Midjourney’s new V7 image model features a revamped architecture with smarter text prompt handling, higher image quality, and default personalization based on user-rated images. While some features like upscaling aren’t yet available, it does come with a faster, cheaper Draft Mode. TechCrunch reports: To use it, you’ll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney “personalization” profile, if you haven’t already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first model to have personalization switched on by default. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to turn V7 on or off on Midjourney’s website and, if you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. In the web app, you can quickly select the model from the drop-down menu next to the “Version” label.
Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a “totally different architecture” in a post on X. “V7 is … much smarter with text prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “[I]mage prompts look fantastic, image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures, and bodies, hands, and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details.” V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo (costlier to run) and Relax, and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are of lower quality than standard-mode images, but they can be enhanced and re-rendered with a click.
A number of standard Midjourney features aren’t available yet for V7, according to Holz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive in the near future, he said, possibly within two months. “This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e want to learn from you what it’s good and bad at, but definitely keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting. So play around a bit.”
AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it’s a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.
There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.
Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and “objects of all kinds.” It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.
Wine 10.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that is the basis for Valve’s Steam Play and allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and elsewhere…
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.
“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.” There are two variations of fast flux described in the advisory: single flux and double flux. Single flux involves mapping a single domain to a rotating pool of IP addresses using DNS A (IPv4) or AAAA (IPv6) records. This constant cycling makes it difficult for defenders to track or block the associated malicious servers since the addresses change frequently, yet the domain name remains consistent.
Double flux takes this a step further by also rotating the DNS name servers themselves. In addition to changing the IP addresses of the domain, it cycles through the name servers using NS (Name Server) and CNAME (Canonical Name) records. This adds an additional layer of obfuscation and resilience, complicating takedown efforts.
“A key means for achieving this is the use of Wildcard DNS records,” notes Ars. “These records define zones within the Domain Name System, which map domains to IP addresses. The wildcards cause DNS lookups for subdomains that do not exist, specifically by tying MX (mail exchange) records used to designate mail servers. The result is the assignment of an attacker IP to a subdomain such as malicious.example.com, even though it doesn’t exist.” Both methods typically rely on large botnets of compromised devices acting as proxies, making it challenging for defenders to trace or disrupt the malicious activity.
Google has introduced Sec-Gemini v1, an experimental AI model built on its Gemini platform and tailored for cybersecurity. BetaNews reports: Sec-Gemini v1 is built on top of Gemini, but it’s not just some repackaged chatbot. Actually, it has been tailored with security in mind, pulling in fresh data from sources like Google Threat Intelligence, the OSV vulnerability database, and Mandiant’s threat reports. This gives it the ability to help with root cause analysis, threat identification, and vulnerability triage.
Google says the model performs better than others on two well-known benchmarks. On CTI-MCQ, which measures how well models understand threat intelligence, it scores at least 11 percent higher than competitors. On CTI-Root Cause Mapping, it edges out rivals by at least 10.5 percent. Benchmarks only tell part of the story, but those numbers suggest it’s doing something right. Access is currently limited to select researchers and professionals for early testing. If you meet that criteria, you can request access here.
There’s the egg price problem for sure, but whether you’re trying to save grocery money or you have an aversion to eggs for dietary or health restrictions—you too deserve cake. Cake for a birthday or cake on a whim, there should be nothing holding you back from achieving your sugary dreams of the moment, least of all a lack of eggless cake recipes. I tested out five common and accessible egg replacement options to see which one produced the best eggless cake.
The batter
I decided to test a basic yellow cake recipe I’ve used before. It uses a combination of butter and oil, sugar, milk, flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla extract, and usually eggs. It’s a good layering cake since when it’s prepared as-written (with eggs), it produces a sturdy, level (not domed), vanilla scented cake. In the interest of time, making multiple batches, and reducing mess, I spooned the batter out into cupcake papers rather than into larger cake pans. The first round of cake was prepared with egg as a control.
