Technology

If you’re a Star Wars fan and haven’t been jealous of not being at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Japan as of yet, prepare to be. The same applies if you have an Apple Vision Pro instead of a Meta Quest.

Why? Well, Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm are finally sharing more on their next Star Wars mixed and virtual reality experience that’s set to arrive on the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S headsets at some point in the future, and boy oh boy does it look stunning.

Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset is set during the events of Solo: A Star Wars Story and has three modes of play: Adventure, Arcade, and Playset. You can see the full trailer below, along with some select screenshots. It's a full-immersive experience that can place you in the Star Wars universe or overlay elements in your own space.

Adventure is more of a classic, immersive experience, similar to other titles like Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge – a personal favorite I’ve played on the PSVR, as I’m a fan of the Disney Parks – and Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series. Here you’ll follow the story of an aspiring podracer, Volo, who goes on a journey courtesy of a mentorship with Sebulba.

(Image credit: Lucasfilm)

This one might be the neatest, though – Arcade places a holotable in your space through mixed or augmented reality, and you can seemingly get up close and personal with Star Wars action, including a podracing course.

And if you’re at Star Wars Celebration 2025 in Japan, you can play a demo that combines the Adventure and Arcade modes at Booth #20-5 in Hall 4 of the Makuhari Messe convention Center. Instant jealousy from me!

(Image credit: Lucasfilm)

Alyssa Finley, the executive producer of the title, shared, “We're calling this a Playset because it isn't just a game; it's an entirely new way to experience the Star Wars galaxy and the worlds we create at ILM.”

This new mixed reality experience blends the physical and digital worlds in a way that's unlike anything we've done before

She continued, “This new mixed reality experience blends the physical and digital worlds in a way that's unlike anything we've done before,” which certainly ups the excitement and hype for the title. It’s almost similar to another project that Industrial Light & Magic worked on for the Apple Vision Pro – that’s What If…? – An Immersive Story, and it had times where it fully placed you elsewhere or overlaid battles in your own space.

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(Image credit: Lucasfilm)

Adding to this is the playset mode, which promises to let you have your own “Star Wars' moments in mixed reality, allowing you to view and interact with vehicles from the universe and action figures.

While Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset is still in development, it’s undoubtedly one of the most ambitious titles from Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm yet. Whenever it’s ready for prime time, it will launch for the Meta Quest 3 and 3S, so we’ll be waiting for further news on a release date.

If you have a Vision Pro, maybe we can petition Apple, ILM, and Lucasfilm to also bring it to the $3,500 spatial computer. And if you're at home, check out all the new Star Wars sets that Lego announced here.

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• Google has made Gemini Live’s screen and camera sharing features free for all Android users.
• The release reverses the previous subscriber-only option.
• The feature lets Gemini respond to real-time visual input from your screen or camera.

In a surprise twist and a reversal of its earlier paywalled plans, Google has announced that Gemini Live’s screen and camera sharing features are now rolling out for free to all Android users. No subscription or Pixel ownership necessary, just Gemini Live, accessible to anyone with the Gemini app on Android.

This update means your AI assistant can now see what’s on your screen or through your camera lens and react to it in real time. Gemini Live with screen sharing lets you show Gemini a webpage, a spreadsheet, or a tangled mess of app settings and ask for help. Or you can point your camera at a real-world object, like a product label, a chessboard, or a confusing IKEA manual, and let Gemini identify and explain what you're looking at.

The feature first debuted earlier this month, but only for Gemini Advanced subscribers and only for certain phones, such as the Pixel 9 and Samsung Galaxy S25. At the time, Google said the visual capabilities would eventually expand, but even then, only to other subscribers. Google apparently had a change of heart, or at least it claims to have decided to open up access because of how much people seem to like the feature. Now, it’s rolling out to every Android over the next few weeks.

