In Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, you’ll be connecting all of Australia to the Chiral Network. Along the way, you’ll find a few optional facilities. One of them belongs to someone called the Ghost Hunter. If you come across this one early, you won’

From the Weird Department: Cody Gindy decided to create a scene using only Suzanne as the base primitive. While a little unsettling, it works well! Source

Indie dev Powerhoof is avoiding typical influences for something more original.

Whatever your day job, many of us would love to jump behind the controls of a dump truck for a lark. In the real world, that takes training and expertise …read more

Club Mocchi-Mocchi Plushie Deals at Amazon Zelda, Mario, Kirby, Sonic, and more See at Amazon We’re inching closer to Prime Day, but you don’t have to wait until July 8 to save a few bucks on some of the best video game-inspired plushies around. Tomy's Club Mocchi-Mocchi collection is filled with ultra-soft, officially licensed plushies themed around Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Kirby, Animal Crossing, and more popular franchises.While many of the standouts hail from classic Nintendo franchises, one of our favorites is the 15-inch Cuphead plush. Fans can get this very cute Cuphead plush for $27 (was $35) at Amazon. This is the lowest price ever for Club Mocchi-Mocchi's Cuphead plush, which is large and chunky enough to be used as a pillow. Cuphead 15-Inch Plush by Club Mocchi-Mocchi $27 (was $35) Cuphead displays a wide range of facial expressions in StudioMDHR's brilliant boss rush action game--and in Netflix's TV adaptation--but Club Mocchi-Mocchi opted for happiness with its officially licensed 15-inch plush. The result is an adorable recreation of the beloved character.Since Cuphead's cup head has a handle on the back, you could attach it to your backpack to have the world's largest keychain plush. In all seriousness, it's worth noting that this plush topples over if you try to display it without a support behind it. And yes, it's because Cuphead has an enormous head.Cuphead isn't the only large Club Mocchi-Mocchi plush available for a discount. Check out deals on Nintendo and Sega designs below. See at Amazon Club Mocchi-Mocchi 15-inch gaming plushiesClub Mocchi Mocchi Plush DealsOther great deals on 15-inch plushies at Amazon include Super Mario's Goomba for $24.49, Mario Kart's Blue Shell for $22.50, and Zelda's Octorok for $23. The list below also includes a few deals from Best Buy, Walmart, and Target. You can get a 15-inch Yoshi Egg plush at Best Buy for $21 and 6-inch Animal Crossing plushies for $10 at Walmart. Target has a 13-inch Dr. Eggman plush for only $20. You can pair Sega's iconic villain with a 15-inch Sonic plush for $25.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Still tending to your island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons? Then it might be worth picking up the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Official Complete Guide. The hardcover guide is still available at Amazon--and it’s even seeing a slight discount right now. Best of all, this is the updated version published in 2023, meaning it includes details for all the major updates and the Happy Home Paradise expansion. Animal Crossing: New Horizons Official Complete Guide $50 (was $55) Published by Future Press, this comprehensive 668-page guide covers everything you need to know about the game, including information on all the islanders, all the craftable items, and every collectible from seasonal events, updates, and DLC. There’s also a section covering unique island designs--so if you need inspiration for your next big project, you’ll find plenty of examples in this official guidebook.The original version of this guide was published in 2020. While the 2020 edition is still available, we recommend the updated 2023 edition, as it includes information on all the additional content released between 2020 and 2023--such as Happy Home Paradise--and is a much better fit for anyone playing New Horizons in 2025. See at Amazon Future Press is also responsible for the new Metaphor: ReFantazio strategy guide and the popular Elden Ring strategy guides, along with dozens of other titles. If you’re interested in rounding out your bookcase with premium video game books, be sure to check out the full collection.Folks who haven’t yet purchased Animal Crossing: New Horizons will find it on sale for just $40 (was $60) at Woot--an Amazon company. If that deal sells out, it’s also discounted to $52 at Amazon.Continue Reading at GameSpot