The replacements
Cupcakes from left to right: egg (control), banana, applesauce, yogurt. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
There are almost too many options for substituting eggs in cake batter, so I focused on the ones I’ve heard about the most often: mashed banana, Greek yogurt, applesauce, aquafaba, and a tapioca flour and baking powder mixture.
Eggs are essential to cake batter and other baked goods, because they’re a binder, can be a leavener, and they’re an emulsifier (they can help keep fats and liquids stable and homogenized). They also add structure and moisture to the finished product. Truly, they’re incredible. We’re looking for a single ingredient to do as much of that as possible, but it’s important to keep our expectations realistic—few other ingredients can accomplish all of that without sacrificing something.
The results
Let’s get to the good stuff—the results. Here are the best egg replacements for cake, and the worst performers.
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
1. Aquafaba. It’s easy to dismiss aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chickpeas or other beans) until you actually use it. This cake was perfectly delicious, spongy, moist, and with no off-flavors. It was the most similar in structure and flavor to a cake prepared with whole eggs. It’s also the easiest substitution. As long as you saved some aquafaba from last night’s dinner (or do what I do and keep it handy in your freezer), you simply add three tablespoons of the bean liquid per single whole egg the recipe calls for.
I mixed it in during the same stage I would have for the egg, right after the butter and sugar got mixed together. Note that if your beans weren’t low-sodium then you may want to reduce the salt in the recipe by a quarter teaspoon.
2. Tapioca flour and baking powder. This easy to make mixture produced a good quality final product as well. Points were taken off for the mixture being an extra step, and for tapioca flour being possibly harder to source depending on where you live. The cake had more loft and was more tender than the aquafaba replacement, making it more delicate to handle if you’re stacking layers for a big cake.
Mix one tablespoon of tapioca flour with one tablespoon of cold water. Stir in a quarter-teaspoon of baking powder, and this replaces one whole egg in your cake recipe. The mixture will be very liquidy.
The tapioca flour, baking powder, and water mixture. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
Alternatively, you can simply add the extra baking powder measurement to the dry ingredients. Add the tapioca and water mixture to the bowl after creaming the butter and sugar, and proceed with the recipe. You can usually find tapioca flour in the baking aisle of large supermarkets.
3. Banana. Bananas are a great helper in batters because they actually can mimic some of what eggs do: they can bind, add moisture, and their fibers provide structure and can help keep fats and liquids suspended like eggs. Plus, they’re pretty easy to access in every region and in most grocery stores. The finished product is sturdy and moist, making it a good cake for handling and decorating. That said, bananas make your cake taste like bananas. If you don’t like that, then this totally stinks.
To use banana as an egg replacement, mash up enough banana to make a quarter-cup of banana glop per egg needed.
4. Greek yogurt. I love when yogurt or sour cream is added to cake batters because the cake is always moist, flavorful, and tender. However, it’s not a very good egg replacement. While the flavor of the cake was delicious, the yogurt added no structure and completely caved in while cooling. For context, I used a quarter-cup of Greek yogurt to replace one whole egg. The only reason I ranked it above applesauce is because the flavor was delicious—but this would never work for a cake that I’d serve in public. Imagine if I had used an eight or nine-inch cake pan. The cake would look like a bowl.
The applesauce and yogurt cupcakes (two on the right side) both fell after cooling. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
5. Applesauce. Applesauce produced similar emulsifying results to bananas but without the benefit of firm structure. You can see in the picture above that after the cake cooled, it dipped in the center. Not as dramatically as the yogurt one, but still, not great. Applesauce adds moisture but since it has less structure, the batter falls while cooling and then you end up with a stodgy center. Furthermore, I found applesauce cake to be slightly nauseating in flavor, and it overly sweetened my cake even though I used the natural kind with no added sugar. If you must use it, use a quarter-cup to replace one egg.