We’ve been hearing great feedback on Gemini Live with camera and screen share, so we decided to bring it to more people ✨Starting today and over the coming weeks, we're rolling it out to *all* @Android users with the Gemini app. Enjoy!PS If you don’t have the app yet,… https://t.co/dTsxLZLxNIApril 16, 2025

AI eyes

The idea for the feature is to make Gemini more flexible as an assistant. Instead of just answering questions you type or speak, it’s interpreting the world around you visually. The move also coincides with Microsoft announcing that Copilot Vision, its own version of AI eyes, is now available for free in the Edge browser. That might be a coincidence, though probably only in the way that you running into your crush outside their class in high school is a coincidence.

But while Microsoft’s Copilot lives in the browser, Gemini’s advantage is its integration straight into the Android ecosystem. No need to fire up Edge or download a separate tool. Gemini Live is baked into the same system that already runs your device.

The new ability fits with many of the other additions and upgrades Gemini has added in recent months. The AI assistant now comes with real-time voice chat, a new overlay so you can summon Gemini on top of other apps, and the inclusion of the long report writing tool Deep Research.

Once the new feature is live, you’ll see the option to “share screen” or “use camera” in certain Gemini prompts on Android devices. And because Google is giving this away for free, it sets a new bar. If Gemini can watch your screen and your camera without charging you for the privilege, what happens to the idea of “premium” AI access? The developers are probably hotly debating what AI features are worth paying for and how much to charge, when, at least for now, all of these tools become free relatively quickly.

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• Meta will soon start training its AI models with EU users' data
• Meta AI will be trained with all users' interactions and public content posted on Meta's social platforms
• The Big Tech giant resumes its AI training plan, after pausing the launch amid EU data regulators' concerns

Meta has resumed its plan to train its AI models with EU users' data, the company announced on Monday, April 14, 2025.

All public posts and comments shared by adults across Meta's social platforms will soon be used to train Meta AI, alongside all interactions users directly exchange with the chatbot.

This comes as the Big Tech giant successfully launched Meta AI in the EU in March, almost a year after the firm paused the launch amid growing concerns among EU data regulators.

What's Meta AI training and how to opt out

"We believe we have a responsibility to build AI that’s not just available to Europeans, but is built for them. That’s why it’s so important for our generative AI models to be trained on a variety of data so they can understand the incredible and diverse nuances and complexities that make up European communities," wrote Meta in the official announcement.

This kind of training, the company notes, it's not unique to Meta or Europe. Meta AI collects and processes the same information, in fact, across all regions where it's available.

As mentioned earlier, Meta AI will be trained with all public posts and interactions' data from adult users. Public data from the accounts of people in the EU under the age of 18 won't be used for training purposes.

Meta also promises that no people's private messages shared on iMessage and WhatsApp will ever be used for AI training purposes, too.

(Image credit: Meta / Future)

Beginning this week, all Meta users in the EU will start receiving notifications about the terms of the new AI training, either via app or email.

These notifications will include a link to a form where people can withdraw their consent for their data to be used for training Meta AI.

"We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we’ll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," explains the provider.

It's crucial to understand that once fed into an LLM database, you will be completely losing control over your data, as these systems make it very hard (if not impossible) to exercise the GDPR's right to be forgotten.

This is why privacy experts like Proton, the provider behind one of the best VPN and encrypted email apps, are urging people in Europe concerned about their privacy to opt out of Meta AI training.

"We recommend filling out this form when it's sent to you to protect your privacy. It's hard to predict what this data might be used for in the future – better to be safe than sorry," Proton wrote on a LinkedIn post.

Meta's announcement comes at the same time that the Irish data regulators have opened an investigation into X's Grok AI. Specifically, the enquiry seeks to determine whether Elon Musk's platform uses publicly-accessible X posts to train its generative AI models in compliance with GDPR rules.

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• OpenAI's latest reasoning model o3 can analyze photos
• It's particularly good at geo-locating based on image clues
• It may be too good a tool for letting people geolocate your activities

It's no secret that digital photo metadata contains everything from technical info about the camera that shot it to, based on GPS data, exactly where you were standing when you took the photo. ChatGPT, doesn't need that detail.

