In today’s fast-paced world, our smartphones have become more than just communication tools. They are our personal assistants, entertainment hubs and even fitness coaches. With the power of technology at our fingertips, android devices offer countless ways to make our lives more convenient and enjoyable. From streaming our favorite shows to exploring new hobbies, the possibilities are endless. As we dive into this article, we’ll explore some of the most innovative ways to utilize your Android device, making your leisure time more fulfilling and exciting. Whether you’re a movie buff, a gaming enthusiast, or someone seeking mindfulness, there’s something here for everyone. Read on to embark on this journey of discovery and see how these small devices can significantly enhance our everyday experiences, making leisure time a delightful part of our lives.
Gaming anywhere
For those who enjoy the thrill of gaming android devices offer an exciting world of possibilities. With platforms like Hajper, players can access a wide range of casino games right from their devices. Imagine sitting in a cozy cafe, sipping your favorite drink and feeling the excitement of a virtual casino at your fingertips. The convenience of playing on your Android device means you can enjoy a quick game during your lunch break or unwind after a long day. A player recently recounted how they hit the jackpot while waiting for their coffee, turning an ordinary day into an extraordinary one. The user-friendly interface and seamless navigation make it easy for players to switch between different games, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable gaming experience wherever they are.
Streaming on the go
Gone are the days when watching a movie required a trip to the theater or a DVD rental. With the advancement of technology, android devices have brought entertainment rights to our pockets. Streaming apps have revolutionized how we consume content, allowing us to watch our favorite movies and TV shows anytime, anywhere. These apps often offer a wide variety of genres, catering to all tastes and preferences. Whether you’re on a long commute or lounging at home, your Android device can provide endless hours of entertainment. So, next time you find yourself with some downtime, why not explore the vast library of content available at your fingertips and indulge in a cinematic experience?
Fitness tracking
Staying fit and healthy has never been easier, thanks to the array of fitness apps available for Android devices. These apps can track your workouts, monitor your progress and even suggest personalized routines to meet your fitness goals. These apps can even be used to train for a marathon, helping people find motivation in tracking their daily runs and seeing improvements over time. Your Android device can be your personal trainer, offering guidance and support as you work towards a healthier lifestyle. From yoga sessions in your living room to intense cardio workouts, there’s an app for every fitness level and interest. The convenience of having a fitness tool in your pocket means you can work out whenever it suits you, making it easier to stay committed to your fitness journey.
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E-books and audiobooks
If you’re an avid reader or someone who enjoys listening to stories, your Android device can be a treasure trove of literary delights. With e-books and audiobook apps, you can carry an entire library in your pocket, ready to dive into whenever you have a moment to spare. This can make things like tackling you ever-growing reading list easier by giving you the ability to turn your daily commute into an opportunity to explore new worlds. Whether you prefer reading on a screen or listening to a captivating narrator, these apps provide a convenient way to enjoy books without the need for physical copies. So, whether you’re lounging by the pool or taking a break at work, you can immerse yourself in a good book and let your imagination roam free.
Virtual travel
Traveling the world and discovering new places has always been a dream for many, but not everyone has the time or resources to do so. Luckily, augmented reality (AR) apps have made it possible to explore distant lands right from your Android device. These apps use your phone’s camera to overlay digital information onto the real world, creating an interactive and immersive experience. You can even use an AR app to explore ancient ruins from their living room, feeling like an intrepid adventurer without leaving home. Whether you’re interested in historical landmarks or natural wonders, these apps can transport you to new locations, offering a taste of adventure and discovery. It’s a fascinating way to learn about different cultures and destinations, broadening your horizons and sparking your wanderlust.
Photography and editing
With the impressive cameras on modern Android devices, capturing stunning photos has never been easier. But the magic doesn’t stop there. Photography and editing apps allow you to enhance and transform your images, turning everyday snapshots into works of art. Someone who is an amateur photographer shared how they used an editing app to create a stunning portfolio of travel photos, capturing the essence of each destination with just a few taps. Whether you’re a seasoned photographer or a casual snapper, these apps offer a range of tools to adjust lighting, add filters and perfect your shots. With the ability to edit and share your photos instantly, your Android device becomes a portable studio, allowing you to unleash your creativity and share your vision with the world.
