Latest news with #Unity
Mint
5 hours ago
- Business
- Mint
‘DeepSeek moment' in AI vs humans: Artificial intelligence influencers outperform human rivals in livestream sales
Artificial intelligence (AI) avatars are now selling more than real people. A live stream hosted by Chinese tech firm Baidu and popular live streamer Luo Yonghao confirms this. On Baidu's platform, Youxuan, Luo and his co-host Xiao Mu used digital versions of themselves to livestream for over six hours. Their AI avatars helped them earn 55 million yuan (about $7.65 million), CNBC reported. This was much more than Luo's earlier livestream using his real self. The earlier stream lasted four hours and made fewer sales. Luo admitted it was his first time using virtual human technology. 'The digital human effect has scared me ... I'm a bit dazed,' CNBC quoted him as saying. Luo became famous through livestreaming on Douyin (China's TikTok). He has over 24 million followers. He started selling online in 2020 to pay off debts from his failed phone company. The avatars were built using Baidu's AI model, which was trained on five years of videos and copied Luo's humour and style. China's livestreaming and digital avatar industry is growing fast. AI company DeepSeek is gaining attention for creating technology like ChatGPT, but at a lower cost. DeepSeek uses open-source tools and is backed by Chinese tech giant Baidu. AI-powered digital avatars are helping companies save money. They can livestream nonstop, without needing breaks or big production teams. Earlier, companies like Baidu were unsure about using digital humans. But, today, their technology has improved greatly. Since the pandemic, livestream shopping has become popular in China as people looked for new ways to earn money. Livestreamers now earn through commissions and digital gifts. The trend is so strong that Douyin became the second-biggest online shopping platform in China. It has overtaken and competing with market leader Alibaba. 'This is a DeepSeek moment for China's entire livestreaming and digital human industry,' Wu Jialu told CNBC. Wu is the head of research at Be Friends Holding, another company owned by Luo. Neuro-sama, an AI streamer, is gaining popularity on Amazon's platform Twitch. She appears as an anime girl who chats, sings and plays games like Minecraft. Her replies come from a chatbot similar to ChatGPT. Her creator, Vedal, built her using the Unity game engine and works on this project full-time, according to Bloomberg. Despite being an AI avatar, Neuro-sama has become a hit. Around 5,700 viewers watch her streams regularly, making her one of Twitch's top streamers.
Metro
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
You can now watch all 6 episodes of 'brilliantly seductive' period drama free
If you're in search of some period drama escapism with a splash of sauciness to it, six new episodes are waiting for you on a free streaming service. The appropriately-named drama Outrageous is based on the true story of the Mitford sisters, as told in Mary S Lovell's bestselling biography. This adaptation – available on U&Drama – sees the six sisters in 1930s London, as the storm clouds of war gather and the pillars of aristocracy start to crack. The sib at the centre of this drama is Diana, played by Scottish actress Joanna Vanderham, who kicks things off with a very public and very scandalous divorce. She trades in her husband for fascist leader Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), which earned the real Diana the questionable honour of being dubbed 'the most hated woman in Britain'. In between the champagne and country estates, there's political intrigue in the mix as, elsewhere among the sibs, Jessica (Zoe Brough) pursues an interest in communism, while Unity (Shannon Watson) gets into fascism (what a thing to say – the real Unity mixed in Nazi circles), leaving their parents perhaps understandably bewildered. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Meanwhile, we also have Nancy, played by Bridgerton star Bessie Carter, who's unlucky in love but tremendously good with a pen. On the whole, the Mitfords can't keep out of the gossipy headlines – they're the Kardashians of the 1930s – while their mother (Anna Chancellor) and House of Lords cardholder father (James Purefoy) try to make sense of what their daughters are up to. The best-known statement from the Mitford sisters' long-suffering mother, according to the New York Times, was: 'Whenever I see the words 'Peer's Daughter' in a headline, I know it's going to be something about one of you children.' Celebrated and sometimes scandalous, The Times once summarised the sisters as follows: 'Diana the fascist; Jessica the communist; Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur'. Catchy. The six sisters gained much attention for their stylish and – if it wasn't clear already – occasionally controversial lives in high society. Their heyday marked a high-water-mark of the British upper class. Much of what we know about the sisters, and that is dramatised in the show, is because they were prolific letter-writers. They would have probably crushed on social media. If any of that sounds familiar, it might be because you watched the 2021 drama The Pursuit of Love, starring