If you’re looking to seamlessly make cakes and cupcakes without extra steps or special ingredients, use aquafaba for the best results. It’s vegan, has good structure and moisture, and doesn’t negatively alter the flavor of your cake. It doesn’t need to be whipped for recipes where the eggs aren’t whipped, but—as an added benefit—this is the only ingredient where you can whip it to replace whipped eggs in a recipe. Aquafaba is a versatile cooking helper to keep around, and it’s essentially free if you’ve been draining it from your beans all these years.
After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023—alleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articles—the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.
According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper’s own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the NYT’s copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist’s reporting.
In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it’s OpenAI’s burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.
A blend of a turned-based RPG and twisted cat simulator, Mewgenics started as the next project from Team Meat, the development duo made up of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes. Team Meat teased Mewgenicsthroughout 2013, but ultimately put the game on hold in 2014 to focus on finishing Super Meat Boy Forever, a mobile sequel to Super Meat Boy.
When McMillen ultimately left Team Meat in 2018 to focus on supporting The Binding of Isaac, Mewgenics came with him,and the game has been slowly making its way to release since then. If the trailer is any indication, repeatable, turn-based battles have become a big part of Mewgenics, but McMillen’s trademark gross-out animation style remains intact (as does all of the cat furniture).
If you’re looking for more information about how the game has changed since it was announced over a decade ago, McMillen and co-developer Tyler Glaiel have kept up a relatively regular cadence of blog posts on Steam covering different aspects of the development process. We should also see a lot more of the game soon: In their latest update, Mewgenics‘ developers shared that IGN is publishing hands-on coverage of the game in May.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/the-creator-of-binding-of-isaac-will-release-a-new-game-mewgenics-this-year-211049653.html?src=rss
Here we are at the end of another week of…well, ain’t the world just a fantastic place right now? Fortunately, civilization has provided us with a number of means of escaping the realities around us. And, you know, that’s not inherently a bad thing. Times sure are interesting and uncertain, and I think it’s especially…
For the second time, President Trump has extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations by 75 days. The TikTok deal “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed,” said Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform. The extension will “keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”
“We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!),” Trump added. CNBC reports: ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government, the company told CNBC, adding that any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law. “An agreement has not been executed,” a spokesperson for ByteDance said in a statement. “There are key matters to be resolved.” Before Trump’s decision, ByteDance faced an April 5 deadline to carry out a “qualified divestiture” of TikTok’s U.S. business as required by a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024.
ByteDance’s original deadline to sell TikTok was on Jan. 19, but Trump signed an executive order when he took office the next day that gave the company 75 more days to make a deal. Although the law would penalize internet service providers and app store owners like Apple and Google for hosting and providing services to TikTok in the U.S., Trump’s executive order instructed the attorney general to not enforce it. “This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!,” Trump said in the Truth Social post. “We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
“There are so many devices we play video games on,” ESA senior vice president Aubrey Quinn said in an interview with IGN just as Nintendo’s preorder delay news broke. “There are other consoles… VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games; if we think it’s just the Switch, then we aren’t taking it seriously.
“This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry,” she continued. “There’s going to be an impact on the entire industry.”
If I told you that your TV watches everything you do in the name of data collection and advertising, it likely wouldn’t shock you. It’s 2025, after all; we’re used to a general lack of privacy. Still, it’s not cool, and it turns out you can stop it (even if your TV manufacturer has opted you into it).
So, how do you stop your smart TV from tracking what you watch, so you can go back to the days of watching Netflix or playing video games in peace? You need to turn off ACR.
How does your TV track what you watch?
Meet ACR: This technology, short for automatic content recognition, allows your smart TV to watch what you watch, identify what you watch, and use that information to both recommend new content and serve you more relevant ads. Your TV observes moments in a show or movie (sometimes including audio), and will send that information to a database to match it against a library of content.
ACR does this by literally taking screenshots of what is happening on your screen, roughly two per second. That enables tracking on everything, whether you use your smart TV apps, a Blu-ray player, a device like an Apple TV, or a PlayStation—whatever you display on your TV, ACR can watch and report.
