The Lifx ceiling light features full-color, tunable white light and an array of effects to light up your home. | Image: Lifx Smart light fixtures are quickly becoming a thing, making it a little easier to add colorful, fun, and useful lighting effects to more areas of your home than you traditionally can with smart light bulbs. While these types of fixtures have been quite pricey, smart lighting company Lifx just announced its new Super Color Ceiling Light starting at just $89.97. The full-color smart LED light fixture offers 2,500 lumens of dimmable light. It works with dynamic lighting effects through Lifx’s app, including a daytime sky with clouds floating by, a night sky with meteors, an invigorating sunrise, and a relaxing sunset.It also has tunable white light ranging from 1,500K to 9,000K, allowing it to work as everything from a soft nightlight to a... Continue reading…

Verne’s robotaxi. | Image: Verne A new robotaxi service is coming to Croatia, courtesy of the country’s leading supercar company, Rimac. The service will be called Verne, named for French novelist and poet Jules Verne, and will launch in Zagreb in 2026, the company said. It’s an interesting pivot for a company that has been on a rocket-ship trajectory over the last few years. Founded by Mate Rimac in a garage as a one-man operation, Rimac has since become a highly desirable brand, with many legacy automakers calling upon the startup to help them build their own electric supercars. In addition to making the record-breaking Nevera hypercar, Rimac also took control of Bugatti from Volkswagen in 2021 in a surprise move that created a new company called Bugatti Rimac. ... Continue reading…

Photo by Becca Farsace / The Verge Meta is testing a feature for its Quest headsets that allows you to place windows freely, similar to the Apple Vision Pro. Multitasking with multiple windows has been part of Meta Horizon OS (formerly Meta Quest OS) for a few years now, but currently, it only supports three virtual windows docked in a side-by-side layout. RoadtoVR points out this demonstration video from a data miner named Luna, who spotted the experimental feature in version 67 of the Meta Quest Public Test Channel.Meta Quest OS v67 PTCSettings > Experimental Features > New Window Layout pic.twitter.com/jDq0hdoCOV— Luna (@Lunayian) June 25, 2024It brings the Quest 3, in particular, a step closer to Apple’s spatial computing when used in mixed reality mode, but... Continue reading…

Image: The Verge The advanced voice mode for ChatGPT that sparked a tussle with Scarlett Johansson was an important element of OpenAI’s Spring Update event, where it also revealed a desktop app for ChatGPT.Now, OpenAI says it will “need one more month to reach our bar to launch” an alpha version of the new voice mode to a small group of ChatGPT Plus subscribers, with plans to allow access for all Plus customers in the fall. One specific area that OpenAI says it’s improving is the ability to “detect and refuse certain content.”As for the new video and screen sharing capabilities that we saw during the event, OpenAI writes that it will “keep you posted” on a timeline. OpenAI had said it would deliver the new capabilities in “the coming weeks.” Now, the... Continue reading…

In case you were wondering, yes, there will be lots of AI. | Image: Samsung Samsung’s next Unpacked summer launch event will take place on July 10th in Paris, France, the company announced on Tuesday. The animation accompanying the invitation hints at foldables, and the invite itself removes all doubt: “Prepare to discover the power of Galaxy AI, now infused into the latest Galaxy Z series and the entire Galaxy ecosystem.” But we’re also on the lookout for something of a different shape: the Galaxy Ring. Rumors indicate that the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6 will be fairly minor upgrades, with the Z Flip 6 getting a slightly bigger battery and the Z Fold 6 looking a little boxier. Not the most exciting stuff, but that’s been the story with the past few generations of Samsung’s folding phones.Instead, the more... Continue reading…

Photo by Michael Tullberg / Getty Images Years after Twitch’s ban, the streamer confirms it was due to messages he sent to a minor on the platform. Continue reading…

