Sony's next-gen PS5 might let owners customize their consoles with skins or even replacable outer coverings unique side casings.

Sony UX designer Matt MacLaurin might've hinted the PS5 will have swappable custom panels that gamers can buy to customize their console, somewhat similar to the Xbox 360's faceplates. In a now-deleted comment on LinkedIn, MacLaurin said: "You will definitely be seeing special editions. This is also customizable in ways previous gens weren't."

This could mean many things, insofar as customization--could the PS5's outer glowing light strip be capable of full RGB? Might we be able to pop off the oddly-shaped side panels and place new custom ones back in? Maybe gamers will get an all-back PlayStation 5 at launch after all?

Sony's ambitious PS4 backwards compatibility support on the PS5 is going smoothly, SIE boss Jim Ryan says.

Microsoft is the uncontested leader in backwards compatibility, and four generations of Xbox games are playable on the Xbox Series X. But Sony also has big ambitions. Sony plans to support the "overwhelming majority of the PS4's 4,000 games library" on the next-gen PS5, but each game has to be added on a title-to-title basis. Thankfully, progress on this compatibility process is going smoothly.

In a recent interview with CNET, Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO Jim Ryan gave a quick update on PS5's backwards compatibility. The console was built with PS4 support in mind, and devs are currently updating their PS4 games to run on PS5.

Today EA announced Star Wars Squadrons, the EA Motive's ambitious spacefighter sim that combines cross-play, online and singleplayer content, and spans multiple Star Wars generations.

Star Wars Squadrons is a lot like Rogue Squadron and Battlefront mixed together. EA Motive's new game is a first-person starfighter that hearkens back to the old Tie Fighter and X-Wing PC games of yore, and lets gamers play both on the Rebel Alliance or Galactic Empire sides. Each side has five pilots, hinting at five ship variants. Below are the confirmed ships in Squadrons:

Star Wars Squadrons has two modes: A fully-fledged singleplayer campaign, and 5v5 online multiplayer. The online component is a live game that'll shift over time--EA refers to it as an "evolving battlefield"--but there's apparently no microtransactions this time. There is a robust level-up and ranking system that'll let you upgrade your ship over time, as well as customize it via cosmetics.

As the United States begins to slowly reopen in select locations, many people are wondering what places pose the greatest risk for contracting the coronavirus.

Public health experts have taken a survey and ranked common places such as bars and public pools on a scale of 1-10, ten being the greatest risk. According to these four health experts, there are five factors when considering how dangerous a location is; if it's outdoors or indoors, proximity to others, exposure time, likelihood of compliance, and personal risk level.

The public health experts generally agreed that outdoor activities are much safer than indoor activities, and that is mostly due to the virus being less concentrated outside than inside. While outdoors is generally safer, activities such as basketball, or a music concert are still considered risky as the activity is likely to break social distancing guidelines.

A former NASA scientist has released an informative animated video that shows how fast Earth is rotating relative to the Sun, the Milky Way galaxy, and the Cosmic Microwave Background.

The simple animation video found above was created by planetary scientists, and former NASA scientist James O'Donoghue, who wanted to put all of this information into context with a simple and informative video. According to O'Donoghue, "People often talk about how we are standing on a ball (Earth) which rotates at great speed, and that this ball orbits another at an even greater speed. Sometimes this is extended to how fast we orbit the centre of our Milky Way."

O'Donoghue also said, "In all the confusion of big numbers and directions, I simply wanted to put all this information into context in a single frame so people could understand where they're headed - and how fast." Looking at the video, we can on the left-hand side the numbers that show the speed of Earth's rotation (1030 mph). Below the Earth is the Sun, and how fast the Earth rotates in comparison to the Sun, the same goes for the Milky Way galaxy, and then finally the Cosmic Microwave Background that was produced by the Big Bang.

This past Sunday, the US Surgeon General took to his personal Twitter to urge everyone to wear face coverings.

US Surgeon General, Jerome Adams addressed the idea that face coverings, or masks are infringing on everyone's freedom of choice right. Adams said that while many people feel like the masks, or coverings are infringing on their freedoms, that wearing the masks actually promotes your freedom.

Adams' way of thinking is that the more face coverings being worn by Americans, the less asymptomatic viral spread, which means more places reopening, and the rate of which they open being faster. Adam's even went onto say, "Exercise and promote your freedom by choosing to wear a face covering!". The Surgeon General isn't the only medical professional urging people to adopt face masks, the Centers for Disease and Prevention has also pushed for everyone to adopt a face covering if they are venturing outside of their house and to a place that makes social distancing guidelines difficult to follow e.g a grocery store.

Australia is expected to launch its "next-generation" hybrid rocket that will take satellites into low Earth orbit in 2022.