Lily James, which was based on the real Nancy Mitford's novel of the same name, which in turn drew heavily on her sisters' lives. Outrageous has already garnered glowing reviews, with a five-star write-up from Digital Spy, labelling it 'brilliantly seductive television'. Meanwhile, the Radio Times awarded the show four stars, hailing it as 'scandalous' and 'stylish', before adding: 'A series which beggars belief, Sarah Williams's six-part drama could easily be mistaken for a work of fiction, and understandably so.' More Trending The show's writer Sarah Williams said she was drawn to the subject material two decades ago, after a friend told her to read Lovell's biography of the sisters. U&Drama is part of the U on-demand service, which is a free British TV streamer. You can access U&Drama through the U app on your TV or phone, as well as through their website. On the website, you can sign up here for a free account and start streaming all the shows they have on offer – including Outrageous. 'I was completely blown away,' Williams told Vanity Fair, 'because here was everything. Love, death, passion, elopements, imprisonment, suicide.' She added: 'They had passionate opinions, and were prepared to go to jail for what they believed in, were prepared to kill themselves for what they believed in. They were not playing about.' View More » Outrageous is available to stream on U&Drama. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: This 'hidden gem' period drama took me by surprise – I'm now obsessed MORE: Bridgerton star was cut from Brad Pitt's new F1 movie, says director MORE: My date said I had one drink to impress him – so I downed it
Metro
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Survival Kids review - lost in blue on the Nintendo Switch 2
The only full price third party exclusive for the Switch 2 launch is a reboot of Stranded Kids, which Konami has turned into a co-op game. For a long time, we thought we were the only people that remembered Survival Kids on the Game Boy Color (or Stranded Kids as it was known in Europe). The game was always fascinating to us, as its open-ended gameplay arrived years before the modern concept of survival games and yet it's never credited for inspiring the likes of Don't Starve and DayZ. Perhaps it didn't, perhaps it was just parallel evolution, but we were glad to see it return for the Switch 2 launch. We came away quite optimistic about it when we played a press preview earlier in the month, but that was when we were surrounded with other experienced players, who knew what they were doing. Sadly, the reality of playing the game in a more ordinary setting is that it's not the jolly co-op adventure that was intended. Konami and developer Unity were clearly aiming for an Overcooked! style game of organised chaos but while Overcooked! is like a fun kids' party, with everyone running around and having fun, Survival Kids is more like an awkward family get together, where no one is talking and you can't wait to leave. Despite its name, and the franchise's origins, Survival Kids is not a survival game. You do play as a kid stranded on a series of islands (which are actually the backs of giant turtles) but you can't die and you don't have to worry about your health or hunger. Instead, there's a very regimented approach to surviving your predicament, that plays out in an identical manner from one island to the next. There's virtually no story, but you do get constant commentary from comedian Marcus Brigstocke, who does his best to seem interested in what's going on, helped by a script that does have a few mildly amusing lines. Survival Kids can be played by up to four players online or two locally, but the whole thing is also perfectly playable on your own – although that magnifies the amount of backtracking you'll have to endure. You start off, washed up on the beach and have to collect the three principal resources of wood, stones, and vines, in order to build a base camp – which houses a cooking pot and workbench. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. The cooking pot takes both fruit and fish, in order to boost your stamina bar, which runs out whenever you do anything straining, including chopping down trees and dragging objects. The stamina bar, represented as a circle constantly hovering by your character's face, is hugely irritating, as it runs out quickly and slows you down to a crawl, as you wait for it to recharge. It's clearly meant to encourage co-operation, by two people carrying larger objects together, but that just ends up with you getting frustrated at them as well. A lot of things in the game seem purposefully designed to irritate, especially the fixed turrets that appear in later stages, and having to go back to base camp to change tools – since you can only carry one at a time. The problem here is that games like Overcooked! and are based around organisation and simple action skills. Survival Kids has none of the latter and while you do have to organise other players, it's less a case of prioritising tasks and more just encouraging them to focus on helping you. Besides, the game makes it clear what you're supposed to be doing at every point, while your overarching goals are always just activate an elevator