NVIDIA was today named an Autonomous Grand Challenge winner at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference, held this week in Nashville, Tennessee. The announcement was made at the Embodied Intelligence for Autonomous Systems on the Horizon Workshop. This marks the second consecutive year that NVIDIA’s topped the leaderboard in the End-to-End Driving at Scale category and the third year in a row winning an Autonomous Grand Challenge award at CVPR. The theme of this year’s challenge was “Towards Generalizable Embodied Systems” — based on NAVSIM v2, a data-driven, nonreactive autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation framework. The challenge offered researchers the opportunity to explore ways to handle unexpected situations, beyond using only real-world human driving data, to accelerate the development of smarter, safer AVs. Generating Safe and Adaptive Driving Trajectories Participants of the challenge were tasked with generating driving trajectories from multi-sensor data in a semi-reactive simulation, where the ego vehicle’s plan is fixed at the start, but background traffic changes dynamically. Submissions were evaluated using the Extended Predictive Driver Model Score, which measures safety, comfort, compliance and generalization across real-world and synthetic scenarios — pushing the boundaries of robust and generalizable autonomous driving research. The NVIDIA AV Applied Research Team’s key innovation was the Generalized Trajectory Scoring (GTRS) method, which generates a variety of trajectories and progressively filters out the best one. GTRS model architecture showing a unified system for generating and scoring diverse driving trajectories using diffusion- and vocabulary-based trajectories. GTRS introduces a combination of coarse sets of trajectories covering a wide range of situations and fine-grained trajectories for safety-critical situations, created using a diffusion policy conditioned on the environment. GTRS then uses a transformer decoder distilled from perception-dependent metrics, focusing on safety, comfort and traffic rule compliance. This decoder progressively filters out the most promising trajectory candidates by capturing subtle but critical differences between similar trajectories. This system has proved to generalize well to a wide range of scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks and enabling robust, adaptive trajectory selection in diverse and challenging driving conditions. NVIDIA Automotive Research at CVPR  More than 60 NVIDIA papers were accepted for CVPR 2025, spanning automotive, healthcare, robotics and more. In automotive, NVIDIA researchers are advancing physical AI with innovation in perception, planning and data generation. This year, three NVIDIA papers were nominated for the Best Paper Award: FoundationStereo, Zero-Shot Monocular Scene Flow and Difix3D+. The NVIDIA papers listed below showcase breakthroughs in stereo depth estimation, monocular motion understanding, 3D reconstruction, closed-loop planning, vision-language modeling and generative simulation — all critical to building safer, more generalizable AVs: Diffusion Renderer: Neural Inverse and Forward Rendering With Video Diffusion Models (Read more in this blog.) FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching (Best Paper nominee) Zero-Shot Monocular Scene Flow Estimation in the Wild (Best Paper nominee) Difix3D+: Improving 3D Reconstructions With Single-Step Diffusion Models (Best Paper nominee) 3DGUT: Enabling Distorted Cameras and Secondary Rays in Gaussian Splatting Closed-Loop Supervised Fine-Tuning of Tokenized Traffic Models Zero-Shot 4D Lidar Panoptic Segmentation NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models RADIO Amplified: Improved Baselines for Agglomerative Vision Foundation Models OmniDrive: A Holistic Vision-Language Dataset for Autonomous Driving With Counterfactual Reasoning Explore automotive workshops and tutorials at CVPR, including: Workshop on Data-Driven Autonomous Driving Simulation, featuring Marco Pavone, senior director of AV research at NVIDIA, and Sanja Fidler, vice president of AI research at NVIDIA Workshop on Autonomous Driving, featuring Laura Leal-Taixe, senior research manager at NVIDIA Workshop on Open-World 3D Scene Understanding with Foundation Models, featuring Leal-Taixe Safe Artificial Intelligence for All Domains, featuring Jose Alvarez, director of AV applied research at NVIDIA Workshop on Foundation Models for V2X-Based Cooperative Autonomous Driving, featuring Pavone and Leal-Taixe Workshop on Multi-Agent Embodied Intelligent Systems Meet Generative AI Era, featuring Pavone LatinX in CV Workshop, featuring Leal-Taixe Workshop on Exploring the Next Generation of Data, featuring Alvarez Full-Stack, GPU-Based Acceleration of Deep Learning and Foundation Models, led by NVIDIA Continuous Data Cycle via Foundation Models, led by NVIDIA Distillation of Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving, led by NVIDIA Explore the NVIDIA research papers to be presented at CVPR and watch the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. Learn more about NVIDIA Research, a global team of hundreds of scientists and engineers focused on topics including AI, computer graphics, computer vision, self-driving cars and robotics. The featured image above shows how an autonomous vehicle adapts its trajectory to navigate an urban environment with dynamic traffic using the GTRS model.

