You might not have heard of the Nex Playground, but it’s a tiny gaming system built entirely around Kinect-like games. With its camera and computer vision processing, the $249 Nex Playground can track up to four players as effectively as Microsoft’s old Xbox motion tracker, according to Engadget’s Devindra Hardawar.

NEX

The hardware is cute and well-designed, there are plenty of games, and it works offline. The only issue is the ongoing subscription needed to access most games. Check out our full review to learn more.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026: Everything we think the company will unveil

• Native Instruments enters insolvency proceedings, leaving its future uncertain

• Mark Zuckerberg says Reality Labs will (eventually) stop losing so much money

Tesla is killing off its Model S and X cars to make robots

Even if demand for Optimus is still unknown.

Tesla

Tesla is going to wrap up production of its Model S and X EVs next quarter, CEO Elon Musk has announced. It’s less of a major shift for the company than it sounds: The newer Model 3 and Y now make up the bulk of the company’s sales. Tesla delivered over 1.5 million Model 3 and Y vehicles but sold under 450,000 Model S and X units. Musk added that Tesla’s long-term goal is to manufacture 1 million Optimus robots in the current Model S and X production space.

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Snap makes its AR glasses into a separate business

It’ll still be under the umbrella of Snap.

Snap’s augmented reality glasses business will now be its own company called Specs Inc. It’ll still be fully owned by Snap, though. The company has been trying to figure out ways to raise outside money for its AR glasses to better compete with Meta, which has a lot more money to spend on development. Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg said his Reality Labs will (eventually) stop losing so much money as it doubles down on AI glasses and shifts away from virtual reality. According to the Meta boss, the company’s smart glasses sales “more than tripled” in 2025.

How can Snap’s Specs match the might of Meta? Well, its next pair will apparently be lighter, smaller and more capable than its older smartglass model, which was pretty dev-focused.   One request: make them not look awful.  

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The best TV deals ahead of Super Bowl 2026

Maybe it’s time for an upgrade.

Hosting a Super Bowl party? Maybe you’ve been thinking about replacing an aging set, or you’re itching for a full refresh of your home theater setup — either way, if you’re looking for a good deal on a new TV, we’ve got you covered. TV prices steadily decrease after a new model comes out. The 2026 TV models were announced at CES and are expected to arrive this year, making now a good time to look for discounts on 2025 sets. Aside from the holiday shopping season, this is one of the best times of the year to save on a TV — it’s like the manufacturers know there’s a Super Bowl.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-the-nex-playground-channels-the-spirit-of-xboxs-kinect-121500965.html?src=rss

Welcome to Edition 8.27 of the Rocket Report! If all goes well this weekend, NASA will complete a wet dress rehearsal test of the Space Launch System rocket in Florida. This is the final key test, in which the rocket is fueled and brought to within seconds of engine ignition, before the liftoff of the Artemis II mission. This is set to occur no earlier than February 6. Ars will have full coverage of the test this weekend.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Why did the UK abandon Orbex? European Spaceflight explores the recent announcement that British launch company Orbex is preparing to sell the business to The Exploration Company in close cooperation with the UK government. This represents a reversal from early 2025, when the United Kingdom appeared prepared to back Orbex as a means of using British rockets to launch British satellites into space. Now the government is prepared to walk away. So what happened? “There are still too many unknowns to count, and the story is far from told,” the publication states.

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It took Android devicemakers a very long time to commit to long-term update support. Samsung and Google have only recently decided to offer seven years of updates for their flagship Android devices, but a decade ago, you were lucky to get more than one or two updates on even the most expensive Android phones and tablets. How is it, then, that an Android-powered set-top box from 2015 is still going strong?

Nvidia released the first Shield Android TV in 2015, and according to the company’s senior VP of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, supporting these devices has been a labor of love. And the team at Nvidia still loves the Shield. Bell assures us that Nvidia has never given up, even when it looked like support for the Shield was waning, and it doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.

The soul of Shield

Gaming has been central to Nvidia since its start, and that focus gave rise to the Shield. “Pretty much everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console,” said Bell, who has worked at the company for 25 years.