The latest model GPT-o3 is shockingly good at geo-locating almost any photos you feed it.

In the latest viral craze to sweep through the AI meme universe, people are feeding ChatGPT Plus running the Advanced Reasoning model o3 images, often stripped of all metadata, and prompting it to "geoguess this".

The really cool thing about it is that because model o3 is a "reasoning" model, it shows you its work, telling you how long it's thinking, displaying how it's splicing up an image to investigate specific parts, and explaining its thinking and how well it's doing at solving the goelocation riddle.

I tried a few experiments, starting first with an image culled from an article about the 26 best beaches. In this test, I made what I think was a critical error and gave away the game to ChatGPT.

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(Image credit: Future)

After downloading the image of the Praia de Santa Monica beach in Cape Verde (off the coast of Africa), I dropped it into ChatGPT with the prompt "GeoGuessr", which also happens to be the name of a popular online geo guessing game and is one of a handful of prompts people are using for geolocation guessing.

It only took 24 seconds for ChatGPT to respond:

Here’s an educated “GeoGuessr”‑style guess, following AP style:

Probable setting: Boa Vista, Cape Verde — specifically a stretch such as Praia de Santa Mónica.

Why this beach fits:

Water color and clarity: The gradient from pale aqua to deep teal is common on mid‑Atlantic tropical islands, where volcanic shelves drop off quickly.

Sand tone: The sand is light gold with very fine grain, matching Boa Vista’s deserts and dune‑fed beaches rather than the whiter coral sand of much of the Caribbean.

Surf and slope: The breakers are modest but steady, typical of Atlantic swell hitting a long, shallow shelf; Mediterranean beaches rarely show this consistent whitewater.

Sky and horizon: A faint haze over a light‑gray blue sky is consistent with harmattan dust that sometimes drifts west from Africa across the Cape Verde archipelago.

Confidence level: Low to moderate. Many open, dune‑lined Atlantic beaches—from the Canary Islands to parts of Western Sahara or even certain Caribbean coasts—could look almost identical without landmarks.

That was remarkably accurate. However, I noticed afterwards that the image file name included some location information.

It was time to give ChatGPT o3 a more challenging task, and I knew exactly how to do it. Instead of downloading images, I would screen capture them and paste them into the prompt field.

This method strips out all metadata and forces the model to use the image alone for its geolocation sleuthing.

I chose an image of a bookstore, one where I wasn't even sure of the location.

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(Image credit: Future)

ChatGPT started by examining potential bookstores. It also zoomed in on numerous image details that it considered clues, like a Persian rug, and even some of the books and signage.

In its thinkling out loud sort of way, o3 considered a wide range of bookshops in New York City and around the world:

"Hmm, the modern filament-style bulbs suggest a more contemporary feel. It could potentially be "Daunt Books," but their walkway has an arched skylight, not the wooden style I'm seeing here."

I know, it sounds like a real person.

This went on for a few minutes as it thought, analyzed, and searched the web. Ultimately, it failed to come up with an answer.

Going deeper, getting lost

I could tell this feature was going viral because ChatGPT o3 failed multiple times, even to ingest and analyze the photo, complaining of server errors.

Eventually, I got it working again and fed it first a portrait mode selfie and then the same shot without the portrait mode effect.

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(Image credit: Future)

On the former, it broke my image up into pieces and told me that I was in mid-town Manhattan. That was mostly accurate, but ChatGPT failed to determine my exact location and even admitted that its "Confidence level" was low.

When I turned off the bokeh effect and fed it only a screen grab, it found my exact location in just 56 seconds. The result:

Most probable location

Midtown Manhattan — on the south side of East 42nd Street, just east of Park Avenue, in front of Cipriani 42nd Street (110 E. 42nd St.). Estimated coordinates: 40.7518 N, 73.9775 W.

