Electronics

Global businesses are embracing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to connect with consumers around the world. The technologies offer new ways to get a feel for products before buying—for everything from virtually trying on a lipstick shade, exploring a brand's world in Roblox, or seeing how a new... Read more

The ubiquitous QR ("quick response") codes that appear on everything from parking pay stations to soda cans and promotional flyers have become an increasingly popular target for cybercriminals to exploit through QR code–based phishing attacks, also known as "quishing." Bad actors will place phony QR codes that direct smartphone users... Read more

Gaming is one of the biggest industries in the world. In fact, in 2024, the revenue from the worldwide gaming market was estimated at almost $US455 billion. For context, the gaming industry is now generating more revenue than the movie and music industries combined.... Read more

Sony PlayStation's online services came back online on Saturday, the Japanese group said, after a 24-hour outage frustrated gamers around the world.... Read more

Immersive film using virtual reality (VR) or 360-degree video is being used increasingly as a tool for eliciting empathy and emotional identification in fact-based stories. Unlike traditional flat film, immersive films allow viewers to look in any direction while watching the video.... Read more

Science fiction film and television has long been fascinated by robots. But stories that show us uncannily human cyborgs have often tended to veer towards either comedy or horror. Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927) and Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" (1982) both imagine a world where beautiful female cyborgs threaten to overstep... Read more

Smartphones are useful tools for everyday life, but they're privy to nearly everything about you, including all the places you've been—if you let them.... Read more

Ever notice that batteries in electronics don't last as long as they did when they were brand new?... Read more

Katy Perry is in a recording booth. She turns to the camera, smiles and begins to sing: "Badipsa frooby noop." As if to confirm that we didn't mishear her, she repeats "Badipsa frooby noop" and gives the camera a thumbs up.... Read more

Apple on Thursday disclosed its iPhone sales dipped slightly during the holiday-season quarter, signaling a sluggish start to the trendsetting company's effort to catch up to the rest of Big Tech in the race to bring artificial intelligence to the masses.... Read more

A recent study titled "Gaming on the Edge: Performance Issues of Distributed Online Gaming," published at the IFIP International Conference on Networking 2024, proposes an innovative model to enhance the experience of online gaming, particularly on mobile devices. Led by an international team of researchers—including Professors Marco Ajmone and Vincenzo... Read more

Even though digitalization is in full swing, most Norwegians are now ambivalent about life online, according to media researchers at the University of Oslo.... Read more

Johan Michalove is nearly 3,000 miles from the Los Angeles wildfires, but that didn't stop him from pitching in.... Read more

Wearable devices have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patient's heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes, sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical signals from the body.... Read more

A new study finds that prompts do a good job of getting drivers to engage with their environment and take over control of the vehicle when necessary while using partially automated driving systems—with one exception. If drivers are deeply distracted, these system-generated prompts have little or no effect. The paper... Read more

There has recently been a shift online from centralized platforms like X (formerly Twitter) to decentralized alternatives like Bluesky. In particular, many users unhappy with the politics and antics of X owner Elon Musk are moving to Bluesky.... Read more

People are listing phones preloaded with TikTok for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, Facebook marketplace and other online storefronts—though it is not clear if there are many buyers at those prices.... Read more

As AI tools like ChatGPT become more mainstream in day-to-day tasks and decision-making processes, the ability to trust and decipher errors in their responses is critical. A new study by cognitive and computer scientists at the University of California, Irvine finds people generally overestimate the accuracy of large language model... Read more

A team of software engineers, AI specialists and programmers at Tsinghua University, working with TikTok parent company ByteDance, has announced the development of a graphical user interface (GUI) agent model called UI-TARS. The group announced its development and introduction to the world at large in a paper posted to the... Read more

Samsung is injecting another dose of artificial intelligence into its next lineup of Galaxy smartphones, escalating an effort to simplify people's lives while deepening their dependence on a device that accompanies them almost everywhere.... Read more

Roblox isn't just another video game—it's a massive virtual universe where nearly 90 million people from around the world create, play and socialize. This includes some 34 million children under 13 who spend an average of 2.6 hours daily on the platform, making Roblox one of the most influential digital... Read more

In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems are rapidly transforming various sectors, a book by a multidisciplinary group of scholars offers a timely and critical examination of these technologies from a human-centered perspective. The open access book delves into the ethical, humane, and holistic aspects of AI... Read more

A leafless, lifeless tree is among the most striking new emojis coming to our smartphones in the coming weeks, as part of the latest batch being released by the Unicode Consortium, which sets the international standard for character encoding.... Read more

While the Australian book market was down 3% last year, genre fiction—popular on BookTok—was among the rare categories that grew.... Read more

