Mike Murphy

Roughly a year after it first announced its intention to bring Mario to mobile, Nintendo’s president, Tatsumi Kimishima, confirmed in an article in Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun today (Jan. 15) that the company’s first mobile game will be launched in March. Kimishima also outlined the company’s plans for 2016, which will see ”details” released about Nintendo’s next-generation games console, the NX.

US secretary of transportation Anthony Foxx unveiled a six-month initiative to prepare for an era of self-driving cars, at a press conference at the Detroit auto show today (Jan. 14). He also announced a new $3.9 billion initiative from the Obama administration’s 2016 budget to encourage self-driving car programs over the next decade.

One of the three halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show was dedicated almost entirely to car technology. In years past, there might have been a few automakers or third-party companies showing off in-car technologies—new ways to connect your phone to your car, new ways to listen to music, or charge your phone—but this year, it felt as if cars themselves had become covetable gadgets. Even though the Detroit Auto Show—arguably the car world’s CES—was just a week later, nearly every car manufacturer had a presence at CES, and at the heart of the North Hall of the convention center was Ford.

After GoPro shares had a pretty rough end to 2015, it seems that few people wanted the company’s action cameras this holiday season either. GoPro temporarily halted trading of its shares Wednesday (Jan. 13) as it announced that earnings for the last quarter of 2015 were likely to be lower than expected, and that it would be laying off 7% of its staff. Shares plunged as much as 28% in after-hours trading following the halt.

The age of consumer virtual reality is nearly upon us. Soon, we’ll all be able to strap on a VR headset, sit back and be transported to new worlds. We’ll be able to play immersive games, watch movies like we’re part of them, and experience the thrill of rollercoasters from our couches. But one theme park in the UK wants to get us off our couches and strap us into VR sets on a real rollercoaster.

At a time when many are questioning the utility of point-and-shoot cameras in favor of relying on their smartphones, Google appears to be working on a standalone handheld camera.

Other than lightsabers, faster-than-light spaceships, and Chewbacca, one of the coolest things in the Star Wars universe has always been the Jedi’s ability to control things with their minds. Now, a developer from IBM wants to give all of us this power—or, at least over our officially licensed Star Wars merchandise.

With the releases of Facebook’s Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive Pre headsets right round the corner, hype around virtual reality devices has built to a fever pitch.

Soon drones will be able to take off, fly, and land all on their own, and self-driving cars are just around the corner. The next step, naturally, is an autonomous drone that can fly you around, and Chinese company Ehang, has already built it.

Las Vegas

On the eve of the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a new Chinese startup showed off its first concept car: an all-electric super-vehicle that uses augmented reality to help drivers see the road as they test its incredible speed.

Over half a year after Facebook’s Oculus showed off its first virtual reality headset to consumers, the company announced that the Rift will be available for pre-order starting Jan. 6 at 8am US Pacific Time (6pm GMT).

As New Year’s Eve parties are getting underway across Europe, with people messaging friends and relatives to coordinate when to be where, WhatsApp has gone down for some users. The Facebook-owned messaging service has over 900 million users, and troubles connecting to the service were widely reported across Europe Dec. 31.

From a distance, Nadine looks like a very normal middle-aged woman, with a sensible haircut and dress style, and who’s probably all caught up on Downton Abbey. But then you hear Nadine talk and move, and you notice something’s a bit off. Nadine is actually the construct of Nadia Thalmann, the director of the Institute for Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She’s a robot that’s meant to serve as a receptionist for the university.

Sometimes, electronic devices seem to get buggy, or slow, for no discernible reason. Often the answer is to turn the thing off and on again, but when that doesn’t work, it feels all hope is lost. But if your iPhone has been having issues updating apps recently, or the App Store has been slow to load, there’s a weird trick—really—that AppAdvice has uncovered that might solve your problems.

Before we see the robots coming for us, it seems we’ll be able to hear them coming.

Boston Dynamics, the Google—now Alphabet—owned robotics company wants to wish us happy holidays. Instead of mailing out cards or posting a note on their site, the company decided to make a short video of its robots, dressed as Santa’s reindeers, pulling someone along in a sleigh.

Google wants to turn its research in autonomous vehicles into an independent business, and Ford may be the automaker to get it started. The two companies are in talks to build a fleet of self-driving cars, according to Auto News.

Before Skynet can become self-aware, before the robots can rise up, we need a system in place to safely pursue research into artificial intelligence. Or so argues Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company, and Jared Cohen, the head of its tech-minded think tank, Google Ideas.

As a child, there used to be no bigger buzzkill on Christmas morning than ripping open a new present, taking it out of the packaging, and finding that it needed batteries to work. Invariably, every battery in the house was being used by TV remotes, cameras, or electric toothbrushes, meaning you’d have to triage where to use your batteries until your parents could get to the store for reinforcements. But this year, when children around the world find out what Santa’s left them, they won’t be scrambling for batteries, they—or their parents—will be plugging in wifi details, downloading apps, and updating firmware before any fun will be had.

The future of photos is short videos, if Apple is to be believed. The company introduced a new feature with its most recent phones, called Live Photos, where the camera records a short clip before and after the photo you shoot, resulting in a Harry Potter-esque moving photo, capturing the emotion and vibrance of the scene. And now, Facebook, the most popular mobile app in the US, is buying into Apple’s new standard.

The Star Wars franchise triumphantly returned to the silver screen this week, raking in over $238 million in the opening weekend in the US alone. And now it looks like The Force Awakens might have destroyed the global box office opening-weekend record more easily than the Rebel Alliance blew up the second Death Star.

While Google’s search homepage is the most popular website on the internet, Facebook’s app is what Americans are using most often on mobile. The social network’s main app now has nearly 900 million daily mobile users around the world.

This post will contain no spoilers—we promise.