Manish Lachwani, who founded the software start-up HeadSpin, is the latest tech entrepreneur to face time in prison in recent years.

A federal auto safety agency said the accelerator pedal on the pickup truck, sales of which began in late 2023, could become stuck, increasing the risk of accidents.

If you're looking to add some new titles to your Meta Quest 3 library then look no further than the Meta Quest April Mega Sale.

From now until April 28 at 11:59 PM PT (April 29 at 07:59 AM BST) you can pick up a whole host of VR games and apps at a bargain price. There are lots of fantastic option to choose from, but I've selected eight deals worth considering.

If you want to find more suggestions you can check out our best VR games list.

Walkabout Mini Golf

• Was $14.99 / £10.99, now $9.99 / £7.99 

If I’m doing a VR game roundup, I’m going to include Walkabout Mini Golf because it’s without a doubt my favorite VR experience. I think you should buy this game at full price so while it’s discounted it’s a no-brainer.

The courses are varied and gorgeous, the mechanics feel true to life, and it offers a superb multiplier experience to boot. But honestly just stop reading this and go buy it if you haven’t already (then come back and keep reading for more suggestions).

Dungeons Of Eternity

• Was $29.99 / £22.99, now $20.99 / £15.56 

Dungeons of Eternity is an action-packed dungeon crawler with an addictive combination of excellent physics-based combat with a satisfying gameplay loop that has you exploring, well, dungeons filled with monsters.

What really takes this game up a level is its multiplayer mode. Just grab a few friends and you can tackle the hordes of terrors together – and you might get a little fitter in the process as this was one of a personal trainer's recommended VR titles for people looking to try VR fitness.

What's even better is that this is a big discount, so it's a great time to finally try Dungeons of Eternity if you haven't already.

The Last Clockwinder

• Was $24.99 / £18.99, now $14.99 / £10.99 

This VR puzzle game is my favorite for people after a more serious experience – combining an intriguing tale of mystery with a host of engaging mechanics.

Your goal is to restore the Clocktower’s gardens to grow different fruits using a small army of robots that mimic your movements – all while you search for the missing Clockwinder. Simply record an action and an automaton will spawn to recreate what you did on a loop; by chaining these robots you’ll create complex sequences to solve the various puzzles in your way.

What makes The Last Clockwinder fun for puzzle fans like myself is that while each mission can be completed using as many robots as you can spawn, there are in-game challenges and rewards encouraging you to be as efficient as possible. 

This means novices can always find a solution, but experts will have a real challenge finding an optimal solution – which often requires precise movements and out-of-the-box thinking.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

• Was $14.99 / £10.99, now $7.99 / £5.99 

This VR multiplayer game is a perfect choice for people who want to enjoy VR together but only have one headset. 

One player – the person in VR – can see a complex bomb with various puzzle modules that must be solved in order to deactivate it. The other player (or players) can see a complex manual – much of which may be irrelevant to the virtual bomb you’re trying to defuse. By working together the duo must defuse the explosive before a timer runs out or making too many mistakes.

It’s chaotic, it’s fun, and right now it’s on sale for a great price.

I Expect You To Die Collection

• Was $49.98 / £37.99, now $29.99 / £22.99 

If you’ve ever wanted to be James Bond – though at times you may feel more like Austin Powers – then this virtual escape room series is what you need. Brimming with all the spy tropes under the sun (complete with kickass theme songs I have in my playlist) this game series is an absolute delight to play through – it’s one of those VR games everyone should play.

This double pack includes the first and second games at a discounted price, but if you already own one or both you can pick up all three games in the series individually for a lower-than-normal price:

• I Expect You To Die: Was $24.99 / £18.99, now $15.99 / £11.99
• I Expect You To Die 2: Was $24.99 / £18.99, now $15.99 / £11.99
• I Expect You To Die 3: Was $24.99 / £18.99, now $16.99 / £12.99

The Light Brigade

• Was $24.99 / £18.99, now $16.99 / £12.99 

This VR shooter roguelike has you fighting through a dark world of corrupted soldiers and monsters. If you fail – and you will – you can retry your mission but be careful as the dungeon you’re adventuring through will have a different layout every time you enter.

