When the Uber Black isn’t premium enough, New Yorkers now have the option to call for a Wheely instead. Whimsical name aside, the London-based company is breaking into the US market by offering its chauffeur-hailing services to residents of New York City first, as first reported by Bloomberg. Think of it like Uber, but for business executives and VIPs who prefer better service and riding in Cadillacs and Mercedes.
“New York has long been requested by our customers, whether that be New Yorkers who have traveled with us in Europe and the Middle East, or our international clients who regularly visit the city,” Anton Chirkunov, founder and CEO of Wheely, said in a press release.
Wheely
Besides its black car Business SUV service, New Yorkers can opt for Wheely First that offers a Mercedes-Benz S-Class W223 filled with amenities like Fiji water and towels. For a more dedicated service, Wheely has its Perfect Airport Pickup where drivers will track flights to line up a pickup, and the Chauffeur for a Day option that lets users reserve a chauffeur that will also pick up friends and family or run errands for you. For interested drivers in New York City, Wheely will port over its in-house “Chauffeur Academy,” which is expected to grow to a network of 5,000 qualified drivers over the next five years.
While Wheely currently operates in London, Paris and Dubai, the company plans to expand to five major US cities within the next three years. According to Bloomberg, Wheely is considering markets in Texas, Miami and Palm Beach, Fla. as well as Washington, D.C. Wheely’s entry into the US market comes about a week after the announcement of the Uber Elite program, which targets a similar demographic. However, Uber Elite is only available in Los Angeles and San Francisco currently, with plans to expand to New York soon. However, Uber may have Wheely beat when it comes to hailing a helicopter, thanks to its upcoming Uber Air option.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/wheely-an-on-demand-chauffeur-app-makes-its-us-debut-in-nyc-143233840.html?src=rss
One of the most prominent VR game piracy groups has been shut down following a DMCA notice which was apparently issued by Meta.
As first reported by Heise Online, the game piracy group ‘VRPirates’ issued a statement on its public Discord last week notifying members that it was ceasing operations.
“Due to a recent DMCA notice from Meta, VRP will be shutting down. As a result, we will no longer accept donations, provide sponsored mirrors, or host content publicly. All related operations are being discontinued effective immediately,” the group said.
The group also offered its own ‘Rookie’ sideloader for Quest, which, much like SideQuest, allowed users to browse a library of content and sideload APKs directly.
While the group has been in operation since at least late 2023, VRP admin ‘Maxine’ says in a recent r/QuestPiracy subreddit post that it was actually the release of a cracked version of Beat Saber (2018) that was the last straw.
“[A]s much as I hate to say, they’re well within their right,” Maxine said, referring to Meta pursuing legal action against piracy of its first-party game.
According to UploadVR, Rookie Sideloader still allows users to sideload self-sourced APKs, however the library of VRPirate-hosted cracked content is now officially offline.
Linus has released 7.0-rc5 for testing.
“It looks like things are starting to calm down – rc5 is smaller than
the previous rc’s this merge window, although it still tracks a bit larger
than rc5s historically do.“
Firefox 149.0 release binaries are now available with a wide assortment of improvements for this month’s update to the cross-platform Mozilla web browser solution…
I’ve loved puzzle games for decades. Myst showed me the immersive storytelling potential of video games. Intelligent Qube on the original PlayStation taught me new ways to think under pressure. Lumines opened my mind to the emotional impact of music, and Echochrome proved the healing power of games when it helped me process unmanageable grief.
But those are stories for another time. The point is, that at this stage of my life it’s almost impossible for a puzzle game to really surprise me. But Interlocked has been just this: a pleasant surprise.
The object of Interlocked: Puzzle Islands is ostensibly simple: solve a succession of increasingly complex burr puzzles. These are assemblies of notched blocks interlocked into intricate three-dimensional shapes. Each puzzle begins with pieces locked into the others by clever geometry, and your job is to study the shape, then push, pull, twist, slide, and somehow remove every piece from the assembled whole. Do this and you win. Do this 30-odd times, and you beat the game.
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Interlocked: Puzzle Islands gameplay captured by UploadVR
The Facts
What is it?: A peaceful, challenging puzzle game, with a mini story involving a growing bird. Platforms: Meta Quest, Coming later to PC VR via Steam Release Date: March 24, 2026 Developer: Puzzle Dev Publisher: Armor Games Studios Price: $11.99
What is Interlocked?