Staying connected
In an increasingly digital world, staying connected with friends, family and colleagues is more important than ever. Video calling apps have made it possible to bridge the distance, bringing people together no matter where they are. These apps can be used to catch up with family members abroad, helping you enjoy face-to-face conversations despite being miles apart. Whether it’s a casual chat with a friend or a business meeting with a client, your Android device can keep you connected with just a few taps. These apps offer a range of features, from group calls to virtual backgrounds, making online interactions more engaging and enjoyable. So, whether you’re organizing a virtual get-together or networking with professionals, video calling apps ensure that you’re always just a call away from the people who matter most.
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Language learning
Learning a new language can be a rewarding and enriching experience, opening up new opportunities for travel, work and personal growth. With language learning apps on your Android device, you can embark on this journey at your own pace and convenience. For example, it’s common to use one of these apps to learn a new language before a trip abroad, making it easier to connect with locals and navigate the country. These apps often incorporate interactive lessons, quizzes and real-life scenarios, making language learning engaging and effective. Whether you’re a beginner or looking to brush up on your skills, your Android device can be your language tutor, helping you expand your horizons and communicate with people from different cultures.
Meditation and mindfulness
In a world that often feels hectic and overwhelming, finding moments of peace and relaxation is essential for our well-being. Meditation and mindfulness apps can guide you through practices that promote stress relief and mental clarity, helping you find balance in your daily life. With guided meditations, breathing exercises and mindfulness tips, these apps offer a variety of tools to help you unwind and recharge. Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or new to mindfulness, your Android device can be a valuable companion on your journey to a calmer and more centered life.
Music production
For music enthusiasts and aspiring producers, android devices offer a range of apps that make music creation accessible and fun. Whether you’re composing a new track or experimenting with beats, these apps provide powerful tools to bring your musical ideas to life. If you are passionate about music, this production app can be used to create original tracks, collaborate with other musicians online and share their work with the world. With virtual instruments, mixing tools and editing capabilities, your Android device becomes a portable studio, allowing you to explore your creativity and develop your unique sound. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned musician, these apps offer endless possibilities for musical expression and innovation.
Shopping and bargains
Shopping has evolved significantly with the rise of online platforms and your Android device can be your gateway to finding the best deals and discounts. Shopping apps offer a convenient way to browse products, compare prices and make purchases from the comfort of your home. Many people score a fantastic deal on a gadget they’ve been eyeing, thanks to a price comparison app that alerts them to a sale. Whether you’re hunting for fashion, electronics, or household items, these apps can help you save time and money, ensuring you get the best value for your purchases. With features like wish lists, notifications and secure payment options, shopping apps make the online shopping experience seamless and enjoyable.
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Personal finance
Managing your finances effectively is crucial for achieving your financial goals and mobile banking apps can be a valuable tool in this endeavor. These apps allow you to track your spending, set budgets and monitor your accounts with ease. For example, if you want to save for a vacation, you can use a budgeting app to track expenses and identify areas where you could cut back, making your dream trip a reality. Whether you’re managing everyday expenses or planning for the future, your Android device can help you stay organized and in control of your finances. With features like expense categorization, bill reminders and financial insights, these apps provide a comprehensive view of your financial health, empowering you to make informed decisions and achieve your financial aspirations.
Netflix has released the first trailer for , a post-apocalyptic road from Marvel (and Community) mainstays The Russo Brothers. The adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s 2018 graphic novel is set in a retro-futuristic version of the ’90s after a robot uprising. It tells the story of Michelle, an orphaned teenager (Millie Bobby Brown) who ventures across the west of the US to look for her younger brother with a smuggler (a mustachioed Chris Pratt) and a pair of robots.
The movie’s look draws heavily from , right down to the oversized VR helmets. The robots, in particular the one accompanying Michelle, have a cartoon-inspired aesthetic that wouldn’t look out of place in Fallout. A large teddy bear robot can be seen as part of a parade of machines, while our heroes appear to face off against a massive one that looks a little like Sonic the Hedgehog.
