Mark Zuckerberg confirms NFTs are coming to Instagram

Love them or hate them, NFTs will soon be coming to Instagram. Speaking at SXSW, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that digital collectibles would be arriving on Instagram “in the near term.”

“We’re working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term,” he said. He didn’t detail exactly how that would take shape, but suggested people would be able to show off their existing NFTs and potentially mint new ones. “I’m not ready to kind of announce exactly what that’s going to be today. But over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment.”

Zuckerberg and other execs have previously expressed an interest in NFTs, with Instagram’s top executive Adam Mosseri saying the company was “actively exploring” the technology. The Financial Times reported in January that the company was hoping to add NFTs into its crypto wallet Novi.

Speaking Tuesday, Zuckerberg also said that NFTs could one day play a role in the company’s eventual metaverse. “I would hope that you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your different places,” he said, “There’s like a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that’ll really be seamless to happen.”

Zuckerberg, who famously used to wear the same gray t-shirt every day, also shared that he now does most of his shopping on Instagram and Facebook. “​​Probably most of the stuff that I wear, I probably bought through an Instagram, or Facebook Shops or ads,” he said.

DeepWell DTx is a therapy-focused game studio from the co-founder of Devolver

Therapy has an engagement problem. Despite the benefits of treatment plans and at-home exercises, people generally resist anything that feels like work, and this impedes the mental-health recovery process across the board. Clinicians have attempted to bridge this gap with various devices and reward systems, but still, it’s often incredibly difficult to motivate patients to help themselves.

Video games have the opposite problem. Players can spend hours immersed in a single digital experience, seated in one spot and lost in their own world, but they’re often branded as “lazy” for this behavior. Video games are widely viewed as a waste of time, even with growing research demonstrating the psychological benefits of play.

So, why not smash these industries together and see what happens? DeepWell Digital Therapeutics is a new video game publisher and developer from Devolver Digital co-founder Mike Wilson and medical device creator Ryan Douglas, and their goal is to alter the way people think about games and mental health. The DeepWell DTx advisory council includes more than 40 medical researchers, doctors and veteran game developers, including Tom Hall (Doom), Zoe Flower (Hellbent Games), Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne), Lorne Lanning (Oddworld) and American McGee (American McGee’s Alice).

“We fight with engagement all the time,” Douglas said. He worked for years with light therapy and other interventions designed to treat anxiety, depression and stress, but said accessibility and participation were constant battles. “And these [game developers] had cracked that code at a level that they were really hitting hard neurological reward centers in the brain, in a way that the availability to effectively change what people do and think in certain times of mental illness was vastly improved over anything I’d seen before.”

DeepWell DTx
DeepWell DTx

DeepWell DTx isn’t about gamifying therapy tools or building digital experiences based on strict medical templates. Instead, the studio will analyze existing games for potential mental health benefits and, in some cases, work with interested developers to enhance these mechanics. The team will then secure approvals from regulators for these games to treat mental health issues including PTSD, anxiety, depression, OCD and addiction.

This is where Douglas’ expertise comes in. He’s the founder and former CEO of medical device company Nextern and he’s secured FDA approval for more than 25 medical devices over the past 15 years; he knows how to navigate this regulatory process and he sees games as a natural fit. He and Wilson started working on DeepWell about 18 months ago, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s a very specific regulatory pathway for this work,” Douglas said. “So, a couple key things — agencies have done a lot of work in the last couple years to figure out how software as a medical device and specifically digital therapeutics are going to work. The FDA has been collaborative in that work. And then in this emergency time, there has been more opportunity to do the work that we need to do to get these in people’s hands as quickly as possible. It’s arduous but not impossible.”

Additionally, DeepWell DTx will provide a framework for players to recognize these benefits as they play — whether that’s a label on the game’s storefront, a welcome screen or another digital signal — allowing them to adjust their mindset before pressing start.

“We’re super excited largely because of some intellectual property Ryan filed long before he met me, a couple years before he met me,” Wilson said. “We believe we’ve got a system built to enable game developers — eventually other media creators, as well — to work their magic and in a way that is already quite beneficial.”

It takes one whole minute before Wilson drops the phrase “digital psychedelics” into the conversation. This is kind of his thing; he’s an evangelist for psychedelics, with endless stories about Burning Man and the personal, therapeutic benefits he’s reaped from trips. Psychedelic therapy was a starting point for Wilson and Douglas, and they’re looking to mimic the perspective-shifting, calming effects of these substances through accessible digital experiences. They’re focused on alleviating a mental health crisis that was exacerbated by the global quarantine, using tools that people already have and naturally reach for.

“While it might not be as powerful as sitting with a macro dose of mushrooms and a couple of therapists, it might not be one session or two sessions or three, but it is an adjunct therapy that is good for you, that you might be way more likely to engage in and that the whole world has access to, even if they don’t have access to health care,” Wilson said. “These will be interventions that are helpful to people that are just paying regular game prices.”

Literally every game is up for review from the DeepWell DTx crew, from platformers and narrative adventures to RPGs and shooters, and interested developers can apply starting today. There’s also an in-house development arm of the DeepWell beast, and its first game is already halfway through development, with a few others in pre-production. The first DeepWell games are due to start rolling out in 2023.

Three ‘known’ Kepler exoplanets are more likely to be stars

The hunt for exoplanets has apparently led to a few near misses. MIT researchers have discovered that three “planets” observed using the Kepler Space Telescope (Kepler-699b, Kepler-840b and Kepler-854b) are more likely to be small stars. They’re simply too big, the scientists found — at two to four times Jupiter’s size, they’re larger than the largest confirmed planets.

A fourth, Kepler-747b, might also be ruled out. It’s small enough (‘just’ 1.8 times Jupiter’s size) to be a planet, but it’s distant enough that it doesn’t receive enough light to be sustainable. It’s “not entirely implausible” that 747b is a planet, according to MIT, but you won’t want to make any bets.

The team found the discrepancies after obtaining improved measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory and double-checking the original classifications. Astronomers were only looking for tidal distortion at first, but noticed odd ellipsoidal signals (the ellipsoid shapes that hint at gravitational pull) that were too large for planets.

MIT doesn’t expect many more false planets. This is a “tiny correction,” the school’s Avi Shporer said. As it stands, this refinement is just what the scientists want — it produces more reliable data that should help with other, broader exoplanet studies.

Google’s domain name registrar is out of beta after seven years

Seven long, long years ago, Google started offering users a way to buy a domain without having to deal with a host provider. Now, Google Domains is at last out of beta as a full-fledged product. 

Google says, to date, millions of people have used the service to manage a domain. It has added more features and tools to Domains over the years. Folks in 26 countries can now use the full version of the service.

Of course, Domains ties in with other Google services. Customers can, of course, use their domain in their email address. You can build a website or store with Google Sites and use it on a business profile on Maps and in Search. Google’s DNS and security tools are available too. There’s also the option to build a site or store for a domain purchased through Google via platforms like Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and Bluehost.

To mark the occasion of Domains becoming a fully formed entity, Google’s offering new and returning users a discount until April 15th. You can get 20 percent off a single domain registration or transfer-in of a domain from another registrar with the code DOMAINS20.

For a bunch of reasons, it feels like a lifetime has passed since 2015, so I wouldn’t blame anyone for forgetting the existence of Google Domains. Still, it has finally emerged from incubation without being scuttled off to the long list of products Google has killed.

Google says Steam is coming to ‘select’ Chromebooks

The rumors of Steam coming to Chromebooks were true. As 9to5Googlereports, Google mentioned in its Games Developer Summit keynote that a Steam alpha test for Chrome OS will be available for “select” Chromebooks. Details weren’t available as of this writing, but Google pointed would-be players to a (currently unavailable) Chromebook community forum post. We’ve asked the company for more information.

A February leak at 9to5 may have revealed the initially supported hardware. At the time, Steam would only run on a trio of Acer Chromebooks (including the Spin 713), ASUS’ Chromebook CX9 and Flip CX5, HP’s Pro c640 G2 and an unnamed Lenovo model. You might be limited to models with at least an 11th-gen Core i5 and 7GB of RAM, too. This wouldn’t be shocking given the demands of many Steam games, but it might rule out many entry-level laptops and well-known models like the Galaxy Chromebook 2.

This will be an alpha, and there are already hints Google will widen support. The bigger question might surround gaming. Which titles will work? Will Steam developers need to optimize games for Chromebooks? All the same, it might be welcome for gamers who’ve wanted a Chromebook but wanted more to play than Android games and cloud services could offer.

Amazon wins EU approval for its $8.45 billion purchase of MGM

European Union officials have unconditionally rubber stamped Amazon’s $8.45 billion bid to buy famed movie and TV studio MGM. The European Commission’s antitrust regulators determined there was limited overlap between the companies and said the merger wouldn’t severely reduce competition in the theatrical film and audio-visual content markets.

“The Commission found that MGM’s upstream activities as a producer and licensor of AV content are limited compared to other market players’ activities; MGM’s content cannot be considered as must-have; and a wide variety of alternative content exists,” the EC said. It noted MGM’s movies account for a limited share of box office revenue in the European Economic Area and that “overall MGM is not among the top production studios, despite its rights over successful film franchises such as James Bond.”

Amazon still requires the green light from the Federal Trade Commission before it can close the deal, which was announced last May. Recent reports suggested the FTC was planning to challenge the merger with an antitrust lawsuit. However, that requires a majority vote by commissioners.

The FTC currently has two Democrat and two Republican commissioners. The Information reported that while they have reached a bipartisan consensus on some issues, a vote on an Amazon-MGM suit could be split along party lines. The Senate has yet to vote on Alvaro Bedoya’s nomination to the commission.

In any case, the deadline for a decision on the proposed MGM buyout is said to be fast approaching, reportedly sometime in mid-March. If the FTC doesn’t mount a legal challenge by then, Amazon could be free to proceed with the merger.

Google’s Immersive Stream lets other companies use Stadia gaming tech

Google is finally sharing more about how it will deliver Stadia game streaming to other companies. The search firm used its Google for Games Developer Summit to detail Immersive Stream for Games, its “expanded” Stadia platform for third parties. The offering lets businesses offer cloud gaming for a wide range of players — not just subscribers.

As with Stadia itself, a “Click to Play Trials” feature will let gamers test full titles without an account. You’ll know if you like a game without having to download it. You can also browse a game store without an account. Accordingly, Google wants to simplify bringing games to the platform through a “Low Change Porting” effort that should reduce the work needed to make games streaming-friendly.

It may take a while for all these features to reach early Immersive Stream adopters. The open storefront model is due in the “coming weeks,” while trials are coming sometime in 2022. Easier porting is still in testing. AT&T already used the rough version of the platform to offer Batman: Arkham Knight for free in October, though, and it’s teasing an upcoming second game that will finally let you stream on mobile, not just on desktop.

The expansion to outside companies was largely expected. It’s no secret that Google has struggled to grow Stadia, and closed its in-house game studios in early 2021. Immersive Stream gives the company a way to profit from Stadia’s technology regardless of how well the core service fares, and might fend off competitors pitching their own cloud gaming toolkits.