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Beasts of the Four Nations: Creatures from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra $37.19 (was $40) | Releases September 23 Preorder at Amazon Beasts of the Four Nations: Creatures from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra (Deluxe Edition) $80 | Releases September 23 Preorder at Amazon Earlier this year, Nickelodeon announced Avatar is coming back with a new animated series called Avatar: Seven Havens, and there's a new Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action movie on the way, too, making now a good time to brush up on the lore and rich worldbuilding the franchise is known for. One way to do that is with the upcoming Beasts of the Four Nations, a 128-page hardcover bestiary offering in-universe lore and behind-the-scenes details on the wildlife and mythical creatures of both animated series. You can preorder the standard edition for $37.19 (down from $40) or secure a copy of the $80 Deluxe Edition that includes exclusive cover art and a lithograph print. Preorders for both editions are available at Amazon, and both ship September 23. Beasts of the Four Nations: Creatures from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra $37.19 (was $40) | Releases September 23 Written by John O'Bryan, Beasts of the Four Nations includes illustrations and information on the many fantastical beasts of The Last Airbender's world. Everything from the Air Nomads’ flying bison to Kyoshi Island’s elephant koi and the Earth Kingdom’s singing groundhogs are detailed in the book, along with commentary by Avatar and Legend of Korra creators Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino. The standard edition launches September 23 and is available to preorder for $37.19 (down from $40) at Amazon. A Deluxe Edition will also launch on the same day that includes a few extras, which we've detailed below. Preorder at Amazon Beasts of the Four Nations: Creatures from Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra (Deluxe Edition) $80 | Releases September 23 The Beasts of the Four Nations Deluxe Edition contains all the contents of the standard edition, but features a few notable upgrades like foil highlights on the cover art and a protective slipcase. The book also comes with an exclusive lithograph print depicting Cai, the cabbage merchant who appears throughout the Avatar series, and his cart pulled by two ostrich horses. You can preorder the Beasts of the Four Nations Deluxe Edition for $80 at Amazon. Preorder at Amazon Beasts of the Four Nations Deluxe EditionIf you want to explore more of the Avatar franchise’s visual history, you're in luck, as several more official Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra art books are available, and some are even discounted. There's a giant Avatar: The Last Airbender - The Art of the Animated Series art book that covers all four seasons of the show. It's packed with concept art, design, and production materials, ranging from the very first sketch through to the series finale.The Legend of Korra has a multi-volume art book series available as well Each volume focuses on a specific season of the show and features creator commentaries and exclusive artwork. Standard and Deluxe Editions are available for each volume. The Deluxe Editions include slipcases, lithographs, new covers, and bonus sketches by the show’s creators.Continue Reading at GameSpot