and/or rebuild your raft, which gets damaged every single time you go to a new island. Instead of action, Survival Kids is puzzle-based, with walls to knock down with exploding flowers, objects that get blown around by the wind from your fan, and various switches to push and pull. A few of the puzzles are quite clever, in a sub-Zelda kind of a way, but they're not the sort of thing that really lends itself to a four-player co-op game, especially when the intended audience is presumably meant to be children. Having one person climb up a ledge, so someone on the ground can throw items up to you, or moving a platform to get someone to an inaccessible location is mildly satisfying, but it never seems worth the trouble of setting up a co-op game in the first place. If anything, playing in co-op is longer and more time consuming than on your own, because you've got to wrangle the other players into doing what's needed. As well as the umbrella, you get a small variety of other tools, including a fishing rod, fan, and a cannon that shoots objects a long distance, but these require blueprints and, maddeningly, these are 'lost' every time you go to a new island. This combined with the constantly breaking raft and faulty elevators, makes the game far more repetitive than it needs to be, especially as there's not actually that many islands. More Trending For a full-price game this is extremely short and while it forces you to collect more stars (given to you for how quickly you complete an island and how many secrets you find) to unlock the final section it still has little replayability once you know the solution to the various puzzles. As one of only two exclusive third party games for the Switch 2, Survival Kids is a huge disappointment. The co-op options are welcome, but the graphics are extremely unimpressive and clearly could've been done on the original Switch. The very bland, cartoon art style also seems a big mistake, as no kid – certainly none we've tried to get to play it – is going to enjoy what is at heart a fairly slow-paced puzzle game. While there are plenty of ports of big name third party games for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, this is currently the only example of an exclusive title from a major publisher. It's not a very encouraging start though and hopefully not a sign of things to come. In Short: A dull and frustrating co-op puzzle game, that has little chance of entertaining a younger audience and is too simplistic and repetitive for adult gamers. Pros: The basic concept is sound and some of the puzzles are quite clever. Cons: Extremely repetitive game structure. Stamina bar and fixed turrets are hugely irritating and traversal and puzzles just aren't fun. Single-player is even more long-winded. Score: 5/10 Formats: Nintendo Switch 2Price: £44.99Publisher: KonamiDeveloper: UnityRelease Date: 5th June 2025 Age Rating: 3 Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Nintendo can put your Switch 2 permanently offline if you use mods MORE: Games Inbox: Is the next gen Xbox a console or a PC? MORE: Hideo Kojima got upset because people thought Death Stranding 2 was 'too good'
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
French authorities finally promise to intercept small boats in the Channel as shocking figures reveal one migrant reaches Britain every four-and-a-half minutes
French authorities have finally promised to intercept small boats in Channel waters as figures reveal a migrant reached Britain every four-and-a-half minutes last week. A new 'maritime doctrine' set to come into operation next month allows French police officers to block dinghy departures within 300 yards of the shoreline. Currently, they are barred from intercepting any boat once it is in the water. But gendarmes have expressed concerns over their safety when the new policy comes into force. The new rules will be introduced after Channel migrants reaching the UK topped 2,000 in a week for the first time in 21 months, following 489 arrivals on Tuesday. The 2,222 arrivals over seven days meant an average of one migrant reached Britain every four-and-a-half minutes. Police unions are understood to have concerns their members may be required to enter the water wearing 'Kevlar' body armour, which can weigh up to 6lbs and would put them at risk of drowning. Sources said French officers had also raised concerns about being unable to carry firearms if they are required to go into the sea, because salt water would damage the weapons. However, French police colonel Olivier Alary said that his teams 'will be able to do more' once the 300-yard rule comes into force. 'If the rules change to allow us to intervene against these taxi boats, as close as possible to the shore, then we'll be able... to be more effective,' he told the BBC. Marc Musiol, of the police union Unity, said: 'I can understand an average British person watching this on television might say, 'Damn, those police don't want to intervene.' But it's not like that. 