At a shopping mall in Beijing, Zhang Yachun murmurs quietly to her closest confidant, a fluffy AI-powered robot whose soothing chirps remind her that she is not alone.... Read more

Studies have long shown that men are more likely to interrupt, particularly when speaking with women. New research by Johns Hopkins engineers reveals that this behavior also extends to AI-powered voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, with men interrupting them almost twice as often as women do. The findings are... Read more

Social media is widely viewed as dynamic, innovative and driven by the ethos to "move fast and break things."... Read more

Apple lost its status as the best selling smartphone brand in the crucial Chinese market last year, new data showed Thursday, with a pair of local rivals surpassing it with surging shipments.... Read more

Nintendo is betting on the 2025 release of a bigger, better version of its blockbuster Switch console to keep up the success of the third best-selling games machine of all time.... Read more

The behavior of a cat rubbing its head against a person, known as bunting, is an expression of affection and is believed to have a healing effect on humans.... Read more

A recent study involving Central European University (CEU) is paving the way for a new field of research that merges artificial intelligence and complexity science to understand how ongoing interaction between humans and algorithms can profoundly impact social dynamics.... Read more

The mobile game advertisements that pop up all over social media platforms may promise better, more complete games than they actually deliver. Researchers at Penn State studying these "fake games"—or those that promote inaccurate depictions of their gameplay and development—identified five characteristics that gamers could use when deciding how much... Read more

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other services has announced it will discontinue its third-party factchecking programs, starting in the US. Journalists and anti-hate speech activists have criticized the decision as an attempt to curry favor with the incoming US president, Donald Trump, but there could be... Read more

Many people around the globe are living in energy poverty, meaning they spend at least 8% of their annual household income on energy. Addressing this problem is not simple, but an experiment by MIT researchers shows that giving people better data about their energy use, plus some coaching on the... Read more

Producers of hi-tech connected eyewear are multiplying their innovations with increasingly discreet models in an attempt to make a difference in a highly competitive—and fast-emerging—market.... Read more

Whether on your bank's website or your telephone provider's help line, interactions between humans and chatbots have become part of our daily lives. But do we trust them? And what factors influence our trust? Researchers at the University of Basel recently examined these questions.... Read more

Video game play met romantic intimacy in a corner of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on Thursday—but it hasn't always been smooth sailing for sex toys at the Las Vegas gadget extravaganza.... Read more

Following in the footsteps of electric scooters on land and wakeboards at sea, young entrepreneurs are bringing electric power to snow travel with self-propelled skis and all-terrain skates.... Read more

I'm a computer scientist and a bad Christmas shopper. Over the weekend, I wondered whether AI systems might be able to help me out.... Read more

When it comes to digital access and internet technologies, some languages are still more equal than others. Speakers of majority languages, who type in English or text in Korean, assume their message will be transmitted accurately. But Indigenous language communities don't share this same confidence.... Read more

After revealing that it was the target of a sweeping hacking campaign, the federal government issued a public service announcement this week urging the public to use "end-to-end encryption" in order to better secure its digital communications.... Read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems tend to take on human biases and amplify them, causing people who use that AI to become more biased themselves, finds a new study by UCL researchers.... Read more

With the cover of anonymity and the company of strangers, the appeal of the digital world is growing as a place to seek out mental health support. This phenomenon is buoyed by the fact that more than 150 million people in the United States live in federally designated mental health... Read more

The metaverse is the next frontier in digital evolution and consists of digital spaces where people socialize, play, learn and spend money.... Read more

Attributing human traits to machines is nothing new, but with the rise of generative artificial intelligence, anthropomorphism is taking on a new dimension. This trend raises crucial philosophical and ethical issues, while redefining our relationship with technology.... Read more

An AI model that creates images as the user types, using only modest and affordable hardware, has been announced by the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence (PAI) at the University of Surrey.... Read more

A team from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), in collaboration with University College London (England) and the University of California, Davis (U.S.), has found that smart TVs send viewing data to their servers. This allows brands to generate detailed profiles of consumers' habits and tailor advertisements based on their... Read more

A new coding tool will help make it easier for children to portably program a popular educational micro-computer on the fly. Researchers from Lancaster University's School of Computing and Communications working in partnership with researchers at Microsoft have evaluated a new programming tool called MicroCode.... Read more

The rapid advancement and adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the field of communications. AI-powered tools can now generate convincing text, images, audio and video from textual prompts.... Read more

Generative models, artificial neural networks that can generate images or texts, have become increasingly advanced in recent years. These models can also be advantageous for creating annotated images to train algorithms for computer vision, which are designed to classify images or objects contained within them.... Read more