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As the Met Gala photos of the hottest celebs dressed in couture started rolling in yesterday (Monday 6 May), an AI photo of Katy Perry tricked her own mom and many others as they branded her ‘best dressed’ despite not being there in person.
The Met Gala isn’t an ordinary ceremony, it’s often regarded as the most prestigious fashion event and is one where celebrities are encouraged to dress up to a theme and revel in the art of fashion.
While Katy Perry has been in attendance in previous years with avant-garde looks, many were tricked into thinking she was at the 2024 event when two AI photos of her went viral.

Internet is playing with my mind right now #MetGala #KatyPerry pic.twitter.com/ElG7hLnaYb
— hemy (@hemysamuel) May 6, 2024

Dressed in two outfits perfect for the ‘Garden of Time’ theme, Katy Perry’s mom believed she had shown up on the carpet. Instead, the singer was recording in a studio.
Katy Perry took to Instagram to share the text her mom sent her which reads: “Ha Feather! Didn’t know you went to the Met. What a gorgeous gown, you look like the Rose Parade, you are your own float lol.”
In response, the artist said: “lol mom the AI got you too, BEWARE!”

Image from Katy Perry’s Instagram
The only major giveaway of the AI photo? The carpet. Every year, to go along with the theme, the Met Gala carpet and entryway are uniquely designed.
The main AI photo of Katy Perry features the 2018 carpet with its beige and red appearance, different from 2024’s earthy green adaptation.
The second AI photo of Katy Perry to go viral featured the newest iteration, so it’s no surprise people fell for it.
AI gets best dressed at Met Gala 2024
At an event where the outfits are the showstoppers and fans of fashion are eager to see how designers and fashion houses interpret the theme year-on-year, the AI version came up trumps.

my favorite thing is katy perry is about to get best dressed despite not attending
— bailey (@_BaileyBrowning) May 7, 2024

Before the realization of it being an AI hit, people took to X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok to share their love for Katy Perry’s take on the theme.

How an AI edit of Katy Perry the best dressed at the gala- pic.twitter.com/wxyrAuaS37
— Kai (@wwsuspension) May 6, 2024

Some people listed her amongst others who actually were in attendance, with one X user saying: “JLO & Katy Perry have done it for me tonight best-dressed women so far”
Another said: “Katy Perry & Zendaya are best dressed hands down.”
Photos of Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj were created by artificial intelligence and shared on social media too.
Featured Image: Via X user @Jxries
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One of the original best games for Meta Quest 1 will no longer support the aging VR headset and will instead concentrate on later models.
The game that helped sell so many VR headsets back in the day, Beat Saber, is finally pulling support for the original Oculus / Meta Quest 1 headset, citing its lack of power and developing for newer tech as a better use of the dev team’s time.
Beat Saber has been a staple of virtually every headset since the Oculus Rift but with the Quest 3 performing so well in the last few months and bringing with it so much more power, it is perhaps an inevitable end for the Quest 1’s version. More pertinently it perhaps signals the actual death knell for the original standalone headset.
The official Beat Saber account on X posted: “Dear players, to focus our development efforts on our next projects within Beat Saber, we will no longer support Meta Quest 1 as of November 2, 2024. The game will continue to be playable, but Multiplayer functionality will stop and Leaderboards might be phased out in the future.”

Dear players, to focus our development efforts on our next projects within Beat Saber, we will no longer support Meta Quest 1 as of November 2, 2024. The game will continue to be playable, but Multiplayer functionality will stop and Leaderboards might be phased out in the future. pic.twitter.com/h7Jefa3g75
— Beat Saber (@BeatSaber) May 6, 2024