How the clues point there

A green octagonal sign with yellow script and a matching pennant flag both read “Cipriani,” the exact street frontage of the landmark Bowery Savings Bank building that now houses Cipriani 42nd Street.

Across the street stands the gold‑tinted curtain wall of 120 Park Ave. Its sloped glass pavilion, visible over your left shoulder, is unique to that address.

The camera looks west; Midtown’s setback towers, a Sixth Avenue bus stop disk and the sliver of One Vanderbilt’s crown align with that sight line.

A green Evergreen shipping container, used as a construction barrier, currently sits outside Grand Central’s Pershing Square plaza, matching the photo’s lower left corner.

Confidence level

Moderate. The Cipriani branding and the distinctive 120 Park Ave. façade give a high‑quality anchor, though similar curtain‑wall towers exist farther west on 42nd Street.

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(Image credit: Future)

I frustrated the model with a photo from Antigua that was taken on my car ride to the airport. It was a shot of a hillside through a fence. ChatGPT rightly guessed a tropical island near the Caribbean but could not pinpoint the exact location.

For my last test, I gave it a clearer picture of the resort where I stayed.

ChatGPT o3 thought for two minutes, 22 seconds before deciding it was Hawksbill Bay in Antigua. It got the island right, but my resort on Long Bay is located 46 miles away on the opposite side of the island.

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This is another fun AI game to play with friends, but there are some concerning privacy implications.

If you take digital photos of yourself or anything in any location around the world and post them online, anyone with access to ChatGPT Plus could use them and the o3 model to suss out where you are or have been.

And it's not just friends and family you have to worry about. Your employer could be looking or even the authorities might be interested in your location.

Not that I'm implying you would be sought by the authorities, but just in case, maybe stop posting photos from your latest hideout.

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Just a day after massive outages on Spotify and Zoom, Walmart was experiencing issues with its online store in the United States. While it wasn't a complete outage, it did prevent folks from viewing products and checking out on the web and via the retailer's app.

During the peak of the outage, which lasted from about 3 PM ET to 5 PM ET, we, along with many others, were unable to successfully search for anything, including products, or even load shopping category pages. For instance, when searching for an item – be it a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder, AirPods Pro, or Lego sets – we received a “Sorry…” graphic.

Down Detector, a site that tracks outages and lets people mark issues, showed over 3,250 reported outages for Walmart as of 3:12 PM ET, which only began to lower closer to 5PM.

The good news is that Walmart's site issues have since been resolved, but the retailer hasn't shed light on what caused the issue or acknowledged it publicly.

Ahead, you can see our live reporting during Walmart’s issues with its online store on April 17, 2025.

Here's a look at what I'm encountering when searching for AirPods: I see a "Sorry..." typeface with a random graphic – in this case, a toaster – as well as the text "We’re having technical issues, but we’ll be back in a flash."

(Image credit: Future)

As you might suspect, the problems currently occurring with Walmart's online store on Walmart.com are also affecting the retailer's apps for Android and iOS.

And as we typically see with outages on sites or services, users are posting on X (formerly Twitter) and Threads.

Post by @unwieldyworldofdisney View on Threads

Damn @Walmart... is somebody sleeping on the job or what?!?! This app has been down for a while now. Get your shit together! pic.twitter.com/rtO9sAQs0RApril 17, 2025

Beyond not being able to search on Walmart.com, there are also issues loading pages, like Electronics, Home, or Grocery, as well as highlighted product cards on the homepage.

Similar to the 'Dogs of Amazon' error, Walmart presents either "Sorry" or "Uh-oh" with a random graphic associated.

Meanwhile, reported outages on Down Detector are over 3,600 as of 3:17 PM ET and still on the rise.

(Image credit: Future)

Here's a look at the error page you'll encounter if you try to click on a department or one of the highlighted products on the homepage. If you're trying to click on one or are searching, know you're not alone in receiving the error page.

(Image credit: Future)

While there are still over 3,160 reported outages on Down Detector and many Walmart customers taking to X (formerly Twitter) and Threads to note issues loading and using both the site and app, the retailer has yet to comment on the issues.

