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Source: Marvel Studios / Apple Vision Pro / Marvel’s What If…? An Immersive Story
Marvel Studios dropped the first trailer for Marvel’s What If…? An Immersive Story, giving people who spent nearly $4,000 on the Apple Vision Pro a reason to turn it on.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to wield the power of the Infinity Stones, make sling ring portals, and cast mystic spells like Doctor Strange?
Well, Marvel Studios is giving you that feeling thanks to the power of the Apple Vision Pro.
The Disney-owned studio dropped the first trailer for Marvel’s What If…? An Immersive Story, which, for some bonehead reason, will live exclusively on the Apple Vision Pro, you know, the $3,500 headset not that many people in the world have.
Adapted exclusively for Apple’s high-end headset, the video game version of the animated Disney+ series will take users on a mixed-reality adventure, allowing them to experience the multiverse shenanigans that happen in episodes of the show.
Lile the Guardians of The Multiverse, players will team up with The Watcher and get help from our favorite Sorceror Supreme, Wong, to take down “dangerous variants.”
Vision Pro users will be taken from their living rooms or gaming caves to familiar and new Marvel locations and interact with characters from the Marvel Studios lexicon.
No controller is necessary to enjoy this experience; all you need is your eyes and hands to get into the action. Spatial audio will also aid in immersing you into the world of Marvel’s What If…?.
Marvel’s What If…? An Immersive Story Release Date & Cost
Surprisingly, you won’t have to wait long to experience this app. It will arrive on May 30 and be FREE but for a limited time.
You would think the free price tag would be forever since you already dropped rent on the Vision Pro.
We are curious to know if this will remain an Apple Vision Pro exclusive or eventually find its way onto the fully capable Meta Quest 3 headset.
You can ponder What If…? (see what we did there?) and watch the trailer below.
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Source: Sonos / Sonos Ace Headphones
Sonos is easily one of the best consumer audio brands on the market, but shockingly, it has never sold headphones, that was until now. The company unveiled its new Ace headphones.
The company’s first entry into the headphone market will not blow you away design-wise. However, what the brand is banking on with its Ace headphones is the sound quality that will offer “the most precise and immersive home theater experience possible.”
The Sonos Ace comes in two color options, “Soft White” and “Black,” with a simple modern look. It is for people in the market for a new pair of headphones that are not called AirPods Max or anything from Apple Beats.
Source: Sonos / Ace Headphones
The Ace headphones fold in the same way as AirPods Max but offer a lightweight travel case, something AirPods Max users have been screaming for.
Sonos Ace Headphones Features
Of course, the Ace headphones are wireless and offer features like “world-class” noise-canceling and transparency modes combined with “breathtaking” hi-resolution wireless audio.
Spatial audio is also available. Sonos promises an astounding 30 hours of battery life, with three hours of juice off three minutes of charging.
Comfort was another focal point with the Sonos Ace headphones featuring vegan leather ear cups that are “pillowy soft” and give the users a “wearing nothing” feeling, and they are replaceable.
“Sonos Ace represents our ambition to create moving sound experiences that are equal to the moment we live in. It is an exciting new chapter as we embark on what it means to design for personal listening,” said Maxime Bouvat-Merlin, Sonos Chief Product Officer. “True to Sonos’ heritage of premium products, each individual detail of Sonos Ace has been expertly crafted, custom designed, and tuned by the world’s leading sound experts to give you a listening experience unlike any other.”
The Sonos Ace headphones are available for pre-order, will officially launch on June 5, and will cost $449.
For more photos, hit the gallery below.
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Linktree, the leading link-in-bio solution aimed to assist the creative community and beyond, is celebrating a major milestone. The company is proud to announce that it now can boast over 50 million users that have employed Linktree to house all their online activities and more.
Linktree has long served as a hub for all manner of entertainers and popular figures, including folks like Ice Spice, Selena Gomez, and a bevy of fashion bloggers and celebrity content creators.
