Skip to main content

🟣 SC 🔵 FS

A few months back Altera launched Project Sid (its name is a hat tip to Sid Meier, the creator of the iconic Civilisation video game). They poured 1,000 autonomous AI agents into a Minecraft world, and sat back to watch what unfolded.

Altera calls this world, ‘the first agent-based civilisation’. Yang and his colleagues watched as the agents learned to harness the natural resources around them, developed their own economy, and even evolved a culture and religion.

Read more

🟣 SC

The technology is certainly there. WebXR is the standard API for immersive experiences on the web, and frameworks like A-Frame provide ready-to-use XR components, covering inputs, primitives, teleportation, gestures and so on. Since AI coding tools can already interact with external libraries, I realized I only needed to provide the intent and guide the AI toward the spatial outcome I wanted.

Read more

🟣 SC 🔴 HCI

The first time we handed our AR demo to a stranger, she did what any sensible person would do, she watched the world around. The room was busy, reflections from a window, her face moving in and out of light, and our neat row of icons behaved like extras, present, but not useful. In my notes I wrote a single line “if the room is our scene, the interface must be part of it not just a heads up display”.

Read more

🔵 FS 🟡 Sci-fi 🔘 Arch

Now that 2026 is no longer speculative but real, Metropolis invites a fresh look. It captured structural tensions that continue to shape modern urban life: who benefits from progress, who pays for it, and how technology changes human relationships when power is concentrated at the top.

Read more

🌀 DTech 🟣 SC

Prices will start from 1,899 yuan ($268.25) for the headset that will be powered by Alibaba's Qwen AI model and app. Unlike other headsets made by the likes of Meta, the Quark glasses look like regular eyewear, with a black plastic frame. Alibaba said the glasses would be deeply integrated with its apps, including Alipay and its shopping site Taobao, with wearers able to use them for tasks such as on-the-go translation and instant price recognition.

Read more

🟣 SC

Today, we’re introducing WorldGen: a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt. WorldGen is built on a combination of procedural reasoning, diffusion-based 3D generation, and object-aware scene decomposition. The result is geometrically consistent, visually rich, and render-efficient 3D worlds for gaming, simulation, and immersive social environments.

Read more

🔵 FS 🟤 PP 🌀 DTech

In the last hundred years, humanity’s capacity for knowledge transmission progressed from the written word and the static-laden echoes of early radio technology to global information systems so vast and complex that no single person on Earth can claim a complete understanding of them. Inevitably, the social technologies built into both our biology and our society are no longer entirely capable of addressing our new epistemological landscape. But is a slow retreat into the machine necessarily the only path we can take to keep up?

Read more