Week in Tech: PS4 pop-ups, Instagram's lunch domination and the face space race

Week in Tech
Faces and pop-up spaces

While NASA shoots for Mars, tech firms have a different kind of space race in mind: their mission is to colonise the space on your face. But that's not all they've been up to this week. We've had PS4s popping up, Instagram ascending, Samsung's secrets spilling and some deeply disturbing Facebook features. Welcome to an alarmingly alliterative Week in Tech!

PS4s pop up

If you fancied Sony's rather lovely 20th Anniversary PS4, you could have got one for just £19.94 - but you had to visit Sony's pop-up shop in London to get one. Inevitably many of the limited edition consoles have popped up on eBay with stupid price tags to match.

Morpheus is still in the arms of Morpheus

The god of dreams hasn't got out of bed, it seems: it looks like the hotly anticipated Project Morpheus VR headset from Sony won't arrive any time soon. Right now it is "purely an R&D project", but it's "something we're really, really excited about," Sony says. Tim Cook says much the same about Apple TV, which hasn't been updated since about 1937.

Face time

Sony isn't the only firm racing to take up space on your face. Google's at it too. While Glass appears to have fallen out of favour, the we-thought-it-was-just-a-gimmick Project Cardboard has been updated for more cardboard-related virtual reality. Could Cardboard be the star of Google IO 2015?

More face time

Fancy some new faces for your Android Wear smartwatch? You can get that and more from the latest Android Wear update, which brings designs featuring the minions from Despicable Me as well as more serious watch faces. Under the hood there is a host of improvements to the settings and notifications systems.

Samsung's secrets spilled

While we wait for the official launch of the Samsung Galaxy A7, details of the Galaxy S6 are starting to leak: it may have a metal frame, a dramatically different design, a better screen and maybe even a flexible display.

We also discovered that the Samsung Galaxy Alpha was leading a secret double life: while everybody thought it was wearing Gorilla Glass 3, it was actually clad in Gorilla Glass 4. If you wondered why your Alpha didn't break when you dropped it, shot it or ran over it with a tank, now you know.

Sayonara, stupid selfies

What's the worst thing in the world right now? If you answered "drunken selfies", you'll be delighted to know that Facebook has some of the planet's finest brains working on a solution. Facebook's AI lab is working on an algorithm that can tell the difference between your face when you're sober and your face when you've had a few shandies and warn you before you upload anything. It's part of a much more serious and in no way frightening project that hopes to imitate the human brain.

Instagram's bigger than Twitter

The Facebook-owned Instagram is now bigger than Twitter, with more than 300 million monthly active users. Between them they've shared more than 30 billion photos of cats and lunch.

All we want for Christmas is you (and by "you", we mean "GTA V")

It's that time of year, and if you're looking for ideas for your email to Santa we'd love to help. The TechRadar team has come up with the must-have kit and accessories for Christmas 2014. The list includes GTA V, GTA V, GTA V and GTA V. We'd quite like GTA V.

TOPICS

The TechRadar hive mind. The Megazord. The Voltron. When our powers combine, we become 'TECHRADAR STAFF'. You'll usually see this author name when the entire team has collaborated on a project or an article, whether that's a run-down ranking of our favorite Marvel films, or a round-up of all the coolest things we've collectively seen at annual tech shows like CES and MWC. We are one.

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