The resource is important for content creators as Linktree’s data team compiled a 2023 Creator Report which uncovered only half of the creators on the platform make money from their productions. Just a scant 2 percent of those earning money via the tool posted salaries of more than $50,000 annually while 72 percent earn less than $500.
Along with the announcement of the milestone of reaching 50 million users —which the brand refers to as Linkers — the company is aligning with several notable retail giants such as Lululemon, Adidas, Shopbop, New Balance, Net-A-Porter, and more.
This is all part of a new social commerce program that will give creators greater opportunities to earn more with each sale. Linktree is fresh off testing the program, doing so by partnering with Sephora, Urban Outfitters, and Revolve to reach Gen-Z folks where they are online and in seek of those wares. Those who participated in this initial phase of the program saw a 12 percent uptick in online traffic after setting up their shop link.
Source: Linktree
The Beta portion of the program empowered creators to continue to innovate and find ways to connect with established entities and boost their earning potential while raising brand awareness with the entities as mentioned earlier, along with expert curation of products they use via Linketree Shops. Further, the program stands out via its seamless integration, usability, and combining curated content with user-generated contributions.
“We created the link-in-bio category back in 2016 when we launched Linktree as a simple solution to help creators unify their digital presence and drive their audience to the things that matter most to them,” CEO and Co-Founder, Alex Zaccaria of Linktree offered in a statement.
Zaccaria adds, “It’s astounding to see the scale we’ve reached by being Linker-first — now empowering more than 50 million Linkers with a space that they own, to grow and monetize. Through social commerce, we’re tackling a new challenge to ensure creators are compensated in line with the immense value they’re driving. For brands of all sizes, we’re unlocking a creator marketing engine that we hope will democratize the future of marketing and commerce.”
To learn more about Linktree, click here.
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Photo: Linktree
Suno, a generative AI music company, has raised $125 million in its latest funding round, according to a post on the company’s blog. The AI music firm, which is one of the rare start-ups that can generate voice, lyrics and instrumentals together, says it wants to usher in a “future where anyone can make music.”
Suno allows users to create full songs from simple text prompts. While most of its technology is proprietary, the company does lean on OpenAI’s ChatGPT for lyric and title generation. Free users can generate up to 10 songs per month, but with its Pro plan ($8 per month) and Premier plan ($24 per month), a user can generate up to 500 songs or 2,000 songs, respectively, on a monthly basis and are given “general commercial terms.”
The company names some of its investors in the announcement, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Matrix and Founder Collective. Suno also says it has been working closely with a team of advisors, including 3LAU, Aaron Levie, Alexandr Wang, Amjad Masad, Andrej Karpathy, Aravind Srinivas, Brendan Iribe, Flosstradamus, Fred Ehrsam, Guillermo Rauch and Shane Mac.
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Suno is commonly believed to be one of the most advanced AI music models on the market today, but in past interviews, the company has not disclosed what materials are included in its training data. Expert Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Trained and former vp of audio for Stability AI, warned in a recent piece for Music Business Worldwide that it seems likely that Suno was trained on copyrighted material without consent given the way he has been able to generate music using the model that closely resembles copyrights.
In a recent Rolling Stone story about the company, investor Antonio Rodriguez mentioned that Suno’s lack of licenses with music companies is not a concern to him, saying that this lack of such licenses is “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys.… Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
Suno representatives have previously said, however, that their model will not let anyone create music by using prompts like “ballad in the style of Radiohead” or employ the voices of specific artists.
Many AI companies, including OpenAI, argue that training on copyrights without licenses in place is “fair use,” but the legality of this practice is still being determined in the United States. The New York Times has launched a lawsuit against OpenAI for training on its copyrighted archives without consent, credit or compensation, and Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO and other music publishers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for using its lyrics to train the company’s large language model.
In the Suno blog post, CEO Mikey Shulman wrote: “Today, we are excited to announce we’ve raised $125 million to build a future of music where technology amplifies, rather than replaces, our most precious resource: human creativity.”
“We released our first product eight months ago, enabling anyone to make a song with just a simple idea,” he continued. “It’s very early days, but 10 million people have already made music using Suno. While GRAMMY-winning artists use Suno, our core user base consists of everyday people making music — often for the first time.