The Light Brigade is adrenaline-inducing in all the right ways, with semi-realistic World War I-era weapons to handle, a diverse range of formidable foes, and a great selection of classes you can switch between – each with a unique style of gameplay. As you progress, you can upgrade your soldier’s abilities to make future runs a little easier.

I adore The Light Brigade – every time I boot it up I binge it for hours on end – and at this price, it’s a certified must-play.

Among Us VR

• Was $9.99 / £7.99, now $7.49 / £5.99 

I love social deduction games – be they board games like Secret Hitler and Coup, or video games like Town of Salem and Among Us – and this VR version is an absolute riot.

The first-person perspective and proximity chat make the experience feel way more immersive (read: it’s a lot scarier being a crewmate), and meetings are a lot more engaging compared to using the flat game’s text-chat option – though chat-only VR lobbies are available.

For only $7.49 / £5.99 Among Us VR is a steal that you should definitely pick up.

Assassin’s Creed Nexus

• Was $39.99 / £34.99, now $31.99 / £27.99 

This is the only game on this list I haven’t played – ignoring an early-access demo I tried when I first gave the Meta Quest 3 a whirl – but I’ve heard great things about it and it’s been on my to-play list for some time.

Nexus lets you play as the series’ most iconic Assassins in VR recreations of iconic locations from the original games. I’ve been told that at times it can be a little janky, but the combat and parkour experience are good enough for it to stick the landing on helping you live out your dream of joining the Brotherhood.

This isn’t the biggest discount in the world, but considering this is a pricey game to begin with we’ll take any discount we can get.

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Windows 11 is going to see a lot more of Copilot in the future – that’s pretty obviously the line Microsoft is taking with its desktop-based assistant – and there’s fresh evidence of the AI creeping into more corners of the OS.

Firstly, we have a sighting of a new wallpaper, which came yesterday, when a couple of inbound laptops with the promising Snapdragon X Elite CPU were leaked. Both of those Lenovo notebooks had a Copilot-themed wallpaper on the desktop, so it’s a safe assumption that Microsoft has an official new background for the AI in the pipeline.

As Windows Latest observes, this is actually a traditional ‘bloom’ wallpaper, except Microsoft has redone the image in the Copilot colors (mirroring the Copilot button in the taskbar).

The tech site also points out other ways in which Copilot is creeping into Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge. For example, in the Edge browser, as highlighted by leaker Leopeva64, there’s now a bar of options pertaining to the AI when you open the Settings panel.

Microsoft is testing a new header on Edge's Settings page with some actions you can perform using Copilot (Canary):https://t.co/VxEQP4vBDP.https://t.co/GTtjr4EzWo pic.twitter.com/7I8LFjDkuLApril 13, 2024

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This bar contains suggestions for how you might use Copilot, allowing you to get advice on security settings for example, or managing your passwords in the browser. These suggestions change depending on what section of Edge’s settings you’re in, by the way, making them more relevant to what you might be looking to do.

Note that this idea is just in testing right now, and in the Canary channel to boot (the earliest test avenue).

Another ability brought in for Copilot in Edge (again, in the Canary channel) is an expanded Ask Copilot context menu. This means that when you select a section of text in a web page, there are new options for directly interacting with Copilot in this menu.

As Windows Latest explains, these choices are: Explain, Summarize, Expand, and Ask anything in Chat.

The last option acts like the current incarnation of Ask Copilot – it just fires up the AI’s panel with a query on the selected text.

With the new options, however, Explain prompts Copilot to do just that – offer an explanation of the text – and Summarize provides a summary, as you’d expect. In a similar vein, Expand goes the other way, furnishing you with extra facts or information about the selected text.

Again with Edge, Leopeva64 also spotted that AI is going to be integrated into the browser’s ‘Magnify Image’ option, with a button spotted that offers to ‘AI Enhance’ the image after it’s been blown up. This is in very early testing, though, and the button doesn’t yet do anything at all.