A new announcement out of the University of Queensland has revealed that Australia is currently moving toward launching its own domestically-made hybrid rocket. This hybrid rocket is expected to take satellites into low Earth orbit, and will be completely constructed of components made in Australia - meaning that Australia won't have to out-source components from a different country.

University of Queensland's Dr. Ingo Jahn said, "Rather than buying products from overseas, the rockets and components will be manufactured in Australia, and this is an essential step towards developing a space launch vehicle industry in Queensland with many expected flow-down benefits to our manufacturing industries". The teams focus is developing and validating fuel systems, which according to Jahn, is "one of the most complex engineering challenges".

Red Barrels' new Outlast game is a grim, bloody and ultra-frenetic hellfest where you scramble to survive in the dark.

A bit of new Outlast Trials footage dropped during the PC Gamer show that haunts my sleep. It's a kind of hellish mixture of SAW's macabre torturous machinations with Hostel's brutal cruelty, with Manhunt's merciless murdering thrown in. There's not a whole lot of new content or gameplay thrown in here, but we do get the general gist of the game through some grisly scenes.

You're a test subject in a horrifying Cold War experiment to see the limits of human survival and shock trauma. We're not sure if you're an American who's been captured, or a Communist who's being put through the hellish test on American soil. You get special night-vision goggles literally drilled into your head and are set to roam around a black-as-night underground maze full of brutality, similar to The Descent.

The PS5's custom 12-channel PCIe 4.0 SSD has been hyped up to no end, and now we finally see proof of how the new storage tech will revolutionize console gaming.

Sony's PS5 SSD is the kind of storage The Flash would be proud of. It rockets data at 5.5GB/sec speeds, and can hit 9GB/sec compressed data rates and up to 20GB/sec with deeply compressed assets. This kind of speed can shoot data, assets, and content through the system to be processed and rendered on-screen. The practical use-case enables instantaneous, interruption-free gaming. And the new Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart game showcases what the SSD can do.

The latest PS5 event showed off lots of games that the system's new tricks, from the ray-traced visuals in Gran Turismo 7 to the elimination of loading screens in Ratchet and Clank. Thanks to the SSD's efficient pipeline, blazing fast speed, and the PS5's architecture, gamers will seamlessly transition between worlds within less than a second.

According to new data from analyst firm Ampere Analysis, the Nintendo Switch is currently beating the Xbox One's total global hardware sales.

The Xbox One has been on the market for seven years now, and compromises four separate SKUs--the 2013 Xbox One, the Xbox One S, Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, and Xbox One X. But the Switch hardware family--Switch and Switch Lite--has already beaten the Xbox One's sales in just four years on the market. This makes sense considering the Switch is the fastest-selling current-gen console in the US.

According to new figures from Ampere Analysis, which estimates total sales up until Q1'20, the Switch has sold 53 million units compared to the Xbox One's 49 million. Remember Microsoft no longer reports hard console sales figures so this data is an estimate.

Bluepoint and Sony Japan Studios are using PlayStation 5 hardware to breathe new life into an PS3 classic, and the results are incredible.

Demon's Souls is getting a fully-fledged next-gen remake on the PlayStation 5, complete with high-end visuals, smooth frame rates, and incredible ray-traced shadow and dynamic global illumination effects. The world has literally been recreated in stunning detail, creating a kind of visual marvel that not only resurrects the PS3 original, but rebirths it in a way not possible before now.

Sony's next-gen PS5 will outsell the Xbox Series X by over 29 million units by 2024, analyst firm Ampere Analysis predicts.

Ampere Analysis' latest report lays out some pretty hefty sales predictions for next-gen consoles. By 2024, four years into the hardware cycle, the PS5 is expected to hit 66 million sales, achieving over 60% of the PlayStation 4's total 110.4 million lifetime sales in five years on the market (the PS4 sold 80 million units by this period). The Xbox Series X, however, is expected to sell a dramatically less 37 million units.

That means by 2024, the PlayStation 5 is expected to have sold 29 million more units than the Xbox Series X. The PS5 is also expected to beat the Xbox Series X by 1.3 million units at launch. The main reason? Sony's existing platform domination with the PlayStation 4 will carry forward into next-gen thanks to backwards compatibility.

We've been hearing rumors thick and fast about NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce RTX 30 series cards, which seems to be led by the flagship GeForce RTX 3090. I'm hoping this isn't the RTX 3090 Ti, and rather NVIDIA bring back the ULTRA nomenclature -- it would be great to see the GeForce RTX 3090 ULTRA.

Anyway, we have some new information to share from Igor -- with a breakdown of the TGP of the purported GeForce RTX 3090. Igor has worked out that the GeForce RTX 3090 (which I'll be calling it for now) should have a rather large 350W TDP (Total Graphics Power) that breaks down into 230W for the GA102 and 60W for the 24GB GDDR6X memory.