Most major TV manufacturers put ACR tracking in their devices. After Vizio got into hot water for not properly disclosing how much data they were stealing from customers, TV manufacturers started baking these settings into initial setup agreements. If you’re like me, you accidentally agreed to this tracking without realizing it, because you were too focused on getting your TV set up to care about, you know, reading a legal document.
If you have a smart TV, it likely has ACR tracking you can disable. However, all TV manufacturers call this option something different. I’ll run through some of the top brands, what they each call their ACR settings, and where to find them. Even still, these brands change their settings menus and settings names all the time, so even if you have a TV from a company listed here, you might not find my instructions relevant.
Your best bet, if these instructions don’t help, is to Google your specific TV model and where to find its ACR settings. You should be able to find a guide from the manufacturer, or a walkthrough from someone with access to your TV who knows where to find the setting. But if you have an LG, Samsung, Sony, Hisense, or TCL, follow along below, with a hat tip to our sister-site ZDNet:
How to disable ACR on your smart TV
LG TVs
If you have an LG smart TV (like me), then your ACR settings are going to be under Live Plus. The setting sounds innocent enough, but it’s likely meant to so that you keep it enabled. You’ll find this option in Settings > General > System > Additional Settings > Live Plus. While you’re here, you might as well enable “Limit Ad Tracking” under Advertisement.
Samsung TVs
Let’s take a look at another popular TV brand, Samsung. You’ll find your ACR options in the sidebar menu under Privacy Choices > Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy. Just make sure to disable “Viewing Information Services.”
Sony TVs
Sony keeps their ACR options under Settings > Initial Setup > Samba Interactive TV. From here, disable Samba Interactive TV. In addition, you might find ad tracking features under About > Ads > Ads Personalization.
Hisense TVs
Hisense keeps its ACR under Settings > System > Privacy. Its name will depend on your particular model, but it might be called “Smart TV Experience” or “Viewing Information Services.” TCL keeps its settings under Settings > Privacy > Smart TV Experience. Here, disable “Use Info from TV Inputs.”
Early this year, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be ditching its long-running fact checking program, claiming that it has enabled too much “censorship” on the company’s apps. Now, Meta has set an end date for fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram and Threads (at least for its US users).
“By Monday afternoon, our fact-checking program in the US will be officially over,” Meta’s recently elevated policy chief Joel Kaplan announced in a post on X. “That means no new fact checks and no fact checkers.”
Instead, Meta has been slowly ramping up Community Notes. Meta began allowing potential contributors to sign up in February. It began testing the system, which will initially be powered by the same algorithm as Community Notes on X, earlier this month. But the crowdsourced fact checks have yet to appear publicly on posts. It sounds like that’s also about to change with the official end of Meta’s existing fact checking partners. “The first Community Notes will start appearing gradually across Facebook, Threads & Instagram, with no penalties attached,” Kaplan said.
Though Meta has said it wants to eventually end fact checking entirely, the company has said relatively little about its plans for Community Notes outside of the US. That may be because officials in other countries, like Brazil and the European Union, have already expressed concern about how the change could affect the flow of disinformation around the world.
Meta’s push to end fact checking in the US came early this year alongside several other policy changes that marked a notable rightward shift for the social network just as President Donals Trump took office. The company also ended corporate DEI programs, rolled back hate speech protections on its services and added a close Trump ally to its board.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-entering-its-post-truth-era-on-monday-202858791.html?src=rss
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen — a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit — not only had no law degree, but didn’t exist at all. The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute. “The appellant has submitted a video for his argument,” said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. “Ok. We will hear that video now.”
On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater. “May it please the court,” the man began. “I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices.” “Ok, hold on,” Manzanet-Daniels said. “Is that counsel for the case?” “I generated that. That’s not a real person,” Dewald answered. It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased. “It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir,” Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off. “I don’t appreciate being misled,” she said before letting Dewald continue with his argument.
