Meta Connect is over for another year, leaving nought but some paper plates on the floor and a raft of new AR/VR gear on the table. Because we’re nice, .
The headline act is the . Getting the base price down to $300 has meant some compromises, however, like removing the pancake lenses, dropping 4K and reducing the storage.
The 3S seems like a smart idea, since cost remains the second biggest barrier to getting VR/AR gear into people’s homes. The first, of course, being there’s still not a truly killer use case to convince the vast majority of people.
To further lever users toward the Quest 3 series, . Naturally, given longstanding developer gripes that it’s difficult to develop for both the Quest 2 and 3, this makes plenty of sense.
The other big news to come out of the show is the announcement of the . These, the company admits, aren’t ready to go on sale yet, but it’s working with developers to refine the technology for some unspecified future release.
I’ll be honest: I’m forever skeptical about the potential for AR to be as smart and useful as I’d need it to be. I’m not going to invest until it’s at least as useful as Jeeves — from PG Wodehouse, not the search engine — even if it’s never going to be able to fold my laundry.
— Dan Cooper
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It’s a throwback with a modern twist.
Nathan Ingraham was lucky enough to play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and is happy to share his thoughts. It’s a throwback top-down Zelda title, albeit with you playing as the title character for the first time. Nathan’s a fan but, much like Tears of the Kingdom, found the sheer breadth and depth of tools available to be frustrating to marshal and organize.
We’ve played with the new console already.
Speaking of being lucky to play things ahead of time, Jessica Conditt has only bloomin’ gone and played with a PS5 Pro already. . But if you have $700 lying around and really would like to see your games pop in a way they never have before, you should get one.
Mostly for not backing its claims that it was better than a flesh-and-blood lawyer.
DoNotPay, the “robot lawyer” designed to help you battle the smaller legal irritations of life, has been fined $193,000 by the FTC. . It’s part of the FTC’s crack down on companies using AI to make boastful claims about their abilities.
Spoiler: Sam Altman will get equity in the new company.
It looks like . This is both in response to the boardroom drama that briefly saw Altman ousted from the project, and because OpenAI is likely to become a cash cow.