Niantic's Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide Niantic is giving its cute AR cartoon companions a voice that will let them guide you around in the real world and point out interesting facts. The feature is being demo'd first in Snap Spectacles. Imagine you're walking your dog. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, "Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?"

President Donald Trump has arrived in the UK for his historic second state visit, which will see a crowded mix of royal pageantry, trade talks and international politics. Before making the trip from the US on Air Force One, Trump sent positive signals, describing the visit as an honour and saying: My relationship is very good with the UK. They want to see if they can refine the trade deal a little bit I'm into helping them, said Trump, with a multi-billion US technology investment deal being announced as the president's visit got underway. But Trump said the main purpose of the visit was to see my friend King Charles: He represents the country so well, such an elegant gentleman. Landing at Stansted airport, President Trump received an official welcome from a line-up on the runway including Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. The president is spending the night in the US ambassador's residence, Winfield House, before a day of royal ceremony and lavish spectacle in Windsor Castle on Wednesday - with the president describing Windsor as the ultimate in settings.

Today, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, one of the most popular social-media apps for teenage users, is announcing a new computer that you wear directly on your face. The latest in its Spectacles line of smart glasses, which the company has been working on for about a decade, shows you interactive imagery through its lenses, placing plants or imaginary pets or even a golf-putting range into the real world around you. So-called augmented reality (or AR) is nothing new, and neither is wearable tech. Meta makes a pair of smart glasses in partnership with Ray-Ban, and claims they're so popular that the company can't make them fast enough. Amazon sells an Alexa-infused version of the famous Carrera frames, which make you look like a mob boss with access to an AI assistant (Alexa, where's the best place to hide a body?).

Snap's latest augmented reality glasses have a completely new -- but still very oversized -- design, larger field of view and all-new software that supports full hand tracking abilities. But the company is only making the fifth-generation Spectacles available to approved developers willing to commit to a year-long 99/month subscription to start. It's an unusual strategy, but Snap says it's taking that approach because developers are, for now, best positioned to understand the capabilities and limitations of augmented reality hardware. They are also the ones most willing to commit to a pricey 1,000 subscription to get their hands on the tech. Developers, explains Snap's director of AR platform Sophia Dominguez, are the biggest AR enthusiasts.

Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) have changed the way we perceive technology. They have been shown to excel in tasks ranging from poem writing and coding to essay generation and puzzle solving. With the incorporation of image generation capability, they have become more comprehensive and versatile AI tools. At the same time, researchers are striving to identify the limitations of these tools to improve them further. Currently identified flaws include hallucination, biases, and bypassing restricted commands to generate harmful content. In the present work, we have identified a fundamental limitation related to the image generation ability of LLMs, and termed it The NO Syndrome. This negation blindness refers to LLMs inability to correctly comprehend NO related natural language prompts to generate the desired images. Interestingly, all tested LLMs including GPT-4, Gemini, and Copilot were found to be suffering from this syndrome. To demonstrate the generalization of this limitation, we carried out simulation experiments and conducted entropy-based and benchmark statistical analysis tests on various LLMs in multiple languages, including English, Hindi, and French. We conclude that the NO syndrome is a significant flaw in current LLMs that needs to be addressed. A related finding of this study showed a consistent discrepancy between image and textual responses as a result of this NO syndrome. We posit that the introduction of a negation context-aware reinforcement learning based feedback loop between the LLMs textual response and generated image could help ensure the generated text is based on both the LLMs correct contextual understanding of the negation query and the generated visual output.

With classic oblivious timing, Nintendo chose 10 March – or Mar10 day, as the company likes to style it – to announce that it is working with Illumination Studios on another Mario movie, even though it was the Oscars that day and absolutely nobody was paying attention. Last year's Mario movie was a smash hit, grossing 1bn and finally ending the long era of the cursed video game film adaptation once and for all, so it's not surprising that another one is in the works for April 2026. What is surprising is that it's not necessarily going to be a direct sequel. Co-directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and writer Matthew Fogel will return, but neither Nintendo nor Illumination committed to calling the new film a sequel. In a video broadcast announcing "a new animated film based on the world of Super Mario Bros", Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto (that's Mario's dad) said: "This time, we're thinking about broadening Mario's world further, and it'll have a bright and fun story."

We introduce PhotoBot, a framework for automated photo acquisition based on an interplay between high-level human language guidance and a robot photographer. We propose to communicate photography suggestions to the user via a reference picture that is retrieved from a curated gallery. We exploit a visual language model (VLM) and an object detector to characterize reference pictures via textual descriptions and use a large language model (LLM) to retrieve relevant reference pictures based on a user's language query through text-based reasoning. To correspond the reference picture and the observed scene, we exploit pre-trained features from a vision transformer capable of capturing semantic similarity across significantly varying images. Using these features, we compute pose adjustments for an RGB-D camera by solving a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem. We demonstrate our approach on a real-world manipulator equipped with a wrist camera. Our user studies show that photos taken by PhotoBot are often more aesthetically pleasing than those taken by users themselves, as measured by human feedback.

The position paper highlights the range of concerns that are engulfed in the injunction of explainable artificial intelligence in art (XAIxArt). Through a series of quick sub-questions, it points towards the ambiguities concerning 'explanation' and the postpositivist tradition of 'relevant explanation'. Rejecting both 'explanation' and 'relevant explanation', the paper takes a stance that XAIxArt is a symptom of insecurity of the anthropocentric notion of art and a nostalgic desire to return to outmoded notions of authorship and human agency. To justify this stance, the paper makes a distinction between an ornamentation model of explanation to a model of explanation as sense-making.

Over the course of the six movies and nearly 30 years leading up to this one, Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt has fought double agents and shadowy terrorist networks, scaled skyscrapers, and thrown himself out of planes. But he's never fought an adversary like the Entity, the rogue artificial intelligence he takes on in Dead Reckoning Part One. For one thing, it has no physical form, which means Tom Cruise can't catch it no matter how fast he runs. And for another, the Entity doesn't just want to defeat Ethan: It wants to replace him. In a briefing of the U.S. top intelligence officials in which exposition is passed from one actor to the next like a red-hot baton, one alphabet-agency higher-up describes the Entity as a "godless, stateless, amoral" being that can infiltrate any system in the world--not unlike the Impossible Mission Force itself, which, though nominally a branch of the U.S. government, doesn't take orders from the military-industrial complex so much as consider its suggestions.

Rivalry is a vital element of fandom. Whether its punks v rockers, Star Trek v Star Wars or Marvel v DC, subcultures have always defined themselves by what they're not as much as what they are. Which is why I'm secretly delighted that Sega and Nintendo are apparently releasing their new Sonic and Mario games within days of each other this October. Both Super Mario Bros Wonder and Sega Superstars are nostalgic callbacks to the era of 2D platforming. Both games allow players to select from a range of classic characters and take on the rich, lushly colourful environments in cooperative modes, and both supplement the retro aesthetics with new abilities.