Meanwhile, the whole “slowed down iteration of a popular song in a movie trailer” thing might have jumped the shark with the version of Oasis’ “Champagne Supernova” that plays over the top of this. It fits the ’90s setting, of course, but I couldn’t help but laugh as soon as I recognized it.
The movie has a hell of a cast. Alongside Brown and Pratt, it stars Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito and Stanley Tucci. The Electric State hits Netflix on March 14.
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Zyphra Technologies, the company working on a multimodal agent system combining advanced research in next-gen SSM hybrid architectures, long-term memory and reinforcement learning, just released Zyda-2, an open pretraining dataset comprising 5 trillion tokens.
The offering comes as the successor of the original Zyda dataset. It is five times larger in size and covers a vast range of topics and domains to ensure a high level of diversity and quality – which is critical for training robust and competitive language models.
But, that’s not the user profile of Zyda-2. There are many open datasets on Hugging Face for training cutting-edge AI models.
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What makes this dataset unique is that it has been distilled to possess the strengths of the top existing datasets and eliminate their weaknesses.
This gives organizations a way to train language models that show high accuracy even when operating across edge and consumer devices on a given parameter budget.
The company trained its Zamba2 small language model using this dataset and found it to be performing much better than those trained with other state-of-the-art open-source language modeling datasets on HF.
What does Zyda-2 bring to the table?
Earlier this year, as part of the effort to build highly powerful small models that could automate a range of tasks cheaply, Zyphra went beyond model architecture research to start constructing a custom pretraining dataset by combining the best permissively licensed open datasets – often recognized as high-quality within the community.
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The first release from this work, Zyda with 1.3 trillion tokens, debuted in June as a filtered and deduplicated mashup of existing premium open datasets, specifically RefinedWeb, Starcoder C4, Pile, Slimpajama, pe2so and arxiv.
At the time, Zyda performed better than the datasets it was built upon, giving enterprises a strong open option for training. But, 1.3 trillion tokens was never going to be enough. The company needed to scale and push the benchmark of performance, which led it to set up a new data processing pipeline and develop Zyda-2.
At the core, Zyphra built on Zyda-1, further improving it with open-source tokens from DCLM, FineWeb-Edu and the Common-Crawl portion of Dolma v1.7. The original version of Zyda was created with the company’s own CPU-based processing pipeline, but for the latest version, they used Nvidia’s NeMo Curator, a GPU-accelerated data curation library. This helped them reduce the total cost of ownership by 2x and process the data 10x faster, going from three weeks to two days.
“We performed cross-deduplication between all datasets. We believe this increases quality per token since it removes duplicated documents from the dataset. Following on from that, we performed model-based quality filtering on Zyda-1 and Dolma-CC using NeMo Curator’s quality classifier, keeping only the ‘high-quality’ subset of these datasets,” Zpyphra wrote in a blog post.
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The work created a perfect ensemble of datasets in the form of Zyda-2, leading to improved model performance. As Nvidia noted in a separate developer blog post, the new dataset combines the best elements of additional datasets used in the pipeline with many high-quality educational samples for logical reasoning and factual knowledge. Meanwhile, the Zyda-1 component provides more diversity and variety and excels at more linguistic and writing tasks.
Distilled dataset leads to improved model performance
In an ablation study, training Zamba2-2.7B with Zyda-2 led to the highest aggregate evaluation score on leading benchmarks, including MMLU, Hellaswag, Piqa, Winogrande, Arc-Easy and Arc-Challenge. This shows model quality improves when training with the distilled dataset as compared to training with individual open datasets.
“While each component dataset has its own strengths and weaknesses, the combined Zyda-2 dataset can fill these gaps. The total training budget to obtain a given model quality is reduced compared to the naive combination of these datasets through the use of deduplication and aggressive filtering,” the Nvidia blog added.
