Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do.
The entire indoor journey, from entry to elevator to the 100th floor, has been reimagined as a multi-sensory, immersive environment. The overhaul comes via a collaboration between experiential design firm Journey, multimedia studio Moment Factory and NYC-based design outfit SOFTlab.
"For the ones who are confined in certain spaces or cannot do it independently, this is a great opportunity to transport them to a different reality from the ones that they are currently living in while keeping them active," Munoz told CBC Hamilton from his lab on Laurier's Brantford campus.
I haven't played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I've seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game. It was signed with a big publisher that has a lot of famous IPs...And then they just changed business direction again and wanted to focus on their existing IPs instead of new ones. They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.
"We want to make the Graham Norton of video games," says Kirsty Rigden, the chief executive of Brighton-based FuturLab, which makes PowerWash Simulator. Aspiring to emulate a talkshow host who has a reputation for being affable rather than for setting pulses racing is perhaps an unusual ambition for a gaming studio.
Decades of research in environmental psychology and building science reveal that indoor conditions can profoundly affect human health and behavior. Lighting influences circadian rhythms and sleep patterns. Air quality impacts cognitive performance and respiratory health. Temperature and acoustics shape comfort and concentration.
Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen.
According to Digi Capital augmented and virtual reality are about to explode as VCs and corporates get in on the act. Facebook's multi-billion dollar acquisition of Oculus got everyone's attention early last year, but it's only really in the last 12 months that investments have accelerated, with more than $1bn pouring into the sector. Meanwhile Mashable reports Nokia's virtual reality camera is now available for pre-order for a cool $60,000.
This past summer, Google DeepMind debuted Genie 3. It's what's known as a world world, an AI system capable of generating images and reacting as the user moves through the environment the software is simulating. At the time, DeepMind positioned Genie 3 as a tool for training AI agents. Now, it's making the model available to people outside of Google to try with Project Genie.
LLMs have made AI assistants a standard feature across SaaS. AI assistants allow users to instantly retrieve information and interact with a system through text-based prompts. Mathias Biilmann, in his article " Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters," discusses two distinct approaches to building AI assistants. The Closed Approach involves a conversational assistant embedded directly within a single SaaS product. Examples include Zoom's AI Companion, Salesforce CRM's Einstein, and Microsoft's Copilot. The Open Approach involves external conversational assistants, such as Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini,
