Pornhub hasn’t been actively enforcing its deepfake ban

Remember how Pornhub said it was banning AI-generated deepfake videos? They’re still a problem months later. BuzzFeed News “easily” found over 100 of the non-consensual videos by searching for obvious keywords like “deepfake” and “fake deep,” nearly all of them explicitly mentioning their deepfake status in the title or the uploader’s username. The clips had been around for a while, too, as they had hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. Some videos surfaced in home page recommendations.

The site had removed some of the videos after BuzzFeed got in touch, but others were still listed (again, with hundreds of thousands of views) after searching for other keywords.

In a statement, VP Corey Price reiterated that Pornhub would remove deepfakes and other non-consensual content “as soon as we are made aware of it” through methods like content flags and a submission form. This material is “a form of sexual assault,” Price said.

The problem, as you might imagine, is that this is a purely reactive approach that doesn’t actually deal with the issue. What’s the likelihood that someone looking for this content is going to report it? While it’s difficult for any large video upload site to completely eliminate unwanted videos (just ask YouTube), it shouldn’t be possible to find an abundance of offending clips with basic search terms. Services ideally make at least some effort to proactively remove and filter content that violates their terms of service.

We’d add that Pornhub has a tendency toward inaction in other categories as well. It’s still well-known as a haven for (clearly unauthorized) game-themed CG porn, often based directly on character models lifted from the games’ resource files. The studios have tried to crack down on this material in the past, but it’s still abundant. There may not be a purge of this content until there’s a fundamental shift in Pornhub’s stance toward all material that violates its terms, not just the most offensive.

Source: BuzzFeed News

YouTube TV brings two Cheddar digital-only shows to its lineup

YouTube TV is making its way onto a more devices and bringing quite a few live TV channels along with it, including Turner Network channels. The Google-owned service is also in quite a few markets, making it easy to access from almost anywhere. Now YouTube TV is blending digital-only channels with its broadcast lineup via the addition of two new properties, Cheddar and Cheddar Big News.

“Cheddar’s emphasis on tech and media news coverage make it a strong fit for the millennial, tech-savvy audience that also loves YouTube TV,” YouTube TVs Christian Oestlien told Variety. While Cheddar already runs its own YouTube channel, this will offer live feeds and on-demand programming from the media company’s finance and news channels. Variety also notes that Cheddar already provides live and on-demand programming to the Dish Network, Sling TV, Comcast X1, Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter and Twitch platforms. Having a partnership with YouTube TV adds another set of viewers to Cheddar’s bottom line. Cheddar also plans to launch its Big News program on Sling TV and Philo in the latter half of this year.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Cheddar

Idris Elba’s Netflix show is ‘Charles in Charge’ with turntables

Netflix just scored a comedy coup. The service has unveiled Turn Up Charlie, a comedy series starring and partly executive produced by Idris Elba. The half-hour show has Elba playing a “struggling” single DJ (fitting given his extensive DJ background) who gets another chance when he becomes the caretaker for a famous friend’s rebellious daughter. Basically, it’s Charles in Charge with mixing and scratching. There’s no release date yet, but production on the first eight-episode season starts in May.

This isn’t Elba’s first Netflix rodeo, of course — he broke ground as a star in the streaming giant’s first original feature film, Beasts of No Nation, and it’s ridiculously easy to find his non-exclusive shows on the service. Turn Up Charlie will be his chance to show what he can do for Netflix in an episodic format, however, and it’s further evidence that the company now has a relatively easy time signing big-name talent.

Via: Variety, AV Club

Source: Netflix

Best Buy drops its price for the MacBook Air to as low as $650

If you’ve had your eye on a MacBook Air for a while, Best Buy’s latest offer makes it much more affordable. Expanding its range of existing deals, Best Buy is now offering a MacBook Air at $300 off. And if you happen to be a student, or a parent of one, then you can net yourself an additional $50 discount on select models, bringing the price down to as little as $650 for the entry-level model.