Ultimately, the company hopes this work will pave the way for better quality small models, helping enterprises maximize quality and efficiency with specific memory and latency constraints, both for on-device and cloud deployments.
Teams can already get started with the Zyda-2 dataset by downloading it directly from Hugging Face. It comes with an ODC-By license which enables users to train on or build off of Zyda-2 subject to the license agreements and terms of use of the original data sources.
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TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just a week away. Our beefed-up Startup Battlefield 200 is a major highlight. Two hundred companies have been hand-selected by the TechCrunch editorial staff to grace the expo hall, 20 of which will launch their company for the first time live on our stage.
Nail-biting pitches live on the Disrupt Stage, make or break hardware and software demos. It’s where legends are made. Throughout it all, we’re incredibly grateful for the expertise of some of the top VCs in the world to tease out the cream of the crop. After an initial, thorough evaluation, five companies are selected to pitch once again in the Startup Battlefield Final on October 30. For this, we enlist the sharpest, most experienced venture capitalists we can find, all of which run a huge fund.
Learn more about these investors below and don’t miss the chance to learn from their expert insights and discover the crucial traits that lead to startup success, only at Disrupt 2024, taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28-30.
Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner, Mayfield Fund
Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner, leads the firm and drives its Cognition-As-A-Service (CaaS) and GenAI cognitive plumbing focus. This approach emphasizes investing in the infrastructure layers behind AI-driven companies and technologies and draws from his deep experience in previous paradigm shifts as founder of VXTreme /Microsoft Windows Media in the Web era and investor in infrastructure leader Hashicorp in the cloud era.
Under his leadership, Mayfield has raised eight U.S. funds and guided over 80 companies to positive outcomes. During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 60 companies, of which 18 have gone public (including Lyft, Poshmark and SolarCity) and 27 have been acquired.
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Navin has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors fifteen times, including being named in the Top Five in 2020, 2022, and 2023. Navin’s investments have created over $120 billion in equity value and over 40,000 jobs.
An alumnus of Stanford and IIT Delhi, Navin is a philanthropist supporting various causes and a serial entrepreneur with notable startups like VXtreme and iBeam Broadcasting.
Chris Farmer, CEO, Partner, and Co-founder, SignalFire
Chris Farmer is the CEO, Partner, and co-founder of venture fund SignalFire, a $2.1 billion AI-native early-stage venture firm.
A decade ago, Farmer pioneered the use of data and AI would let VCs source better investments while scalably helping portfolio companies. So Farmer built Beacon, SignalFire’s in-house AI platform, with the help of Google veterans, Stanford AI PhDs, and feedback from 500 founders on what they really needed. Now Beacon crunches a half trillion data points to rank over 650 million people in the tech ecosystem on talent and hireability to assist portfolio companies with recruiting and go-to-market.
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At SignalFire, Farmer has led investments in companies like Grammarly, Frame.io, ClassDojo, and Stampli. The firm writes lead checks from seed to Series B with a focus on sectors including health and life sciences tech, developer tools, cybersecurity, and vertical AI SAAS.
Previously, Farmer was a successful entrepreneur, spearheading the turnaround of wireless-enabled SaaS company Skybitz, preparing it for its acquisition by Telular Corporation. Farmer built one of the first technologies for startup investment sourcing while at Bessemer Venture Partners in 2007 to track the new Apple App Store. He then joined General Catalyst, where he led seed investing in iconic companies like Alation, Coinbase, Discord, Fivetran, Getaround, Segment, Stripe, and Zapier.
Most recently, Farmer launched SignalFire’s AI Lab to handpick high-potential founders and partner them with top corporations in their sector as design partners, pilot customers, and training data providers.
Dayna Grayson, Co-founder & General Partner, Construct Capital
Dayna Grayson is Co-founder and General Partner of Construct Capital, an early-stage venture firm that invests in extraordinary founders building technology to transform the most foundational industries of our economy from manufacturing to mobility. Dayna was one of the first venture capitalists to turn her attention to transforming these sectors of our economy through software-based models. She backed companies creating new advances in manufacturing, automation, and vertically integrated consumer brands. During her time as a partner at NEA (2012-2020), she was the lead investor from the earliest stages and was on the board of companies including Desktop Metal (2015 – today), Tulip (2017 – 2020), Onshape (acqd by PTC) (2013-2019), and Framebridge (acqd by Graham Holdings) (2014-2020) among others. She also led investments in Guideline, Formlabs, Evenly and Neuralmagic.
