Google spinoff Niantic had a on its hands when it launched Pokémon Go several years ago. The title made use of augmented reality (AR) technology to make it look like all your favorite pocket monsters were roaming around in the real world. However, the AR was rudimentary at best. Niantic has since acquired several smaller firms to beef up its AR tech, and now it’s preparing to roll out its enhanced “Real World Platform.” The company plans to make the available to third-party developers, too. The Real World Platform powers Pokémon Go, but some impressive new capabilities are coming.
Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has spent more than three years alone in the emptiness of space on its way to rendezvous with an asteroid. The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) has now confirmed that Hayabusa 2 is . On the agenda are numerous mapping and remote surveys, as well as a brief landing to collect samples for return to Earth. The spacecraft has spent the last three and a half years traveling 177 million miles (285 million kilometers) from Earth to meet up with the asteroid Ryugu. This object is about half a mile across and a member of the carbon-rich C-type asteroid family.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket flared to life in the early hours of Friday morning to launch a resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The rocket carried, among other things, a . That’s not the only reason this launch was special. Both the Falcon 9 first stage booster and the Dragon capsule , allowing SpaceX to again gloat about its reusable rocket prowess. The mission launched at 5:42 AM from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The second stage separated and made its way into orbit. It will meet up with the space station on Monday to deliver 5,900 pounds (2,700 kg) of cargo.
DC Comics has teamed up with the folks at GraphicAudio to deliver a bevy of the best comic book stories in dramatized audiobook format. And with this week’s Humble Audiobook Bundle, you pick up 22 audiobooks for just $15. Better yet, you can get a taste for only a dollar. • If you’re unsure if GraphicAudio is a good fit for you, the $1 tier is a good place to start. For about the price of a candy bar, you’ll get two Batman audiobooks, two Green Lantern audiobooks, and the Countdown audiobook. Pay a minimum of $1Green Lantern: Hero’s QuestWayne of GothamBatman: The Stone KingGreen Lantern: Sleepers (Book One)CountdownIf you’re willing to go in for $8, you’ll unlock the five audiobooks above and eight more starring the likes of Superman, Martian Manhunter, Lobo, Flash, Wonder Woman, and more.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in the wee hours Friday morning. The unmanned mission will bring new supplied and instruments to the station, along with something a bit… different. (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) will soon be buzzing around the ISS. CIMON is a project from German Aerospace Center, Airbus, and IBM. The will arrive at the station on Monday as the autonomous Dragon capsule links up with the crew. At its most basic level, CIMON will act as a flying camera. Using fans and maneuvering fins, CIMON will zip around the station to serve as a camera to monitor experiments and repairs.
For years, Facebook users and journalists have noticed that the service has an unsettling habit of serving up advertisements related to topics they’d often been discussing in their personal lives or had no previous habit of Googling. The question of whether Facebook listens to conversations going on around us has come up so regularly, there’s been a host of investigatory articles and discussions on the topic in 2018 alone. Facebook’s position throughout all this has been consistent: The company claims it does not spy on users by using their smartphone mic to listen in on conversations. It has maintained this position officially since 2016.
Think about how many times you’ve alt-tabbed between applications in your life. Probably a lot, right? For the last six months, Microsoft has been publicly testing a Windows feature that could vastly reduce the need to switch applications. The so-called Sets feature could add tabs to almost any Windows app, but now the feature has been . Reports indicate Sets is on hold and won’t ship this year as many had hoped. Building tab support into the core of Windows 10 would solve a myriad of headaches. For example, you could avoid having half a dozen File Explorer windows floating around your desktop throughout the day by unifying them in a single window.
Remember the NES Classic? Nintendo’s first effort at a stand-alone retro console was enthusiastically received and just about impossible to find after retail bots and scalpers sucked down most of the available inventory and left store shelves barren throughout the entire holiday season of 2016. By the time Nintendo announced the Super Nintendo Classic, the bad taste left in gamers’ mouths was significant enough that the company made repeated efforts to reassure gamers that sufficient numbers of consoles would be available, then announced that the NES Classic was so popular, it would make a return in 2018. This is that return, and the NES Classic goes on sale on Friday once again.
Fujitsu doesn’t have a reputation as a major microprocessor developer the way AMD, Intel, or ARM do, but the company’s supercomputer and HPC work has resulted in multiple generations of high-performance systems, historically built on the SPARC architecture. Now the company is working on the successor to the K supercomputer it built in partnership with RIKEN, the Japanese research institute. And it’s leaving SPARC behind for good in favor of a new, ARM-based architecture. Where the old K supercomputer was built around the SPARC64 VIIIfx (itself based on SPARC64 VII with a number of HPC modifications), the new machine is a custom implementation of the ARMv8 instruction set.