Dewald later penned an apology to the court, saying he hadn’t intended any harm. He didn’t have a lawyer representing him in the lawsuit, so he had to present his legal arguments himself. And he felt the avatar would be able to deliver the presentation without his own usual mumbling, stumbling and tripping over words. In an interview with The Associated Press, Dewald said he applied to the court for permission to play a prerecorded video, then used a product created by a San Francisco tech company to create the avatar. Originally, he tried to generate a digital replica that looked like him, but he was unable to accomplish that before the hearing. “The court was really upset about it,” Dewald conceded. “They chewed me up pretty good.” […] As for Dewald’s case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.
Yesterday, Microsoft released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.3671 (KB5055622), which contains a new feature that allows users to select how their taskbars will display app icons.
This new feature shrinks down incons when multiple apps are open to accomodate more apps on the taskbar. However, this option is not compulsory for every
A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.
The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.
A significant threat
“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”
Vestiges: Fallen Tribes is making its Quest debut later this month.
Developed by Ragnarock and Propagation: Paradise Hotel team WanadevStudio, Vestiges: Fallen Tribes is a deck-building auto battler that asks players to pick from a pool of warring factions and unleash hell on a board game battlefield. Here, you can engage with a miniature sci-fi world by placing offensive and defensive lines from an overhead perspective, with the soldiers continuing to battle until the skirmish is won. Announced in the Ruff Talk VR Showcase, you can see the reveal trailer below.
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Vestiges: Fallen Tribes on Quest will launch with a solo campaign, where players can choose between three factions of fighters, each crew boasting unique skills in battle. Alongside the campaign, Vestiges also features a Sandbox and a PvP mode. The Sandbox mode allows players to practice their strategies without pressure. The PvP mode is all about competition, with players using custom decks against one another in search of victory.
Vestiges: Fallen Tribes launched in Early Access on Steam in October last year, and it’ll receive its full release alongside the launch of the Quest port on April 24.
There’s a scene in Far Cry 4 in which a female NPC chastises the player if they look down at her bare chest. “Stop looking at my tits,” she says. Well, at least one player was shocked to find the scene censored when they were playing the 11-year-old Ubisoft game this week. The French publisher says it was a mistake…
On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that would transform personal computing over the next five decades.
I’m not here to do a history of Microsoft, because Wikipedia already exists and because the company has already put together a gauzy 50th-anniversary retrospective site with some retro-themed wallpapers. But the anniversary did make me try to remember which Microsoft product I consciously used for the first time, the one that made me aware of the company and the work it was doing.
Brian Watters makes the commute to Miami a couple dozen times a year, more than an hour from his home to the local ballpark.
There he pays homage to the American pastime of baseball. As a toddler, his first games were at Wrigley Field in Chicago, but now he’s nearly 40 and bringing his kids to loanDepot in Miami.
“It’s always been a lifelong dream of mine to catch a home run on the fly,” Watters told me by phone call this week.
He says he’s a “ball-hawk”, what in this context would describe a sub-genre of avid baseball fan obsessed with catching balls sent into the stands. He’s says he’s got about a thousand of them from over the years, including the “cursebreaker” ball he’s getting signed by the world champion 2016 Chicago Cubs.
Most of the balls in his collection are from batting practice, tossed into the stands by players or “mud-rubbed” balls that haven’t seen play but did enter an umpire’s bag. Then there are the autographed balls and the two home runs he retrieved from the ground. Those are family heirlooms.
“I show up early to every game for batting practice,” Watters said. “But the goal is catching home run balls.”
He often brings a couple in his pockets to get autographs. He said he’d seen a couple folks in another fan group that focuses on autographs using the Meta glasses, and he realized they might be usable for his own hobby.
He bought them about six weeks ago and started practicing during spring training. The voice commands are too slow for recording right now.
“Home runs happen pretty fast, so I have to be as quick as possible,” Watters said.
He practiced catching balls while also pressing the button on the glasses as quickly as he could. It’s a lot to do while also calculating the path of a fast-moving object and moving into place for interception among a crowd of people.
