List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

Microsoft will pay $20 million to settle US government allegations that the tech giant violated children's privacy by illegally collecting their personal information through its Xbox Live gaming service.

By Paul Sandle LONDON (Reuters) -The president of Microsoft said he was looking for solutions to try to get British

The release of “Diablo IV” is right around the corner

Twitter has been widely criticized for trying to charge transit agencies, third-party app developers and academics for data access to its platform, a move opponents say has forced independent apps to shut down and threatened research on misinformation and hate speech.

Apple looks set to reveal its long-awaited virtual reality headset in the coming days – and new reports have revealed more details on what it could actually look like. The company has been rumoured to be working on a virtual reality headset for years. But it now looks set to reveal that to the world, according to numerous reports. In recent days, Apple has sent out invitations to its unveiling event to virtual reality publications, and some have speculated that the media invitations included hints that the headset was due to be released. While Apple does not comment on unreleased products, there has been no indication from inside the company or in any reports that the excitement over the imminent unveiling of the headset is mistaken. Now new reports have indicated how exactly the headset might work. Display analyst Ross Young, who has a track record of revealing unreleased Apple products, said the upcoming headset has two displays inside, each of which measure 1.41 inches diagonally across. Those displays can show more than 5,000 nits of peak brightness, he indicated. That is vastly brighter than other virtual reality competitors, such as the PSVR or Meta Quest, whose brightness figures are in the low hundreds. Bright displays are one of the difficulties facing those companies who want to develop convincing displays. Real life is vastly more bright than any head-mounted screen is capable of showing, which means that they can be unconvincing and dark when worn. Meta, for instance, has revealed that it has been working on a prototype technology named Starburst, which can show up to 20,000 nits. But that prototype is impractical and far from a released product – and for now it has been left with various headsets, each of which match the various capabilities that Meta would eventually like to add to one headset. The screen will also have 4,000 pixels per inch, the same report from Ross Young indicated. That would also make it much more capable than even the high-end offerings from other companies such as Meta. Away from the hardware itself, the software that will run on the headset still remains largely mysterious. While reports have suggested that Apple is working on new virtual reality and augmented reality versions of its existing apps, and the developers of the game No Man’s Sky have suggested that they could be involved in the unveiling, there have been no meaningful reports about how the software might actually appear inside the headset. Read More Apple is going to reveal something else alongside its headset, rumours suggest Trust and ethics considerations ‘have come too late’ on AI technology New iPhone update ‘completely changes how the lock screen works’

Sony has announced “Project Q”, a portable version of the PlayStation. The handheld system appears to be something like a PlayStation 5 controller, chopped in half with a screen placed in the middle of it. It works by streaming games over WiFi, the company said during a reveal. But it also suggested that customers will still need a PS5 in their home, and that the Project Q handheld will not be a standalone device. “We will launch a dedicated device that enables you to stream any game from your PS5 console using Remote Play over Wi-Fi,” said PlayStation boss Jim Ryan. “Internally known as ‘Project Q,’ it has an 8-inch HD screen and all of the buttons and features of the DualSense wireless controller.” That divided controller will have all the same “buttons and features” of the controller from the PS5, Sony said. That includes its adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. It will also have a screen that can show up to 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second, the company said. The headset is due to be announced later this year. Sony gave no further information about when that would be, how much it would cost, or even whether “Q” would be its eventual name. The system is not a devoted handheld device, like the Nintendo Switch or the Steam Deck. Nor is it specifically for streaming games over the internet, which would be part of a long-rumoured push into cloud gaming from PlayStation. Instead, it appears to be intended as a way of playing PlayStation games in other parts of the house. Users must not only have a PS5 also connected to the WiFi – which will be accessed through that Remote Play service – but also have the game they want to play installed on that console. Other services already offer the ability to play Remote Play games on handheld devices. Android and iPhones can use that same service, and can pair with controllers. Read More WhatsApp could be making a major change in how you find people Top Twitter engineer quits after DeSantis campaign fiasco Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip company gets FDA approval for human testing

Sony Group Corp. is gearing up for a push into cloud gaming in the coming months as it

Male characters in role-playing video games have 50% more dialogue than females, highlighting a “stark gender imbalance” in the gaming genre, scientists have said. In role-playing games (RPGs), the gamer controls one or more characters undertaking quests or missions in an imaginary world. Researchers from the Universities of Glasgow and Cardiff analysed the dialogue of 50 RPGs from 1986 to 2020, including Final Fantasy, Skyrim and Mass Effect. This encompassed 6.2 million spoken words from 13,000 characters. The results, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggest 94% of the games studied had more male dialogue than female dialogue, including ones with multiple female protagonists such as Final Fantasy X-2 or King’s Quest VII. They also found that the proportion of female dialogue is slowly increasing in RPGs at a rate of 6.3 percentage points per decade – from a mean of about 18% in the 1980s to about 40% by 2020. While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games - just three of 50 - had more than 50% female dialogue Dr Stephanie Rennick, University of Glasgow However, the researchers said that if this rate were to continue, gender balance would not be reached until 2036. Dr Stephanie Rennick, research associate in philosophy, school of humanities at the University of Glasgow, said: “While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games – just three of 50 – had more than 50% female dialogue. “I was also surprised that the lack of female characters compared to their male counterparts persisted at every level, from main player characters through to background NPCs (non-player characters).” For the study, the researchers obtained the transcripts of dialogue used in the games and identified which character said what. Dr Sean Roberts, lecturer at the school of English, communication and philosophy at Cardiff University, said: “We categorised the gender of each character, not assuming binary gender. “This allowed us to count how many words were available for each gender in each game. “For example, we can compare the number of words spoken by female characters to the number of words spoken by male characters.” The researchers found only 35% of words were spoken by female characters and they were more likely to apologise, hesitate or be polite, compared with their male counterparts. They said the proportion of female dialogue ranged from 6% (King’s Quest VI) to 80% (King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella). They discovered one game, Monkey Island, did not pass the Bechdel test, which requires two named female characters to talk to each other about something besides a man. Around half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion. More diverse representation is being called for by players and developers Dr Sean Roberts, Cardiff University The team also found examples of stereotyped gendered behaviour. The researchers said that in Stardew Valley, characters respond differently depending on the player character’s gender. For example, they said, female players are offered a salad, wine, repeatedly described as beautiful and assumed to have little experience of video games, while male players are offered pasta, ale, described as “full of energy” and are assumed to be good video game players. Analysis also showed only 30 out of 13,000 characters belong to the non-binary gender categories, which is about half as much as in real life, the researchers said. Dr Roberts said: “Around half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion. “More diverse representation is being called for by players and developers. “So we hope that developers will consider addressing the imbalances we found in order to create more inclusive games.”

By Mike Scarcella Microsoft Corp evaded a potential early legal obstacle in its $69 billion deal to acquire

Sony Group Corp. is weighing a partial spinoff and separate listing for its financial unit in two to

YouTube is great at sending users videos that it thinks they'll like based on their interests

Take Two Interactive Software Inc., known for the Grand Theft Auto video-game franchise, soared in extended trading after