Microsoft will also integrate AI into Edge's "Magnify image" feature, there will be a new button to "AI enhance" the magnified image, this new option doesn't seem to work yet (at least in my case):https://t.co/ZIfFQbiBuS.https://t.co/TkPLI918AE pic.twitter.com/qNRkIYfT8lApril 18, 2024

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Another recent addition Windows Latest flagged up is ‘Circle to Copilot’ in Edge in Windows 11 (and iOS), allowing you to literally draw a circle around something to activate a Copilot query about the highlighted item.

All this comes on top of a recent move in the Beta channel of Windows 11 previews, trying out a new way of highlighting that Copilot can help with something – by animating the taskbar button for the AI when this is the case. New options have also been added to the menu that appears when you hover over the Copilot button, too, expanding that further.

Analysis: Making Copilot a more visible presence

All of this is still to come, we should note – these are changes in testing for Windows 11 or its Edge browser, and in the case of the wallpaper, a glimpse of what’s very likely to come.

Indeed, that Copilot background will likely be the default wallpaper for AI PCs starting with Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops that launch in June. (Not forgetting Microsoft’s own Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6, the consumer spins on which will land then, and may have a custom version of the Elite SoC inside).

Overall, though, it’s clear that Microsoft is pushing forward with expanding Copilot’s capabilities, and sussing out ways in which the AI can be made more visible on the desktop. Whether that’s about an animation for the taskbar button (effectively declaring “It’s-a-me, Copilot, I can help with that”), or a fancy desktop wallpaper that could be a permanent reminder of the AI, if you fall for the color scheme (which does look quite funky, to be fair).

We’d be surprised if most of these tested changes didn’t come to fruition, frankly, and as noted, there’s a theme of Microsoft increasingly pushing Copilot which comes as no surprise.

The big rumored addition on the horizon is, of course, AI Explorer – but that feature (supposedly debuting in the Windows 11 24H2 update) may have an unexpected twist in its initial incarnation that’s a bit of a shocker. (Spoiler alert: If you don’t have an ARM CPU like the aforementioned Snapdragon, then you can forget it – Intel and AMD-powered PCs might be left out in the cold).

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“I feel like we’ve been at the club. I need some water and some electrolytes.”

Apple said it removed WhatsApp and Threads from its China app offerings Friday on Beijing’s orders, amid technological tensions between the U.S. and China.

The company’s revenue was 15 percent higher compared with last year, and it solidified its standing as the entertainment company’s dominant streaming service.

NVIDIA sees AI as a means of putting new tools into the hands of gamers and creators alike. NVIDIA Instant NeRF is one such tool, leveraging the power of NVIDIA’s GPUs to make complex 3D creations orders of magnitude easier to generate. Instant NeRF is an especially powerful tool in its ability to create these 3D scenes and objects. 

In effect, NVIDIA Instant NeRF takes a series of 2D images, figures out how they overlap, and uses that knowledge to create an entire 3D scene. A NeRF (or Neural Radiance Field) isn’t a new thing, but the process to create one was not fast. By applying machine learning techniques to the process and specialized hardware, NVIDIA was able to make it much quicker, enough to be almost instant — thus Instant NeRF. 

Being able to snap a series of photos or even record a video of a scene and then turn it into a freely explorable 3D environment offers a new realm of creative possibility for artists. It also provides a quick way to turn a real-world object into a 3D one. 

Some artists are already realizing the potential of Instant NeRF. In a few artist showcases, NVIDIA highlights artists’ abilities to share historic artworks, capture memories, and allow viewers of the artworks to more fully immerse themselves in the scenes without being beholden to the original composition.

Karen X. Cheng explores the potential of this tool in her creation, Through the Looking Glass, which uses NVIDIA Instant NeRF to create the 3D scene through which her camera ventures, eventually slipping through a mirror into an inverted world. 

Hugues Bruyère uses Instant NeRF in his creation, Zeus, to present a historic sculpture from the Royal Ontario Museum in a new way. This gives those who may never have a chance to see it in person the ability to view it from all angles nonetheless.