Interlocked: Puzzle Islands is a sort of sequel to the unsurprisingly named Interlocked, a game originally released in 2011 as a browser-based game, then later released as an app on iOS and Android, where it has been downloaded by over 5 million users.
Now it’s out on Quest and coming soon to Steam, where VR has transformed it into something greater. Being able to lean in, change your perspective simply by moving your head and body, to manipulate the structures directly with your handheld controllers, it all adds a layer of immersion that flat screen versions of this and similar puzzlers simply can’t match.
There’s tactile satisfaction in testing a piece for movement, finding it locked in place, reapplying yourself and finally discovering the one directional movement that begins to unravel the knot. That core physical loop of test, fail, repeat, succeed is executed extremely well.
The controls are simple and intuitive in VR, where you can grab and manipulate the puzzle directly, turning the shapes naturally in your hands as if they were a real object sitting on your desk. You twist and poke and prod with perfect accuracy.
Video gamey controls are available at the same time: by simply twiddling the control stick and pressing some buttons, you can manipulate the puzzle without directly touching it in virtual space. Either methodology works intuitively.
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Interlocked: Puzzle Islands gameplay captured by UploadVR
While you’re puzzling, there’s no real urgency. There’s no ever-dwindling timer, no penalty for failure. You’re free to sit with a puzzle for as long as you like, rotating it slowly, thinking through the possibilities, touching each piece to see its silhouette shining through its fellow blocks, making moves or thinking about them or simply sitting and enjoying the pastel beauty and ambient tunes of the lovely world around you. It’s all quite pretty.
And then there’s the bird.
Very early in the game you’re introduced to a hatchling, a tiny chick that bursts from its shell to blink enormous black eyes at you as it flitters about the first of the game’s puzzle islands. It chirps and nudges your surrogate hands, flaps its wings, and eventually takes flight.
To say that this bird is a deeply written character may be a stretch. There’s a story here, but it’s told with an extremely light hand. Rather, the bird is a sort of ever-present companion that flits from island to island, occasionally growing or changing, keeping you company. It takes what may have felt like a lonesome, solitary experience and turns it into something warm and charming. Small companionship is just that, small, but it can have outsized meaning.
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Interlocked: Puzzle Islands gameplay captured by UploadVR
Immaculate Vibes, Solid Core
The bird, the world, the music, the puzzles: they all combine so that just a few moments in the world of Interlocked reveals the real object of the game.
As an ambient soundtrack of gentle strings ebbs and swells, as the weather changes and the sunshine or the rain washes your small diorama island, as the fall foliage drops away making way for snow to kiss the dark branches of the trees, there is a feeling of peace.
This is the real object of Interlocked. It’s a game that allows you to breathe and relax, to lower the heart rate and stretch the mind and feel that things maybe aren’t quite so difficult if you just slow down, hold the problem in your hand, and solve it one move at a time.
The facts that the game is so pleasant and lovely, and that you’re hanging out with a cute-as-hell bird are only icing on the proverbial cake. Because the game’s core mechanic, its puzzles, are great.
The game starts out, as you’d expect, pretty easy. You unlock a few interlocked blocks, clear the first island, and move on to increasingly challenging shapes. The difficulty curve is thoughtfully modulated so that new configurations and complications pop up at a steady and linear pace. Later puzzles become decidedly more intricate, requiring multi-step sequences and plenty of trial and error.
There are moments of genuine satisfaction, where you’ve been stuck for a minute or two, turning the complicated structure over and over, convinced you’ve tried everything only to suddenly realize a subtle solution had eluded you. You make a small adjustment and a piece slides free, and suddenly the entire structure begins to unlock. These classic “aha” moments are critical to the best puzzle games, and Interlocked delivers them consistently.
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Interlocked: Puzzle Islands gameplay captured by UploadVR
That said, if you’re an impatient person, Interlocked may frustrate you. There’s no avoiding that by the midway point of the journey, puzzles can be downright wild in their complexity. While the ambient surroundings will do their best to keep you calm, wiggling the same blocks over and over and getting nowhere closer to solving the puzzle may cause certain personality types to snap like a celery stick.
Then again, it may just teach you patience.
Comfort
Interlocked: Puzzle Islands can be played seated or standing, and in room scale. The game is controlled with controllers and can be manipulated with analog sticks and buttons.
Interlocked: Puzzle Islands – Final Verdict
In a medium that often prioritizes excitement, tension, horror, and dopamine drip, Interlocked: Puzzle Islands feels radical in its serenity. It reminds me of what makes games like Lumines and Echochrome so impactful, not just as puzzles to be played and solved, but as experiences.
