nomad’s latest fancy MagSafe charger is aluminum, heavy, and $110

The Stand One keeps your MagSafe iPhone angled upright and your wallet a bit flat.

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How to watch Epic Games’ State of Unreal 2023

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Epic Games is nearly ready to reveal its latest updates to Unreal Engine, its hugely popular suite of development tools. The company is just about to host its 2023 State of Unreal keynote, where the company plans to “take a look at some new projects, dive into the latest Epic tech, and have some fun along the way.”

The keynote is taking place as part of this year’s Game Developers Conference, and the company’s tech talks following the keynote give some clues as to what might be discussed. A few sessions include Unreal Engine 5.2 in the title, so you can expect Epic will share some news on that during the keynote. If you want to see what’s possible with Unreal Engine 5.1, just hop into a match of Fortnite. And speaking of Fortnite, Epic...

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Pete Buttigieg still believes in smart cities

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg poses for a portrait at the Department of Transportation offices in Washington, DC. | Image: Cheriss May for The Verge

The US Department of Transportation is making a big bet on smart city technology with the release of $94.8 million in federal funding. But in an interview, Secretary Buttigieg warned that not every project ‘is going to prove out.’

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WhatsApp’s latest updates make groups easier to find and manage

WhatsApp users can soon search mutual contacts to check what groups they have in common, and admins have more control over who can join community groups. | Image: WhatsApp / Meta

WhatsApp has announced two new features coming to the Meta-owned messaging app that are designed to improve the privacy of community group chats while also making it easier to find groups users have in common. Both new features will roll out globally “over the coming weeks.”

The updates are related to the WhatsApp community tab — group chats designed for large collections of people (such as organizations and schools) to house multiple related sub-groups, akin to something like Slack or Discord. WhatsApp Communities rolled out last year and currently supports up to 5,000 users, video calls for up to 32 participants, and group-wide admin announcements.

Admins will have more control over who can join a group through an invitation link

One...

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Modder lands industry job after co-creating excellent unofficial Resident Evil 4 HD remaster

A screenshot from the Resident Evil 4 HD Project. | Image: Albert Martin / Capcom

Albert Martin, one of the modders behind the eight-year Resident Evil 4 HD remaster project, has landed an industry job at a studio best known for its work remastering retro games.

“I’m really happy because I’m finally and for the first time in my life working in the videogame industry,” Martin wrote in a blog post. “Thank you, Joel, for having faith in me, and thank you, Stephen, for the opportunity in Nightdive Studios.”

It’s well deserved. The Resident Evil 4 HD Project was a mammoth task that Martin and co-creator Cris Morales started in 2014 in an attempt to overhaul the textures in the then-recent Resident Evil 4 Ultimate HD Edition re-release. In a NeoGaf thread from the time, Morales estimated that the job would take the two of...

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Waymo is taking on the task of writing a safety case for the entire AV industry

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Waymo published a paper today outlining a safety case for autonomous vehicles that the company says should serve as a blueprint for the entire industry.

Waymo’s safety case would be “a formal way to explain how a company determines that an AV system is safe enough to be deployed on public roads without a human driver, and it includes evidence to support that determination,” the company says in an accompanying blog post.

In other words, Waymo is presenting an argument for the safety of autonomous vehicles, along with evidence that it says backs up this argument. And the company wants other AV companies — essentially, its competitors — to adopt a similar approach in order to prove to regulators that AVs can safely be deployed at a wide...

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Miniot Wheel 2 review: a unique vertical turntable worth waiting for

It’ll cost you more than $2,000. It nearly cost its maker everything.

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Meta’s new quests could give you something to do in its VR social network

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR social network is getting quests. No, not Quest headsets, but in-game missions with rewards that might make its experiences more entertaining to visit and more interesting to return to.

With the new quests, which are now in testing, you can complete certain tasks in a given world to earn in-game rewards like clothing for your avatar. Meta’s test takes place in an experience called Giant Mini Paddle Golf, which is set in a whimsical mini golf course where you use a paddle to whack a ball toward each hole. If you’re in the test, you can access the quests screen from a new icon you’ll see in the card with your profile picture, and when you complete a quest in that screen, you’ll get a prize.

GIF:...

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Future Apple Watches could automatically accessorize with their bands

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Imaging swapping out a hot pink Apple Watch band for an earth-tone green one, and having your watchface automatically change to a matching color, cutting out the (more annoying than it should be) manual customization process. According to a patent filing spotted by Patently Apple, we may actually get something like that. The patent describes a wearable and bands that have NFC chips, letting the watch automatically take action when you connect or remove certain accessories.

Apple patenting something doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll get it in the future, but it does show that there are some pretty fun ideas floating around inside the company. Beyond switching up the color palette when you attach the band, the patent says the system...

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