Month: September 2022

Enlarge / As Skull & Bones suffers yet another delay, we question Ubisoft's choice of an ominous skull as its featured box-art image. (credit: Ubisoft)

2022 is turning out to be a substantial rebuilding year for game publisher Ubisoft, as its holiday 2022 release slate of major multi-platform games has now been all but wiped clean.

The bad news came on Wednesday when Ubisoft again delayed the launch of its open-world pirate adventure Skull and Bones, this time past its previously suggested November 8 launch date on PC and current-gen consoles. The game maker confirmed the delay to March 9, 2023, after an independent report from Kotaku suggested that S&B's latest rounds of pre-release testing pointed to a stable-but-boring experience for its online multiplayer modes and noted issues with the game's "progression" systems.

Skull and Bones debuted at E3 2017 as an apparent build-out of the third-person, open-seas pirate adventuring found in mid-'10s Assassin's Creed games—albeit with no formal ties to that other Ubisoft-helmed series. As originally announced, players would directly control a pirate ship's captain and issue orders to AI-controlled crewmates to either engage in a solo campaign or connect online for open-seas combat with both PvE (fight the computer) and PvP (fight real players) elements.

Enlarge / An artwork created with OpenAI's DALL-E image generator. (credit: OpenAI)

If you've been itching to try OpenAI's image synthesis tool but have been stymied by the lack of an invitation, now's your chance. Today, OpenAI announced that it removed the waitlist for its DALL-E AI image generator service. That means anyone can sign up and use it.

DALL-E is a deep learning image synthesis model that has been trained on hundreds of millions of images pulled from the Internet. It uses a technique called latent diffusion to learn associations between words and images. As a result, DALL-E users can type in a text description—called a prompt—and see it rendered visually as a 1024×1024 pixel image in almost any artistic style.

Aside from image-to-text generation, DALL-E also includes a feature called "Outpainting" which allows you to upload an image and extend its borders using image synthesis. You can also merge several photos into one by generating a visual bridge between them, blending styles.

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  Open up live view and you can search for things (at the bottom) like Restaurants, ATMs, and shopping locations. (Next in the gallery is Google's animated gif of this in action.) [credit: Google ]

Google Maps loves augmented reality. After launching augmented reality walking navigation in 2019 and indoor AR navigation in 2021, it's now showing off augmented reality search results.

Augmented reality search results will put markers in your video feed, positioned in 3D space. It's a dream interface for augmented reality goggles, but for now, it will only work on a phone.

As usual for Maps AR features, this will be powered by Google Maps VPS or "Visual Positioning System." This is a camera-powered location system: You fire up the camera, point it at the world, and your camera feed is compared against Google's huge collection of street view data to determine your location. This is an extremely data-intensive way of determining location, but it's a lot more accurate at orientation and street-level location than a phone compass and GPS, which are both prone to interference.

Enlarge / Illustration of fiber-optic cables. (credit: Getty Images | Tetra Images)

Google Fiber is touting a test that delivered 20Gbps download speeds to a house in Kansas City, calling it a milestone on the path to offering 100Gbps symmetrical Internet. The company said it will also offer new multi-gigabit tiers in the near future.

"We used to get asked, 'who needs a gig?' Today it's no longer a question," Google Fiber CEO Dinni Jain wrote in a blog post yesterday. "Every major provider in the US seems to have now gotten the gigabit memo, and it's only going up from there—some providers are already offering 2, 5, 8, even 10 Gig products."

The Alphabet division recently began selling 2Gbps download speeds with 1Gbps uploads for $100, alongside its longstanding offer of symmetrical 1Gbps speeds for $70 a month. "In the coming months, we'll have announcements to dramatically expand our multi-gigabit tiers. These will be critical milestones on our journey to 100 Gig symmetrical Internet," Jain wrote.

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  Amazon's Kindle Scribe is a 10.2-inch e-ink e-reader with a bundled pen and handwriting support. [credit: Amazon ]

Earlier this month, Amazon announced an update to its entry-level Kindle, but at the company's product event today, the focus was on a new flagship product that includes handwriting support and a stylus—not a new feature for e-readers but a first for the Kindle lineup.

The Kindle Scribe is a 10.2-inch e-ink e-reader that includes a pen for taking notes, annotating documents, or general scribbling. The device will start at $340 for 16GB of storage and a Basic Pen accessory, and it's available for preorder today. It will begin shipping at some unspecified date later this year.

The Scribe looks like a blown-up version of the Kindle Oasis, with a large bezel on one side to make it easier to hold one-handed without touching the screen, though it lacks the Oasis' physical page-turn buttons. Foldable leather and fabric cases can protect the front and back of the Scribe when closed or prop the tablet up at a couple of different angles when folded. Like other modern Kindles, the Scribe boasts a 300 PPI pixel density to make text and handwriting look sharp.

Enlarge / Multibeam sonar image of the SS Mesaba shipwreck lying on the sea bed in the Irish Sea. (credit: Bangor University)

Before the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in April 1912, the ship's wireless operators received multiple warning messages of icebergs, growlers, and field ice from six other ships in the region. Now, researchers at Bangor University have identified the wreck of one of those ships in the Irish Sea: the SS Mesaba, which sank in 1918 after being torpedoed by a German submarine. It's one of 273 ships mapped and mostly identified in that 7,500-square-mile region, using a state-of-the-art technique called multibeam sonar.

As we've reported previously, Titanic set out on her maiden voyage to much fanfare on April 10, 1912. Among other amenities, there was a shiny new wireless telegraph system on board, courtesy of the Marconi International Marine Communication Company, capable of transmitting radio signals over a radius of 350 miles (563 kilometers). Although its purpose was mostly to send so-called "marconigrams" for the ship's wealthiest first-class passengers, operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride also handled any messages from other ships—notably weather reports and ice warnings.

Phillips and Bride had been receiving ice warnings from other ships all day on April 14, beginning at 9 am with reports of "bergs and growlers and field ice" from RMS Caronia. Later that day, RMS Baltic warned that a Greek ship had reported "passing icebergs and large quantities of field ice." Captain Edward Smith acknowledged receipt of both messages and shifted course a bit further south in response, but he didn't reduce the ship's speed.

Enlarge / The people in this room are smiling because they know that little Wi-Fi hub on the ceiling could power a whole bunch of cameras and access points over Ethernet.

Amazon-owned Eero announced today that its latest Echo devices can serve as Wi-Fi mesh extenders for Eero networks, using built-in hardware to expand a network up to 1,000 square feet.

Eero will also add "Internet Backup" for Eero Plus (formerly Secure+) subscribers, allowing Eero networks to automatically use a hotspot or nearby Wi-Fi during an Internet outage and use it to keep select devices connected until a dedicated connection returns. And the company announced power-over-Ethernet devices aimed at enterprise, business, and serious networking enthusiasts.

Eero Built-In, which made its debut in the Ring Alarm Pro last year, will be available on the latest (fifth-generation) Echo Dot and Echo Dot with Clock devices and the fourth-generation Echo, expected to be unveiled today. Mesh capabilities will also come to fourth-generation Echo Dot and Echo Dot with Clock devices through an over-the-air update, Eero says. (Essentially, if your Echo device is spherical, a clock, or announced today, it's likely to have built-in Eero).