The MacBook Air turns ten years old this year and though it might not have quite the same relevance today as when it first launched, it’s still a popular choice — especially at such a discounted price. However, it is important to note that there have been rumors that Apple will be updating and replacing the existing MacBook Air this year, which might be why Best Buy is offering such aggressive discounts for its remaining hardware.

Best Buy’s MacBook Air offering comes in three flavors. The first has a fifth-generation Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. The second ups the ante to 256GB of storage space, while the third improves that to 512GB and pairs it up with a Core i7 CPU of the same generation. All CPU options are only dual-core, however.

The differing models are priced at $700, $900, and $1,250 respectively. In order to secure the additional $50 discount, you’ll need to sign up to Best Buy’s Student Deals program, after which you’ll be sent coupon codes you can redeem on the Best Buy website or in-store, as per MacRumors.

The MacBook Air range isn’t the only one getting the discount treatment at Best Buy at the moment. Joining it are a number of offerings from HP, Dell, and Lenovo, all discounted and many of them packing much more modern and powerful hardware than the Apple alternative. The deals released as part of this “Computing Savings Event,” however, do change on a day-to-day basis, so you’ll need to check back every 24 hours if you’re looking for something in particular.

You’ll also find new offers on smartphones, games, and TVs, so you can still look around if you’re not interested in a new laptop right now.

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Microsoft Windows Defender extension offers Chrome users extra protection

alexeyboldin/123RF

If you’re a Chrome user, you’ll have one more choice this week for defense against phishing while you’re on the internet. Even though Microsoft and Google compete in a number of areas — Windows 10’s Microsoft Edge browser is a direct competitor to Chrome — Microsoft is making nice with its frenemy by releasing its Windows Defender Browser Protection extension for Chrome browsers.

Although solutions already exist for Chrome — Google, for its part, displays a bright, red screen whenever you visit a website suspected of phishing or scam — Microsoft claims that Windows Defender for Chrome is superior and can stop more threats. When the company highlighted the merits of its Microsoft Edge browser, it noted that Windows Defender is 99 percent effective at thwarting threats. Chrome was effective at just 87 percent of the time, and Firefox had a 70 percent effective rate. In theory, with Windows Defender available as an extension and working in Chrome, Chrome users should benefit from the same level of protection as Microsoft Edge.

With Windows Defender engaged at the browser level, if you visit a malicious website, the screen will flash red, alerting you to navigate away. “The extension alerts you about known malicious links, and gives you a clear path back to safety,” Microsoft said. Microsoft maintains a list of known or suspected malicious sites that is constantly updated as part of Windows Defender.

The good news is that if you use Windows Defender, you’ll still benefit from Google’s anti-phishing protection. “The new extension doesn’t appear to disable Chrome’s own checking (or at least, it doesn’t seem to be doing so for me), so at the very least isn’t likely to make you less safe, and with phishing being as widespread as it is, the extra protection probably doesn’t hurt,” Ars Technica reported.

A report published by the Federal Bureau of Investigations revealed that phishing scams cost American businesses roughly $500 million per year, according to Forbes. Tripwire found that 76 percent of organizations have experienced a phishing attack in 2017. On the consumer side, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported that more than 1.2 million attacks were recorded in 2016, a 66 percent increase from the year prior.

Given that Google’s Chrome browser is far more popular than Microsoft’s Edge offering, making Windows Defender more widely available will have broader reach and more impact. According to W3Counter‘s March 2018 report, Chrome commanded a browser market share of 60.6 percent, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge browsers had a 7.6 percent market share.

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Localblox data breach is the latest nightmare for Facebook, LinkedIn

After Facebook found itself embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that affected the personal information of 87 million of its users, the company is once again tied to another data breach. This time, Localblox is the culprit.

Like Cambridge Analytica, Localblox creates profiles of individuals using information scraped from publicly accessible sources, like social network profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Zillow. Localblox chief technology officer Ashfaq Rahman describes the process to ZDNet as creating transformative intelligence by joining bits and pieces together. A listing on Crunchbase describes Localblox as “a location-based social network that builds scalable neighborhood platforms, aggregating business profiles with metadata.”