(Image credit: NVIDIA)

With tools like Instant NeRF, it’s clear that NVIDIA’s latest hardware has much more than just gamers in mind. With more and more dedicated AI power built into each chip, NVIDIA RTX GPUs are bringing new levels of AI performance to the table that can serve gamers and creators alike. 

The same Tensor Cores that make it possible to infer what a 4K frame in a game would look like using a 1080p frame as a reference are also making it possible to infer what a fully fleshed out 3D scene would look like using a series of 2D images. And NVIDIA’s latest GPUs put those tools right into your hands. 

Instant NeRF isn’t something you just get to hear about. It’s actually a tool you can try for yourself. Developers can dive right in with this guide, and less technical users can grab a simpler Windows installer here which even includes a demo photo set. Since Instant NeRF runs on RTX GPUs, it’s widely available, though the latest RTX 40 Series and RTX Ada GPUs can turn out results even faster. 

The ability of NVIDIA’s hardware to accelerate AI is key to powering a new generation of AI PCs. Instant NeRF is just one of many examples of how NVIDIA’s GPUs are enabling new capabilities or dramatically speeding up existing tools. To help you explore the latest developments in AI and present them in an easy-to-understand format, NVIDIA has introduced the AI Decoded blog series. You can also see all the ways NVIDIA is boosting AI performance at NVIDIA’s RTX for AI page. 

Tigran Gambaryan, an American compliance official for the giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, flew to Nigeria in February for a planned two-day business trip. He hasn’t returned.

The grant to the memory chipmaker is the latest federal award aimed at boosting U.S. chip manufacturing.

Bitcoin aficionados are hoping that a scheduled reduction in the number of new coins going into circulation will cause the price of the cryptocurrency to skyrocket.

Users of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger will be able to turn to the new technology, powered by Meta’s latest artificial intelligence model, to obtain information and complete tasks.

Windows 11’s Photos app has been getting some impressive upgrades recently, and it looks like another one is on the way. The app is getting Designer web app integration, which is Microsoft’s tool that enables people to make professional-looking graphics, but there’s one little catch - it’ll prompt Designer to open in Edge (Microsoft’s web browser that comes installed with Windows 11). 

The new Designer integration joins a line-up of other features that have been added in the last two years, including the background blur feature, an AI magic eraser, and more. The new feature is  accessible via an 'Edit in Microsoft Designer' option within the Photos app, represented by an icon that will appear in the middle of the Preview window. 

It’s not the most subtle position for it, and I think it’s fair to assume Microsoft is doing that because it wants users to click it. Doing so will take users to the Microsoft Designer website which opens in an Edge window - and due to Edge not being the most popular of web browsers, this could irritate people who have set their default browser to a different app, such as Chrome. 

This development is still in the testing stages, according to Windows Latest, making its way through the Windows Insider Program. The feature can be found in Photos app version 2024.11040.16001.0, which is a part of the Windows 11 24H2 preview build in the Canary channel. The feature should also be available in the Windows 11 Insider Dev channel build, but the Photos app version has to be version 2024.11040.16001.0.

Apparently, you can also prompt the Designer web app to open by right-clicking the image while in Preview in the Photos app, and clicking ‘Edit in Designer online’ in the menu that appears.

(Image credit: Shutterstock/fizkes) The apparent state of the new feature

When it tried to activate the new feature, Windows Latest hit a wall as it was presented with a blank canvas in Designer, rather than the image that was going to be edited. Hopefully, this is an anomaly or an error, and it presumably will result in the image you’re looking at in Preview in the Photos app opening up in Designer when the feature is fully rolled out in a Windows update. 

Windows Latest made several attempts at making the feature function as intended, but it wasn’t to be, and I would hope that Microsoft takes this feedback on board, especially if it’s a widespread issue. You can import the image manually while having the Designer web app already open, but this will defeat the purpose of having an easily accessible option in the Photos app. 

