Month: November 2022

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  An Apple Watch showing dive metrics. [credit: Apple ]

In September, Apple announced a new wearable called the Apple Watch Ultra, and one of the company's key pitches for the device was its use as a diving computer. Now Oceanic+, the app that makes that feature possible, launched exclusively for the Ultra, Apple announced today.

The Watch Ultra has depth gauge and water temperature sensors that drive some of the features in the app. To access a few of those features—such as decompression tracking—you'll have to subscribe to the app's premium version for $4.99 per day, $9.99 per month, or $79.99 per year. There's also a family plan at $129.99 annually. If you don't subscribe, you can still use some key features like dive logs, depth tracking, and so on.

The app—which was developed in partnership with Apple by a company called Huish Outdoors, lets you track dive conditions like tides, water temperature, and more. Here's a quick summary from Apple's blog post announcement:

Enlarge / Call it a hunch, but something tells me these two players are working together...

Do you ever feel like your opponents in a free-for-all online game are trying to get you, specifically? It might not just be paranoia; it might be collusion among your opponents. And in a newly published patent application, Electronic Arts details some potential tools and data points—both inside and outside the game—that it could use to detect and root out this unfair practice.

EA's simply titled "Detecting Collusion in Online Games" patent, published earlier this month, defines collusion as when two or more players/groups that are "intended to be opponents" instead "contribute to a common cause" to "gain an unfair advantage" over others. In battle royale shooter, for instance, a small group of players communicating outside the game could stay together and gain a decided firepower advantage against their single opponents.

Many of the patent's potential methods for discovering this kind of collusion use simple and obvious in-game data. If two or more ostensibly opposed players or teams show abnormal amounts of "time spent in proximity... without engagement," for instance, there's a good chance they're working together. Even if those players show some cursory opposition at points, metrics like damage per second can be compared with the average to see if this is just opposition "for appearance sake."