Image: Ultimate Ears How many Boom-branded speakers is too many? Can there even be such a thing? Ultimate Ears seems to be on a mission to find out. The company just announced the $249.99 Everboom — now the sixth speaker in its lineup. In both size and price, this one slots in between the Megaboom speaker and the $299.99 Epicboom released late last year.The Everboom has UE’s typical traits: it’s IP67 (dustproof and waterproof), it’ll float should you drop it into a pool or lake, and it comes with a removable carabiner. There’s an outdoor boost mode that adjusts the sound profile for wide open environments while also leveling up the bass response. The battery lasts for up to 20 hours and there’s easy NFC pairing, but that’s about it for the feature list. A... Continue reading…

The new 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless Controller includes Bluetooth, USB-C, and 2.4GHz connectivity. | Image: 8BitDo 8BitDo announced its latest budget-minded wireless controller today, the Ultimate 2C. For $29.99, it includes features like an extra pair of shoulder buttons to satisfy most PC and Android gamers, Hall effect sticks and triggers to keep problems like the Switch’s notorious “Joy-Con drift” at bay, and three different ways to connect it to a gaming machine with USB-C, a 2.4GHz dongle boasting 1,000Hz polling rates, and Bluetooth.Amazon lists a July 15th release date, and while we haven’t had a chance to go hands-on with it yet, it could be a better bargain than the Ultimate C controllers the company released last year with the same $29.99 price. There is a catch. Unfortunately, the Ultimate 2C’s Bluetooth compatibility only lists support... Continue reading…

Image: Xbox Game Studios / Turn 10 The “delisting” ax is swinging once again, and this time, Forza Horizon 4 is the latest major video game to be cleaved from digital storefronts. Developer Playground Games announced on its site that sales of the 2018 open-world racer are ending due to licensing and partner agreements, and the game will be removed from Microsoft stores and Steam on December 15th, 2024.While the days are numbered for people to still be able to buy the game, the final in-game event will run from July 25th to August 22nd — after which, some achievements linked to the seasonal Festival Playlists will no longer be unlockable.To add a little further confusion, Forza Horizon 4’s DLC is being delisted beginning today. And if you played the game via Xbox Game... Continue reading…

Volkswagen is investing $1 billion in Rivian as part of a new joint venture that will give the German auto giant access to the buzzy California EV company’s software and EV platform. Rivian will receive an additional $4 billion over time, for a total sum of $5 billion. The joint venture will be co-owned by Rivian and VW Group, which oversees brands like Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini, and its flagship Volkswagen. The two companies will introduce vehicles developed from the joint venture in the “second half of the decade,” they announced.The new venture was announced in a post from Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, who noted the investment will help the company bring its next generation R2 electric vehicle to market starting in 2026. The R2 is... Continue reading…

Image: Toys R Us Do you have fond memories of Toys “R” Us, back before private equity helped lay it to waste? If so, I’m really curious what you think of this partially AI-generated video that the zombie brand is calling “the first-ever brand film using OpenAI’s new text-to-video tool, Sora.”OpenAI’s Sora wowed the world in February with photorealistic videos created by generative AI — and again when the company’s CTO refused to say where Sora was getting its training data from. (YouTube is the going theory.) But though OpenAI has reportedly been pitching Hollywood on the tech, one of the first entities to publicly bite is brand management firm WHP Global, which currently licenses the Toys “R” Us brand to stores like Macy’s and is also exploring larger... Continue reading…

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images Udio and Suno are not, despite their names, the hottest new restaurants on the Lower East Side. They’re AI startups that let people generate impressively real-sounding songs — complete with instrumentation and vocal performances — from prompts. And on Monday, a group of major record labels sued them, alleging copyright infringement “on an almost unimaginable scale,” claiming that the companies can only do this because they illegally ingested huge amounts of copyrighted music to train their AI models. These two lawsuits contribute to a mounting pile of legal headaches for the AI industry. Some of the most successful firms in the space have trained their models with data acquired via unsanctioned scraping of massive amounts of information... Continue reading…