South Park’s latest video game, Stick of Truth, brought the often controversial humor of South Park to the world of role playing games, but it was missing a certain something. Ubisoft has heard your cries, and has developed the Nosulus Rift, a special device designed to bring the unique scents of your hero’s special … power right into your nostrils.
“In South Park The Fractured but Whole you’re playing the new kid in town, the hero,” says Ubisoft senior producer Jason Schroeder in the dreamy, startup-esque video announcement. “One of your special abilities is really the power of your ass.”
The Nosulus Rift, which players can strap over their nose, releases one of two specially crafted fart smells via small burners. It connects to a PC or console via Bluetooth to deliver the aromas at precisely coordinated moments. It’s nothing short of a revelation in gaming, clearly, although its exclusively compatible with Fractured but Whole at the moment.
In the first game, players learned to use their impressive farts as a powerful weapon to blow away enemies, and in the new game, it appears that ability has only grown stronger. Clips from the game show the character using farts as a jetpack to propel them to the top of a building.
Is this all an April Fool’s joke come out of season? Not exactly. While Ubisoft won’t be selling the Nosulus Rift anywhere, it is a real, working device, and it will be at Gamescom in Cologne (yes, as in cologne) for gamers to try out.
On a more serious note, scent is an incredible tool for bringing up memories and emotions. A device that’s able to deliver them accurately and in coordination with a game’s timing could provide an amazing sense of immersion, especially when paired up with a virtual reality headset. It may just be a fart joke right now, but Ubisoft may have created something with a lot of potential.
After five years with Apple silicon, from the original M1 MacBook Air to the M5 MacBook Air released earlier this year, I've watched these chips mature not just on the spec sheet, but in real-world workflows and overall efficiency.
The new M6 chip might sound like a routine generational upgrade, but it's the company's first chip built on a 2nm manufacturing process, which brings meaningful improvements over previous Apple chips.
Gemini Notebook’s mobile app now has a built-in recorder for capturing lectures and meetings as sources. You can record directly where you’ll use the material, skipping the separate recording app and the file upload afterward.
Google announced the feature on X, highlighting classroom lectures and team meetings as potential uses. It also works for capturing your own thoughts, so you can talk through an idea and bring that explanation into your notebook while it’s still fresh.
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?