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CES 2026 live: Wild tech, weird gadgets, and the laptops everyone's talking about
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. CES 2026 live: Wild tech, weird gadgets, and the laptops everyone's talking about PCWorld's staff has descended upon Las Vegas to bring you all the must-see PC sights from CES 2026. It's that time once again: CES 2026 is here. Think of CES like a harbinger of what's next in technology. Every January, the industry descends upon Las Vegas to pull back the curtain on the products that will power the upcoming year.
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Manipulator for people with limited abilities
Huang, Bingkun, Kotov, Evgeniy, Yuschenko, Arkady
The topic of this final qualification work was chosen due to the importance of developing robotic systems designed to assist people with disabilities. Advances in robotics and automation technologies have opened up new prospects for creating devices that can significantly improve the quality of life for these people. In this context, designing a robotic hand with a control system adapted to the needs of people with disabilities is a major scientific and practical challenge. This work addresses the problem of developing and manufacturing a four-degree-of-freedom robotic hand suitable for practical manipulation. Addressing this issue requires a comprehensive approach, encompassing the design of the hand's mechanical structure, the development of its control system, and its integration with a technical vision system and software based on the Robot Operating System (ROS).
Replaying games from my past with my young children has been surreal – and transformative
Thanks to some distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we'd planned to attend. My smallest son's wee pal and his parents came over for dinner, and when the smaller members of our group started to spiral out of control around 9pm, we threw them a little midnight countdown party in Animal Crossing. The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the depths of lockdown. Tending my island paradise helped me cope while largely imprisoned in a 2.5 bedroom basement flat with a baby, a toddler and a teenager. Our guests had brought their family Switch, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the animals' New Year party. They spent about 10 minutes gleefully whacking each other with bug nets before gathering with the other inhabitants in the square with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island's racoon magnate Tom Nook offering party poppers and shiny top-hats.
'Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door' Sets the Standard for Classic Game Remakes
Limitations can, paradoxically, be a boon for artists. Such was the case with the original Paper Mario on the Nintendo 64. The system could handle only so many polygons, and it's difficult to make a collection of polygons cute, so Nintendo opted to design a world around simple, flat planes. A paper RPG brought to life, the game had a design that was so iconic that it has stood the test of time. Surely, a modern high-definition remake would undermine that, right? If it hadn't been for the 2019 remake of 1993's The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, it would've been easy to doubt that a graphical upgrade could improve an older classic.
The Open-World Genius of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
In September of 1982, a young engineer named Thomas Zimmerman filed a patent for an optical-flex sensor mounted inside a glove. The mitt would measure the yaw, pitch, and roll of its wearer's forearm and the bending of their fingers, a useful way to transpose a person's movement onto a screen. Seven years later, a commercial version known as the Power Glove launched for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The technology was simplified and styled to look like a knight's gauntlet, to which a video-game controller appeared to have been inelegantly glued. While wearing the glove, a player could throw a punch from the sofa, and watch it land in an explosion of pixels behind the television's glass.
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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the fastest-selling game of series
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is perhaps the most anticipated addition in the popular series - and it's easy to see why. The epic earthy adventure takes gamers to new heights by literally spanning across both land and sky to uncover the secrets in the kingdom of Hyrule. Much like the predecessor Breath of the Wild, gamers step into a world of discovery and exploration, but now hero Link is given the ability to harness new powers. These new abilities allow our protagonist to fuse together a variety of objects to build vehicles - from cars to rafts, gliding jets and even hot air balloons. One gamer even recreated a Trojan horse for Link to hide inside and avoid enemies nearby.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker at 20 – this under-appreciated Zelda game is also one of the best
When people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: "What, the one with all the sailing?" To many, that's all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a "swift sail", allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. The seafaring was the point. It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it's time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong.
'Is this really going to work?': the makers of mega-hit video game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The release of a new Zelda game is always a major event worldwide. Ever since 1986, when famed Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto first attempted to capture in code some of the wonder he experienced exploring the Kyoto countryside as a child, Zelda games have been pushing the boundaries of what's possible in virtual worlds. Look at any best-games-of-all-time list and you'll see Zelda in the Top 10, often more than once. But 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was particularly special. Launching alongside the Nintendo Switch console, which has since sold more than 125m units, it was perhaps the best realisation yet of the promise of boundless freedom and adventure that video games have been dangling in front of players' noses for decades.
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Is Link Really the Hero of the Zelda Story?
I first encountered Link's work when he was a temporally displaced preteen in 1998's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. He had finally unlocked the inner sanctum of the Temple of Time and seized the hilt of the mythic, Excalibur-ish Master Sword. A wreath of blue light circled Link's feet, shunting him seven years into the future. Link left the temple as a grown man, with a post-pubescent voice and a chiseled jawline, to discover that the bucolic lands of Hyrule had become twisted and malignant during his absence. Vacant zombies roamed the newly befouled farmers market, the royal castle had been demolished in favor of a Sauronified citadel, and the volcano painted against the skyline (called, yes, Death Mountain) roiled with portentous, tectonic energy.