Latest news with #XuanWang
Engadget
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Engadget
The Morning After: Meta teases high-spec VR headset prototypes
Meta previewed some of its latest virtual reality prototypes this week and plans to demo them at next week's SIGGRAPH conference. The aim, according to Meta's blog post, is to offer VR experiences 'indistinguishable from the physical world' — something it says no present-day VR system has yet done. It wants to surpass what it terms the visual Turing test. 'Our mission for this project was to provide the best image quality possible,' said Xuan Wang, an optical research scientist with Reality Labs Research's Optics, Photonics and Light Systems (OPALS) team. And Meta's Tiramisu project seemingly has the numbers to back up those ambitions. It promises three times the contrast, 14 times the maximum brightness and 3.6 times the angular resolution of the Meta Quest 3. The headset offers 1,400 nits of brightness and an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree. It's a work in progress, however. Tiramisu has a field of view of just 33 degrees by 33 degrees compared to the 110 degrees horizontal and 96 degrees vertical FOV in the Meta Quest 3. It also looks like Google's Daydream, from back in the day. Conversely, another pair of prototypes, codenamed Boba 3, leans into an ultrawide field of view. It has a 180-degree FOV, when human vision extends to around 200 degrees. Also, they're roughly the same size as current VR headsets. — Mat Smith Get Engadget's newsletter delivered direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here! The news you might have missed Google says AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks Everyone else says differently. A Pew Research Center report last month shed light on Google's AI Overviews' effect on web publishing, showing an abysmal outlook for anyone relying on web traffic. But this week, Google Search head Liz Reid penned a blog post that puts quite a different spin on things. Naturally, she claims click quality and Google Search's total organic click volume to websites has been 'relatively stable' year over year. Reid also said Google sends more 'quality clicks' (visitors who don't quickly bounce) to websites than a year ago. She shared no numbers, however. Continue reading. OpenAI's GPT-5 is here, and it's free for everyone It's safer, faster and more accurate than OpenAI's past models. OpenAI is releasing the long-awaited GPT-5 and says it has across-the-board enhancements. The company claims the model is its best yet for coding, writing, safety, accuracy and more. At the start of the year, Altman said GPT-5 would offer a unified experience for users, and the new model delivers on that promise. For the first time, OpenAI's default offering is a reasoning model, meaning the system is programmed to tackle complex problems by breaking them into smaller parts. Previously, if you wanted to force ChatGPT to use one of OpenAI's reasoning models, you had to select the Think Longer option from the prompt bar. This meant most free users didn't even know OpenAI had more capable models. Continue reading. Framework Desktop (2025) review Powerful, but not for everyone. Framework's 2025 edition of its Desktop PC is powerful, particularly for creative professionals and developers. It uses an AMD Ryzen AI Max APU, which is a workstation-level chip, but to integrate it, the CPU and RAM are soldered directly to the mainboard, making them non-upgradable. The DIY Edition of the Desktop fortunately requires minimal setup, but this isn't the easy-to-make gaming PC you might be hoping for: It's better suited to productivity tasks, like running AI models and video editing. Continue reading. The most fun Switch 2 accessory is on sale If you're going to get a webcam, make it a Pirhana Plant. If you've got a Switch 2 but haven't yet dived into the camera functionality, here's a good reason to. HORI's Piranha Plant camera is on sale right now for only $40. That's $20 off and a good deal for anyone who wants to take advantage of the Switch 2's camera functionality in games like Mario Kart World. It even comes with a plant pot stand if you want to use it not directly plugged into the Switch 2. If you buy something through a link in this article, we may earn commission.
Engadget
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Meta says these wild headset prototypes could be the future of VR
Meta previewed some of its latest virtual reality prototypes this week, with concepts that are compelling on the specs and long on the design. Literally. The company shared some details on its Tiramisu project, dubbing it "hyperrealistic VR." This set promises three times the contrast, 14 times the maximum brightness and 3.6 times the angular resolution of the Meta Quest 3. In actual stats, that's up to 1,400 nits of brightness and an angular resolution of 90 pixels per degree. One of the goals for Reality Labs Research's Optics, Photonics and Light Systems (OPALS) team is to create a virtual reality experience that is indistinguishable from the real world, or what it calls a visual Turing test. "Our mission for this project was to provide the best image quality possible," said Xuan Wang, an optical research scientist with OPALS. But the team achieved that quality with some tradeoffs; Tiramisu has a limited field of view of just 33 degrees by 33 degrees compared to the 110 degrees horizontal and 96 degrees vertical FOV in the Meta Quest 3. And the form factor is currently a pretty bulky beast, as you can see above. Meta researcher wearing the Boba 3 headset (Meta) The other prototypes detailed in the company's blog post are Boba 3 headsets. These mixed and virtual reality headsets offer an ultrawide field of view. All three projects will be on display during the SIGGRAPH 2025 conference in Vancouver next week.
