Following her Nintendo Labo collaboration with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots (see video above), American singer, songwriter and actress Ariana Grande appears to have acquired her very own Switch. The only problem is, she had to sort out a few things before she could enjoy Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with a friend who was in another location.

Taking to Instagram, Ariana asked her 123 million followers how she could play Mario Kart online with a friend:

“does anybody know how to playmario kart with a friend from different locations onnintendo switch? pls dm me it’s urgent. thank u so much.”

She obviously worked out friend codes needed to be exchanged and a Nintendo Switch Online subscription was required in order to get the race up and running. After this was solved, she posted the following picture acknowledging the “crazy” powers of modern technology:

Machine learning and statistics are playing a pivotal role in finding the truth in human rights cases around the world – and serving as a voice for victims, Patrick Ball, director of Research for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, told the audience at Open Source Summit Europe.

Ball began his keynote, “Digital Echoes: Understanding Mass Violence with Data and Statistics,” with background on his career, which started in 1991 in El Salvador, building databases. While working with truth commissions from El Salvador to South Africa to East Timor, with international criminal tribunals as well as local groups searching for lost family members, he said, “one of the things that we work with every single time is trying to figure out what the truth means.”

In the course of the work, “we’re always facing people who apologize for mass violence. They tell us grotesque lies that they use to attempt to excuse this violence. They deny that it happened. They blame the victims. This is common, of course, in our world today.”

Human rights campaigns “speak with the moral voice of the victims,’’ he said. Therefore, it is critical that statistics, including machine learning, are accurate, Ball said.

He gave three examples of when statistics and machine learning proved to be useful, and where they failed.

Learn more and watch the complete presentation at The Linux Foundation

As new technologies, tools, and platforms spring to life in augmented and virtual reality, a new era of XR design and artistry is unfolding. Today, we announce the release of a project that empowers creators to spend less time explaining, editing, and re-doing XR creations, and more time being creative. Sketch 360, a Microsoft Garage project, is a UWP app  enables designers and artists to sketch and prototype 360 degree VR scenes–now available for free download in the Microsoft Store.

Innovation from Passion

The Microsoft Garage empowers employees to channel their passions into innovations that can, in turn, inspire and enable customers. Creative Experience Engineer Michael Scherotter has been nurturing a passion for using artistry to capture his adventures in traditional journals for over 30 years. “I love to travel and I’ve always found sketching such a great way to capture the essence of a place. Last year, it occurred to me that I might be able to pair my software skills with my love of sketching to build a richer, digital tool to capture the interesting places I’ve visited.”

Michael found it hard to sketch scenes in a classic or even digital notebook and crafted a new tool that would allow him to create digital, panoramic sketches viewable in all directions. “It’s very difficult to freehand draw in 360. You need to draw straight lines curved and you can’t see how your creation turns out until you’ve finished the whole thing.”

While Michael was originally inspired to build Sketch 360 to make the experience of sketching 360 environments more natural, he also quickly realized it may have other creative applications as well. “Sketch 360 is a game changer for designers working in XR,” according to Mike Pell, the Lead Designer for the Microsoft Garage and a big proponent of the possibilities for designers in XR. “This tool unlocks a whole new way to do rapid prototyping to fuel those experiences.”

Create and Prototype VR Scenes in 360 Degrees

As designers create and collaborate on 360 degree scenes, sketching provides a quick way to convey the vision of an end-product to a developer or other team member, paving the way to quickly create multiple directions on a design or make tweaks before moving on to the labor-intensive work of 3D modeling. With Sketch 360, a design team can align on the vision for a VR environment and save hours in changes and re-dos. In addition to VR design, Sketch 360 can be used in a variety of sketching scenarios. “I actually got my start in design at architecture school,” adds Michael. “I can see this being a great tool for architects looking for a digital canvas that brings their ideas to life.” With guided gridlines and a dual, ink/finished product interface, Sketch 360 can be useful both to designers, architects, and game creators prototyping early versions of a finished product as well as the casual user leveraging the canvas to sketch interior decorating vision or even artists using sketch as their medium.

“Sketch 360 is another really exciting tool for designers, just like Microsoft Maquette will be for in-device rapid creation,” shared Tom Mignone, a Program Manager on the Mixed Reality User Experience team and a contributor to another 3D project and Garage Wall of Famer, 3D Models in Office. “We want to empower creators to be more productive with Windows Mixed Reality and this Garage project joins a group of experiences all aimed at that.” Microsoft Maquette is a mixed reality tool for creating immersive prototypes using a PC VR headset. While Maquette strives to make spatial prototyping fast and easy with a focus on 3D objects, Sketch 360 focuses on the setting around those objects. Designers can use these two, complementary experiences to prototype both the environment of a VR experience and the elements within it. Maquette and Sketch 360 are compatible with mutiple PC VR setups including Windows Mixed Reality, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.