On March 31st, the New York Mets played the Marlins at loanDepot and Watters realized a lifelong dream with a crack of the bat. What’s more, he caught it “on my Metas”.
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Video by Brian Watters
Catching A Home Run
“Oh man, this is gonna take all season,” he thought, but “it only took me four games.”
“I had plenty of time to get to the spot, catch it,” he said. Baseball is “my everything, my whole life. Ever since I was a kid, my dad was a tee-ball coach. When baseball season is over I hibernate and wait till spring.”
Posting videos now to YouTube and TikTok as Catchingballz, Watters finds himself attaching to social media in a way he never has before because of “his Metas”.
“I’ve never used social media like an influencer, it’s always been for family and friends, but nothing to this extent,” he said. “I didn’t even know if I got it recorded until four innings later.”
You can see the moment of extreme focus and execution in the video. “Pure joy” is what he says he felt when he confirmed the achievement was actually saved in video forever.
“I first sent it to my wife at home, then a bunch of friends messaged me,” he said.
The ball-hawk community saw him in the stands on live TV claiming his moment of victory, he said. On Reddit, others shared the clip they saw on TV of the catch. With Watters also sharing his own view, I’ve cut together the clip from the game’s broadcast with the one from Watters, both as shared with me by him. I’ve retained most of the aspect ratio of the MLB broadcast as horizontally-oriented, though I’ve clipped the edges a bit to zoom so you can see him better in the stands. When we cut to Watters’ glasses, we see the full frame of the meta vertical video cutting at nearly the exact same moment.
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Oculus to Meta
Watters said he owns an original PlayStation VR headset, and was interested in “the Oculus” but not so much anymore given time constraints of raising a family.
“I always wanted to go the Oculus route, and my interest changed,” he mentioned. “I’m not really into the video gaming anymore, I’m just more into baseball. I have to pick and choose my hobbies.”
He says he’s interested in AR that might show him occasional stats of players, and he’s already used the AI on his glasses to pull up information pretty quickly even without a display of any kind.
Transparent Optics & Focus Mode In AR Glasses
Last year, architect and technology integrator Alex Coulombe wrote about his experience in Meta’s $10,000+ Orion AR glasses prototype. Watters’ accomplishment and his shared desire for AR glasses illustrates some interesting ideas about use cases like this one on hardware like that.
Hypothetically, when he gets to a baseball game anywhere in the world he should be able to point to the infield and say “Hey Meta I’m watching a baseball game over here and trying to catch a home run ball, please don’t distract me with anything else when a player is about to take a swing.”
This hypothetical “focus” mode for AR glasses without a display would be the opposite of the “focus” mode you might experience in practically any piece of software in a VR headset. The former keeps you focused on reality, the latter keeps you focused on virtual reality.
Mixed reality sits somewhere in the middle of both AR glasses and VR headsets, and as we’ve reported exclusively for years now, Meta’s vision for the future of personal computing includes both VR headsets and AR glasses.
Imagine Watters’ future “Metas” fading away all distracting visuals at just the right time to remind him he needs to be as focused on the plate as every other player on that field. Meanwhile, one of his kids sits beside him in a VR headset, focused on playing Fortnite in a floating window while looking up occasionally at the game. Mixed reality is better in a headset, and the kid has given his Metas a slightly different command than his dad’s pair. The kid points to the field and says:
‘Hey Meta, I’m gonna play Fortnite with my friends but I’m also watching a baseball game and I want to help my dad try to catch a ball, can you help me out?”
As a tense match comes to its conclusion in Fortnite in inning 2, a flickering fairy flies in front of the kid’s screen and darts over to a cluster of glowing lights in the next section of the baseball stadium. Above three glowing lights on the ground his Metas display: “This batter hit 3 home runs here over the last 5 seasons.”
So the kid points: “Hey dad, over there he’s hit a bunch of homers.”
“I’m down for that”, Watters responds when I paint that picture for him.
Do Meta’s upcoming glasses with monocular display support this kind of focus mode?