It’s a brief game (about four hours long), and a relatively simple one. It’s a journey across floating islands, meandering through seasons of the year and seasons of life accompanied by soft music and a curious little bird. It’s a place of comfort, a place to unwind, where your hands are busy, your mind engaged, and where everything else disappears for a little while. In today’s world, that might be the best gift any game can give.
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.
The big news today is that reviews of Intel’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus processors are live, including our own, and of course these Arrow Lake Refresh parts slot into the same LGA 1851 socket as their regular, non-Plus Arrow Lake counterparts. What about future generation CPUs, though? This is probably the end of the
Digital safety is a pressing concern in an increasingly connected world. In classrooms everywhere, educators face the challenge of supporting young people to learn about cybersecurity and to navigate online risks and the impact of AI tools and social media.
In issue 29 of Hello World, out today for free, educators all over the world share what digital safety and security mean in their classrooms. We hope this new issue will help you to actively empower your learners by equipping them with the understanding and skills to safely navigate our complex digital landscape.
How can educators connect learners to real cybersecurity experiences?
What does youth online safety look like in the Global South?
How is Australia’s youth ban on social media impacting young coders?
Other highlights from Hello World issue 29
Beyond the focus on safety and security, here are three highlights from issue 29:
Shuchi Grover explores what ‘thinking’ means in the current age of large language models (LLMs)
Sethi DeClerq provides a checklist of important questions to ask yourself before spending your precious budget on new education technology
Rachel Fenichel argues that block-based programming isn’t just for kids, highlighting how Blockly can be a helpful abstraction when talking about algorithms at any age or stage
The first episode is another edition of our teacher tips series, where computer science educators and experts from around the globe share practical, actionable tips that you can use in your classroom. In the upcoming episode, teachers will be sharing what works for them to engage students in cybersecurity, protect schools from cybersecurity breaches, and safely introduce generative AI to the classroom.
In the second episode, we’ll talk to Dr. Karla Badillo-Urquiola about her research in online safety in the Global South.
To listen to these podcasts, make sure you follow us in your preferred app, or head to helloworld.cc/podcast.
Share your thoughts and subscribe to Hello World
Visit helloworld.cc/29 to read our newest issue for free today, and let us know what you think by leaving a comment here or on our social media.
helloworld.cc is also where you go to subscribe and find older issues of Hello World magazine.
If you have a moment, do leave us a podcast review or share the magazine with a fellow educator. It really helps more people to discover Hello World.
Gamers in the European Union are getting a revised version of Nintendo’s popular Switch 2 console that will make battery replacements a cinch, according to a Japanese news report. Assuming the report is accurate, the special hardware revision is in response by recent EU regulation that requires portable devices to have user-replaceable batteries.
A change to the Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” for allowing nifty scheduler implementations via BPF programs will begin to prioritize SMT siblings to help with better performance…
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Amazon’s Spring Sale is set to kick off later this week, but some early discounts are already live. One worth paying attention to is the Insta360 X5 Essentials Bundle. Currently listed at $559.99 (originally $659.99), this is the lowest this bundle has ever reached, according to price trackers. It’s also worth noting that PCMag gave the X5 an “outstanding” rating and named it the best action camera of 2025. That context makes the $100 discount feel more meaningful, especially since this bundle already includes most of what you need to get started, including a selfie stick and a carry case. You’ll still need to factor in a microSD card, but this gets you most of the way there without needing to piece things together later.
The X5 is built around the idea that you don’t have to frame your shot perfectly while filming. It captures everything in 360 degrees at up to 8K, so you can decide what the shot should look like later in the app. That approach makes a lot of sense for fast-moving situations like biking, traveling, or navigating crowded places where stopping to adjust angles just isn’t practical. It can also shoot 4K at 120fps for slow-motion clips and take 72MP photos that are detailed enough for social media. You can take it straight into the water too, since it’s waterproof up to 49 feet without needing a case.
One of the more practical upgrades is the user-replaceable lenses. Scratches are common with action cameras, and this lets you fix the problem without replacing the entire unit. Plus, the touchscreen is easy to work with, and the app does a decent job of guiding you through edits with AI tools that can pull together highlights or suggest templates. That said, the learning curve is the main trade-off. You can shoot quickly, but getting polished results takes some effort, especially when reframing clips and applying edits. As for its battery life, it’s rated for up to 185 minutes in endurance mode, though that number drops with higher resolutions and frequent use of features.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting its ‘Sim 5’ update soon, which is slated to bring PSVR 2 support to the PS5 version of the game.