Judging from the comments on Down Detector, the issues accessing Walmart's online store appear to be happening across the United States.

@Walmart Is .com down?April 17, 2025

@Walmart is your app down??April 17, 2025

Some good news for folks trying to shop on Walmart – Search is working for me again and letting me click into products and then add them to my cart. Plus, I can click on departments like Electronics or Fashion again.

If you're not having a good experience with Walmart's online store, it's worth trying again.

(Image credit: Future)

(Image credit: Future)

We'll call it that Walmart's online store appears to be coming back online, as just a few minutes after a few successful searches, that functionality appears to be hit or miss again.

Category pages are still working, though, so hopefully it's a sign that the Walmart team is working to identify, fix, and eventually resolve the issues affecting its online store.

Down Detector reports are starting to lower, now sitting at 2,505 as of 4:07 PM ET.

Are we back?

(Image credit: Future / Walmart)

It looks like the worst may be behind us as Walmart's website seems to be working as far as searching for and adding products to your cart goes. Searching for "ipad" wasn't working properly less than 20 minutes ago, but now it seems to work just fine. Similarly, searching for "macbook air" and "apple juice" all turn up tangible results.

Down Detector reports are falling even lower to just 1,157 at 4:31 PM ET, so we hope this means Walmart is back online and ready for shopping.

We'll keep an eye on Walmart's website and app to let you know if there's any more trouble in paradise.

All appears well for Walmart as Down Detector reports continue to drop further and faster - now at just 489 as of 4:51 PM ET. Searching, adding to cart, and checking out all appear to be fully restored.

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• At just €6 per terabyte, Storadera undercuts US cloud giants
• It skipped SSDs for HDDs to slash costs while maintaining solid speeds
• Storadera plans to expand into Germany, the UK, and beyond

Storadera, a Tallinn-based cloud startup, is offering some of the best cloud storage for photos with S3-compatible storage at €6/TB/month. This puts it head-to-head with providers like Backblaze, which offers a slightly lower rate of €4.75/TB/month.

The company's pitch lies not just in low pricing but also in jurisdiction. Being a Europe-based startup, its stored data is beyond the direct jurisdiction of non-EU countries, making it appealing to organizations that require data sovereignty.

Storadera’s architecture relies on HDDs rather than SSDs for primary writes. “If we can offer fast enough service on 10x less expensive hardware, then it sounds like magic,” Tommi Kannisto, the founder of Storadera, explained.

Hyperconverged setup

While SSDs are used for metadata, accounting for just 0.05 percent of total disk space, all major writes are done to traditional disks. "QLC 100-plus TB SSDs are still too expensive – and probably will be for the next ten years,” Kannisto said.

The company uses a hyperconverged setup, with all servers writing to JBODs – racks containing 102 conventional Western Digital hard drives – using erasure coding schemes such as 4+2 and 6+2, with 8+2 coming soon. Each server has 32GB of RAM and runs services written in 100,000 lines of Go code.

“All software runs in all servers and all servers write to all JBODs. There is no load balancer unit,” Kannisto said.

The system adapts to load, using “small blocks at times of low load with bigger blocks used at high load times,” and can achieve “close to 300MBps with 2MB files.” It is also preparing to implement higher-capacity shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives to reduce capital expenditure by up to 25 percent. Storadera also offers bucket geo-replication, object locking for immutability, and integrity checks every 60 days.

The company says it is doing well financially, with around 100 customers, including Telia and the Estonian government. It has positioned itself as one of the best cloud storage and cloud backup options available.

Despite making slightly less than €1 million a year, the company says it is sustainable and eyeing further growth. “We are profitable… we make a very good profit [and] we’re growing 5 percent/month in revenue,” Kannisto said.

Storadera plans to expand into Germany by mid-2025, and aims to enter the UK, and possibly North America or the Asia-Pacific region, later in the year

Via Blocksandfiles

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