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360-degree virtual tours are easier to make with Insta360 and Matterport

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As the world continues to battle COVID-19, the likes of realtors, museums and galleries have been seeking alternative ways to serve their clients or visitors remotely. Matterport even claims that its platform helped create more than twice as many 360-degree virtual tours weekly between early March and mid-August, and it’s hoping to continue this momentum by expanding its list of compatible 360 cameras.

Following the Insta360 One X, Ricoh Theta V and Ricoh Theta Z1 integrations last year, Matterport has now added the newer Insta360 One R camera to the beta release of its Capture app, with full integration due in October. This gives users a fourth alternative choice to Matterport’s very own Pro2 Professional 3D Camera, which produces high quality 360 shots but falls short on portability and price — it’s currently asking for around $3,000.

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Virgin Galactic’s last round of SpaceShipTwo tests begins October 22nd

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If all goes well, the two tests will be the last before Virgin’s space tourism starts in earnest. It hopes to fly company founder Sir Richard Branson into space sometime in the first quarter of 2021, effectively kicking off the company’s tourist business. Not that you’ll want to rush to the front of the line. With tickets costing $250,000 each (and possibly more), Virgin Galactic’s initial service will cater solely to wealthy people eager to say they’ve been to space.

This will be the first spaceflight from Spaceport America, and will be the first since a February 2019 test. A lot is riding on these last tests besides Virgin’s pride. The company is still bleeding money, with a net loss of $63 million in the second quarter of 2020. It can’t really recoup its losses until it’s serving paying customers, and that means finishing its pre-service tests in a timely fashion.

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China says it landed a reusable spacecraft after a two-day flight

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Xinhua said only that the craft represented an “important breakthrough” in China’s development of reusable spacecraft that could provide a cheaper, more convenient solution for the “peaceful use of space.” In other words, it might lower the costs of delivering payloads into space and allow for quicker turnaround times.

There are details for the rocket that launched the space plane, at least. China said it deployed the reusable vehicle using the Long March 2F, a veteran rocket system with a first launch in November 1999. The new machine clearly isn’t ready to take off by itself — it needed the help of a well-established mode of transportation to reach orbit.

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Amazon bans foreign sales of plants in US after mysterious seed deliveries

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Tens of thousands of Americans have received mysterious seed shipments in the past few months. Most have been postmarked as coming from China and have often been falsely labeled as another product. At least some of them were potentially harmful to US agriculture, including noxious weeds, plant diseases and even pests.

The US is working with China to track down the seed sources. This isn’t necessarily an attack — one main theory suggests the seeds are part of a “brushing” scam where vendors pay people (“brushers”) to order cheap products and write bogus reviews to spur sales. Amazon maintained that seed deliveries from its site were real orders delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s investigating possible links between its site, the packages, and possible brushing.

Amazon’s crackdown might not amount to much if the seed mailers are using other services. Even so, this reflects the company’s increasingly active response to dodgy products and orders. It doesn’t want to be held responsible for problematic shipments, and it’s apparently willing to lose potential sales rather than risk future incidents.

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Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra gets a whopping $300 discount at Amazon

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All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. If you buy something through one of the links on this page, we may earn an affiliate commission. Pricing and availability are accurate as of the time of publication but are subject to change.

Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra is normally one of the most expensive phones you can get, but it might be considerably more reasonable if you act quickly. Amazon is offering a daily deal on the unlocked S20 Ultra with 128GB of storage that lowers the price to $1,099, or a substantial $300 off its usual cost. You can theoretically get the flagship for less if you trade in a device through Samsung, but this is the lowest price we’ve seen without any catches.

Buy Galaxy S20 Ultra on Amazon – $1,099

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After Math: Fast cars, discount scooters and hopping spacecraft

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Then again, why spend tens of thousands of dollars on an electric muscle car when you can spend ones of thousands on an internet-connected treadmill that continually shouts at you as you run?

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Engadget

The company whose founder died because he drove their product off a cliff wants to assure you that this vehicle is actually totally safe, will very much stop when you tell it to and is now half off at Amazon. Consume, plebes, as is your duty.

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Elon Musk’s plan to outfit the world’s population with brain chips will probably (hopefully) will never get off the ground but SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft has proven that it can. Twice now. Woot, who’s ready to go die on Mars so a billionaire can brag about being smart?

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Engadget

The COVID pandemic has thoroughly exposed a number of glaring societal inequities since it’s start at the beginning of the year but perhaps none more-so than the digital divide. While wealthy families have no issue attending online-only classes, far fewer working class folks can claim the same. That’s why T-Mobile is stepping in to help provide free internet to 10 million households nationwide.

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Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ will self-regulate to avoid India censorship

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The Indian government has been hesitant to censor streaming services and would rather they keep themselves in check. This theoretically keeps officials happy — they don’t have to worry as much that parents will inadvertently play inappropriate movies for their kids, or that there will be no way to report a TV show.

Services like Netflix already honor age ratings in other countries. However, it’s rare for these internet-focused outlets to unite on a rating system — they’ve clearly determined that it’s easier to work with each other than to have the government step in.

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Twitch will shut down its live karaoke game on January 1st

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Twitch Sings will bid karaoke fans farewell after 2020. The Amazon subsidiary has announced that it’s shutting down the live karaoke game on January 1st, 2021, less than two years after it was officially launched. In its announcement, Twitch says it decided to close the platform to “invest in broader tools and services that will help support and grow the entire music community on Twitch.”

Streamers can play Twitch Sings by choosing one of the game’s available songs, giving their fans the power to choose what they should sing or asking friends or fans to join them for duets. As PC Gamer notes, though, the Twitch Sings channel only has 161,000 followers, even though the Music category it’s under has 3.6 million. It sounds like the platform decided to redirect its resources, because the game wasn’t exactly contributing to its growth in the music department.

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Electronic skin reacts to pain like a human

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Electronic skins can already react to touch, but they’re not much good at reacting to the jabs and burns that cause pain. That’s a problem for prosthetics and robots that are supposed to have human-like responses. They may be more sensitive in the future, though. RMIT University researchers have developed an artificial skin (via SciTechDaily) that reacts to pain much like humans do. It would provide “near-instant” feedback if pressure and temperatures hit levels that would make someone yelp.

The wearable prototype is made of stretchable, extremely thin electronics (oxides and biocompatible silicone) with pressure sensing, temperature-reactive coatings and brainlike memory cells. It’s subtle enough to communicate the difference between gently poking yourself with a pin versus a painful jab, researcher Md Ataur Rahman said. The design mimics the neurons, neural pathways and receptors that guide human senses.

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Microsoft details how it will phase out Flash support in Edge after 2020

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As of summer 2021, Microsoft will remove the Flash-related developer frameworks, group policies and user interfaces from legacy Edge and IE11 through cumulative updates across multiple Windows versions, including Windows 10 and 8.1.

Corporate customers that need Flash will still have options. Edge will let Flash run as a plugin through the Internet Explorer mode. You’ll switch away from the Microsoft-supplied Flash code, though, and you won’t get Microsoft’s support as a result.

Microsoft doesn’t have much choice about the primary end-of-2020 cutoff. Google is removing Flash support from Chromium, the underlying engine for the current version of Edge, around the same time. Adobe has added that it will tell people to uninstall Flash well before that change happens. It’s nonetheless good to know just when Microsoft will drop the web technology — and you probably won’t miss it given its obsolescence and security issues.

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