MFS ’24 has been available on PC with full VR support since late 2024. Late last year though, developer Asobo Studio revealed that the PS5 version of the game would be getting PSVR 2 support some point after launch.
Now, the studio revealed PSVR 2 support is slated to arrive with the free Sim 5 update coming in April.
Note: the video below is a compilation of clips revealed in the PS blog post.
In a PS blog post, Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann details just what into creating the PSVR 2 mode:
“Cockpit interactions in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 are complex. There are so many different instruments, knobs, and switches to interact with. Every interaction model had to be redesigned to fit the PS VR2 Sense controllers to action them in a natural and intuitive manner,” says Neumann.
While Sense controller-supported cockpits add a layer of complexity, Neumann explains that maintaining a smooth framerate for such a visually demanding game was a challenge in its own right.
“Getting foveated rendering with Flexible Scaled Rasterization right was quite a challenge,” says Neumann. “It impacts the entirety of the rendering pipeline, and subtle off-by-on-pixel bugs during development could result in dramatic quality issues.”
The PSVR 2 mode, which is said to support the game’s 125 different aircraft, also relies on frame duplication to increase perceived frame rate, Neumann says.
“Another tech developed specifically for PS VR2 support was frame duplication, where the render thread would iterate twice for one frame of the main thread, updating the camera position in-between. This technical approach was another key in achieving the framerate needed for PS VR2 support.”
The studio says Sim 5 should launch as a free update sometime in April, although there’s no exact release date yet.
Simulation Daily got a chance to go hands-on with a beta version over the weekend at the MSFS 2024 booth during FSWeekend 2026 in Lelystad, Netherlands, which includes a 10-minute video of their impressions.
“I wasn’t expecting the level of spectacle you’ll see in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on a $4000 PC, but the PS5 version absolutely punches above its weight when paired with PlayStation VR2, likely in part due to the headset’s technological prowess,” Simulation Daily’s Giuseppe Nelva notes.
You can check out Nelva’s hands-on below, which notably was shown working with the standard DualSense gamepad.
Schell Games’ parting gift to the Among Us 3D community needs extra time in the oven.
Earlier this month, we reported that Schell Games would be transitioning out of development on Among Us 3D, a move it says was ‘always the plan.’ On the way out the door, Schell announced the release of the Definitive Edition of the game. This new version would bring fan favorite limited-time event features and cosmetics back to the game permanently.
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Now Schell Games has announced that the Definitive Edition will release on April 7, delayed from its original date of March 24, coinciding with the VR Games Showcase.
Returning features include the Mess Hall map from the Infection event, the Deputy role from Round Up, the Afterlife event’s Wraith role, and the Scanner from last summer’s Critical Cargo. New cosmetics will be available every month for the rest of 2026 and into 2027.
In addition, Schell noted that original Among Us developer Innersloth, who will be taking over development of the 3D game, has no plans to shut down the game.
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Amazon’s Spring Sale hasn’t officially started, but some of the better discounts are already live, like the OnePlus Buds 4. These latest earbuds from the brand are down to $79.99 (from $129.99), their lowest price so far, according to price trackers. Amazon is also testing one-hour and three-hour delivery in select locations, as reported by our senior tech editor Jake Peterson, which makes these early deals easier to act on if you need something fast. The Buds 4 are positioned as a step up from the Buds 3, borrowing a few ideas from the more expensive Pro series, particularly in how they handle noise cancellation and overall tuning.
The biggest reason to consider these is the noise cancellation—it cuts down steady background sounds like traffic, fans, or office chatter well enough that you don’t have to keep increasing the volume. They’re also light enough to wear for a few hours without ear fatigue. Sound-wise, these lean toward bass. Songs with heavier beats feel fuller and more engaging, though it can come at the cost of some clarity in vocals or instruments. You also get Bluetooth connectivity that stays stable, along with decent battery life that can stretch through most of a day with the case.
That said, the experience isn’t perfect. The companion app can feel inconsistent, with occasional bugs that make adjusting settings more frustrating than they should be. Plus, the touch controls take some getting used to and can misfire if you’re adjusting the earbuds on the go. There’s also the fact that these cost more than the Buds 3 (at full price), which still hold up well for less money. Still, at $79.99, the Buds 4 makes more sense as a value buy, especially if strong noise cancellation is high on your list.
Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now