Users can edit their image in Designer, but only if they’ve signed into their Microsoft account. Microsoft wrote about the feature in an official Windows Blogs post, explaining that it’s currently being tested in the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, India, and New Zealand.

Having various image editing tools scattered across the Photos app, the Designer web app, and the Paint app doesn’t make things easy for Windows users. People like accessing all the relevant tools from whatever app they’re currently using instead of having to memorize which app has what exclusive feature. 

The approach has been called ‘inconsistent’ by Windows Latest, and I would bet that it’s not alone in that opinion. While it’s clear that Microsoft wants to get people using its new AI-powered tools, the company would be much better served if made them easier to access through one powerful program, rather than being scattered around Windows 11.

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Court records, mistakenly made public, tell a story about the birth of ByteDance, its bumpy road to success and the role of the Republican megadonor Jeff Yass’s firm.

Donald Trump’s social media platform has outdistanced similar conservative sites such as Parler and Gettr, even as it lags far behind X and others.

The dismissals escalated longstanding tensions between company leaders and activist employees opposed to supplying technology to Israel’s government.

Recent leaks claim Google is working on further integrating satellite connectivity to their Pixel phones and could introduce support for the tech in Google Maps. This information comes from two industry insiders: AssembleDebug who shared his findings with PiunikaWeb and Nail Sadykov over on Telegram. Beginning with the former, users will apparently be able to share their location with others via satellite connection.

Hints of the location-sharing tool were found in the strings of code on the latest Google Maps beta. It’s unknown exactly how it’ll work. The report doesn’t go into detail. They do, however, say people “will be able to update their location” in the app every 15 minutes to maintain accuracy. But there’s a catch – you can only refresh your whereabouts “up to five times a day.” It makes sense why Google would implement some sort of restrictions. 

This is supposed to be an emergency, potentially life-saving feature akin to Emergency SOS on the iPhone and Google may not want people messing around with it.

Setting up a satellite connection

As for the other update, Nail Sadykov states he found evidence of something called the Android Satellite Pointing UI.

It appears to be a help guide for Pixel that’ll teach people how to connect their smartphone to an orbiting satellite. A video posted to the unofficial Google News channel on Telegram shows how the process could work. 

Users will have to hold their phone in front of them and physically move it around to find a satellite. Once found, you’ll need to keep moving the device until a blue satellite icon reaches the middle of an on-screen circle and stays there for several seconds. Holding the icon in place allows the device to establish connection. If you don’t connect, you’ll receive an on-screen message telling you the session failed. 

(Image credit: Nail Sadykov)

Sadykov goes on to say the guide will be a part of the Pixel’s “Adaptive Connectivity Service (ACS) app”. It’s unclear if he meant the currently available feature or if there will be a new app solely for ACS. 

He says it’ll be possible to minimize the window into a floating widget on the home page so you can continue texting while trying to establish a connection. When it’s all done, Pixel owners can see Satellite SOS running by swiping down on Quick Settings. You’ll also receive a short message in the menu telling you to avoid buildings, trees, and mountains to ensure a clear view of the sky and not interrupt service.

Potential arrival date

An arrival date for everything you see here is unknown, although both sources believe their respective features will launch on the Pixel 9. The two groups mention a third leak from April 15 about the Pixel 9 series possibly receiving the Samsung Modem 5400 to enable satellite connectivity. The same satellite icon (albeit red) and guide animations from Sadykov’s post were found in the earlier report. PiunikaWeb also mentions seeing the same symbol.

So what we’re seeing today could be the fruits of this new labor – at least potentially. Things could always change at the last minute. Be sure to take all this info with a grain of salt.

While we have you, check out TechRadar's roundup of the best Pixel phones for 2024.

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A new measure attempts to force the Senate’s hand on passing legislation to ban TikTok or mandate the app’s sale.

The company’s directors are asking shareholders to again approve the multibillion-dollar compensation plan and to move the company’s registration to Texas, from Delaware.

In a first, a Colorado law extends privacy rights to the neural data increasingly coveted by technology companies.