BBC News
28-01-2025
- General
- BBC News
What is the Year of the Snake?
Gifts, food, parades and fireworks - just some of the ways that the Lunar New Year has been celebrated, and this year is no 29 January, communities from across the world will usher in the Year of the Snake. But what exactly is the Lunar New Year and what does the snake represent?'BBC Bitesize spoke to Dr Xuan Wang, a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at Cardiff University, to learn more about the festival. What is Lunar New Year?The Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is estimated to be celebrated by two billion people. It takes place over a 15-day period, and this year it culminates with the Lantern Festival on 12 February. The holiday is observed by many countries including China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and people from those communities who live across the worldThe exact date of the Lunar New Year varies each year, as it is linked to the start of a new moon. This differs from the Gregorian calendar typically used in the UK, which begins on 1 is the Lunar New Year observed?With almost one quarter of the world's population marking the event, you may be wondering why the festival is celebrated in the first Lunar New Year signals the traditional start of the agricultural season and its origins can be traced back thousands of years. As well as welcoming prosperity and luck for the New Year, it is also traditionally a time to honour ancestors and Dr Wang reminds us that observing the start of a new calendar year isn't unique to the Spring Festival. 'I think celebrating New Year is of great significance in all cultures, not just people who use the lunar calendar,' she told us.'Marking the New Year represents people's longing for something better, for prosperity, for certainty, for progression and health for family.' How is the Lunar New Year celebrated?The Lunar New Year typically falls between 21 January and 20 February, but some festivities take place in the build up to the holiday.'Leading up to the New Year's Day, there is already a sort of countdown,' Dr Wang explains.'For instance, there is a festival called Laba, in the month immediately before the New Year. It is like a warming up month.'Laba Festival is a traditional Chinese holiday that takes place on the eighth day of the 12th month in the lunar calendar. While the festival celebrates winter, it is also a time for people to prepare for the main the first day of the first lunar month does arrive, it is marked in a number of an event observed by so many people with different languages and cultures, celebratory customs of the Spring Festival can sometimes differ quite drastically. But often it is celebrated with special food, fireworks, new clothes, gifts and parades with friends and the festival honours its ancient roots, Dr Wang acknowledges that the way that some people celebrate the occasion has changed with time.'Using fireworks has been a practice in China for thousands of years […] but is becoming less encouraged because people are more aware of the environmental impact,' she told has resulted in more people attending organised firework shows, opposed to individual household displays, as well as professional drone examples Dr Wang highlights includes becoming more conscious of not wasting food and sending digital, instead of physical, red packets containing money. What is the significance of the snake?In the Chinese zodiac, the snake is the sixth of the twelve-year cycle of animals and represents those born in 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001 and 2013. There are also five zodiac elements - wood, fire, earth, metal and water. This year is the Year of the Wood are some differences in the zodiac across Asian countries. For example, in Myanmar, your zodiac animal is determined by the day of the week you were born, as opposed to the last Year of the Snake took place in 2013. But the last Year of the Wood Snake took place in 1965, meaning that 2025 will complete the zodiac's 60-year in both symbolism, the snake is represented across Chinese mythology, literature and art. One unique figure in Chinese culture is Nüwa, a mother goddess who is credited with creating humankind. A very important deity, she is depicted as a supernatural creature with a human face and a snake's Wang highlights that the snake, like all zodiac symbols, has both positive and negative connotations. She explained, 'For a snake, it would mean they are intuitive, because they quickly sense risk. They're very mysterious, but also very smart and so on.'But as you can imagine, a snake would also represent cunning and danger, which is seen as the dark side.'But regardless of which zodiac sign you fall under, she explains that the zodiac isn't used as a way to define an individual or their attributes.'People don't just believe that if they were born in the Year of the Snake that's all they are. They make use of these symbols to help them, to recognise themselves. But very importantly they use this zodiac sign to look at the year ahead,' Dr Wang said. She explains that zodiac signs can be used, "to navigate through different things that may cause uncertainty and help them to realise their hopes and dreams in the New Year.'This article was published in January 2025
