Apple forced to make major cuts to Vision Pro headset production plans

Enlarge / This is Apple’s Vision Pro headset. It looks a bit like a particularly bulky pair of ski goggles, with the materials and design language of Apple’s AirPods Max headphones. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has been forced to make drastic cuts to production forecasts for the mixed-reality Vision Pro headset, unveiled last month after seven years in development and hailed as its most significant product launch since the iPhone.

The complexity of the headset design and difficulties in production are behind the scaling back of targets, while plans for a more affordable version of the device have had to be pushed back, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the manufacturing process.

Apple has already flagged that the $3,500 “spatial computing” headset device will not go on sale until “early next year,” a lengthy gap from its June 5 launch. Analysts have interpreted this as being more to do with supply chain problems than allowing developers time to create apps for the Vision Pro.

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Lonely people see the world differently according to their brains

Enlarge (credit: D. Anschutz)

There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.

Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at UCLA conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely people not only interpret things differently from their non-lonely peers, but they even see them differently from each other.

“Our results suggest that lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness,” the research team, led by psychologist Elisa Baek of USC Dornsife, said in a study recently published in Psychological Science. 

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Apple plans to launch a monitor that stays on when you shut down your Mac

Enlarge / Pictured: Apple's 2022 Studio Display. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

In the subscribers-only section of his weekly newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman (who has reported accurately on new Apple hardware in the past) claims that Apple will introduce an external Mac monitor that can act as a smart home display when a Mac goes to sleep or is shut down.

The feature would be available on at least one monitor in an upcoming lineup that will likely include successors to Apple's Pro Display XDR and Studio Display. The newsletter didn't go into much detail about the upcoming displays beyond the smart home feature.

Like the Studio Display, a new monitor with smart home capabilities would run on a chip first seen in the iPhone. The Studio Display contains Apple's A13 chip—the same seen in the iPhone 11 line of smartphones. The upcoming smart display could potentially run on the A16 seen in the iPhone 14 Pro, since that device introduced a similar always-on display feature to Apple's smartphone lineup.

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Valve says Steam games cant use AI models trained on copyrighted works

Enlarge / Are we certain this famous Valve promo image wasn't generated by an AI? (credit: Valve)

Last week, we shared an anonymous report that Valve was blocking from Steam at least some games that make use of AI-generated artwork. Over the weekend, Valve confirmed that report, telling Ars in an e-mailed statement that the company is blocking games that use AI-generated content unless developers can prove those AI models were trained with data that does not "infringe on existing copyrights."

"The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show that a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music," Valve spokesperson Kaci Boyle told Ars. "In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game."

Boyle stressed in the statement that Valve's "goal is not to discourage the use of [AI-generated content] on Steam" and that the company's "priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can." Generative AI is "bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming," Valve continued.

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Europes venerable Ariane 5 rocket faces a bittersweet ending on Tuesday

Enlarge / The Ariane 5 has been a workhorse since 1996 for the European Space Agency. (credit: ESA/Arianespace)

The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space.

But now, the road is coming to an end for the Ariane 5. As soon as Tuesday evening, the final Ariane 5 rocket will lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A 90-minute launch window opens at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). The launch will be webcast on ESA TV.

And after this? Europe's space agency faces some difficult questions.

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Mars has liquid guts and strange insides InSight suggests

Enlarge / Artist's view of what InSight looked like after landing. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Mars appears to be a frozen expanse of red dust, gaping craters, and rocky terrain on the outside—but what lies beneath its wind-blasted surface? NASA’s InSight lander might have discovered this before it took its proverbial last breaths in a dust storm.

Whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid has been long debated. While there is no way to observe the Martian core directly, InSight tried. Its seismometer, SEIS, was the first instrument to find possible evidence of a liquid core. In the meantime, its RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) instrument had been measuring minuscule changes in the planet’s rotation as it orbited, “wobbles” in its axis caused by the push and pull of the Sun’s gravity.

“Our analysis of InSight’s radio tracking data argues against the existence of a solid inner core and reveals the shape of the core, indicating that there are internal mass anomalies deep within the mantle,” write the researchers behind the instrument in a study recently published in Nature.

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SpaceX launches groundbreaking European dark energy mission

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket soars through the sky over Cape Canaveral with Europe's Euclid space telescope. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)

A European Space Agency telescope launched Saturday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida to begin a $1.5 billion mission seeking to answer fundamental questions about the unseen forces driving the expansion of the Universe. The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician, will observe billions of galaxies during its six-year survey of the sky, measuring their shapes and positions going back 10 billion years, more than 70 percent of cosmic history.

Led by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission has the ambitious goal of helping astronomers and cosmologists learn about the properties and influence of dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.

Stumbling in the dark

“To highlight the challenge we face, I would like to give the analogy: It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat,” said Henk Hoekstra, a professor and cosmologist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “That’s a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in because we have these observations … But we lack a good theory. So far, nobody has come up with a good explanation for dark matter or dark energy.”

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