“We’ve seen producers crate digging, friends exchanging memes and streamers co-creating songs with stadium-sized audiences. We’ve helped an artist who lost his voice bring his lyrics back to life again after decades on the sidelines. We’ve seen teachers ignite their students’ imaginations by transforming lessons into lyrics and stories into songs. Just this past weekend, we received heartwarming stories of mothers moved to tears by songs their loved ones created for them with a little help from Suno.”
Voice-Swap, an ethically-trained AI voice company, and BMAT Music Innovators, a company that indexes music usage and ownership data using machine learning, have partnered to launch a new technical certification for AI voice and music models. It is designed to verify that the audio content used to train voice models does not infringe on any […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. NCT Dream wants to enchant fans beyond their music with their first-ever collection of tech accessories in collaboration with CASETiFY. Get […]
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Source: NurPhoto / Getty / X / Twitter
It took a while, but Twitter.com is officially dead.
The rollout for X, Elon Musk’s version of the social media platform known as Twitter, was a hot ass mess. Logging onto Twitter.com still worked, and sharing tweets on websites didn’t work unless you changed the x in the URL to Twitter (that still is the case.).
Today, many desktop Twitter users were surprised to see that typing Twitter.com now redirects them to Elon Musk’s X.
Along with the redirect, a message at the bottom of the webpage says, “We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same.”
The domain transition from Twitter to now X was a weird one. Almost everything, like the platform’s official account, mobile apps, and useless premium accounts, was under the new X branding, while Twitter.com still worked.
Of course, even though Elon Musk is still turning X into the “everything app” he has envisioned, users on X are sticking by the original name and telling Musk, “We are still gonna call it Twitter.”
The platform, formerly known as Twitter, has seen better days. Bots live in people’s mentions, porn is all over timelines, and there are way too many Cheech and Chong edible ads.
Still, as our favorite tech reviewer, Marques Brownlee, said in a post, it’s “still Twitter.”
You can see more reactions in the gallery below.
2. Forever
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Source: Rockstar Games / GTA 6
We don’t have an exact date for when we will return to Vice City in GTA 6, but the window for the highly anticipated game’s release did narrow a bit.
Rockstar Games’ parent company, Take-Two Interactive, revealed in its Q4 2024 earnings report that Grand Theft Auto 6 will arrive in fall 2025.
While that’s not an exact date, it’s a slight update from the more vague “coming 2025” release window.
“Our outlook reflects a narrowing of Rockstar Games’ previously established window of Calendar 2025 to Fall of Calendar 2025 for Grand Theft Auto VI,” Take-Two Chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick said in the report. “We are highly confident that Rockstar Games will deliver an unparalleled entertainment experience, and our expectations for the commercial impact of the title continue to increase.”
In an interview with Variety, speaking on the game’s fall 2025 release window, Zelnick added, “I think we’re going to leave it there for now.”
GTA 6’s Rollout Marred By Leaks
Gamers shouldn’t be surprised by the vagueness. Rockstar Games plays it very close to the chest for its games, especially Grand Theft Auto.
Information about the game in the form of leaked materials hitting X, formerly Twitter timelines, September 2022.
Then, the game studio had to release GTA 6’s trailer earlier than planned when a bunch of crypto dweebs leaked it.
The trailer confirmed that the game will feature two male and female protagonists and take us to Leonida, the GTA equivalent of Florida, and we will spend most of our time in Vice City, the game’s take on Miami.
With any news regarding GTA 6, the reactions are pouring in. Some are excited that we seem to be getting closer to a release date, while others want to know the EXACT day we can expect to boot up the game.
With this game, we want Rockstar Games to take its time and deliver a game on the same level as GTA V.
You can see more reactions in the gallery below.
2. Challenge accepted
4. A perspective we can get behind.
12. Now why would you say that?
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Tablets have basically become a travel necessity these days, acting like a supersized version of a smartphone with the ability to […]