Netflix viewers love (or love to hate) Adam Sandler's particular brand of comedy. Any one of his many Netflix originals – The Ridiculous 6, The Week Of, Sandy Wexler, Murder Mystery – gets the streaming giant more viewers than most critically acclaimed films could combined.

Today Netflix released Uncut Gems, which should appeal to Sandler fans and film snobs. This critically acclaimed indie film follows Sandler as Howard Ratner, a New York City jeweler whose gambling debts compel him to make a series of increasingly dangerous, self-destructive choices. 

Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox and Broadway star Idina Menzel co-star, as well as NBA star Kevin Garnett and Grammy-winning performer The Weeknd appearing as themselves. But the star of the show was Sandler, whom many critics said had given the best performance of his career.

When the movie wowed critics and received Oscar buzz, Adam Sandler told Howard Stern that if he didn't get an Oscar nomination, he would make a movie "that is so bad on purpose just to make you all pay". 

Despite this self-aware threat, or maybe because of it, Oscar voters didn't give Uncut Gems any nominations. So we can certainly expect some more critically panned Netflix comedies from Sandler in the near future. 

Uncut Gems is a stressful, fast-paced, chaotic film designed to make you deeply uncomfortable. While it may not be for everyone, the compelling narrative and acting make this a film you shouldn't miss.

• The best Netflix comedy specials

Sony already promised that the PS5 will revolutionize gaming sound with its built-in 3D audio processing unit. Now it appears Sony's next move is to develop AI-powered game soundtracks that react to how you play, or to your emotions, and change the music accordingly. 

The 'Dynamic Music Creation in Gaming' patent was first discovered by Game Rant, and while it doesn't specifically mention the PlayStation 5, it has all the hallmarks of a feature that Sony is considering for the forthcoming console.

In the patent, Sony's engineers describe how they plan to use machine learning to analyze how different 'musical components' like rhythm, melody and harmony map to specific emotions, and then create different emotional variants to musical scores that will trigger specific feelings in gamers as they play. 

First, Sony will have its composers create musical 'motifs' that map to a specific character, in-game activity, locations or even the player's 'personality'. Then, these motifs will be coded to play based on Sony's data on what the player is feeling, or should be feeling, in a given moment.

For example, on the PS5, Sony could take the overworld music from Assassin's Creed Valhalla and reduce the tempo and percussion for a calmer ambience if the player has stopped moving for a while, up the tension if they've locked onto a target, or add some soulful violin if a beloved character appears.

• All the confirmed and expected PS5 games thus far
• Sony patents a cute robot to keep you company while gaming

Specific emotions that this dynamic system would try to evoke include Tension, Power, Joy, Wonder, Tenderness, Transcendence, Peacefulness, Nostalgia, Sadness, Sensuality, and Fear.

The engineers plan to analyze tons of popular music in order to turn emotion-inducing music into a science. Their machine-learning system will convert music into electronic scores, match the scores up with reviews from critics and fans, then timestamp specific stretches of music that correspond with specific emotions. 

Sony then plans to experiment with 'mapping emotions to scenarios'. During a stressful moment, rather than predictably play tense music, they claimed that an undercurrent of sensuality could have a 'better and more interesting effect' on your experience.

While we don't know when the 'Compositional Engine' will be considered viable, it's certain that it could work the late 2020-bound PS5 as an effort to differentiate the console from the Xbox Series X. Many of today's video games already adjust their music based on players' actions or events in-game, but not with this level of subtlety and personalization.

Sony's biometric future for PS5?

Sony wants to adjust the soundtrack based on who you are, listing out categories like "young, old, male, female, introvert, [and] extrovert." But the patent explores how their musical system could go well beyond such basic descriptors.

Gamers could 'opt in' to provide their social media data to Sony for personality and behavior analysis. Gamers could also use 'biometric devices' to provide data like "electrodermal activity, pulse and respiration, body temperature, blood pressure, brain wave activity, [and] genetic predispositions".

To track this information, the engineers listed some potential biometric devices that could track users' data: a 'thermal or IR camera', a 'wearable activity tracker' or a 'smartwatch with bio-sensing'. 

From there, the system would take your bodily data and adjust the soundtrack to match. Imagine if you have died multiple times to a tough boss, and the PS5 could sense your elevated heart rate, interpret this as frustration, and adjust the soundtrack to play something more soothing.

Many PS5 owners won't feel comfortable with Sony knowing so much about their health and personality. But if Sony's machine learning can create profiles of a subset of gamers, they can likely predict average emotional responses to certain game segments. Then they can extrapolate how any gamer might react to a given scene and adjust the music accordingly.

Regardless of privacy concerns, this patent does hint that Sony may be interested in tracking gamers' health in other contexts. Nintendo has explored sleep-tracking tech for years and its exercise game Ring Fit Adventure was a major hit. 

It's possible Sony has similar aspirations for the PlayStation 5, either to create its own tracking tech, or to connect gamers' existing smartwatches and fitness trackers to the PS5 to provide real-time data. 

• PS5 soundtracks will heavily feature Sony Music's contracted artists
• All the latest PS5 news and release date rumors

The Moto Razr 2 may launch sooner than you think in 2020, and it may remedy some of the biggest concerns we had with the Moto Razr when we reviewed it in February.

That's good news because the reborn Razr charmed us with its nostalgic design but completely disappointed us in terms of its specs and user experience, while the more impressive Samsung Galaxy Z Flip easily won our Motorola Razr vs Galaxy Z Flip comparison.

Unsurprisingly, Motorola is rushing to release a revamped Razr. What is surprising is a reported September launch for the Razr 2, just seven months after the original release date. That's a very quick turnaround to fix the Razr's many issues.

A Lenovo general manager said that he thought the 'generation two' foldable phone – a 'new iteration' of the Razr – would launch sometime in September, according a podcast interview first picked up by Android Authority.

A separate report, while not confirming this date, went into great detail about the Motorola Razr 2 specs. According to an XDA Developers source, the 2020 Razr, codenamed "smith", will run on a Snapdragon 765 chip with a Snapdragon X52 5G modem, lining up the Motorola Razr 2 to be a 5G phone. 

This will be a welcome improvement on the 710 chipset found in the original Razr. The Galaxy Z Flip, for comparison, uses a Snapdragon 855, more powerful than the 765 but without 5G connectivity. Still, reports suggest Samsung's new 5G foldable phone will use the Snapdragon 865 chip when it launches – also due later this year. 

Razr 2.0 will also upgrade the original's specs on most other benchmarks. RAM will jump from 6GB to 8GB; internal storage thankfully doubles from an inadequate 128GB to 256GB; and the 2,845mAh battery will outlast the original's thin 2,510mAh capacity.

Another problem area in our Razr review was its 16MP rear and 5MP selfie cameras. The new model will launch with a 48MP rear camera with an 'ISOCELL Bright GM1 sensor' from Samsung, and a 20MP front camera.

Our reviewer also expressed frustration with the Razr using the outdated Android 9 OS out of the box, but the Razr 2 will apparently launch with Android 10 on board. Of course, by September, we the first phones may be getting Android 11, but that update will be one month old, not seven months like we saw with February's Razr.

Assuming these leaks are accurate, the Razr 2 will certainly be more comparable to the power and specs of non-foldable smartphones when it launches in September. The question becomes whether the changes will be enough to keep up with the Galaxy Z Flip 2, with its triple-lens rear camera, or with a rumored foldable Google Pixel currently in the works.

We also are awaiting information on some of our other desired improvements for the Razr 2, like a less expensive price tag or a higher-quality screen.

• See the latest rumors about the Samsung Galaxy Fold 2

Recently we were invited to the Samsung QA Labs in New Jersey, to get a closer look at its new Q950R 8K QLED TV and get an in-depth explanation of how exactly how it uses an AI-based quantum processor to upscale content to 8K.

The visit, while certainly educational, raised a number of questions about how many people actually want to buy 8K TVs. So, in the midst of metaphorically dissecting their TVs to help us understand what makes them tick, Samsung’s engineers also gave us the rundown on why they believe the TV market is ready for an 8K explosion and how 8K might fit together with other new screen technology.

Will 5G networks, Hollywood buy-in and pressure from TV parts manufacturers make 8K the new standard, or will slow broadband, content creator apathy and pricey TVs keep 8K as a novelty for the next few years? Here are the best questions we came up with about 8K adoption and what we found out.

Is 8K an inevitability or a passing fad?

What we know right now is that there are three main 8K TVs for sale in the US market: the Samsung Q950R, its 2018 predecessor the Q900R, and the Sony Master Series Z9G. All three received 5-star reviews from Techradar editors, with the Q950R and Q900R receiving best-in-class rankings. Once more TV manufacturers leap into 8K, we’ll have to see if Samsung retains its infant championship belt.

While the timing and pricing for upcoming 8K TVs aren’t fully set in stone, we do know that the majority of major TV manufacturers will either release their first 8K or bring Asian-exclusive 8K sets to North America and Europe in 2020.

LG will bring its 88-inch 8K OLED (OLED88Z9) to western markets later this year. Panasonic first built an 8K TV back in 2012, and recently joined the 8K Association (8KA) with Samsung to set guidelines for 8K hardware and content; so it’s safe to say it will be hopping back into the 8K fray soon. 