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At Construct, along with her co-founder Rachel Holt, Dayna is exclusively focused on early stage investments and investing behind the accelerating changes in foundational industries that together make up half our economy’s GDP are failing to meet customer expectations. Some of their investments include Copia, Veho, Hadrian, The Rounds, and Verve Motion.
Dayna started her career in product development and led design efforts at Blackbaud [BLKB], the leading global provider of software to nonprofit organizations, as the company grew to over $130 million in revenue and completed a successful public offering and was an investor at North Bridge Venture Partners from 2007-2012.
She is a graduate of the University of Virginia (Systems Engineering) and Harvard Business School, where she serves as a venture partner today.
Known for her inception stage investments that range from marketplaces to highly technical companies, Ms. Miura-Ko’s investments have earned her repeat appearances on the Forbes Midas List and The New York Times list of top twenty venture capitalists worldwide. At Stanford University—where she received her Ph.D. for her work on mathematical modeling of cybersecurity—she is a lecturer in engineering, teaching on topics from blockchain to intelligent growth for startups. In addition, she is a co-director of the Stanford Mayfield Fellows Program, which helps train undergraduates to become technology leaders.
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Ms. Miura-Ko is a co-founding member of AllRaise, an organization dedicated to increasing the success and prevalence of female funders and founders. Ms. Miura-Ko received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Yale. As an alumna, she has served on the School of Engineering & Applied Science Leadership Council and as a non-trustee member of the Corporation Committee on Investments. She was elected an alumni fellow in 2019.
Hans Tung, Managing Partner, Notable Capital
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital and has invested in early-stage investments across the global digital economy. He has partnered with top founders from everywhere in e-commerce and fintech where the US is a key end-user market. Hans’ consumer internet portfolio has included notable companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Ibotta, Peloton, Poshmark, Quince, StockX, and TikTok.
Don’t miss the battle at Disrupt 2024!
The Startup Battlefield winner, who will walk away with a $100,000 equity-free prize, will be announced at Disrupt 2024 — the startup epicenter. Join 10,000 attendees to witness this groundbreaking moment and see the next wave of tech innovation.
Instagram is launching several new features designed to protect teens from sextortion scams, which occur when scammers threaten to share intimate images of victims unless they receive a payment or more photos.
One guardrail that’s rolling out soon will prevent people from screenshotting or screen recording disappearing images or videos sent in a private message. If the sender enables replays of the image or video, Instagram will block people from opening them on the web. This won’t stop scammers from capturing the image or video by recording it with another device, however.
Starting today, Instagram will begin using certain indicators, like how new an account is, to detect scammy behavior as well. The platform will then prevent these accounts from sending follow requests to teens by blocking their request or moving it to the teen’s spam folder.
It’s also testing a safety notice in Instagram and Messenger that will alert teens if the person they’re talking to is located in a different country, as sextortion scammers often lie about their location.
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In addition, Instagram will now start blocking suspicious accounts from viewing the following or followers lists of their victims, which sextortion scammers can use for blackmail. Instagram will similarly prevent suspect accounts from seeing the lists of accounts that have liked a target’s posts, the photos they’re tagged in, and other users tagged in their photos.
To protect kids from viewing obscene photos, Instagram is launching a feature that will automatically detect and blur nude images for users under 18. Instagram started testing this filter in April, and it will be enabled for teens globally by default. Other safety measures coming to the platform include an option to chat with the Crisis Text Line in the US if users report sextortion or child safety issues. It will also show an educational video to teens in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia to spread awareness about sextortion scams, which are on the rise.
This suite of features comes as part of Meta’s broader efforts to make its platforms safer for kids. Last month, Instagram announced that it would start putting all teens into more private accounts with certain safety settings enabled by default, like restricted DMs and Sleep Mode to silence notifications at nighttime.
