The Avengers was the film that made me fall in love with Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. It was the scene when Agent Coulson died, and our comic book heroes turned on each other — backbiting, blaming, lashing out as their center collapsed. After five and a half movies’ worth of comic book acrobatics and space villains, we were suddenly watching just a handful of scared people in a room, acting all too human.

The Light Stage captures realistic scans of human bodies That simple floating ball requires the kind of hardware that’s rarely seen outside science fiction movies. The setup starts with a square patch of tracking cameras above our heads, safely buffered from the plastic storage tubs and old electronics that line the walls. The cameras can tell that I’m chasing a drone (and tell the drone to get away from me) because we’re both covered in LED markers.

Earlier this month, I shadowed several restaurants throughout New York and talked to restaurant employees across the US to see how they’ve received Google Duplex, the AI that makes life-like calls for reservations on your behalf. Most if not all agreed that those calls sounded unmistakably human — and according to Google’s response to reporting by The New York Times, there’s a 25 percent chance that they were. Google says that a quarter of Duplex calls start with human callers, and 15 percent start with the AI and are later intervened by a person from the Duplex call center.

Projekt Melody swears her body belongs to her — the purple hair, the cat-eared bow, and all the barely there clothing that strategically covers her up. She commissioned it from an artist for $5,000 and even kept the receipts as proof. And for her thousands of fans on Twitch, this is what they see when she streams herself playing Minecraft, watching movies, or just sitting around chatting in her room. It wasn’t until this month that she ran into a problem: the artist, alleging that Melody owed him money, filed a copyright complaint claiming that she didn’t actually own her body — he did.

The Acer Swift 5 is Acer’s top ultraportable laptop. It’s essentially the closest thing the company has to a MacBook Air competitor. It’s thin and light, it looks nice, and it’s powerful enough for most office use cases (though probably not for demanding computing workloads). By and large, the past several Swift 5 modelsI’ve reviewed have been the same package. The chassis is 2.65 pounds and 0.59 inches thick with a sturdy aluminum build.

Amazon just announced a new version of its Alexa-equipped Echo Frames audio glasses at its September 2023 devices event. The new glasses are quite stylish and have some tech improvements, too. One big tech change is improved battery life. At the event, Amazon said that the new Echo Frames have six hours of battery life, and if that holds up in real-world use, that’s up from the just over three hours of active use Dieter Bohn got when he reviewed the original version.

AMD is introducing three new Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards today that will take on Nvidia’s latest RTX 3000 Series of GPUs. There’s the Radeon RX 6800 XT ($649), which goes up against the RTX 3080; the Radeon RX 6800 ($579), which can be compared to the RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 3070; and finally the Radeon RX 6900 XT ($999), which is pitted against Nvidia’s giant RTX 3090.

What does a $2,000 flex in mechanical keyboard form look like? Or a pair of wireless earbuds ripped from a video game’s post-apocalyptic future? What kind of zaniness does a boutique microbrand get up to when it has the freedom to charge premium prices for arthouse-level tech projects? Tucked away in the recesses of mechanical keyboard fandom and a loyal Discord server is Angry Miao — the Zhuhai, China-based company originally founded in 2019 as a small-batch keyboard company and which now says it’s building a “Future Art Community” with serious VC money and feedback from its fans.

It’s been a second since the company has sold a dark version of the trackpad separately. The space grey (which was decidedly lighter than the version on Apple’s store now) version was discontinued early last year. The black and silver version was available — if you bought a Mac Pro. In fact, the Mac Pro product page still says that the “matching trackpad can only be purchased with your Mac Pro” at time of writing.

Apple is continuing its run of streaming sci-fi with the upcoming Dark Matter, a thriller about a man who... kidnaps himself. The first trailer looks appropriately trippy and follows a physicist played by Joel Edgerton who is “abducted into an alternate version of his life.” The show involves him trying to get home while navigating this new multiversal reality, which is powered by a big black box that he invented.