Key Features

• Trace along embedded, equirectangular gridlines designed for 360 degree scenes
• See your design come to life with a side-by-side, dual interface
• Create designs in a variety of thicknesses and in any of 30 colors, powered by Windows Ink
• Use pen or touch to make your masterpiece, best on Surface with the Surface Pen
• Adjust the settings for your preferred drawing experience including sketching on the right or left pane, changing gridline opacity and canvas color
• Export your creations as JPEGs with 360 metadata that immersive experience sites like Facebook and Kuula enable or embed in full websites (HTML, CSS, JS, JPEG)
• Tilt and rotate in senor-enabled devices
• Import Sketch 360 files to edit and collaborate on a design
• Work offline or on-the-go, works great on Surface Book 2 or Surface Go
• Created with ease using Windows Ink APIs

Best with Surface

Sketch 360 is powered by Windows Ink and best with Surface Pen. And inspired by sketching while traveling, Sketch 360 is designed around the active, on-the-go designer who uses a Surface Go or Surface Book 2 as their digital canvas.

Try Sketch 360 and Share Your Creations with Us

Sketch 360 is available for free download at the Microsoft Store worldwide. Designers and creators can provide feedback on the experience and share their VR and 360 sketch creations with the Garage by tagging @MSFTGarage and #Sketch360 on Twitter and Instagram.

You might recall how Everspace has been in development for the Switch eShop for some time now. In case you forgot, it was originally released by ROCKFISH Games in 2017 and is a beautiful single player space sim with roguelike features.

If you’ve been wondering when this game running on the Unreal Engine was going to land on the Switch, according to an Everspace: Stellar Edition listing over on the eShop, the space exploration title will be arriving next month on 11th December for $39.99. Below is the official eShop description:

EVERSPACE™ is an action-focused single-player space shooter, combining roguelike elements with top-notch visuals and a captivating story. It takes you on a challenging journey through an ever-changing, beautifully crafted universe full of surprises. Your skills, experience, and talent for improvisation will be tested continuously as you piece together the puzzle of your existence through encounters with interesting characters, each having their own unique part of the story to tell.

During an interview in March, ROCKFISH Games CEO and co-founder Michael Schade said the developer’s mobile background had been very helpful during the development process – with the team able to produce a super smooth game that also looked stunning in handheld mode.

Will you be travelling to the stars when this game arrives on Switch in December? Leave a comment below.

Meteorfall: Journey quickly became one of our favourite card games after it was released in February this year. Since then it’s had countless patches and two major content updates, the most recent of which was in September.

All of this has been for free, and developer Slothwerk is getting ready to add yet more content in a new update coming this December.

Titled ‘The Queen of Shadow’, this new patch is modest but adds some interesting twists to keep the game fresh. Firstly, it adds a new skin ‘Rose, Queen of Shadow’. Not just cosmetic, this new visage also comes with a changed start deck, with 10 new cards added to Rose’s loot table:

• Corruption
• Bewitch
• Acolyte’s Hood
• Enfeeble
• Helm of the Bat King
• Devil’s Bargain
• Soul Chalice
• Feedback
• Amulet of Cosmic Horrors
• Dark Presence

The update also comes with tweaks – a big-fix for Mining Pick and an few UI revisions. The full patch-notes (for all the patches to the game to date, as it happens) can be read here, such as they are.

Are you still enjoying Meteorfall? Will this update make you go back? Let us know!

Shenmue 3 developer Ys Net has ended its crowdfunding efforts after raising over $7.17 million from 81,078 backers. 

As some of you might recall, the studio actually began raising cash back in 2015, when it launched the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter during E3. 

That initial campaign saw 69,320 backers pledge over $6.3 million, helping Ys Net absolutely smash its initial $2 million funding goal.

After concluding its Kickstarter, the dev team opened up a three month “slacker backer” period through PayPal, which we now know resulted in around 12,000 latecomers pledging an extra $800,000 — taking the grand total across all campaigns to $7,179, 510.

“Quite an impressive score, isn’t it!? Seeing the final numbers, all of us here can’t help but feel all over again the immensity of the support everyone has given to make this project come true,” commented Ys Net in a Kickstarter update. 

“There are now less than 10 months left until the release date on August 27, 2019. Everyone on the team is giving it all they got every day in the run-up to the release, and we hope we can continue to count on your support.”