Urban populations are expected to double by 2050, which means around 2.5 billion people could be added to urban areas by the middle of the century, driving the need for more sustainable urban planning and public services. Cities across the globe are turning to digital twins and AI agents for urban planning scenario analysis and data-driven operational decisions. Building a digital twin of a city and testing smart city AI agents within it, however, is a complex and resource-intensive endeavor, fraught with technical and operational challenges. To address those challenges, NVIDIA today announced the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for smart city AI, a reference framework that combines the NVIDIA Omniverse, Cosmos, NeMo and Metropolis platforms to bring the benefits of physical AI to entire cities and their critical infrastructure. Using the blueprint, developers can build simulation-ready, or SimReady, photorealistic digital twins of cities to build and test AI agents that can help monitor and optimize city operations. Leading companies including XXII, AVES Reality, Akila, Blyncsy, Bentley, Cesium, K2K, Linker Vision, Milestone Systems, Nebius, SNCF Gares&Connexions, Trimble and Younite AI are among the first to use the new blueprint. NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for Smart City AI  The NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for smart city AI provides the complete software stack needed to accelerate the development and testing of AI agents in physically accurate digital twins of cities. It includes: NVIDIA Omniverse to build physically accurate digital twins and run simulations at city scale. NVIDIA Cosmos to generate synthetic data at scale for post-training AI models. NVIDIA NeMo to curate high-quality data and use that data to train and fine-tune vision language models (VLMs) and large language models. NVIDIA Metropolis to build and deploy video analytics AI agents based on the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for video search and summarization (VSS), helping process vast amounts of video data and provide critical insights to optimize business processes. The blueprint workflow comprises three key steps. First, developers create a SimReady digital twin of locations and facilities using aerial, satellite or map data with Omniverse and Cosmos. Second, they can train and fine-tune AI models, like computer vision models and VLMs, using NVIDIA TAO and NeMo Curator to improve accuracy for vision AI use cases​. Finally, real-time AI agents powered by these customized models are deployed to alert, summarize and query camera and sensor data using the Metropolis VSS blueprint. NVIDIA Partner Ecosystem Powers Smart Cities Worldwide The blueprint for smart city AI enables a large ecosystem of partners to use a single workflow to build and activate digital twins for smart city use cases, tapping into a combination of NVIDIA’s technologies and their own. SNCF Gares&Connexions, which operates a network of 3,000 train stations across France and Monaco, has deployed a digital twin and AI agents to enable real-time operational monitoring, emergency response simulations and infrastructure upgrade planning. This helps each station analyze operational data such as energy and water use, and enables predictive maintenance capabilities, automated reporting and GDPR-compliant video analytics for incident detection and crowd management. Powered by Omniverse, Metropolis and solutions from ecosystem partners Akila and XXII, SNCF Gares&Connexions’ physical AI deployment at the Monaco-Monte-Carlo and Marseille stations has helped SNCF Gares&Connexions achieve a 100% on-time preventive maintenance completion rate, a 50% reduction in downtime and issue response time, and a 20% reduction in energy consumption. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/01-Monaco-Akila.mp4 The city of Palermo in Sicily is using AI agents and digital twins from its partner K2K to improve public health and safety by helping city operators process and analyze footage from over 1,000 public video streams at a rate of nearly 50 billion pixels per second. Tapped by Sicily, K2K’s AI agents — built with the NVIDIA AI Blueprint for VSS and cloud solutions from Nebius — can interpret and act on video data to provide real-time alerts on public events. To accurately predict and resolve traffic incidents, K2K is generating synthetic data with Cosmos world foundation models to simulate different driving conditions. Then, K2K uses the data to fine-tune the VLMs powering the AI agents with NeMo Curator. These simulations enable K2K’s AI agents to create over 100,000 predictions per second. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/02-K2K-Polermo-1600x900-1.mp4 Milestone Systems — in collaboration with NVIDIA and European cities — has launched Project Hafnia, an initiative to build an anonymized, ethically sourced video data platform for cities to develop and train AI models and applications while maintaining regulatory compliance. Using a combination of Cosmos and NeMo Curator on NVIDIA DGX Cloud and Nebius’ sovereign European cloud infrastructure, Project Hafnia scales up and enables European-compliant training and fine-tuning of video-centric AI models, including VLMs, for a variety of smart city use cases. The project’s initial rollout, taking place in Genoa, Italy, features one of the world’s first VLM models for intelligent transportation systems. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/03-Milestone.mp4 Linker Vision was among the first to partner with NVIDIA to deploy smart city digital twins and AI agents for Kaohsiung City, Taiwan — powered by Omniverse, Cosmos and Metropolis. Linker Vision worked with AVES Reality, a digital twin company, to bring aerial imagery of cities and infrastructure into 3D geometry and ultimately into SimReady Omniverse digital twins. Linker Vision’s AI-powered application then built, trained and tested visual AI agents in a digital twin before deployment in the physical city. Now, it’s scaling to analyze 50,000 video streams in real time with generative AI to understand and narrate complex urban events like floods and traffic accidents. Linker Vision delivers timely insights to a dozen city departments through a single integrated AI-powered platform, breaking silos and reducing incident response times by up to 80%. https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/02-Linker-Vision-1280x680-1.mp4 Bentley Systems is joining the effort to bring physical AI to cities with the NVIDIA blueprint. Cesium, the open 3D geospatial platform, provides the foundation for visualizing, analyzing and managing infrastructure projects and ports digital twins to Omniverse. The company’s AI platform Blyncsy uses synthetic data generation and Metropolis to analyze road conditions and improve maintenance. Trimble, a global technology company that enables essential industries including construction, geospatial and transportation, is exploring ways to integrate components of the Omniverse blueprint into its reality capture workflows and Trimble Connect digital twin platform for surveying and mapping applications for smart cities. Younite AI, a developer of AI and 3D digital twin solutions, is adopting the blueprint to accelerate its development pipeline, enabling the company to quickly move from operational digital twins to large-scale urban simulations, improve synthetic data generation, integrate real-time IoT sensor data and deploy AI agents. Learn more about the NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint for smart city AI by attending this GTC Paris session or watching the on-demand video after the event. Sign up to be notified when the blueprint is available. Watch the NVIDIA GTC Paris keynote from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at VivaTech, and explore GTC Paris sessions.