This year's surprise hit Blue Prince is a proper video game wonder. It's an architectural puzzler in which you explore a transforming mansion left to you by an eccentric relative. The place is filled with secrets, and whenever you reach a door you get to pick the room on the other side from a handful of options. The whole game is a rumination on houses and how we live in them. Nostalgic and melancholic, it feels designed to make us look harder at what surrounds us. This Addams'-style Queen Anne with clapboard facades and dark windows is a classic haunted house, reportedly inspired by the Skywalker Ranch.

Product search is uniquely different from search for documents, Internet resources or vacancies, therefore it requires the development of specialized search systems. The present work describes the H1 embdedding model, designed for an offline term indexing of product descriptions at e-commerce platforms. The model is compared to other state-of-the-art (SoTA) embedding models within a framework of hybrid product search system that incorporates the advantages of lexical methods for product retrieval and semantic embedding-based methods. We propose an approach to building semantically rich term vocabularies for search indexes. Compared to other production semantic models, H1 paired with the proposed approach stands out due to its ability to process multi-word product terms as one token. As an example, for search queries "new balance shoes", "gloria jeans kids wear" brand entity will be represented as one token - "new balance", "gloria jeans". This results in an increased precision of the system without affecting the recall. The hybrid search system with proposed model scores mAP@12 = 56.1% and R@1k = 86.6% on the WANDS public dataset, beating other SoTA analogues.

Two beloved games from the past have been rereleased in the last week: 2008's nauseating sci-fi horror Dead Space has been resurrected with modern technology, and 1997's first-person-shooter gamechanger GoldenEye 007 (pictured above) has arrived on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, looking somewhat less fresh. Dead Space (pictured below) was not my thing – I'm too sensitive for horror (I sometimes cry at adverts). But GoldenEye 007 brings back a host of great memories for me, as it does for anyone who was playing games during the Nintendo 64 era. Try to find a millennial who doesn't have fond recollections of gathering at that one friend's house after school for split-screen death matches, or a Gen Xer who didn't nearly miss a university essay deadline because of it. My first thought, whenever a game such as this arrives anew, is always: what if it's terrible now?

Robots must move legibly around people for safety reasons, especially for tasks where physical contact is possible. One such task is handovers, which requires implicit communication on where and when physical contact (object transfer) occurs. In this work, we study whether the trajectory model used by a robot during the reaching phase affects the subjective perceptions of receivers for robot-to-human handovers. We conducted a user study where 32 participants were handed over three objects with four trajectory models: three were versions of a minimum jerk trajectory, and one was an ellipse-fitting-based trajectory. The start position of the handover was fixed for all trajectories, and the end position was allowed to vary randomly around a fixed position by $\pm$3 cm in all axis. The user study found no significant differences among the handover trajectories in survey questions relating to safety, predictability, naturalness, and other subjective metrics. While these results seemingly reject the hypothesis that the trajectory affects human perceptions of a handover, it prompts future research to investigate the effect of other variables, such as robot speed, object transfer position, object orientation at the transfer point, and explicit communication signals such as gaze and speech.

In the '90s, Croft's face was everywhere. Arguably the most iconic gaming character to come out of the decade, Croft frequently appeared in magazines and on television commercials, "modeling" for clients ranging from credit card companies to soft drinks. She became a figure bigger than gaming, pushing into the mainstream. Within the games industry, her impact was crucial: Croft, portrayed as tall and athletic and often adorned in revealing outfits, helped establish female protagonists in the medium and the action-adventure genre as a whole. These days, her presence can be felt in the likes of "Horizon Zero Dawn's" Aloy and Ellie from "The Last of Us" -- even if Croft herself has stepped out of the zeitgeist, to a degree.

Orcas have complex social structures that include close friendships, a study that used drones to film the animals suggests. The marine mammals – also known as killer whales – live in groups of related individuals called pods, which have their own distinct cultures. The new findings show each orca spends more time interacting with certain individuals in their pod, and they tend to favour those of the same sex and similar age. But as they get older, whales appear to grow apart, according to research led by the University of Exeter, UK, and the Center for Whale Research, Washington. "Until now, research on killer whale social networks has relied on seeing the whales when they surface, and recording which whales are together," said Michael Weiss at the University of Exeter, the study's lead author.

Early trailers for Shadow of the Tomb Raider have portrayed Lara Croft as a ruthless killer. Someone who can hide in the jungle and silently dispatch armored soldiers with sophisticated traps and fast, calculated strikes. The underlying message is clear: The beloved archaeologist is now the hunter rather than the hunted. Developer Eidos Montreal is framing the game as Lara's pivotal shift from reactive to proactive fighter. In 2013, when Crystal Dynamics rebooted the franchise, players were introduced to a younger, inexperienced tomb raider who had never been in a firefight before.

The film only earned $57 million domestically, but it still topped 2016's Assassin's Creed, which earned $54 million in the US with a $240 million cumulative box office. And here's the thing: Tomb Raider was really good. Alicia Vikander's Lara Croft is really good. It's one of the best video game movies I've ever seen, and if you missed it at the movie theater, you should definitely check it out from the comfort of your own home. "Best video game movie" is a fairly low bar, but I genuinely enjoyed Tomb Raider as a movie---not just as a video game movie. It certainly has more than a few similarities to the rebooted video game franchise.

U.S. Transportation Secy.: Self-driving tech will make roads safer Innovation is underway to rethink one of the biggest headaches we face on a daily basis: getting to work. From crowdsourced shuttle buses to companies offering rides to lure top talent, here are concepts used in some cities that could one day help your morning commute. Some of the largest US companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook, offer shuttles or arranged ride shares to get employees to work. These shuttles often come with free WiFi, and pick up near employees' homes. "It's the dawn of private transportation systems operating under the radar," Ryan Croft, co-founder of TransitScreen, a startup providing real-time transit planning information, told CNN.

Video game adaptations have a long history of being, well … mostly completely terrible, thanks largely to the vapid efforts of one Uwe Boll. And even the most ardent Angelina Jolie fan would presumably admit that the Tomb Raider movies were hardly the Oscar-winner's finest hour. So why would Alicia Vikander, Hollywood It girl and current art house dahling, sign up to star as Lara Croft in a reboot of the action-adventure series? Were there no Marvel superhero parts available? Critics have reacted with predictable sniffiness to Norwegian director Roar Uthaug's debut Hollywood outing, with the movie rated just 50% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.