TCL and Hisense also joined the 8KA and have their own 8K sets in the works, though with uncertain timelines. At CES 2019, the TCL 8-Series 8K QLED Roku TV impressed our editors as a visually superb, budget 8K option during their hands-on. While the 8K 8-series was expected to come out in 2019, TCL’s last press release only confirms that the 4K 8-Series will sell this fall—the 8K, meanwhile, should sell “soon”. Toshiba (a brand owned by Hisense), on the other hand, showed off an 8K concept model last year that blew us away with its color gamut and pixel quality, but hasn’t officially confirmed its intention to mass produce it. 

Japanese manufacturer Sharp has sold 8K monitors in Europe and Asia since last year, and recently reacquired its license from Hisense to sell in the United States. So you can bet that a flashy 8K TV could be one way Sharp inserts itself back into the minds of TV buyers. 

What does any of that mean, well, it shows that nearly every TV manufacturer—Samsung included—is very serious about 8K.

Will I be able to buy 8K Blu-rays?

When asked if Samsung had any plans to sell an 8K Blu-Ray player in the future, their engineers said that they couldn’t give a definitive answer, but that they didn’t think it would ever happen. They suggested that Hollywood studios and the marketplace were collectively and happily moving towards streaming as the best way to distribute content—meaning the demand for an 8K player wasn’t high enough to justify the costs of creating one.

We should take this prediction with a grain of salt: Samsung stopped creating both 4K UHD Blu-Ray and 1080p players earlier this year, showing that its company has lost faith in that market; however, other companies like Sony and Panasonic still have high hopes for 4K disc players, so they could very well choose to produce 8K discs a well if they ever want to. 

Nothing of the sort has been announced but it is possible: According to Display Daily, Blu-Ray discs can contain approximately two hours worth of 8K content, but is only licensed to do so in the Japanese market. So while it’s possible, it may not reach an American or European market where discs may have dropped in popularity. 

Will I be able to stream 8K video?

Samsung was much more effusive about its content partners’ plans to bring 8K content to its apps. According to them, it’s very popular for filmmakers to shoot scenes in 8K for an eventual 4K release. During an 8K summit that Samsung hosted, filmmakers discussed how 8K made post-production so much easier, because hey have four 4K streams worth of content to choose between, so they don’t miss a shot. 

Now Samsung’s engineers predict that filmmakers will adapt to use 8K cameras for their actual purpose and produce native 8K content for 8K screens. Eventually, you’d likely see movie icons in the Samsung universal guide that indicates when a film is made in native 8K. 

This won’t be a widespread practice; filmmakers would resent losing the flexibility that downgrading to less-stringent resolution standards would afford them. But some acclaimed directors like Peter Jackson and Christopher McQuarrie have already adopted 8K. Channels and apps that can offer these max-res films for their platform will have a definite advantage.

How will 8K video be encoded?

Odds are, even if you buy an 8K TV or monitor, you haven’t actually watched much native 8K content. Amateur filmmakers can upload 8K video to YouTube or Vimeo, like the video above, but the quality depends on your internet bandwidth and the video’s compression codec. 

Watch this video on your YouTube app on the Q950R, and your service provider will use High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) to decompress it. One HEVC, according to the folks at the 8K Video Summit earlier this year, demands a “minimum average bitrate of 84Mbps”, just below the 95Mbps average for US households. And in actuality, the industry recommendation for a successful decompression is 120Mbps, well above the average household maximum.

For comparison, Samsung very optimistically claimed that you only need 40MB of bandwidth for 8K.

Mauricio Alvarez-Mesa, a speaker at the Summit, gave a more realistic prognosis: 8K TVs will need to adopt a new codec like Versatile Video Coding (VCC), or else a huge portion of TV owners won’t actually be able to take advantage of 8K content. VCC will reportedly be approved as an HEVC in 2020, so we may see some streaming improvements next year.

Will 5G play a role in 8K technology?

5G networks with their 1Gbps download speeds are slowly approaching—at least in more urban areas—and could have a major effect on the feasibility of 8K streaming.

Samsung said as much during its presentation, claiming that 5G would majorly improve access to 8K content for a number of households.

For now, however, only one company is explicitly building its 8K TV with 5G in mind: Huawei. Famous for its mobile devices, this Chinese manufacturer has never made a TV before now—only TV parts for other manufacturers like Hisense. Now Huawei plans to combine its 5G expertise with a next-gen TV, and ensure that its content always runs more smoothly than TVs restricted by your terrible home wifi.

Will 8K TV prices come down?

For the five-star 8K sets on sale now, you’re paying a premium for quality. 

The Sony 8K costs $12,999 (£14,000) for the 85-inch set and a shocking $69,999 (£84,999) for the 98-inch set. Samsung’s 82- and 98-inch Q900 Series costs a similar $14,999 (£14,000) and $69,999 (£80,000), respectively—though only after a $30,000 price cut to better match Sony’s prices.

 For mere mortals, you’re better off spending a more economic $3,000 / £3,000 for a 65-inch Q900R or £4,999 for the Q950R. 

Of course, these prices are only economic for a wealthy minority of buyers; for everyone else, three to five grand for a TV with very little native content can only be described as a luxury buy, no matter how impressive the specs.

Competitive price cuts will be what makes 8K affordable enough for a larger minority of TV buyers. Though considering the powerful specs in 8K TVs, along with the fact that the majority of them are 75 inches or larger, manufacturers likely can’t discount them too much and still make a profit.

If any company will make 8Ks more accessible for everyday consumers in 2020, TCL and its Roku 8-Series would be a safe bet... but even that's not a guarantee. TCL's 4K 8-Series is expected to sell for $1,999 so you can bet that the 8K will be closer to the Q900R price than we might like.

Are people ACTUALLY buying 8K TVs right now?

According to this Broadband TV News write-up on 2018 TV sales, consumers bought 221 million TVs last year. Of those, 99 million were UHD sets, and UHD sales surpassed regular HD TV sales for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2018. 

8K TVs, by comparison, sold 18,600 globally in 2018, with most of those sales isolated to Japan according to the report. Keep in mind, though, that IHS Markit predicted that 8K sales would jump to 430,000 this year, and 3.6 million in 2020. Samsung’s team members, by comparison, said that they predicted that the market would “get closer to 100,000 units” for 2019.

How accurate these numbers are will depend greatly on how much consumers buy into the idea that they need to upgrade from 4K, despite the steep cost. Until they do buy in, content creators may be reluctant to produce 8K content for such a small user base.

How much does Samsung and LG have control of the market?

Samsung admitted during its panel that switching to a new TV format is always a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation. You have to make 8K TVs even if the market isn’t ready for them, because the market will never be ready until more people have 8K TVs.

So why try selling them now? One reason could be pressure from the third-party factory companies that manufacture your TVs. The Samsung reps suggested that panel manufacturers, for example, need to keep improving the types of panels they build in order to remain profitable. 

Thus, the market could see fewer and fewer HD and 4K TVs, not because they aren’t selling well, but because 8K will present more market opportunities for greater profits per manufactured TV. Huawei's sudden entrance into the TV game is just one example of how the manufacturing market has shifted to make 8K a priority, for better or worse.

Will Netflix ever stream 8K videos?

When asked about the lack of 8K content to support the new influx of 8K TVs, the QA Labs team claimed that the free market and consumer choice would soon come to the rescue. With the advent of new streaming services like Disney+, other services would begin differentiating itself from the competition by adding as much 8K video as possible.

How likely is this to happen? It already has once, in the case of rental app Rakuten TV. The CEO, Jacinto Roca, said in an interview that the app will feature 8K content “in the second half of this year” and would continue to add more over time. In exchange, 8K TVs may add a dedicated Rakuten button to their remotes, steering users directly to 8K content.

Will other streaming services follow Rakuten’s lead? Netflix seems unlikely, for one: in a 2016 interview with Digital Spy, Netflix’s CPO Neil Hunt said that “8K is only interesting if you're going to sit too close to the TV”, and that the company’s focus was on HDR. A lot can change in three years, but 4K HDR may very well be as far as the service goes for now.

Because 8K TVs do such an amazing job of upscaling, there really isn’t much pressure for these services to prioritize filming in 8K if it will be more expensive. At least until more folks have actually bought 8Ks.

Will any of this impact 4K OLED prices?

This wasn't exactly covered by Samsung, but it seems clear to us that not everything in 2020 will be about 8K Samsung QLED TVs. We recently learned that manufacturing costs for OLED TVs will drop up to 25% by next year, thanks to a new process where they “print” OLED panels between panes of glass in the TV set.

Those savings will be passed along to the consumer, making OLED a more tantalizing, affordable alternative right as 8K supplants it as the high-quality, premier-priced TV on the market.

•  Why 8K could be the new normal for Samsung TVs 

Samsung’s 2020 business strategy for TV sales is simple: 8K or bust. With its QLED 4K TV sales being undercut by budget 4K TVs, Samsung plans to shift the market again, to a format that has (so far) very few competitors, but also very little native content.

Yet as we saw in our 4K vs 8K comparison test earlier this year, you don’t actually need video shot in 7680 × 4320 (8K) resolution to take full advantage of those millions of pixels—Samsung’s 8K TVs use AI upscaling to convert any video type (SD to 4K and everything in-between) into 8K resolution. 

