Chappell Roan fans will soon be able to transform into the US pop star when playing the video game Fortnite. The singer has been announced by developers Epic as the latest icon for the game's next festival season, which kicks off on Thursday. As part of collaboration, players will be able to wear some of the singer's most iconic outfits and listen to some of her hit songs. The collaboration comes after Roan told BBC Radio 1 last year that she would love to feature in the game. During the interview with Radio 1 presenter Jack Saunders, the singer professed her love for the video game and asked the developers: Please give me a skin, please.

Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. What is the split between your individual and enterprise customers? It was [previously] lower on the enterprise side. At the beginning of 2024, it was 90/10.

A judge ruled on Tuesday that Google would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser or the Android operating system, saving the tech giant from the most severe penalties sought by the US government. The same judge had ruled in favor of US prosecutors nearly a year ago, finding that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly with its namesake search engine. Groups critical of Google's dominance in the internet search and online advertising industry are furious. They contend the judge missed an opportunity to enact meaningful change in an industry that has suffocated under the crushing weight of its heaviest player. Tech industry groups and investors, by contrast, are thrilled. Shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, have risen 9% since Tuesday afternoon.

With over 650 million registered players, Fortnite is without a doubt one of the most popular video games in the world. Now, experts have warned that some children are spending so much time playing the game that they're developing'Fortnite accents'. The Fortnite accent is typically high-pitched and fast-faced, according to the experts at Preply. It also often features an upward inflection at the end of each sentence, almost as if everything is being said in the tone of a question. 'Because of the game's young player base, it mimics the sound of an overly excited or frustrated child's voice,' Preply explained.

We present learning-based implicit shape representations designed for real-time avatar collision queries arising in the simulation of clothing. Signed distance functions (SDFs) have been used for such queries for many years due to their computational efficiency. Recently deep neural networks have been used for implicit shape representations (DeepSDFs) due to their ability to represent multiple shapes with modest memory requirements compared to traditional representations over dense grids. However, the computational expense of DeepSDFs prevents their use in real-time clothing simulation applications. We design a learning-based representation of SDFs for human avatars whoes bodies change shape kinematically due to joint-based skinning. Rather than using a single DeepSDF for the entire avatar, we use a collection of extremely computationally efficient (shallow) neural networks that represent localized deformations arising from changes in body shape induced by the variation of a single joint. This requires a stitching process to combine each shallow SDF in the collection together into one SDF representing the signed closest distance to the boundary of the entire body. To achieve this we augment each shallow SDF with an additional output that resolves whether or not the individual shallow SDF value is referring to a closest point on the boundary of the body, or to a point on the interior of the body (but on the boundary of the individual shallow SDF). Our model is extremely fast and accurate and we demonstrate its applicability with real-time simulation of garments driven by animated characters.

A year since Sony Honda Mobility (SHM) announced its debut EV concept, the Afeela, the company is back at CES 2024 to offer more details, more collaborations and a driving simulator. The name of the concept vehicle hasn't changed since last we saw it. What is new, however, is the car's ability to be driven around with a PlayStation controller. I didn't get to do that -- it was a stunt operated by one of the company's employees -- but there was a DualSense controller involved in my demo. So let's begin where SHM left off.

Welcome back to our weekly gaming news roundup. As the year comes to a close, we're looking back on 12 months of massive change for the video game industry, driven by acquisitions, layoffs and unionization. You can read my story on consolidation for more on gaming's tough year. Baldur's Gate 3 is officially the Game of the Year and after months as a PlayStation console exclusive, it's finally available on Xbox. However, if you're waiting for it to become available on Game Pass, stop.

The Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau has found that a unit of the developer of online game Fortnite failed to report some ¥30 billion in revenue from in-game spending, sources said Wednesday. The problem, which lasted for three years to December 2020, was uncovered in an investigation by the tax bureau. The bureau concluded that some ¥3 billion in consumption tax was left undeclared, slapping the unit with back taxes and penalties reaching an estimated ¥3.5 billion. It is believed to be an unusually large amount imposed on a foreign company as a result of a tax investigation. Fortnite is a popular online game developed by Epic Games of the United States. It is estimated to be played by over 400 million people worldwide via personal computers, game consoles or smartphones.

The antitrust lawsuit Epic Games and Match Group have filed against Google was supposed to go to trial on November 6, but now it looks like the video game developer might go at it alone. Google and Match, the parent company of Tinder, OkCupid and Hinge, have reached an agreement and have agreed to drop all claims against each other. According to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, Google has agreed to return the $40 million Match had place in escrow to cover the service fees it would supposedly owe the Alphabet unit while the dispute is ongoing. Match also announced in its earning report that its apps will be using Google's User Choice Billing program starting on March 31, 2024. Under the program, users will have the option to choose between Google's and the developer's billing systems when purchasing an app or paying for a subscription.

Developers and teams building avatars and virtual assistants can now register to join the early-access program for NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a suite of cloud-native AI microservices that make it easier to build and deploy intelligent virtual assistants and digital humans at scale. Omniverse ACE eases avatar development, delivering the AI building blocks necessary to add intelligence and animation to any avatar, built on virtually any engine and deployed on any cloud. These AI assistants can be designed for organizations across industries, enabling organizations to enhance existing workflows and unlock new business opportunities. ACE is one of several generative AI applications that will help creators accelerate the development of 3D worlds and the metaverse. Members who join the program will receive access to the prerelease versions of NVIDIA's AI microservices, as well as the tooling and documentation needed to develop cloud-native AI workflows for interactive avatar applications.