Independent power producers Vistra , Constellation Energy and Talen Energy are positioned to benefit from a “paradigm shift” in electric demand from artificial intelligence data centers, according JPMorgan. The investment bank initiated coverage of the stocks Thursday with overweight ratings. Shares of the three power companies are poised for more upside even after their tremendous rally this year, according to a team of analysts led by Jeremy Tonet. “We see structural tailwinds, including manufacturing onshoring, broader electrification trends (transportation, heating, and more), as well [as] data center development underpinning a paradigm shift in power demand,” Tonet and his team told clients in research report. Power supply in competitive electricity markets will not keep pace with demand, enabling the three companies “to capture outsized margins for an extend period of time,” the analysts wrote. Demand from tech companies for carbon-free power to drive their data centers will transform nuclear power and enable its owners to “command a substantial premium,” they wrote. Vistra is JPMorgan’s top pick with a price target of $178, suggesting upside of 31% from Wednesday’s close of $135.69 per share. The Texas-based power producer has already more than tripled this year, soaring 252%. Vistra can offer natural gas- and nuclear-fueled power to data center customers. With half of its gas generation in the Texas ERCOT grid, Vistra can also help fill a potential 40 gigawatt supply gap in the Lone Star State by 2030, according to JPMorgan. VST 1Y mountain Vistra shares over the past 12 months. Meanwhile, Constellation’s industry leading nuclear fleet is well positioned to continue capturing long-term power contracts with data center developers at premium prices, according to JPMorgan. Its decision last month to restart Three Mile Island after signing a power purchase agreement with Microsoft was an industry milestone. The investment bank has a price target of $342 on Constellation, implying 22% upside from Wednesday’s close of $279.80 per share. Constellation’s stock has more than doubled this year. CEG 1Y mountain Constellation Energy shares over the past 12 months. Finally, Talen’s multi-decade agreement with Amazon Web Services to power a data center campus with electricity generated at the Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania could help send the stock higher if it delivers the full 960 megawatts of power to AWS, according to JPMorgan. Susquehanna also offers additional power that can be contracted. JPMorgan has a price target of $268 on Talen shares, suggesting upside of nearly 57% from Wednesday’s close of $171.05. Talen’s stock, too, has more than doubled this year. TLN 1Y mountain Talen Energy stock over the past year
Unity has announced that Unity 6, the latest version of its cross-platform game engine, is now available worldwide.
Unity 6 can be downloaded here, and is the company’s “most stable and best-performing version of Unity” yet that has been built, tested, and refined in partnership with game developers around the world.
According to Unity, the updated software will allow developers to create games much faster and more efficiently than ever before and comes with new features like end-to-end multiplayer workflows, tools that target the mobile web, alongside new graphics capabilities that move workloads from the CPU to the GPU, improving CPU performance by up to 4X in internal.
Unity has also shared its plans for the engine post-launch, confirming that it will be “dedicating long-term product and engineering resources to Unity 6” to enhance features and add new functionality, while continuing stability.
“We are relentlessly focused on delivering tools to help game developers build games more quickly and efficiently while also facilitating innovation,” said Matt Bromberg, President and CEO of Unity. “We’re going to do everything we can to ensure that Unity 6 is at the heart of game development for years to come.”
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Alongside the launch of Unity 6, the company has also introduced some brand-new learning resources for developers, like Time Ghost, the latest Unity Originals real-time cinematic demo which includes advancements in environment building and character design, as well as Megacity Metro, a demo that showcases how to build a 100+ player cross-platform multiplayer game.
“Unity 6 gives our global multi-functional team the stability and scalability we need. The improved performance combined with features like the new WebGPU graphics API and the seamless live services integration make our workflow much more efficient and our production quality top-tier,” said Josh Loveridge, managing director of Stratton Studios.
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“It’s been a game-changer while developing PGA TOUR Rise. We’ve truly been able to push the boundaries of creativity at every step of the development pipeline.”
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