• Here’s everything you need to know about 8K 

Upscaling, of course, isn’t anything new. For years, 4K and even HD sets found ways to stretch lower-resolution content to fit the greater pixel-per-inch ratio of modern TVs. But with 8K TVs needing to fill four 4K TVs worth of pixels, conventional upscaling methods just don’t work, for reasons we’ll get into below.

Now, after visiting the Samsung QA Labs in New Jersey and speaking with its engineers, we have a better idea of how Samsung uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to make 8K upscaling possible—and how its AI techniques compare to other TV manufacturers’ early AI efforts.

Why conventional upscaling looked so terrible 

Before 1998, television broadcast in 720x480 resolution, and films shot in higher quality were compressed to fit that format. That’s 345,600 pixels of content, which would only take up a tiny window on modern TVs with higher pixels-per-inch (PPI) ratios. That SD content? It must be stretched to fit over 2 million pixels for high definition, over 8 million for 4K or over 33 million for 8K. 

The baseline for upscaling is maintaining the proper pixel ratio by simple multiplication. To convert HD to 4K, the TV’s processor must blow up one HD pixel to take up four pixels of space on the higher-res screen. Or 16 pixels during an HD-to-8K conversion. 

Without any image processing the picture ends up, to quote Tolkien, “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” Each bit of data becomes unnaturally square-shaped, without a natural gradient between details and colors. The result is a lot of blocking, or noise, around objects on screen.

You’ll also likely see something called “mosquito noise”. To compress a video to work for your limited internet bandwidth, broadcasters and websites must fill the stream with intentional color flaws, or “compression artifacts”. The purposefully flawed pixels will swarm around parts of the screen where there are sharp contrasts, like the brown bridge before blue sky in the image above.

The math behind upscaling 

In the face of these issues, TV programmers taught their TVs to analyze and digitally process the images in real time to fill in or repair missing or damaged pixels. And they accomplished this using mathematical functions, which you can tell your loved ones the next time they say that too much TV rots your brain.

Specifically, engineers taught the TV processor to interpolate what each missing pixel’s color value should be, based on its surrounding pixels. To do so, it had to define its kernel: the function that assigns color priority to a pixel’s neighbors, based on their proximity.

The most basic kernel used in TVs is nearest neighbor kerneling, which simply calculates which pixel is nearest a vacant pixel and pastes the same color data into the empty pixel. This method causes the picture to take on a blocky zig-zag pattern, or aliasing, with poor edging. Picture a black letter “A” on a white screen; a missing pixel just outside the letter may be filled in as black, while a pixel on the edge of the letter could display as white. The result will either be a gray blob around the letter or a jagged staircase of black and white going up and down.

Bilinear interpolation requires more processing power but is more effective. In this method the blank pixel is compared against the nearest two neighbors to form a linear gradient between them, sharpening the image. This produces smoother visuals but can be inconsistent. So other TVs use bicubic interpolation, which pulls from the 16 nearest pixels in all directions. While this method is most likely to get the color as close to accurate as possible, it also typically produces a much more blurry picture, with edges taking on a distracting halo effect.

You can likely guess the problem already: these TVs fill in pixels based on mathematical formulas that are statistically most likely to produce accurate visuals, but have no way to interpret how they’re thematically supposed to look based on what’s actually on the screen. 

So, after explaining how these algorithms consistently came up short, Samsung’s team explained how their AI overcomes these shortcomings.

Samsung’s secret: Machine learning, object recognition and filters 

Samsung’s secret weapon is a technique called machine learning super resolution (MLSR). This AI-driven system takes a lower-resolution video stream and upscales it to fit the resolution of larger screen with a higher PPI ratio. It’s the equivalent of the old ridiculous TV trope of computer scientists zooming in and “enhancing” a blurry image with the tap of a keystroke, except done automatically and nearly instantaneously. 

Samsung’s reps explained how they analyzed a vast amount of video content from different sources—high- and low-quality YouTube streams, DVDs and Blu-Rays, movies and sporting events—and created two image databases, one for low-quality screen captures and one for high-quality screen captures.

Then, it had to train its AI to complete a process called “inverse degradation” by the AI industry. First, you take high-resolution images and downgrade them to lower resolutions, tracking what visual data is lost. Then you must reverse the process and train your AI to fill in the missing data from low-resolution images so that they mirror the high-resolution images.

Samsung’s team calls this process a “formula”. Its 8K processors contain a formula bank with a database of formulas for different objects, such as an apple or the letter “A”. When the processor recognizes a blurry apple in an actor’s hand, it’ll restore the apple edges, repair any compression artifacts, and ensure that blank pixels take on the right shade of red based on how apples actually look, not based on vague statistical algorithms. Plus, along with specific object restoration, the AI will adjust your stream based on whatever you’re watching. 

According to Samsung, it has dozens of different “filters” that change how much detail creation, noise reduction and edge restoration is needed for a given stream, based on whether you’re watching a specific sport, genre of movie or type of cinematography.

The edge restoration shown in the slideshow above—an insane amount of text to restore in real time—isn’t even the most difficult task for the AI, according to Samsung's engineers. Instead, replicating the proper textures of an object in real time remains a difficult challenge. They must ensure that the processor augments the appearance of objects without them taking on an artificial appearance.

What the processor won’t do (according to Samsung) is miscategorize an object. “It won’t turn an apple into a tomato”, one engineer assured us, though without giving any details. Very likely the processor is trained to avoid any drastic alterations if it doesn’t recognize what an object is.

You also won’t see the AI alter the “directorial intent” of a movie, as Samsung’s team put it. So if a director uses the bokeh effect, the blurred background will stay blurred, while the foreground gets dialed up to 8K crispness.

They also claimed they don’t specifically analyze more popular streams for their object categorization, aiming more for general quantity and diversity of content. So, no word if they have a “dragon” or “direwolf” formula for your Game of Thrones binge-watches.

New Samsung 8K (and 4K) TVs ship with the most recent formula bank installed, and then new object data is added via firmware updates that you must approve. Samsung says that it will continue to analyze new visual streams to expand its object library, but that it does that locally on Samsung servers; it doesn’t analyze data from people’s TVs.

Just how many object formulas has Samsung accumulated from its endless stream analysis? One of its engineers gave an off-the-cuff amount that sounded impressively large, suggesting the processor will typically recognize a huge number of objects on screen. But a PR rep cut in and asked that we not print the number, saying that they’d rather that consumers focus on how well Samsung’s MLSR works than on arbitrary numbers.

AI upscaling: the new normal? 

Samsung isn’t the only TV manufacturer that currently uses artificial intelligence and image restoration for its TVs. 

Sony’s 4K ad page goes into obsessive detail about its AI image processing solutions. Its new 4K TVs contain processors with a “dual database” of “tens of thousands” of image references that “dynamically improv[e] pixels in real time”.  

LG also announced ahead of CES 2019 that its new a9 Gen 2 TV chip would feature image processing and machine learning to improve noise reduction and brightness—in part by analyzing the source and type of media and adjusting its algorithm accordingly.

Beyond the AI elements, however, it seems as though these TV processors do still depend somewhat on automated algorithms. When we previously interviewed Gavin McCarron, Technical Marketing & Product Planning Manager at Sony Europe, about the AI image processing in Sony TVs, he had this to say:

"When you're upscaling from Full HD to 4K there is a lot of guesswork, and what we're trying to do it to remove as much of the guesswork as possible. [Our processor] doesn't just look at the pixel in isolation, it looks at the pixels around it, and on each diagonal, and also it will look up the pixels across multiple frames, to give a consistency in the picture quality.”

Sony, along with LG and Samsung, very likely use some form of bilateral or bicubic algorithm as its baseline upscaling system. Then they analyze the near-4K content and determine which pixels should be augmented with image processing and which should be deleted as noise.

In that sense, most TV manufacturers are relatively close to one another in the AI upscaling race. The exception is Samsung, which uses the same techniques but fills in four times the number of missing pixels to fit an 8K screen. We’ll have to wait and see if other manufacturers’ AI efforts will allow them to leap into the 8K market as well. 

• What TV can you buy with Samsung's 8K upscaling tech? Check out the Samsung Q950R 8K QLED TV

At the Tribeca Film Festival last week, Hideo Kojima fans arrived in force, hoping for new footage or spoilers for his mysterious new game Death Stranding. Out of hundreds of waiting fans, many arrived wearing Kojima Productions shirts or carrying Metal Gear merch for the gaming auteur to sign. Kojima ended up rushing across the red carpet, while Walking Dead star Norman Reedus posed for selfies and signed one fan’s NES Metal Gear cartridge.

Unfortunately, it turned out Kojima had no new footage of Death Stranding to show that night, though he did hint that gamers could expect some new footage in a month or so - we’re guessing at E3 2019. But lack of trailer aside, moderator Geoff Knightley of Game Awards fame managed to wring plenty of intriguing information about the upcoming title out of Kojima and Reedus.

Here are the most intriguing details we gleaned from the panel about what to expect from this bizarre PS4 title. 

You play as both Sam and Norman Reedus...