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A former Google engineer has been found guilty on multiple federal charges for stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets on artificial intelligence to benefit Chinese companies he secretly worked for, federal prosecutors said. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, a jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets, following an 11-day trial. The 38-year-old, also known as Leon Ding, was hired by Google in 2019 and was a resident of Newark.

According to evidence presented at trial, Ding stole more than 2,000 pages of confidential information containing Google AI trade secrets between May 2022 and April 2023. He uploaded the information to his personal Google Cloud account. Around the same time, Ding secretly affiliated himself with two Chinese-based technology companies. Around June 2022, prosecutors said Ding was in discussions to be the chief technology officer for an early-stage tech company. Several months later, he was in the process of founding his own AI and machine learning company in China, acting as the company’s CEO. Prosecutors said Ding told investors that he could build an AI supercomputer by copying and modifying Google’s technology.

In late 2023, prosecutors said Ding downloaded the trade secrets to his own personal computer before resigning from Google. According to the superseding indictment, Google uncovered the uploads after finding out that Ding presented himself as CEO of one of the companies during an Beijing investor conference. Around the same time, Ding told his manager he was leaving the company and booked a one-way flight to Beijing. “Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security. The jury delivered a clear message today that the theft of this valuable technology will not go unpunished,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement.

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A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive “interval” breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study — published in Thursday’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet — more than 100,000 women had mammography screenings. Half were supported by AI and the rest had their mammograms reviewed by two different radiologists, a standard practice in much of Europe known as double reading. It is not typically used in Canada, where usually one radiologist checks mammograms.

The study looked at the rates of interval cancer, the term doctors use for invasive tumors that appear between routine mammograms. They can be harder to detect and studies have shown that they are more likely to be aggressive with a poorer prognosis. The rate of interval cancers decreased by 12 percent in the groups where the AI screening was implemented, the study showed. […] Throughout the two-year study, the mammograms that were supported by AI were triaged into two different groups. Those that were determined to be low risk needed only one radiologist to examine them, while those that were considered high risk required two. The researchers reported that numerically, the AI-supported screening resulted in 11 fewer interval cancers than standard screening (82 versus 93, or 12 per cent).

“This is really a way to improve an overall screening test,” [said lead author, Dr. Kristina Lang]. She acknowledged that while the study found a decrease in interval cancer, longer-term studies are needed to find out how AI-supported screening might impact mortality rates. The screenings for the study all took place at one centre in Sweden, which the researchers acknowledged is a limitation. Another is that the race and ethnicity of the participants were not recorded. The next step, Lang said, will be for Swedish researchers to determine cost-effectiveness.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK could introduce a universal basic income (UBI) to protect workers in industries that are being disrupted by AI, the investment minister Jason Stockwood has said. “Bumpy” changes to society caused by the introduction of the technology would mean there would have to be “some sort of concessionary arrangement with jobs that go immediately”, Lord Stockwood said. The Labour peer told the Financial Times: “Undoubtedly we’re going to have to think really carefully about how we soft-land those industries that go away, so some sort of [universal basic income], some sort of lifelong mechanism as well so people can retrain.”

A universal basic income is not part of official government policy, but when asked whether people in government were considering the need for UBI, Stockwood told the FT: “People are definitely talking about it.” […] While he has previously been a vocal proponent of a wealth tax in the UK, Stockwood told the FT he had not repeated his calls for the government to go further on taxing the rich. However, he added: “If you make your money and the first thing you do is you speak to a tax adviser to ask: ‘Where can we pay the lowest tax?’ we don’t want those people in this country, I’d suggest, because you’re not committed to your communities and the long-term success in this country.”

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Comcast’s attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn’t stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh’s] comment about Comcast “not winning in the marketplace” nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

“Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity,” Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast’s residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, “consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines.” Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly “for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing.” Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing “a more competitive environment from fiber” and continued competition from fixed wireless. “The market is going to remain intensely competitive,” he said.

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