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Unity's impressive new 'Enemies' short shows off a remarkably realistic digital human - The Verge
Today I learned an iPhone trick to quickly select multiple items - The Verge
Fortnite Chapter 3: Season 2 - All Gameplay and Map Changes Explained - IGN

Unity's impressive new 'Enemies' short shows off a remarkably realistic digital human - The Verge

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 05:00 AM PDT

Unity is releasing an impressive new tech demo called "Enemies" that demonstrates what the popular game development engine can be capable of.

The video opens in an ornate and stunningly realistic room before zooming in on a mysterious woman sitting in front of a chessboard. The woman is rendered in remarkable detail — her hair shifts in subtle ways as she moves her head, her eyes look around the room and then at a chess bishop in a surprisingly natural way, and the final close-up shot of her face looks almost as if it's one of an actual human being.

"Enemies" builds on the work in Unity's "The Heretic" videos from 2019 and 2020, which showed off Unity's efforts to create a realistic digital human, and all the videos demonstrate what teams might be able to do when using Unity to create games and animation. "How do we not only make it easier to create characters — but how do we also make it more accessible?" Unity's VP of graphics, Natalya Tatarchuk, said in an interview with The Verge. Unity's focus is to bring "accessibility and ease of creation through [its] tools" to help people create interactive stories more quickly and with less complexity, she said.

The videos also serve as a way to help show how Unity competes with Epic Games' Unreal Engine, which is also widely used in game development and entertainment. In addition to impressive demos, Unity has made some big acquisitions to bolster its offerings, including paying $1.6 billion for The Lord of the Rings VFX maker Weta Digital.

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Today I learned an iPhone trick to quickly select multiple items - The Verge

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 02:13 AM PDT

I almost feel silly writing this out but… did anyone else know there's a built-in gesture to bulk select messages, emails, notes, and more across Apple's stock apps? Rather than using a sub-menu to put the items in "Select" mode and then ticking the circles that appear in each row, you can just swipe two fingers down the list to select every item in the list that your fingers touch.

If you already knew about this feature then feel free to stop reading here, but I, and several of my Verge colleagues, only learned about it when developer Jordan Morgan tweeted to complain that more third-party apps should make use of it. So although it's a feature that's available to all apps on iOS and iPadOS, you'll mainly find it in Apple's stock apps. From poking around, it seems to be available in Messages, Mail, Notes, and Reminders, but there are almost certainly lots more.

One Apple app that I really wish made use of the feature is Clock, where it has the potential to be a super handy way of selecting all those old alarms you no longer need and deleting them in one fell swoop. And obviously it would be great to see it used across more third-party apps like Gmail and WhatsApp (but it's not).

Hidden features like this are interesting to me because they reveal how Apple's software can struggle to reveal its more advanced features to users over time, despite the company's attempt to make it as intuitive as possible. That's particularly apparent with iPadOS. My ex-colleague Dieter Bohn has written at length about all the extra bits of laptop-like functionality that can easily be overlooked by most users.

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Fortnite Chapter 3: Season 2 - All Gameplay and Map Changes Explained - IGN

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 08:17 PM PDT