'Imagine people on a boat panic and we end up with children drowning. The police officer who intervened would end up in a French court.' He added: 'It's a complicated business, but we can't fence off the entire coastline. It's not the Second World War.' Last week's crossing total was the most since September 2023, when the former Tory government's Rwanda policy was still in legal limbo. It tipped the total since Labour came to power at last July's general election past the 40,000 mark, hitting 40,276. Since the start of this year, 17,034 migrants have reached Britain, up 38 per cent on the same period last year. The figure does not include hundreds more who reached Dover yesterday. Reform leader Nigel Farage said it was 'about time' Britain faced up to the fact it was 'our fault' – rather than France's – that so many migrants head here. 'We will never stop the boats from leaving France,' he told broadcaster Talk. 'They'd need 10,000 soldiers on the beaches to stop every boat from going. The reason they're coming isn't the French's fault, the reason they're coming – it's our fault. It's about time we faced up to that.' His remarks echoed comments from French politicians over recent years which blamed Britain's asylum system, as well as inadequate checks on illegal working, for making this country an 'El Dorado' for illegal migrants. In a new development, people-smuggling gangs have begun delivering inflated dinghies to the shore tied to car roofs rather than inflating them on French beaches, in a bid to reduce the risk of detection by police. It demonstrates how traffickers are constantly evolving their methods. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer cancelled the Tories' Rwanda asylum scheme – which was designed to deter crossings and save lives – as one of his first acts in office. Instead, Labour vowed that investment in law enforcement would solve the crisis. But migrant numbers are soaring and Downing Street this week admitted the situation was 'deteriorating'. A government source said last night: 'Any new tactics to prevent these criminals from facilitating these dangerous journeys are always welcome.' And a Home Office source pointed out: 'On exactly the same days in 2023, 2,375 people arrived – or one every 4.2 minutes – when Rishi Sunak was PM and Robert Jenrick was immigration minister.'
National Post
12-06-2025
- Business
- National Post
Unity Selects Optable to Power New Audience Hub, Unlocking Smarter Targeting for Brand Marketers
Article content MONTREAL — Optable, a pioneering identity management & data collaboration platform, has announced it has been selected by Unity to power its newly launched Audience Hub. Unity's Audience Hub empowers brand marketers to create custom audiences of gamers in a privacy-first way. Article content Unity partnered with Optable to offer brand marketers a new way to reach players using a seamless and secure platform for audience collaboration, precision targeting and omni-channel activation. The Optable team worked with Unity to build an audience mesh that captured Unity's unique player insights in a secure, privacy-first manner and integrated data from leading providers like Experian to build high-intent audiences. Article content 'Unity's Audience Hub represents a new era of omnichannel audience targeting and insights being driven by companies like Unity,' said Yves Poire, co-founder and CEO of Optable. 'By combining the power of Unity's unique reach and understanding of gamers with the interoperability and activation of Optable's platform, we were able to create a powerful solution that enables advertisers to activate richer engagement and measurement opportunities.' Article content 'We created the Audience Hub to help brand marketers unlock the full potential of Unity's [3 billion] gamers in a scalable and privacy-first way,' said Alex Blum, COO, Unity. 'Our collaboration with Optable is a key step in our mission to build a more connected and effective ecosystem for advertisers across the gaming landscape and beyond.' Article content 'Unity operates one of the world's largest gateways to gaming audiences, engaging millions of players daily,' said Crystal Jacques, Vice President of Enterprise Partnerships at Experian Marketing Services. 'Working with Optable enabled Unity to pair their unrivalled reach with Experian's turnkey audiences so that brand marketers can pinpoint unique, highly engaged players across every screen and turn that precision into richer engagement, more substantial ROI, and sustainable growth for advertisers and developers alike.' Article content About Optable Article content Optable is an identity management & data collaboration platform designed for the advertising ecosystem in the age of privacy. Optable makes it easy for media owners, publishers and platforms to harness the power of their first party data by building a comprehensive identity strategy, enriching their audiences with leading data sets, and activating audiences through purpose-built integrations. Optable simplifies difficult data management challenges so that customers can build identity graphs quickly, reduce their overall technology costs, and grow revenue through multiple monetization strategies. To learn more, visit: About Unity Unity [NYSE: U] offers a suite of tools to create, market, and grow games and interactive experiences across all major platforms from mobile, PC, and console, to extended reality. For more information, visit Article content Article content Article content