Unfortunately for the company, the collected data was stored in an unsecured and unlisted Amazon S3 container, which was discovered by ethical data breach hunter Chris Vickery at cybersecurity research firm UpGuard. The combined files amounted to 1.2 terabytes of storage, and up to 48 million user profiles were kept without a password. Localblox had quickly secured access with a password within hours of Vickery’s notification.

“The data collected includes names and physical addresses, and employment information and job histories data scraped from Facebook and LinkedIn profiles — like dates of birth and other public profile data, and Twitter handles,” ZDNet reported after examining the files Vickery collected.

Rahman disputed Vickery’s reports, claiming that most of the data was fabricated for testing, and that Vickery had hacked into Localblox’s systems.

It’s unclear what legal repercussions, if any, Localblox will suffer as a result of its collection of data without user consent. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow all have policies prohibiting data scraping, but there are no laws in the U.S. that allow people to remove their personal data once it has been collected by firms like Cambridge Analytica and Localblox. In Europe, consumers benefit from stricter digital privacy regulations.

When compiled, the scraped data could be used in powerful ways, as Cambridge Analytica has shown with its involvement in Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign.

“The exposed LocalBlox dataset combines standard personal information like name and address, with data about the person’s internet usage, such as their LinkedIn histories and Twitter feeds,” UpGuard wrote in a report. “This combination begins to build a three-dimensional picture of every individual affected — who they are, what they talk about, what they like, even what they do for a living — in essence a blueprint from which to create targeted persuasive content, like advertising or political campaigning. If the legitimate uses of the data aren’t enough to give pause, the illegitimate uses range from traditional identity theft, to fraud, to ammunition for social engineering scams such as phishing.”

In an interview with StreetFight in 2013, Localblox president Sabira Arefin shifted the data protection blame to networks like Facebook, stating, “it is up to the individual sites and system to determine the terms and conditions and then enforce any security mechanism in place if they want to prevent scraping.”

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Wikipedia is making it easier to explore the internet with page previews

There are few rabbit holes that are deeper or more informative than Wikipedia. In much the same way that you can’t possibly just eat one potato chip, it’s tough to just read one Wikipedia article. After all, with so many hyperlinks to choose from, how could you possibly close your Wikipedia tab without reading up first on elephants, then learning more about matriarchs, and finally, checking out Phoenician? Far be it from us to tell you to read less Wikipedia, but now, the online encyclopedia is making it a bit easier to stay on track and not get too distracted by the plethora of knowledge available on the internet — page previews.

Now, if you visit Wikipedia on your computer and hover your cursor over any of the blue hyperlinks on a given page, you will be able to see the newly deployed page previews feature. This, the Wikimedia Foundation notes, “allows you to get a quick grasp of what’s behind a link without committing to a click-through.” The preview gives you the first few lines of information, which may just be enough to satiate your curiosity. If not, you can continue by actually clicking through and falling further down the rabbit hole.

Wikipedia rarely changes its interface (this is actually the largest change the platform has made since 2010), and as such, the new feature is indeed quite noteworthy. The online encyclopedia conducted extensive testing to first ensure that this would be a useful option for its readers. According to a Medium post, A/B testing suggested that page previews make it “easier and more efficient for Wikipedia readers to interact with our content and get more context about a topic on Wikipedia.”

Now, rather than opening several tabs or having to click the back button time and time again to return to your initial query, you can now quickly gain an understanding of a word or concept that may be crucial to your original search. The goal of the function, the Wikimedia Foundation explains, is to “decrease the cost of exploration for each blue link you come across, allowing readers to satisfy their curiosity or clarify a confusing or unknown topic without the burden of opening a new page and navigating back to the original.” Think of it as a way to look down that rabbit hole without actually plunging headfirst into it.

Thus far, it would seem as though page previews are quite popular among readers. “The rates of disabling the feature are negligibly low — a strong indicator that people find it useful,” the Foundation notes. “For two, each reader is interacting with the content of more pages while navigating the site, as people are able to engage with knowledge on Wikipedia in more meaningful and efficient ways. And for three, the number of classical pageviews is slightly decreasing.”

Of course, Wikipedia is always in search of additional feedback and readily admits that the long-term effects of the previews feature has yet to be determined.

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Tweaking these Fortnite game settings can give you a split-second edge

Fortnite wasn’t the first battle royale to splash across online stores in early access, and it’s no longer the newest, but it remains the most popular. It’s available on just about every platform imaginable, from consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One, to Android and iOS. Chances are you have a device that can play Fortnite without too much trouble. Yet PC remains the original platform and, in the eyes of many, the best. There’s no matching the precision accuracy of a keyboard and mouse.

Luckily, Fortnite is a very forgiving game, and it can run on just about any PC if you have a discrete graphics card and a decent processor. With that said, there’s a huge gap between how it looks – and how smoothly it plays – between entry-level laptops and high-end gaming desktops.

Testing Conditions

Our test rig has an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. We’re using such powerful hardware for these tests to get a baseline for each graphics card in our stable. That way, we can see definitively how well each card performs on its own. With such a powerful processor and more than enough RAM, we’re able to remove any bottlenecks that might end up throttling our graphics card performance.

PC remains the original platform and, in the eyes of many, the best.

We tested the game by trekking to approximately the same location in Fortnite and doing our best to survive long enough to manage some performance metrics. We ran the benchmark several times for each graphical preset with one exception. We kept the in-game render scale at 100 percent no matter the graphical settings, to get a clear picture of performance without “juicing” the results by tweaking the in-game render scale. More on that in a bit.

Finally, we performed our tests on the following graphics cards — The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1060, and GTX 1050. On the red team, we tested the AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, Vega 56, RX 580, RX 570, and RX 550.

Pressing the presets

Like most games, Fortnite has several different built-in graphical presets to help customize your performance — Low, Medium, High, and Epic. And like most recent games, you’re going to notice something about the way they change your settings. Instead of just turning graphical details up or down, these presets also include tweaks to the in-game render scale. That’s a problem for our benchmarks.

Changing the render scale changes the in-game graphical resolution for everything but menus and user interface assets. If you turned your resolution up to, say 1440p, and your render scale all the way down, your game would look and run like it was being played at a much lower resolution than 1440p.

It’s an easy way to put the thumb on the scale and squeeze extra performance out of underpowered hardware, but it can skew the results of our benchmarks. With that in mind, it’s important to point out that changes to the render scale are bundled in as part of the presets in Fortnite, but we set the render scale back up to 100 percent for each benchmark so our results more accurately reflect what you’ll see at a given resolution.

1440p

Starting at 1440p resolution, one thing makes itself abundantly clear about Fortnite. This game is incredibly well-made. Nearly every GPU we tested was capable of hitting a playable framerate at 1440p without too much trouble. Our high-end cards hit ultra-high figures that should make anyone with a 144Hz monitor happy, and our mid and low-end cards managed surprisingly solid performance at the High and Medium presets. Let’s dig into the numbers.

In short, all but the most entry-level cards, like the RX 550, will have no problem running Fortnite even at High settings with the resolution cranked up to 1440p. Step down to Medium, and the RX 550 can even achieve a reasonable 30 FPS at 1440p, but the GTX 1050 really shines at Medium settings — it hits a nice, comfy 60 FPS.When we step down to High settings, things get interesting on the mid-range and low-end. The GTX 1050, the variant with 2GB of memory, easily manages a playable 37 FPS average at 1440p, putting it just behind the RX 570. The GTX 1060 even achieves an admirable 70 FPS, putting it on par with the RX 580.Looking at the average FPS at the high-end, on the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1070 Ti, and both the AMD RX Vega cards, performance stays comfortably above the 60 FPS mark, even with all the settings pushed to Epic. The 1080 Ti easily doubles that figure, which means the ultra-premium graphics cards can definitely keep up with a similarly ultra-premium high-refresh-rate monitor.

1080p

Moving down to 1080p, we saw our performance spike across the board. It’s not a surprise that we saw better performance at a lower resolution, but the performance increase opens things up all the way down to the RX 570. That means even an entry-level card like the GTX 1050 can hit an impressive 85 FPS at max detail and 1080p.

Custom SettingsAt the high-end, the Vega cards saw a significant increase in performance, bringing the average FPS figures into high-refresh-rate territory, with the Vega 64 hitting 116 FPS, and the Vega 56 hitting 100 FPS. Naturally, the GTX 1080 Ti outperformed all the other cards with an impressive 176 FPS at 1080p. That means if you do have a 144Hz gaming monitor, you have enough FPS headroom that you’re going to see some seriously smooth gameplay out of the GTX 1080 in Fortnite. And who knows, those extra frames might give you a competitive edge.

Fortnite makes it easy to customize your settings. There are just six categories — view distance, shadows, anti-aliasing, textures, effects, and post-processing — and each one has four settings from Epic at the top-end and Off or Low at the bottom-end. It’s a simple, straightforward graphics menu, and it’s very user-friendly.

Even if you’ve never bothered to fine-tune your settings, Fortnite is a great way to get started. Just mouse over any detail setting you’re curious about and the game will pop up a little box describing what each setting controls.

During our testing, we turned all the settings up and down to try and find out which ones had the biggest impact on visual quality and overall performance, but let’s start with a look at what each setting does to the visual quality in the game.

View Distance

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, the first battle royale game to hit it big, has struggled with issues of balance and view distance. In its case, players found that reducing view distance of objects like grass gave them an advantage because it revealed players who thought they were hiding. PUBG has issued patches to address that.

Fortnite has the same problem. Turning the view distance up or down impacts object render distance, not player render distance. That way players with more powerful computers don’t end up with a competitive advantage by being able to crank up the view distance. However, some players turn their view distance down so objects that might obscure enemies don’t render at long ranges, so you can see potential enemies more clearly.

The penalty you pay for that, however, is a big drop in visual quality. Fortnite’s signature art style blunts most of the quality loss as much as possible, but low view distances result in a significantly more barren world.

Despite that, we didn’t see much performance benefit from a short view distance, as the average framerate increase from 88 FPS to 91 FPS with the view distance turned all the way down. That’s not something you’ll notice in regular play.

Shadows

Next up we have shadows. This setting is the one you almost always want to take a second look at if you’re having trouble with your performance. In most games, Fortnite included, high-quality shadows are a luxury that can really tank your framerate.

As you can see in the screenshots, scaling down the shadows does impact their sharpness and detail, but overall, we didn’t notice a significant hit to visual quality when they’re turned down to Low or Off. Most of the time, you probably won’t even notice. We attribute this to Fortnite’s cartoonish art style. You might not expect realistic shadows in a world this bright and vivid.

That’s good, because turning shadows off increased our overall performance by a huge margin. We went from 88 FPS to 119 FPS, just by turning shadows off. That’s a 35 percent increase from just changing one setting. This is the setting you should look at first if you need to boost your performance up to a specific ceiling.

Anti-Aliasing

Next up we have anti-aliasing. This setting mitigates in-game “jaggies” by using some extra graphical horsepower to smoothe them out. Look at the edge of the wooden shack in the screenshots above, and you can see the difference anti-aliasing makes. It’s even more noticeable in motion because the “jaggies” change with each frame, which adds a distracting shimmer to hard edges.

Turning the setting all the way down to Off only saw about a four percent performance bump, so it’s only going give you a significant performance increase if you’re going to turn down a few other settings as well. This is one we recommend you leave on.

Textures

Normally, adjusting your texture quality will have an enormous impact on what your game looks like, but in this case, it’s only barely noticeable. Fortnite’s art style mitigates most of the quality loss you’d see by turning down your textures, so your game looks great even at low textures.

That said, because textures don’t change too much up or down the scale, you’re only going to see about a three to four percent performance jump by turning your texture quality all the way down. Again, this is a setting you can leave at medium or high without too much of a performance hit.

Effects

Like most of the other settings in Fortnite, you’re only going to notice some minor detail changes when you turn your effects up or down. When you’re in a heated firefight, you might notice that rockets have less detailed plumes, or that explosions don’t look as sharp as they did at higher detail settings. Because this one doesn’t have a huge impact on visual quality, it’s another one that gave us a marginal three percent performance bump.

Post Processing

Notice the way light looks in Fortnite? How the environment has a sort of diffuse glow about it? How everything looks a little dreamy? That’s because of post-processing. It’s a term that encompasses a variety of different techniques game developers use to add a little more appeal to environments.

It’s usually graphically intensive, but in Fortnite’s case, it’s only noticeable when you find yourself stuck in the storm. Which you shouldn’t do. Because it kills you. Still, expect to see a small bump in performance from this if you turn the setting down, without much hit to visual quality.

Bottom line

If you’re looking to get the most out of Fortnite you, can probably breathe easy. Most of the graphics cards in our stable performed very well at 1440p, and even better at 1080p, so no matter what you have in your PC, chances are you’re going to be able to run the game well enough that it won’t be a slideshow.

Should you need to squeeze a little extra performance out of some aging hardware or max out your FPS for a high-refresh-rate monitor, it’s as simple as turning down a couple individual settings. We recommend you turn your shadows all the way off and turn your effects and post-processing to low. This should net you an overall performance increase close to 40 percent, depending on your hardware.

Will you buy a Pixelbook if it could boot into Windows and Chrome OS?

Daven Mathies/Digital Trends

Would being able to boot Windows 10 on your Pixelbook excite you? That is one possibility as newly discovered commits reveal that Google may be working on allowing Chrome OS devices to load a secondary operating system. Given that Google’s Pixelbook already ships with high-end internals that are more than capable of loading Windows, this makes sense and gives the hardware more flexibility depending on the task that you need to accomplish.

“A few weeks back, a new Chrome OS build called eve-campfire popped up. It looks like this is a new branch of Pixelbook (eve) for making it easier to boot into different OSes,” a Reddit user posted about the code commits. “There are other commits regarding AltOS, including this telling one called “Message string for AltOS picker screen”. The options displayed are Chrome OS and AltOS.”

It’s still unclear if booting into Windows is exactly what Google had in mind for the AltOS picker. “It could be that AltOS allows you to dual-boot into another operating system, exists as its own operating system, or is somehow related to the possibility of natively booting Windows on the Pixelbook,” Android Authority reported. “Other commits did allude to Windows working on the Pixelbook, a possibility that could entice more users to Chrome OS.”

Apple, for its part, allows users of its MacBook, iMac, and Mac Pro to dual-boot into Windows, giving them the flexibility to run Mac OS daily and use Windows when the need occurs. A similar implementation could allow Chrome OS users the flexibility to use Windows 10 to test code, for example, if the Pixelbook is being used in a development environment.

Still, another use for AltOS could be to allow developers and users to test Google’s new — and unreleased — Fuchsia operating system. A wider deployment of AltOS could even allow Google to recruit consumers to beta test Fuchsia without worrying about reliability or requiring users to abandon Chrome OS support on existing hardware.

We don’t know too much about Fuchsia OS at this time, but there is speculation that this new operating system could replace Android in the future. There will be two implementations of Fuchsia — one for phones called Armadillo and another for the desktop called Capybara. An early version of Fuchsia was even spotted working on a Pixelbook, leading many to believe that it could even replace Chrome OS.

Given that Fuchsia’s already found a home in testing on the Pixelbook, allowing Chrome OS developers, and potentially general consumers in the future, to dual-boot Fuchsia onto their current hardware for testing makes sense.

At this time, this is still all conjecture, and likely most of the secrets behind AltOS is buried deep inside the Chromium gerrit that isn’t accessible to the public, according to XDA Developers. Google may drop hints at the Google I/O developer conference this year.

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Alicia Vikander turns ‘Tide’s Fall’ into a VR masterpiece

Penrose Studios set a new standard for VR storytelling last year with Arden’s Wake, a stunning short that introduced us to Meena, a young girl living in a post-apocalyptic, waterlogged world. But that was just the prologue. At the Tribeca Film Festival, the studio is back with the next chapter, Tide’s Fall. And it’s bringing some serious star power: Alicia Vikander (Tomb Raider) has taken on the voice of Meena, and she’s also serving as an executive producer. Just like in Ex Machina, Vikander instantly makes the character someone you can’t help but connect with.

The 30-minute film starts deep in the ocean, so far down you can’t even see the surface. The only source of light is a lamp that slowly drifts towards you, illuminating two figures. One is a woman, the other a child, both are falling lifelessly towards the bottom. If I were watching on a TV, it would be a sad, but beautiful scene. In VR though, I felt compelled to reach out and save them. Instead, help comes in the form of a man. He’s a burly fellow and a powerful swimmer — so it’s all the more heartbreaking when he struggles to save them both. In the end, he has to leave the woman behind, and we’re left watching her sink out of sight. Welcome to Arden’s Wake.

As the studio’s film Allumette proved, Penrose isn’t afraid to pull heartstrings. But what really sells its stories are a combination of fluid character animation, VR innovation and strong voice acting. We’ve seen VR experiences with notable actors attached, like Dear Angelica, which featured Geena Davis and Mae Whitman. But Arden’s Wake is notable for having an immensely talented Oscar winner behind its lead character. Vikander plays Meena as an innocent and lonely young woman, one who was raised in a tiny building floating atop an endless ocean. She’s still dealing with the loss of her mother, and her father is her only companion.

“This project is unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and I think virtual and augmented reality are going to be big in Hollywood, as well as entertainment more broadly,” Vikander said in a statement. “Meena’s character has a special spark, and I was immediately drawn to her when I experienced her in VR. The movie daringly brings up difficult situations while also allowing viewers to get quite close to the characters in such an immersive and emotional experience.”

In Tide’s Fall, Meena is forced to grow up and confront profound issues with her family. We learn about the events that led to the dramatic opening sequence, and why her father — up until that point a gruff-yet-caring figure — might hold some responsibility. By the end of the episode, Meena is more adventurer than cloistered child, something you can tell from Vikander’s performance alone. It’s clear that Penrose has also matured as a storytelling team; there’s even more detail around models and their facial expressions, which makes them seem more like Pixar characters.

You experience Arden’s Wake as a passive observer. There’s no controller interaction at all. Still, the film takes advantage of VR by letting you walk around and observe the action from any angle. When Meena and her father are in their adorable island home, you can peer inside and check out their furniture and family photos. When one of them goes outside, you could either take a step back to view the whole scene, or glimpse through a window while staying in the house. And if you don’t feel like walking around, the film will also automatically adjust for a seated experience.

According to Eugene Chung, CEO and founder of Penrose (and also the writer and director of Tide’s Fall), the studio has been steadily refining Arden’s Wake since its debut last year. It’s also more reliant on Maestro, Penrose’s custom VR collaboration tool, for all of its projects. Fable Studio, another VR outfit filled with members of Oculus’s Story Studio, has also committed to making its films in virtual reality. That’s a trend we’ll likely see from others working in this new medium. After all, it’s hard to see and feel the impact of VR character and environmental changes if you’re just staring at a flat 2D monitor.

While Penrose planned to make Arden’s Wake available on all VR platforms last year, it ended up holding off its release. Chung says it’ll take a while to prepare the experience for consumers, but he might have more news later this year. I hope so, because Arden’s Wake deserves a wider audience than the film festival crowd.