The breakdown is much more detailed:

Warner Bros. has delayed a bunch of their tent pole movies for this year, with Christopher Nolan's Tenet and The Matrix 4 both delayed -- and now Wonder Woman 1984, for the third time.

Wonder Woman 1984 along with Tenet and The Matrix 4, along with other big movies from competing movie studios, were delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wonder Woman 1984 was already delayed from June 5 to August 14 over COVID-19, and now it has been delayed from August 14, to October 2, 2020.

Let's hope that Wonder Woman 1984 doesn't go through another delay, and I hope that we see absolutely beyond the best CGI effects ever. Normally these movies are rushing to get to the finish line and visual effects are the hardest to finish on time -- well, they've had months and months of time in post now, so we shouldn't get some of the cheap and nasty VFX that we saw in the original Wonder Woman (hopefully).

I think I've read everything I need to about COVID-19 coronavirus now, as a spiritual healer who helped people with coronavirus in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has died of COVID-19.

The spiritual healer kissed peoples hands to cure them of coronavirus, has died of coronavirus. Vice.com reports that the "Baba" or "self-styled holy man was apparently a black magic healer from the Ratlam district". He cured people by kissing their hands.

Ratlam's District Magistrate Ruchika Chauhan told VICE on a phone call: "He got himself tested for coronavirus after he began having severe symptoms, and passed away immediately. From the contact tracing we have done so far, seven of his family members and thirteen followers have tested positive. We are investigating the transmission and trying to contain it".

Sony will release two PlayStation 5 consoles in 2020: a standard model that plays 4K UHD Blu-ray XL discs, and a digital-only disc-less model. This latter model could be up to $50 cheaper.

In an effort to reduce prices and give players more options, Sony will kick off its new PS5 generation with a digital-only version. The idea here is two-fold: the disc-less PS5 would be more attractive because it'd be cheaper (Sony will shave off the console's Blu-ray drive, which has been upgraded to support the 4K format BDXL discs that hold up to 100GGB), and Sony wants to lock people to its digital ecosystem where the real money is made.

So how much cheaper could the digital PS5 sell for? Possibly up to $50. Based on manufacturing estimates and historical market data, the PS5 could cost around $500 when it releases, possibly $550. This could put the digital-only PlayStation 5 in the $450-$500 range.

UPDATE: Play Asia's PS5 listing has been updated. Price has been removed, and you can no longer pre-order the console.

A $699 PS5 is very, very unlikely for many reasons, but the biggest one is the system's estimated manufacturing costs.

A new Play Asia pre-order listing prices the PS5 at $699. This is obviously a placeholder, and the console won't cost this much. It's simply too high of a price tag considering the console's estimated $450 manufacturing costs. Back in February 2020, production supply sources told Bloomberg's Takashi Mochizuki the PS5 would cost $450 to manufacture. The expensive GDDR6 RAM and PCIe 4.0 SSD flash memory make up $250 of that cost, or more than half. Given the margin of error and other costs, the PS5 is expected to sell at $500.

Christopher Nolan's mysterious new movie 'Tenet' had a release date of July 17, 2020 -- but thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been delayed -- but thankfully, only by two weeks.

Warner Bros. delayed a bunch of their new tent pole movies in a huge delay spree, with the studio delaying Tenet, Wonder Woman 1984, and even The Matrix 4. Tenet was meant to open on July 17, 2020 which would've been the 10 year anniversary of Inception.

Instead, theaters will now re-release Inception in "honor" of its 10th anniversary. Recently, a new trailer for Tenet was debuted inside of Fortnite in the Party Royale space, which you can read more about here.

The Matrix 4 was originally meant to hit cinemas on the same day as John Wick 4 -- May 21, 2021, but thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic it has been pushed back by close to an entire year.

Warner Bros. have announced at The Matrix 4 will now be released on April 1, 2022 and I'm hoping it is not going to be the greatest April Fools Day joke ever told. We only just heard barely 48 hours ago that The Matrix 4 star Carrie-Anne Moss, who plays Trinity, talking about The Matrix 4 script with Empire magazine.

Moss said: "I never thought that it would happen. It was never on my radar at all. When it was brought to me in the way that it was brought to me, with incredible depth and all of the integrity and artistry that you could imagine, I was like, 'This is a gift.' It was just very exciting".

If you believed all the marketing and hype you'd think every single PlayStation 5 game was going to be blasting away at 4K 60FPS, 4K 120FPS, or 8K... yeah -- you might want to adjust your hype meters.

The good folks at Digital Foundry have done what they do best: deep dive on the resolution and operating frame rates of the games Sony showed off during its PlayStation event. Digital Foundry provides a kick ass, in-depth commentary on PS5 games including Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Gran Turismo 7.

The team has a list of what they think the expected frame rates are for some of the games on the PS5. It seems as though there are many more games at 30FPS, which is ultra disappointing given all the hype around the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles.