Technologies

Hot Wheels’ iPhone and PlayStation Mixed-Reality RC Racing Game Races In Your Home

The AR-enhanced RC car game, by the makers of Mario Kart Live, lets you shrink down and race around your living room. We played it.

A few years ago, Nintendo’s real-life-meets-video-game Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit turned my pandemic home into a theme park race course for my kids. Mario Kart Live’s RC cars need a Nintendo Switch to work, but now Mattel and Hot Wheels have made a whole new RC car mixed reality game experience made by Mario Kart Live’s developer, Velan. Hot Wheels Drift Rally, arriving March 14 for $130, is an RC car video game that races around your real world. And just like Mario Kart Live, it’s a lot of fun.

You need a Switch to play Mario Kart Live, but Hot Wheels Drift Rally works with iPhones, iPads and the PlayStation 4 and 5. It can cross-play between them, either locally or with others online.

I played with Drift Rally for about an hour in New York. The concept is similar to Mario Kart Live: A camera-enabled RC car streams its point of view to your TV or Apple device. From there, you drive the car and see the real world augmented with all sorts of video game special effects and a glowing race track.

The twist with Drift Rally is that the car itself, a sort of futuristic compact race car called the «Chameleon Car,» can transform in-game into 140 different Hot Wheels cars. It works weirdly well. Even though the physical car drives around your home the same way, in-game you see a different car appear, along with different driving physics and speeds.

Much like Mario Kart Live, the camera-equipped car works along with four included gates that form marker waypoints for your real-world race track. These get dropped down anywhere, and then the car drives through them and anywhere else to «paint» a track. Once that’s done, augmented reality effects sprout up all around, along with virtual race car opponents, to make a race experience that’s in your actual home.

The experience, zooming through your real world and floor-level obstacles as if you’ve been shrunken down to toy size, feels like a car-based version of drone racing. Drift Rally’s mix of TV via PlayStation or iPhone/iPad controls flexes the experience out around your home in a similar way that the Switch’s Mario Kart Live could work on-Switch or with the TV dock.

Drift Rally has some key improvements over Mario Kart Live: it can work at larger and smaller scales. By also connecting with Wi-Fi networks instead of just your iPhone, iPad or PlayStation, the cars can work across larger home spaces: I drove my car all through a four-room apartment while sitting on a sofa, watching my race car zip under beds and around kitchen cabinets. Besides the race modes, there are also stunt modes that could be set up without all the big race gates, meaning you could possibly play around in a smaller corner of your home more easily. Still, these cars are big; much bigger than your everyday Hot Wheels car. They’re roughly the size of the Mario Kart Live cars, and run for about 2 hours on a charge.

Drift Rally works with up to four car racers at once in the same room, or has split-screen multiplayer with one real car and everyone else driving virtual ones that can collide with the RC car on the race track. But, like Mario Kart Live, the cars aren’t meant to be used outdoors unless they’re on a flat driveway. (They’re not made to handle debris, dirt and water.)

At $130 — or $150 for a «deluxe» version that also comes with an actual collector’s Hot Wheels car — this game is more expensive than Mario Kart Live, which cost $100 at launch. But if you don’t have a Nintendo Switch and want to try to shrink yourself down into a mixed-reality RC racing game, this looks like your best bet.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, Oct. 14

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Oct. 14.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s Mini Crossword has an odd vertical shape, with an extra Across clue, and only four Down clues. The clues are not terribly difficult, but one or two could be tricky. Read on if you need the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Smokes, informally
Answer: CIGS

5A clue: «Don’t have ___, man!» (Bart Simpson catchphrase)
Answer: ACOW

6A clue: What the vehicle in «lane one» of this crossword is winning?
Answer: RACE

7A clue: Pitt of Hollywood
Answer: BRAD

8A clue: «Yeah, whatever»
Answer: SURE

9A clue: Rd. crossers
Answer: STS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Things to «load» before a marathon
Answer: CARBS

2D clue: Mythical figure who inspired the idiom «fly too close to the sun»
Answer: ICARUS

3D clue: Zoomer around a small track
Answer: GOCART

4D clue: Neighbors of Norwegians
Answer: SWEDES

Technologies

Watch SpaceX’s Starship Flight Test 11

Technologies

New California Law Wants Companion Chatbots to Tell Kids to Take Breaks

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the new requirements on AI companions into law on Monday.

AI companion chatbots will have to remind users in California that they’re not human under a new law signed Monday by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The law, SB 243, also requires companion chatbot companies to maintain protocols for identifying and addressing cases in which users express suicidal ideation or self-harm. For users under 18, chatbots will have to provide a notification at least every three hours that reminds users to take a break and that the bot is not human.

It’s one of several bills Newsom has signed in recent weeks dealing with social media, artificial intelligence and other consumer technology issues. Another bill signed Monday, AB 56, requires warning labels on social media platforms, similar to those required for tobacco products. Last week, Newsom signed measures requiring internet browsers to make it easy for people to tell websites they don’t want them to sell their data and banning loud advertisements on streaming platforms.

AI companion chatbots have drawn particular scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in recent months. The Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into several companies in response to complaints by consumer groups and parents that the bots were harming children’s mental health. OpenAI introduced new parental controls and other guardrails in its popular ChatGPT platform after the company was sued by parents who allege ChatGPT contributed to their teen son’s suicide.

«We’ve seen some truly horrific and tragic examples of young people harmed by unregulated tech, and we won’t stand by while companies continue without necessary limits and accountability,» Newsom said in a statement.

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One AI companion developer, Replika, told CNET that it already has protocols to detect self-harm as required by the new law, and that it is working with regulators and others to comply with requirements and protect consumers.

«As one of the pioneers in AI companionship, we recognize our profound responsibility to lead on safety,» Replika’s Minju Song said in an emailed statement. Song said Replika uses content-filtering systems, community guidelines and safety systems that refer users to crisis resources when needed.

A Character.ai spokesperson said the company «welcomes working with regulators and lawmakers as they develop regulations and legislation for this emerging space, and will comply with laws, including SB 243.» OpenAI spokesperson Jamie Radice called the bill a «meaningful move forward» for AI safety. «By setting clear guardrails, California is helping shape a more responsible approach to AI development and deployment across the country,» Radice said in an email.

One bill Newsom has yet to sign, AB 1064, would go further by prohibiting developers from making companion chatbots available to children unless the AI companion is «not foreseeably capable of» encouraging harmful activities or engaging in sexually explicit interactions, among other things.