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Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here. It’s a great time to be a gamer — I mean, what else is there to do? And with the prospect of a long winter and lonely holiday season ahead of us, here’s a list of games on all the major platforms that you can really sink your teeth — and a few dozen hours — into. Buying for a gamer and have no idea what’s worthwhile? Once you’ve figured out which gaming system is their platform of choice, any of these should be guaranteed wins. This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission. All major platforms: Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Image Credits: Ubisoft I genuinely enjoyed AC: Odyssey’s gorgeous landscapes and main characters, but the game systems felt disconnected and arbitrary. Th...

ANYbotics , the creators of ANYmal , a four-legged autonomous robot platform intended for a variety of industrial uses, has raised a $22.3M Swiss Franc (~$20M) round A to continue developing and scaling the business. With similar robots just beginning to break into the mainstream, the market seems ready to take off. The company spun out of ETH Zurich in 2016, at which point the robot was already well into development. ANYmal is superficially similar to Spot, the familiar quadrupedal robot from Boston Dynamics, but the comparison mustn’t be taken too far. A four-legged robot is a natural form for navigating and interacting with environments build for humans. ANYbotics is on the third generation of the robot, which has progressively integrated computing units and sensors of increasing sophistication. “Our current ANYmal C model features three built-in high-end Intel i7 computers that power the robot and customer-applications such as automated inspection tasks,” explained co-founder ...

Amazon in September announced it was bringing video calling support to its Fire TV platform. Today, the company says two-way video calling is now available with its Fire TV Cube devices (2nd gen.) The new feature will allow customers to pair a third-party webcam with their Fire TV Cube in order to make and receive video calls from their TVs to any other Alexa device with a screen. That means customers could call other Alexa owners who have a Fire TV Cube of their own, an Echo device with a screen like the Echo Show, or even just the Alexa app installed on a smartphone or tablet. For the feature to work, Amazon says the third-party video cams will need to meet certain minimum requirements, including UVC support, 720p resolution, 30 frames per sec (fps). Amazon, however, recommends that a better experience will be had with cameras with 1080p resolution and 60-90 degree field of view (FOV). It advises against 4K webcams. The company also says a better experience will be had with a f...

Looking Glass’s technology is extremely cool, but has, thus far, been prohibitively expensive, ranging from $600 for its 8.9-inch product to $6,000 for the 15-inch model — and an undisclosed sum for its 32-inch 8K display. Portrait might not be the most technically ambitious or versatile product the Brooklyn-based startup has produced, but it’s easily the most accessible. At $349, it’s still not cheap (though it’s $199 if you get in early via Kickstarter ), but it has to be one of the most affordable holographic displays on the market. Along with the pricing, the company is taking a more populist approach to functionality, as well, offering up what is essentially a very advanced digital photo frame. The system offers up to 100 different perspectives on a 3D image, which, unlike products like Sony’s new 3D display, can be viewed by multiple people at once. Image Credits: Looking Glass The system can also be run without being tethered to a computer. Its standalone mode relies on ...

With the release of watchOS 7 , Apple at last turned the Apple Watch into the GPS-based kid tracker parents have wanted, albeit at a price point that requires careful consideration. As someone in the target demographic for such a device — a parent of a “tween” who’s allowed to freely roam the neighborhood (but not without some sort of communication device) — I put the new Family Setup system for the Apple Watch through its paces over the past couple of months. The result? To be frank, I’m conflicted as to whether I’d recommend the Apple Watch to a fellow parent, as opposed to just suggesting that it’s time to get the child a phone. This has to do, in part, with the advantages offered by a dedicated family tracking solution — like Life360, for example — as well as how a child may respond to the Apple Watch itself, and the quirks of using a solution that wasn’t initially designed with the needs of family tracking in mind. As a parent of a busy and active tween (nearly 11), I can se...

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released a new product today. It’s a tiny $5 fan combined with a small heatsink for the Raspberry Pi 4. It works with the official case, below the top cover. That accessory should prevent the Raspberry Pi from overheating. If you’re not familiar with the Raspberry Pi, it’s a cheap, single-board computer with a lot of connectors that is the size of a deck of cards. You can give it to a kid so they can play around with a terminal, you can use it for your weekend projects as the computing brain and more. The Raspberry Pi 4 is the most recent Raspberry Pi device in its classic form factor. And it’s a huge performance improvement over the Raspberry Pi 3. And yet, shortly after its release last year, the community of Raspberry Pi users noticed that the single-board computer tends to get hot. In some cases, it becomes so hot that the device has no choice but to throttle the frequency of the CPU. That problem is particularly noticeable if you’re using t...