Meta’s Horizon Worlds social platform is finally coming to mobile and the web

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image via theverge.com

Meta is finally bringing Horizon Worlds out of virtual reality. The 3D social platform has previously been exclusive to its VR headsets, but Meta announced on Thursday that Horizon Worlds is starting to roll out on mobile and the web in early access. “To start, a small number of people can now access Super Rumble through the Meta Quest app on Android, with iOS rolling out in the coming weeks,” Meta said. “Early access is also available on any web browser at horizon.meta.com.”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/14/23873820/meta-horizon-worlds-mobile-web-vr-early-access-release

Procreate’s latest iPad app aims to make animation easier for everyone

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image via theverge.com

Designed for touch, Procreate Dreams features tools like Performing that enable users to automatically add keyframes to a project using gestures that record the animator’s actions in real time. Procreate claims the tool will “forever change the way creatives animate” by allowing them to instantly respond to their project as it plays.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/8/23864374/procreate-dreams-animation-app-ipad-release-date-announcement-price

Microsoft to detail OneDrive AI plans in ‘future of file management’ event

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image via theverge.com

Microsoft is holding a special OneDrive event on October 3rd where the company plans to offer a “sneak peek at our AI plans” for the cloud storage service. “The future of file management” event will be live streamed on Microsoft Teams and looks like it will include a redesigned OneDrive interface, alongside new AI-powered search and sharing features.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/6/23861040/microsoft-onedrive-ai-features-october-event

Snapchat is jumping on the AI selfie train with ‘Dreams’

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image via theverge.com

Snapchat is now jumping on the AI selfie bandwagon with a new feature called Dreams. The first pack of Dreams is free to make and each additional one costs $1 as an in-app purchase. Snapchat users in Australia and New Zealand are getting access to Dreams starting today, followed by access opening up to the rest of the world over the coming weeks.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849611/snapchat-releases-ai-selfie-feature-dreams

AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge

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image via theverge.com

United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created. Nobody really knows how things will shake out around US copyright law and artificial intelligence, but the court cases have been piling up. Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed suit against OpenAI and Meta earlier this year over their models’ data scraping practices, for instance, while another lawsuit by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick alleges that data scraping by Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI amounted to software piracy.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court

Slack’s biggest redesign ever tries to tame the chaos of your workday

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image via theverge.com

The overarching goal of the new design, Weiss says, was to give users more context and more focus. “We think of these as modes of work that you have,” he says. “I catch up on everything that’s going on, I respond to inbound, I triage and respond to all the activity, and then I go through my to-do list of what I need to follow up on — that’s what this is organizing, is modes of working rather than types of objects.” For more chaotic, everything-all-at-once Slack users, Slack has also been reworking its multi-windowing system so you can have multiple views open at a time. It all adds up to not quite a total reorganization of Slack but at least a slightly different way of thinking about the app. Before, it was two things: the list of all your stuff on the side and whatever you’re currently engaged with in the middle. Now, there’s a third organizational layer in between, aiming to sort and filter all the stuff you care about in a few different ways. “It was about actually putting all the things that we’ve built over time into a sensible, comprehensible place,” Weiss says. It’s going to look and feel really different to a lot of users at first, but Weiss is confident users will like the new tools. And if the pitch doesn’t resonate, well, that’s why Slack rolls out new products slowly — and has been testing it for a while.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/9/23824562/slack-redesign-app-dms-activity-later

Twitter is being rebranded as X

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image via theverge.com

X.com now redirects to Twitter.com, following a tweet from Twitter owner Elon Musk today, and an “interim X logo” will replace the Twitter bird logo later today. Leading up to the change, Musk spent a lot of time tweeting about it.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/23/23804629/twitters-rebrand-to-x-may-actually-be-happening-soon