We knew from E3 that you play as delivery man Sam ‘Porter’ Bridges. But Kojima revealed that you’re also playing as Norman Reedus himself.

A huge cinephile, Kojima said that Reedus’ previous filmography will influence the character you’ll play in Death Stranding. While he liked how Daryl’s side-character badassery stole the show in Walking Dead, he also enjoyed how “sexy and cute” Norman was in Boondock Saints, and his black humor as the host of reality show 'Ride with Norman Reedus'. 

“In Death Stranding I’m trying to put every aspect [of Norman] in there,” Kojima said through his interpreter, “and you will see his … everything, in the game,” he finished, suggestively, cracking up the crowd. By the end of the game, he says, you’ll “love Norman”.

“So, they’ll play as me?” Reedus recalled asking Kojima for clarification. “No, they’ll be you,” Kojima replied.

Metal Gear Solid always had meta elements to its stories, from Psycho Mantis judging your player stats and favorite Gamecube games in Twin Snakes to the AIs telling Raiden to sit further back from the television in Sons of Liberty. It’s unsurprising that Kojima’s first game with total narrative control would play back into the idea of Sam/Norman being separate from the player that controls him.

“You’ll see Norman as Sam in the game, and you’ll see his acting, and you’ll enjoy that,” Kojima promised. “You have to become Norman when you play. And Norman says a lot of things that you’ll probably feel, playing as Norman. So he’s Norman and Sam as the same time.”

To fully capture Reedus for the game, Kojima spent two straight days scanning Reedus’ body and facial expressions for the game. Later, when Reedus got a new tattoo, Kojima insisted that they rescan to insert the tattoo into the game. And he joked that if Reedus got a tattoo after the game comes out, he’d sell it as a DLC skin. 

Reedus, who joked that he came from the “waka-waka-waka generation”, said that he thinks it’s important to make Sam feel like a real person, compared to an empty avatar you control. 

...and as a camera?

Kojima finished off his confusing Sam/Norman explanation with a hint about another section of the game, where you’re not playing as either.

“If you go somewhere in the game, you won’t be controlling Norman or Sam. You’ll just be controlling the camera, and you’ll see Sam/Norman, and if you look at him he might do something like wink at you.”

Lots of AAA games have a photo mode now, where you can take a shot of the protagonist amidst the beautiful scenery. Unsurprisingly, Kojima took this concept and inserted it into DS as a meta game mechanic. 

We know he did something similar with the classic concept of the “Continue” screen after death in a video game. In a 2017 IGN interview, he explained that an underwater sequence in a 2017 trailer for Death Starnding was actually a “purgatory” that your dead Norman Reedus must be reincarnated from to return to the game world. 

A story about connections

Thematically, Metal Gear went far beyond secret clone agents fighting giant mechas. The series touches on everything from the dangers of genetic modification to the merits of denuclearization to the exploitation of soldiers for political gain. 

We still don’t know why Norman Reedus is wandering a post-apocalyptic world with a baby inside his throat. But, Kojima revealed the themes that he hopes gamers will take away from Death Stranding: connectivity (or disconnect) from the world and the people around us. 

“There are so many things happening in the real world - in America, in Europe - everything is actually connected by internet, but we’re kind of not connected the way we want to be,” Kojima said. "I'm putting that in a metaphor in the game. The player will have to reconnect the world in the game. You're very alone, in solitude, but you're trying to connect.”

To complicate things, he also suggested that connection isn’t always the answer. As an example, he claimed that a person might be jealous of a happy couple, but then go on a date and realize he was happier on his own. Knowing when to disconnect from persons or things that don’t inspire happiness also, apparently, plays into the themes of the story. 

Whatever your decisions, it’s sure to be intentionally political and controversial. Kojima says he envisions Death Stranding’s story taking place in the “near future”, as the result of the “tensions and divisions” in the world today. 

He also predicts that the story will "make people cry". So you'd best be prepared for an emotional, intellectual roller coaster.

An open world, but a non-branching narrative

Open-world games present a challenge for large gaming studios, let alone indie developers like Kojima Productions. You need to tell a cohesive story while also letting players do whatever they want; create a convincingly large environment with enough activities inside of it that it doesn’t feel empty; and ensure those activities aren’t repetitive or buggy. 

Kojima admitted this has been a challenge during the panel. Game narratives, he claimed, used to be like a highway: gamers could ride in any lane or go backwards, but the world’s parameters were set and narrow. Now, gamers can exit the highway and drive on other roads at any time.

For Death Stranding, Kojima's solution seems to be to offer the illusion of choice to gamers.

Kojima hinted that the game will offer players with painful, tear-inducing choices. But when Knightley asked if this meant that players could influence the story via their choices - think Mass Effect or Dragon Age - he firmly shut down the idea, saying he has one narrative in mind. 

Reedus did suggest that his acting did vary based on potential choices the player might make. But it almost seems like these choices ultimately won't effect the overall story for one gamer versus another. 

Potential online features

Fairly early on, we learned that Kojima planned to include some elements of online co-op in Death Stranding, with player two playing as a female protagonist. But based on last week’s comments, there may be far more to it than just that. Kojima claims that he “threw in a really new idea".

"You're connecting the game, and everyone is playing it together, and you'll be connected, everyone will be connected together as well," Kojima teased.

"And I can't say anything because Sony will be very unhappy. I don't want to be disconnected to Sony," he finished, to laughs from the crowd. 

Despite Death Stranding being single-player, it sounds like you’ll need Playstation Plus to get the most out of it. But what is Kojima’s supposedly unique idea? Players dropping into other players’ worlds happens in games as varied as Forza Horizon 4 and Dark Souls. MMOs’ very foundation is connectivity with other gamers. So we admit to being stumped about what exactly he has planned that Sony wants kept mysterious for now. 

How Death Stranding came to be

After Konami forced Kojima out and cancelled Silent Hills, Kojima decided that he wanted to start his own independent game studio. He also decided that he wanted to design his next gaming protagonist with Norman Reedus specifically in mind. 

Only problem was, he had no concept art to show or staff to begin working on pre-production; only his words and ideas. So Kojima invited Norman Reedus out for sushi and talked about his Death Stranding ideas for two hours. At the end of his pitch, Kojima asked Reedus if he wanted to star in the game, and he immediately said yes.

This was thanks to Oscar winner and Silent Hills collaborator Guillermo del Toro, who has great respect for Kojima and told Reedus to “do whatever [Hideo] wants".

Reedus gushed to the audience about Kojima’s directing style, saying that he has an “infectious enthusiasm” for his work, an inherent “honesty” to his filmmaking, and a respectful desire to collaborate and improvise ideas with him rather than control his every move, as other Hollywood directors have done in the past. 

Because of the MGS series’ meticulous attention to detail, Kojima has obtained the reputation of a perfectionist; he denied this during the panel, however. He “daydreams” the outline for his games’ stories, but he needs dialogue with others to truly flesh out the details. "I like a lot of things live," Kojima explained. "I want to really do a collaboration."

He says that he can never go back to the way things used to be, when he only worked with voice actors and scripted games alone in his room. He wants his experience directing actual scenes with Hollywood actors like Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Léa Seydoux to be the norm going forward. 

Though one thin certainly hasn’t changed from the old days of Metal Gear Solid 4: Kojima admitted that “of course there are a lot of long cutscenes” in Death Stranding. 

The future of Kojima Productions: a Netflix partnership?

During the Q&A, one fan asked if Kojima ever planned on directing a movie of his own. Sadly for his admirers, it doesn’t look like that’ll ever happen - at least not in the traditional sense.

“I really wanna shoot movies too,” he answered, “but I don’t have time. I’ve received many offers, [but] I really want to create games until I die.”

He continued on to express his interest in creating content for streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime. “Everything is there right now, and I think there will be games there sooner or later.” He predicts that games and films will become “closer” from a structural standpoint, and wants to “challenge” bridging that gap. 

Netflix has already begun releasing interactive 'Choose Your Own Adventure' experiences like Bandersnatch. One can only imagine what the king of gaming cutscenes could do with his own branching FMV experience.

In an interview with Nikkei Business (found by Variety), Kojima said that with the advent of 5G and the Google Stadia gaming streaming service, he’s excited about the possibilities they represent for his future games. “There’s one big thing I have in mind related to streaming as well,” he said, but “I can’t say anything more as I don’t want to spoil though.”

One thing’s for certain: the only thing Kojima loves more than thinking up bold new ideas is keeping those ideas top secret and tantalizing us with enigmatic hints.

• The best PS4 Pro deals for when Death Stranding finally comes out!

People flocked to Toy Fair 2019 earlier this month to find the latest toy reveals from major brands like LEGO and Mattel for the coming year. But toy inventors, distributors and sellers also attend to pick each other’s brains on which toys will fly off shelves, not just this year, but in five to ten years, too. 

This year, the industry scuttlebutt was fairly straightforward: by 2023, consumers will spend tens of billions of dollars on augmented reality (AR) toys. 

With Apple and Google going all-in on their ARKit and ARCore platforms, and apps like Pokemon Go enjoying huge popularity, toymakers see augmented reality as the perfect way to bridge physical toys and app-loving, screen-addicted children. 

But successfully combining physical playsets with AR is no easy feat, the Toy Fair experts warned. You need both physical toy designers and AR programmers to successfully work together; a physical play experience that can stand on its own without the app; an AR interface that doesn’t have the child staring for too long at the screen and ignoring the physical toy; and a dozen other rules for making sure the augmented side of a toy doesn’t feel gimmicky or tacked on. 

We scoured the Toy Fair for all of the smart tech toys we could find, and unsurprisingly, many of them used AR. But does the AR actually make these toys more fun, or is it just a gimmick to increase the toys' price tags? Here are our thoughts on the highest-profile AR toys due to come out later this year. 

LEGO Hidden Side

By 2023, consumers will spend tens of billions of dollars on augmented reality (AR) toys.

LEGO Hidden Side, an 8-set series of spooky locations and possessed vehicles, is the best example of an AR toy that technically doesn't need AR for a kid to enjoy playing with it.

As with any LEGO set, kids can engage simply by building the haunted town of Newbury, then playing with their minifigs inside of them, without ever opening a phone app. 

Plus, Hidden Side's sets have a fun mechanic. Some of the blocks rotate between their normal appearance and their haunted appearance. These were designed as something for kids to interact with that would trigger an augmented reality reaction, but they easily work as a purely physical way to play. 

Once kids open the AR app, they begin a more guided experience as a ghost-busting sleuth, investigating the area for clues before driving the hidden ghosts out into the open and defeating them during a rail-shooter minigame. 

Finding the ghosts is relatively simplistic: kids will hover their phone over bright lights of "gloom"; collect enough gloom currency (which takes a few seconds), and a haunted object will be highlighted. Interact with that object in the real world, and the ghost will appear to be captured.  

There are 100 ghosts to collect, and certain ghosts are much more likely to appear in certain sets than others. Supposedly, different ghosts will have different personalities and actions while being hunted, but the core gameplay of ghost hunting should be the same across each set. 

The optimistic view of the AR app is that it extends the physical play of Hidden Side by helping kids to imagine the haunted world surrounding their sets—a world they can conceptualize and play in once the app is closed. Plus, the LEGO rep said they would be able to add more missions to the app as time went on, further adding to Hidden Side's replay value. 

The more cynical view is that this app exists for collectible-loving kids to pressure their parents into buying all 8 sets so they can collect all 100 ghosts. 

Video games and mobile games compel kids to invest more and more time into them in exchange for rewards—achievements, loot boxes, collectibles, etc. By adding an AR online element, LEGO hopes to lure its kids into a similar recurring play pattern. And we find it highly likely that other companies will try to replicate this model, and potentially sell subscriptions or season passes to toys. 

Pictionary Air

At the other end of the spectrum from the highly independent Hidden Side LEGO sets, Pictionary Air relies entirely on augmented reality tech for its playing experience: You draw in the air using a light-tracked pen, in front of someone holding a phone or tablet camera. The camera tracks your drawing and projects it onto the screen for everyone else to see, and they guess what you're drawing. 

It's a simple system, and it mostly worked very well when we tested it out at the Toy Fair. The pen uses light tracking instead of more advanced sensors to make it more affordable for consumers, but in our experience it tracked our drawings accurately. Though it's difficult to tell, since we're drawing in mid-air: without a real canvas you'll find it difficult to remember where you've already drawn, leading to some pretty inscrutable sketches. 

Also, since you have to face the person with the table so the camera can track the pen, your drawing is a mirror image of what you want the person to see. I tried to draw the United States for a clue, and California and Florida ended up flipped, making it pretty hard for the other person to recognize.

"Use the screen in order to get you off the screen. Screens can sometimes facilitate interaction with other kids."

Pictionary isn't just a promising AR toy because it's fun to use, or because it fulfills the "A" requirement for a STEAM toy (Arts). It's also promising because it doesn't isolate the person using it, like many AR apps. 

During a panel on STEM/STEAM toys, littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir said that, while research is still ongoing on the effects of prolonged screen time on kids' brains,  "social interaction is a key component of helping the development of kids. And so by inference you can say that if face-to-face interaction is so important, and if the screen is getting in the way of that, then we need to make room for what’s working ... Use the screen in order to get you off the screen. Screens can sometimes facilitate interaction with other kids."

In other words, giving kids toys that revolve around screens isn't bad per se, but it's better if those screens involve work or play with other people. In this case, drawing for and responding to other people. By contrast, Hidden Side's AR app clearly restricts the play to one person, where normally multiple children could build and play together. 

PaiBotz

A lot of parents are looking to cut down on kids' screen time; an entire Toy Fair panel titled "Screenless Is In" was devoted to covering tech toys that don't use screens. So it's safe to say that toys with corresponding AR apps aren't going to be popular with parents unless they combine recreation with learning. 

PaiBotz is one such toy that strikes that balance. It teaches young children about Block-based coding languages and techniques like sequencing and looping. But not just through the AR app shown above, but also through the 150 physical building blocks your kid will use to build and rebuild the robot. 

Intriguingly, during the Pai Robotics demo, I saw that someone from Google had come to check out the little bot as well. He and one of the Pai representatives were having a serious discussion about PaiBotz's calibration issues. 

Google, Apple and Microsoft have engaged in a years-long war to determine AR dominance in the tech marketplace. Google, for instance, is reportedly developing an AR headset designed to be competitive with Hololens 2. We aren't surprised by the idea that Google would look for promising AR toymakers and developers to partner with, and that AR toymakers would want to grab some of that $100+ billion competitive marketshare. 

What the rise of AR means for kids

Technology is already rapidly changing how young children see the world. During a panel, toy business owner Kate Stone discussed how two-year-olds have been seen pinching and zooming magazine pages, not understanding why they were "broken" and not reacting to their touch. 

Toymakers see augmented reality as the perfect way to bridge physical toys and app-loving, screen-addicted children.

Before long, if augmented reality apps and toys continue to proliferate into our daily lives, children will consider seeing holograms into the real world to be the norm. 

The real question is what form all of these AR apps will take. Phil Sage, an inventor at Hasbro who was on the same panel, said that these apps will become more and more multi-modal, incorporating other senses and features beyond AR like voice assistant support. 

Eventually, your child may be able to summon holographic objects into their toy realm simply with their voice. Or, if glasses like Apple AR take off, kids could use AR apps without having to hold a phone in one hand, encouraging freer playtime in an augmented environment. 

• Here are the best AR apps available now

People flocked to Toy Fair 2019 earlier this month to find the latest toy reveals from major brands like LEGO and Mattel for the coming year. But toy inventors, distributors and sellers also attend to pick each other’s brains on which toys will fly off shelves, not just this year, but in five to ten years, too. 

This year, the industry scuttlebutt was fairly straightforward: by 2023, consumers will spend tens of billions of dollars on augmented reality (AR) toys. 

With Apple and Google going all-in on their ARKit and ARCore platforms, and apps like Pokemon Go enjoying huge popularity, toymakers see augmented reality as the perfect way to bridge physical toys and app-loving, screen-addicted children. 

But successfully combining physical playsets with AR is no easy feat, the Toy Fair experts warned. You need both physical toy designers and AR programmers to successfully work together; a physical play experience that can stand on its own without the app; an AR interface that doesn’t have the child staring for too long at the screen and ignoring the physical toy; and a dozen other rules for making sure the augmented side of a toy doesn’t feel gimmicky or tacked on. 

We scoured the Toy Fair for all of the smart tech toys we could find, and unsurprisingly, many of them used AR. But does the AR actually make these toys more fun, or is it just a gimmick to increase the toys' price tags? Here are our thoughts on the highest-profile AR toys due to come out later this year. 

LEGO Hidden Side

By 2023, consumers will spend tens of billions of dollars on augmented reality (AR) toys.

LEGO Hidden Side, an 8-set series of spooky locations and possessed vehicles, is the best example of an AR toy that technically doesn't need AR for a kid to enjoy playing with it.

As with any LEGO set, kids can engage simply by building the haunted town of Newbury, then playing with their minifigs inside of them, without ever opening a phone app. 

Plus, Hidden Side's sets have a fun mechanic. Some of the blocks rotate between their normal appearance and their haunted appearance. These were designed as something for kids to interact with that would trigger an augmented reality reaction, but they easily work as a purely physical way to play. 

Once kids open the AR app, they begin a more guided experience as a ghost-busting sleuth, investigating the area for clues before driving the hidden ghosts out into the open and defeating them during a rail-shooter minigame. 

Finding the ghosts is relatively simplistic: kids will hover their phone over bright lights of "gloom"; collect enough gloom currency (which takes a few seconds), and a haunted object will be highlighted. Interact with that object in the real world, and the ghost will appear to be captured.  

There are 100 ghosts to collect, and certain ghosts are much more likely to appear in certain sets than others. Supposedly, different ghosts will have different personalities and actions while being hunted, but the core gameplay of ghost hunting should be the same across each set. 

The optimistic view of the AR app is that it extends the physical play of Hidden Side by helping kids to imagine the haunted world surrounding their sets—a world they can conceptualize and play in once the app is closed. Plus, the LEGO rep said they would be able to add more missions to the app as time went on, further adding to Hidden Side's replay value. 

The more cynical view is that this app exists for collectible-loving kids to pressure their parents into buying all 8 sets so they can collect all 100 ghosts. 

Video games and mobile games compel kids to invest more and more time into them in exchange for rewards—achievements, loot boxes, collectibles, etc. By adding an AR online element, LEGO hopes to lure its kids into a similar recurring play pattern. And we find it highly likely that other companies will try to replicate this model, and potentially sell subscriptions or season passes to toys. 

Pictionary Air

At the other end of the spectrum from the highly independent Hidden Side LEGO sets, Pictionary Air relies entirely on augmented reality tech for its playing experience: You draw in the air using a light-tracked pen, in front of someone holding a phone or tablet camera. The camera tracks your drawing and projects it onto the screen for everyone else to see, and they guess what you're drawing. 

It's a simple system, and it mostly worked very well when we tested it out at the Toy Fair. The pen uses light tracking instead of more advanced sensors to make it more affordable for consumers, but in our experience it tracked our drawings accurately. Though it's difficult to tell, since we're drawing in mid-air: without a real canvas you'll find it difficult to remember where you've already drawn, leading to some pretty inscrutable sketches. 

Also, since you have to face the person with the table so the camera can track the pen, your drawing is a mirror image of what you want the person to see. I tried to draw the United States for a clue, and California and Florida ended up flipped, making it pretty hard for the other person to recognize.

"Use the screen in order to get you off the screen. Screens can sometimes facilitate interaction with other kids."

Pictionary isn't just a promising AR toy because it's fun to use, or because it fulfills the "A" requirement for a STEAM toy (Arts). It's also promising because it doesn't isolate the person using it, like many AR apps. 

During a panel on STEM/STEAM toys, littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir said that, while research is still ongoing on the effects of prolonged screen time on kids' brains,  "social interaction is a key component of helping the development of kids. And so by inference you can say that if face-to-face interaction is so important, and if the screen is getting in the way of that, then we need to make room for what’s working ... Use the screen in order to get you off the screen. Screens can sometimes facilitate interaction with other kids."

In other words, giving kids toys that revolve around screens isn't bad per se, but it's better if those screens involve work or play with other people. In this case, drawing for and responding to other people. By contrast, Hidden Side's AR app clearly restricts the play to one person, where normally multiple children could build and play together. 

PaiBotz

A lot of parents are looking to cut down on kids' screen time; an entire Toy Fair panel titled "Screenless Is In" was devoted to covering tech toys that don't use screens. So it's safe to say that toys with corresponding AR apps aren't going to be popular with parents unless they combine recreation with learning. 

PaiBotz is one such toy that strikes that balance. It teaches young children about Block-based coding languages and techniques like sequencing and looping. But not just through the AR app shown above, but also through the 150 physical building blocks your kid will use to build and rebuild the robot. 

Intriguingly, during the Pai Robotics demo, I saw that someone from Google had come to check out the little bot as well. He and one of the Pai representatives were having a serious discussion about PaiBotz's calibration issues. 

Google, Apple and Microsoft have engaged in a years-long war to determine AR dominance in the tech marketplace. Google, for instance, is reportedly developing an AR headset designed to be competitive with Hololens 2. We aren't surprised by the idea that Google would look for promising AR toymakers and developers to partner with, and that AR toymakers would want to grab some of that $100+ billion competitive marketshare. 

What the rise of AR means for kids

Technology is already rapidly changing how young children see the world. During a panel, toy business owner Kate Stone discussed how two-year-olds have been seen pinching and zooming magazine pages, not understanding why they were "broken" and not reacting to their touch. 

Toymakers see augmented reality as the perfect way to bridge physical toys and app-loving, screen-addicted children.

Before long, if augmented reality apps and toys continue to proliferate into our daily lives, children will consider seeing holograms into the real world to be the norm. 

The real question is what form all of these AR apps will take. Phil Sage, an inventor at Hasbro who was on the same panel, said that these apps will become more and more multi-modal, incorporating other senses and features beyond AR like voice assistant support. 

Eventually, your child may be able to summon holographic objects into their toy realm simply with their voice. Or, if glasses like Apple AR take off, kids could use AR apps without having to hold a phone in one hand, encouraging freer playtime in an augmented environment. 

• Here are the best AR apps available now

Toy Fair 2019 in New York City had just about everything we could have hoped for - between STEM toys that help kids become the next generation of NASA engineers, to AR toys that offer a new level of interactivity, there was a treasure trove of toys to entertain us throughout the conference.

That said, the only thing it didn't have was Avengers: Endgame toys, which Marvel refused to let the press see. Sorry, no spoilers here!

We ran up and down the halls of the Javits Center looking for the 2019 toys that your kids will be begging you for, the toys that the whole family will enjoy, and the ones that the pop-culture nerd in your life will love - that way, when their birthday rolls around, you'll know just what to buy them.

LEGO Hidden Side

LEGO Hidden Side, due out in August, is an 8-set series that is meant to combine physical play with an augmented app experience for "holistic fun" for kids. Like the LEGOs of yesteryear, each set will cost between $19 and $129. 

Half of the sets are locations—a haunted school, a graveyard, etc... —that they must essentially exorcise via their app; the other half are controllable vehicles that kids can drive around in the app. 

Unlike other connected LEGO sets like Lego Boost or the Lego Batmobile, Hidden Side isn't as dependent on the app for kids to enjoy it. The primary school set, for example, is rife with moving parts that transform it from a regular building into something much more sinister—with no phone required.

If your kids do open the app, though, they'll find some cute minigames to enjoy: Hidden Side essentially makes them ghostbusters as they track down possessed objects by physically interacting with the set's moving parts, drawing out the ghosts, and then battling them in a rail shooter. 

Once they've defeated the ghost, they'll add them to their collection.  

You only need one set to use the app, but each one will allegedly have unique ghosts with different personalities and animations. And the vehicle sets will have entirely different AR games involving moving them around—though we weren't able to test that one out at the show. 

Hot Wheels TechMods

Launching on Indiegogo this April, TechMods are smart racing kits that you will construct yourself. With the free iOS/Android app, you can either drive it around like a regular RC car or use it as a motion-sensitive controller for a variety of video game experiences. It will retail for $50 and ship to backers in mid-2019. 

TechMod has an 8 mph max speed, which gave it plenty of zip as we drove it around the Mattel show floor. But inside the app, its virtual speed only grows as you play. You choose from a variety of modes—survival, race, and treasure hunt—and drive around a small arena, trying to collect points and dodge an increasing number of deadly obstacles. 

Our initial impression is that TechMod has much more replay value than Hot Wheels' more expensive Augmoto AR set we covered at last year's Fair: Augmoto's real-world track limited you to the same path, while your virtual TechMod car is only limited by the number of levels and maps in the app. (As of now, they have 20 survival challenge maps alone.) 

We tried out one of the early challenge levels, which truly was a challenge. As you drive around the obstacle-ridden map and pick up collectibles, each collectible becomes a new harmful obstacle. The TechMoto tracked our motions well, making it seem a bit like a bulky Wiimote or Move controller with wheels. 

Star Wars Lightsaber Academy

Kids have been whacking each other with toy lightsaber replicas for decades in their quest to reenact their favorite Jedi vs Sith duels. Now, parents will be thrilled with Hasbro for making lightsabers that virtually dual with one another—though, let's be honest, kids will hit each other with them anyway. 

Lightsaber Academy launches later this year 2019 for $50, plus $8-$20 for each additional lightsaber. Each hilt has an accelerometer, gyro, barometer and bluetooth tech built in, to track movement and send the data to the iOS/Android app. 

In the app, Jedi instructors like Yoda, Rey and Vader teach children various sword techniques, grading their accuracy up to 100%. We found the tracking of the sword in the app to be impressively accurate, especially with the app surrounded by so many other competing signals. 

Kids can then dual one another in what the Hasbro rep called a "rock-paper-scissors type battle": blocking motions beat attack motions, force focus beats defense, attack beats focus. Winning duals or completing tutorials will improve the kid's rank until they become a Master.

It sounds cerebral in theory, but in practice children will likely just swing wildly until the app names a winner. Of course, if your kids ever grow tired of the app, they can just use the lightsabers as regular toy swords. 

Giiker Super Cube

Rubik's Cubes can be incredibly intimidating for people who haven't tried them. But Xiaomi is trying to demystify learning how to be a Rubik's pro with its new Bluetooth-enabled Super Cubes. 

Already for sale in China and due out in the United States sometime this summer for $50, the Super Cube tracks the movement of the blocks in real time in the connected app. Within the app, newbies can take different tutorials, starting with getting one side to be the same color and progressing in difficulty from there. 

As I followed the app's instructions in the first tutorial, the screen showed the exact real-time location of each color—though there did seem to be a bit of delay between moving a row and seeing it move in the 3D replica.

The app will also record your stats and best times, let you compete against or chat with other Rubik's fans, and complete other Rubik's mini-games beyond just matching all the colors. 

Pictionary Air

Take the Pictionary you know and love, add a light-tracking pen and an AR app, and use the air instead of paper for a canvas. That's the simple premise behind Pictionary Air, which comes out in late 2019 for $20. 

The set comes with 112 double-sided cards, ten clues each, for you to draw and your friends and family to guess. You simply hold down a button on the pen while you're drawing in mid-air; one of your friends, meanwhile, holds up a phone or tablet camera that tracks the movements; and then your sketch will appear on the screen. After each round, you can record the drawer's terrible creations for posterity.

Despite what it sounds like, the Pictionary Air pen was intuitive to use but difficult to master. Without being able to see what you've already drawn, it's difficult to draw straight lines or improve the picture if you forget where in the air you left off. 

Also, if you're facing the person with the tablet, your drawing is a mirror image of what you want the person to see. I tried to draw the United States for a clue, and California and Florida ended up flipped, making it pretty hard to guess. The Hasbro rep cheated and gave me the same clues he gave the woman above, so I don't know how legible I actually was. 

The best option would probably be to cast your tablet to a larger TV, and have the drawer face the TV (and tablet-holder) and see what he or she has created thus far. So if you want to give this to your non-tech-savvy family, you'll probably need to set it up for them. Once you get things rolling, though, it's quite fun.

Carpool Karaoke, the Mic

Fans of James Corden's Carpool Karaoke, or anyone who loves to let their vocal cords loose on family road trips, will find a lot to love about Singing Machine's Carpool Karaoke, the Mic, which will be available later this year for $50. 

Essentially, this Bluetooth-enabled microphone connects to your car's speakers, either via your phone or tablet or via your car radio's Aux port, and then lets you hear your voice over the speakers as you belt out your favorite ballad. 

You're not restricted to any proprietary music app with this Mic: you can simply hook up to the radio and sing along to your local broadcasts. Or, you can find an unoccupied FM channel, then pair the Mic to your favorite app—Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, etc.—and sing along to the road trip playlist.

With the Mic itself, you can adjust the volume or echo of your voice through the car radio, and the Mic's lights will flash in time with the music. 

PowerUp 4.0

Since 2013, PowerUp Toys has been Kickstarting smartphone-connected paper airplanes that you fold yourself, then fly via app, since 2013. Sometime in the fall of 2019, they will launch a new Kickstarter for the 4.0 version. 

This $60 plane, which you will once again have to fold yourself, features two propellers for double the power and more maneuverability; an autopilot-controlled flight feature that makes flying in windy conditions ultra-easy, and new on-board sensors that collect real-time flight performance data. 

Tetris Micro Arcade

 Super Impulse has made a name for itself selling tiny arcade cabinets of classic games like Pac-Man for your desk or tiny-handed toddlers. Now it is releasing business card-sized arcade emulators of classics like Tetris, Missile Command, Centipede, Pac-Man and Pong. They'll be out later this year for $20-25.  

PaiBotz

For kids too young to use the more advanced coding and robotics toys, Pai Technologies is launching PaiBotz, aimed for kids 4+. 

These beginner kits, priced at $99, come with 150 physical blocks for constructing and customizing your bots, so young kids won't spend their entire playtime staring at a screen. Once the bot is built, your kid will use the free iOS/Android app for 30 AR coding puzzles, designed to instruct them in Block-based coding languages and techniques like sequencing and looping.

Artie 3000

A STEM toy that bridges robotics and art, the Artie 3000 opens up to let kids insert their favorite markers, then use remote controls or coding to draw. 

Artie connects to any smart device via a built-in Wi-fi server (no internet connection required), and the built-in app instructs the kid on multiple coding languages, including Blocks, Javascript and Python. 

The SLOW MOTION RACE game

As a runner, nothing will ever be more challenging than a race where you're forced to slow your roll. But that's the amusing premise behind the Slow Motion race game by Hasbro, due to release this autumn. 

For $20, you get two headbands that track your movement via accelerometers. Move too quickly, or make too jerky of a motion, and the headset blares and turns red. You're then required to stop and watch your opponent inch ahead, until the color dies and you're allowed to move again. 

During our "race", we were able to slide forward agonizingly slowly, just ahead of our opponent, only activating the alarm once when we lost our balance. But kids will likely eschew any caution and see how fast they can move while keeping their motion as fluid as possible. 

It's a simple premise, and one that may not keep your kids entertained for too long before they move on to the next toy. But at least it's one of the few tech toys we saw this year that doesn't require kids stare endlessly at screens.

The LIE DETECTOR Game

Sitting across from the Hasbro rep, he asked us solemnly if I had ever picked at a scab and then eaten it. I nervously answered "no" and waited, heart pounding, while the Lie Detector beeped cryptically for a few seconds, and made a positive beep. I had told the truth. 

My pounding heart, thankfully, wasn't tracked by Hasbro's new Lie Detector game, which costs $35 and hits shelves this August. Instead, the device focuses entirely on your voice. And the one time I did lie, it somehow knew from a simple "no" that I hadn't been truthful. 

Hasbro says it uses "Layered Voice Analysis technology" to gauge "emotional reactions" in your voice, and determine whether or not you're hiding anything. You score points every time you tell the truth—or disguise your emotions well enough to convince the machine you've told the truth.

While the box comes with 64 cards with embarrassing questions to ask your friends, you can obviously branch out to whatever horrible line of inquiry you want, which could make this a hilariously ill-advised, friendship-breaking party game of choice.

Next year, Samsung hopes you'll spend thousands of dollars on its new, cutting-edge foldable phone. 

Samsung's Galaxy X smartphone, codenamed "Winner", is a fully bendable and foldable device that, when flat, will be the size of a small tablet, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

The device will launch in early 2019, its sources say. This aligns with previous reports suggesting that Samsung hoped to launch the device during Mobile World Congress in February. 

The Galaxy X will reportedly measure seven inches diagonally when flat; for comparison, the iPad Mini 4 tablet measures 7.9 inches diagonally. To fit in your pocket, Samsung's phone will fold in half “like a wallet”. 

One side of the smartphone will have the primary display , while the back of the device would also feature a secondary "display bar" on one folded side and cameras on the other side. 

Samsung patents and renderings have long pointed to a foldable phone in the works:

In one 2017 patent, Samsung detailed a foldable display that would hinge like a flip phone. In another patent, Samsung showed how the home interface would automatically spread across two screens when the phone is folded. 

The Wall Street Journal’s sources appear to confirm that both of these designs could easily feature in the final product. 

Samsung hopes to target the smartphone to a more hardcore demographic of gamers, the report says, before trying to reach a wider audience later in 2019. However, the rumored price of the smartphone could drive away casual buyers. 

Samsung reportedly wants you to pay more than $1,500 (about £1,150 / AU$2,000) for the device. Neither the Galaxy Note 8 nor the Galaxy S9 Plus come close to this price tag. 

In the same report, the Wall Street Journal also claimed that Samsung's Bixby speaker would be officially announced this August, during the Samsung Unpacked event in New York City.  

A foldable smartphone revolution?

Considering the Galaxy X’s similarities to the foldable (but not bendable) Nintendo 3DS, the split display could certainly appeal as a gaming platform. But the 3DS costs a couple hundred bucks/pounds, and Nintendo specializes in gaming. 

We’ll have to wait and see if enough developers buy into Samsung’s foldable platform and make games specialized for two phone screens instead of one. 

Right now, only one foldable smartphone is on the market: the ZTE Axon M, which has a hinge, but not a bendable display. However, other major tech companies are racing to catch up with Samsung and release their own bendable smartphones. 

Huawei may actually outpace Samsung to launch its own foldable flagship device. The latest rumors suggest Huawei will showcase its still-unnamed flexible phone in November, and will aim for an early 2019 launch. Its device may employ LG’s flexible screen tech. 

Other major firms, on the other hand, look more likely to sell foldable devices by 2020 or later. 

Apple has patented its own foldable displays, but a top analyst believes Apple is targeting a 2020 launch for such a device. Sony and Lenovo, meanwhile, have dropped hints about foldable screens, but we have no patents or insider reports to suggest those will launch anytime soon. 

• 5 reasons you need a foldable smartphone

Mobile email notifications are a great way of reminding you to unsubscribe from dozens of annoying promotional lists. It’s typically less useful for knowing when emails that are actually important have come in. 

Google’s G Suite team announced a plan this week to change that. As part of the recent Gmail redesign, Google unveiled a new feature, currently for iOS only, that ensures your Gmail app only sends you push notifications when “high-priority” emails come in. 

Unlike Outlook, Gmail doesn’t have a high-priority option to label emails. Instead of adding one, Google will use its AI and machine learning tech to categorize your emails and determine which ones you want to read first. 

To enable this option, open your Gmail iPhone app and tap Settings. In the Notifications drop-down menu, you can select “High Priority only” to make only relevant emails appear—at least, relevant based on Google’s criteria. 

If you open your Settings and can’t see the above option, just be patient: Google began rolling out the feature on Thursday and claimed it would only take one to three days to reach everyone.

As for Android users, the G Suite team promised it would make the feature available “soon”, but gave no specific timeline. 

One of many Gmail upgrades

Gmail doesn’t scrape your emails for targeted ads anymore, but it has used AI to redirect your emails into categories like Social and Promotions for some time. The notifications move is a natural next step for the company. 

This feature is only one of many since Google announced its plans to overhaul Gmail at Google IO 2018 last month. 

Its flashiest update: smart compose, another machine learning-enabled feature that examines your previous sent emails to predict what you intend to write. You then have the option to auto-finish your sentences.

