All eyes fall on Los Angeles every summer for E3, a week of video game announcements, huge press conferences, and sprawling expo halls. We sent down a full squad of writers to cover every inch of the show — or as much as we could — including the hosts of the Close to the Metal podcast. There was plenty to see and too many games to play, but we did manage to find a few computers stashed among the Xbox Ones and Playstation 4s.
For the third year, E3 played host to the PC Gaming show, a smaller press conference exclusively for announcements from developers working on PC titles. Games like Sea of Thieves and Killing Floor 2 made an appearance, but one of the biggest announcements came from the team behind Lone Echo. Not only did the developers announce a July 20th release date for the zero gravity story game, but also announced the multiplayer side of the game, Echo Arena, would be free for a limited time. Intel sponsored the giveaway, with the hopes of it becoming a true VR esport.
We also got the chance to play Bungie’s hotly-anticipated Destiny 2, which is finally making its way over to PC in the fall. Running at a buttery smooth 60 frames per second at 4K, the game is absolutely stunning, and we’ve got the gameplay video to prove it.
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the Xbox One X. Promising true 4K gaming at $500 is no easy feat, and it gives gaming computers a lot more room to fight back. We’ll get under the hood on Microsoft’s latest console, and ask whether people really have the resolution to support it.
Close to the Metal is a podcast from Digital Trends that takes a deep dive into computing and PC gaming topics. Each show, we’ll focus in on one topic, and leave no stone unturned as we show off the latest in hardware and software. Whether it’s the latest GPU, supercomputers, or which 2-in-1 you should buy, we break down the complicated jargon and talk about how user experience is affected in the real world. Please subscribe, share, and send your questions to [email protected]. We broadcast the show live on YouTube every Tuesday at 1pm EST/10am PST.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.