You also can snooze emails now, another way to keep your overcrowded inbox manageable. Select an email you don't have time to respond to now, and Gmail will remove it from your inbox and redeliver it at a time that works for you. 

Other new tricks include a Confidential mode that lets you set time limits on how long people can see your emails; smart replies for short, pre-written replies; and attachment clips that let you preview or download attached files without having to open the email. 

Via Engadget

• Here's how to switch to the new Gmail redesign
• Not just a dream: our Google Daydream View review and what you need to know about Daydream VR

Google began rolling out its Google Lens tech to Android phones back in March, allowing third-party smartphone owners to update the Google app to directly integrate Lens into a device's native camera app. 

Now Sony’s latest phones will finally include that option as well. Owners of the Sony Xperia XZ2 and Xperia XZ2 Compact will no longer have to open the Google Photos app to access Lens features, Sony announced this week. 

For now, only English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Italian languages support Lens features. And Sony warns that depending on your market, Xperia XZ2 owners may not have access to Lens just yet. 

Once it is available, you only need to update your Google app via the Play store. You don’t need to update your phone at all. 

Google Lens allows smartphone users to scan people or objects and automatically search Google for more information, like restaurant reviews or the history of a famous landmark. 

Just last week, Google rolled out real-time object recognition for Lens: you no longer have to take a picture to prompt Google to look something up. 

Point your camera at an Nike advertisement, for example, and Google will instantly recognize and transcribe the text, and potentially provide links to Nike’s website. 

Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S7 smartphone families, LG’s V30 series, and the Asus Zenfone AR also support this functionality today. 

And, owners of Huawei, Motorola, Xiaomi, Nokia, ZTE or Vivo phones could also see native Lens support added in the near future. For now, Google continues to be tight-lipped about its release schedule. 

AR Wars: Google vs Apple

Google also added Lens to iOS back in March. But Apple may hope to steal some of Google’s AR thunder next week at WWDC 2018. 

New rumors suggest that Apple could unveil “ARKit 2.0” for iOS 12 on Monday. Apple’s AR ambitions may include AR multiplayer games on iPhones and iPads, but there’s no word yet on whether Apple has plans to take on Lens’ visual search engine.  

Via Android Police

• Xperia XZ2 vs XZ2 Compact: which phone is right for you?

Facebook Messenger is about to make it easier for people from other countries to communicate with one another in Marketplace. 

At the F8 2018 developer conference today, Facebook announced M Translations, a Messenger and Marketplace feature that gives users the option to translate foreign text into their default Messenger language. 

When translatable text comes in, Facebook’s AI will register that the text isn’t in your default language and send you a “Translate to [default language]” pop-up. If you tap it, you’ll receive the option to translate any text sent to you by the account in the future. 

The other person will then receive a notification that you’re translating their text, so they know you can understand them. 

Currently, only English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English translations are available, and only in the US. Facebook stated that “we will launch this functionality in additional languages and countries” in a press release, but didn’t give details on specific languages or a timeframe. 

When asked for further details, a Facebook representative noted the company currently "[doesn't] have a date to share", though it hopes "to roll it out in additional languages/countries soon."

As of now, M Translations will only available for Marketplace transactions, but Facebook plans to update the main Messenger app with M suggestions “in the coming weeks”. 

Translation: business first, fun later

Facebook Messenger may have embedded games, Spotify playlists and tons of funny GIFs, but for Facebook, it’s all about business, which is likely why the Marketplace update was prioritized. 

Facebook's 300,000 chatbots and adverts were built to sell stuff to users across the globe; with this update, Facebook’s business partners will have easier access to a wider selection of potential customers.  

Adding translations will also finally bring Facebook’s chat service closer to  Google Chat’s level for international communication. 

Google has offered translations for Google Chat, and for other Android phone apps like Facebook Messenger, since 2015. 

• 10 things you didn’t know you could do with Facebook Messenger

Waiting for Android Oreo to drop on your Samsung Galaxy? If you bought a phone from the Galaxy S6 lineup, you might be stuck with Android Nougat for the time being. 

On Samsung’s Android Security Upgrades page, they list out all of their devices currently receiving monthly or quarterly security updates, including their smartphones. But they note that this list is “subject to change as support period expires”. 

That support period looks to have expired for the S6 series. The Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Galaxy S6 Active have all been removed from the support page entirely. 

Considering the S6 came out in April 2015, it appears there is a two year cut-off for Android support on Samsung phones. Samsung still promises monthly support for the Galaxy A5, but only if you purchased it in 2016 or later. If you bought it in 2015, you’re officially stuck with Android 7 and its last security patches. 

Samsung S6 users don’t need to ditch their phones immediately. Google’s Nougat OS was updated last December, so it’s not entirely obsolete just yet. And if you wanted to take advantage of Oreo’s newest tech, like AR functionality, you’d need to upgrade to Samsung S8 or later anyway.

Still, it’s disappointing to see Samsung drop support for a phone that hasn’t even been out for three full years. Especially considering the iPhone 5S, which came out in 2013, still gets updates for iOS 11. 

Samsung hasn't officially commented on their decision to drop support for the S6 lineup. We'll update this post if they do. 

• Looking for an upgrade? We've picked out the best phones for you

SpaceX cleared a major hurdle in its goal to launch a network of broadband satellites in low Earth orbit yesterday, when the FCC approved a revised draft of their 2016 proposal. 

Today's news follows the story from last month where Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, launched its first two satellites into orbit during their PAZ mission from Spain. 

Nicknamed Tintin A and B, they temporarily blasted a Wi-Fi-enabled message to the city of Los Angeles.

Now SpaceX can officially plan to launch thousands more satellites from the US, but they’d better book their launchpad schedule well in advance: the FCC requires that they launch half of their 4,425-satellite fleet by 2024—a six-year deadline. 

Current broadband satellites sit tens of thousands of kilometers above the surface; Starlink would place their 4,425 satellites at only 700 miles (1,150 kilometers), then launch another 7500 satellites at only 200 miles (320 kilometers), according to SpaceX’s FCC filing.

Broadband for the masses

So close to Earth’s surface, Starlink satellites would have minimal latency delays, supposedly comparable to current cable and fiber response times. SpaceX VP Patricia Cooper told the US Senate Chamber of Commerce that the network would provide 25ms latency and 1 Gbps speeds. 

FCC chairman Ajit Pai led the unanimous vote approving SpaceX’s proposal. In a statement, Pai said, “Satellite technology can help reach Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach. And it can offer more competition where terrestrial Internet access is already available.” 

The FCC has reserved the right to revoke their license, if SpaceX can’t also obtain permission from the International Telecommunication Union, which controls the radio bandwidths Starlink will use to send signals to the surface. But beyond that, they can proceed full steam ahead. 

SpaceX isn’t the only company hoping to fill up our skies with satellites. OneWeb received FCC permission last year to launch 720 satellites using Amazon’s Blue Origin rockets, and an Apple-Boeing partnership could yield up to 3,000 satellites. 

Satellites vs 5G

Satellite broadband will let people around the world have access to fast internet speeds, which in the past would have required labor-heavy installation of fiber-optic networks stretching to every home—something especially difficult in rural areas. 

In the decade or more it will take to fully roll out their network, SpaceX may be hoping that an Earth-based alternative to cables doesn’t take too much of their future business. 

5G, the next-gen upgrade to our current model, provides 1 Gbps speeds without needing to connect each home to a fiber optic network. Instead, carriers can install fiber optic hubs every few blocks that communicate at incredible speeds with wireless modems. And these hubs apparently have the capacity for all the streaming and downloads that you might need. 

Samsung and Verizon have already begun testing 5G in several cities across the US, and industry experts predict 5G will be the dominant mobile net source by 2025—right around the time Starlink could go online. 

Of course, Starlink will also go to regions where no cable companies would ever install any fiber optics, 5G or otherwise. But to pay for all of these rocket launches, SpaceX will need to make a lot of money on its network; so no doubt he’ll also want plenty of first-world consumers to buy into his product as well. 

Space just got crowded

To launch 2,200 satellites within six years, SpaceX will have to boost slightly more than one satellite per day. That will take monumental resources and planning to achieve on time without the satellites crashing into one another. And competitors like OneWeb will be trying to hit their own targets at the same time. 

After SpaceX proposed its plan, OneWeb petitioned that the FCC reject it, claiming that the volume would inevitably lead to Starlink satellites or delivery rockets crashing into one another, or into OneWeb objects. 

While OneWeb obviously had plenty of motivation for their rival’s proposal to fail, even NASA warned that current safety standards for satellites would no longer apply safely to Starlink, due to the sheer number of satellites it would require. 

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who voted for the proposal, warned of the dangers this could pose, should this rapid schedule risk satellites crashing into one another. 

“As more satellites of smaller size that are harder to track are launched, the frequency of these accidents is bound to increase,” she said in a statement. “Unchecked, growing debris in orbit could make some regions of space unusable for decades to come.”

In response, SpaceX promised to coordinate with NASA, OneWeb, and any other satellite company planning on sharing low-orbit space with Starlink. 

• We've got the latest on the FCC's dismantling of net neutrality and SpaceX's latest Falcon Heavy launch.