So it appears that while the game will remain playable in some form, Quest 1 players will lose access to multiplayer and, going forward, Leaderboards.
Over the weekend Beat Sabre was also made cross-playable meaning people (like me) who had bought it on the Oculus Rift all those years ago on PC could now add it to their Quest libraries for free.
For a game that has been out for so long Beat Saber really has been a bastion of VR gaming and recently received a Daft Punk music pack. It will be interesting to see where it heads now that the Quest 1 is deemed not powerful enough to keep up.
While most players were pragmatic, the response thread was still scattered with those upset about the decision:
“Guess I’m not playing Beat Saber anymore. Shame. I don’t intend to spend another 400 on a headset. Multiplayer is part of the playability factor. You take that away it’s like 50% of functionality that adds to the game vs. playing solo.”
The Quest 1 came out some five years ago in 2019 so is now showing signs of age, especially when compared to the Quest 3. It seems as though the headset is destined to disappear from our desktops now, rather quickly we would suspect.
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The Chinese state has reportedly hacked the UK Ministry of Defence, with MPs receiving reports of a massive data breach.
Although a country has not officially been named as yet, Sky News reports that the perpetrator is believed to be China. MPs will be formally briefed later today on May 7 but as it stands, the Chinese state is thought to be accused of two or three attempts to attack Ministry of Defence (MoD) employees. The MoD is a department of British government that implements defence policy, made up of a combination of admin and military personnel.
The data under attack appears to stem from the payroll system, which contains personal information of current MoD personnel and some veterans. Sky News reports that the main types of data affected are thought to be named and bank details. The news outlet asserted that all salaries will still be paid this month.
What’s more, the BBC reported on May 7 that the hacked system was managed by an external contractor, meaning that no operational MoD data is believed to have been obtained. The contractor system has since been taken down, with a review launched into how the attack took place.
How has China responded to the Ministry of Defence hacking accusations?
China’s foreign ministry stated that it “firmly opposes and fights all forms of cyber attacks” and “rejects the use of this issue politically to smear other countries”.
The reasoning behind the attack could be related to attempting to coerce UK MoD employees, as suggested by Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood when speaking to Sky News, arguing that China “was probably looking at the financially vulnerable with a view that they may be coerced in exchange for cash”.
The UK government has not yet made a public statement on the situation but Defence Secretary Grant Shapps will make a statement to the Commons around lunchtime on May 7, with the BBC stating he will set out a “multi-point plan” which will include action to protect affected service men and women.
This wouldn’t be the first time that China has been accused of hacking Western countries, with millions of Americans thought to be affected by a hacking plot in March 2024.
Featured image: Harland Quarrington on Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
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After testing back in March, YouTube is rolling out their new AI ‘Jump Ahead’ feature for Premium subscribers, making it easier to skim videos and find the best bits.
The feature works as an AI-powered recommendation system that analyzes patterns in viewer behavior to help users skip to the most popular parts with just a double tap.
The double tab is used on videos currently to skip time and jump between chapters if the creator has implemented those, but it’s not always been the easiest to use and can appear quite clunky. This is especially so when using the tool on a mobile device.
On YouTube’s Creator Insider channel, the ‘small experiment’ was first announced on March 19 and the current format for skipping was described as a reason why the AI version has been experimented with.
“…Constantly tapping can be tedious. We’re running a very small experiment in the US for a premium-only feature that combines user watch behavior data and AI to help identify the next best point a viewer typically wants to skip ahead to.”
While the feature was merely being tested a couple of months ago, it’s now in full action for full experiment mode. This is available for users of the YouTube Android app who pay for the Premium service.
YouTube Premium is a paid-for membership that allows people to watch ad-free and download videos to watch when offline.
It only applies to English videos at the moment, but the experiment could be rolled out further in the future.
How does YouTube’s Jump Ahead AI feature work?
The double-tapping process will see an upgrade for Premium subscribers who take part in the experiment, as this will now bring up a pill-shaped button that says ‘Jump Ahead.’ This will move the video along to where other users commonly skip to.
“The way it works is, if a viewer is double tapping to skip ahead on an eligible segment, we’ll show a jump ahead button that will take them to the next point in the video that we think they’re aiming for.”
Creators will be able to use the feature too when watching their own videos, including those who don’t have YouTube Premium.
Featured Image: Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
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Okay, so far we have used modern 3D print technology to create some amazing models for the best Games Room ever that we are building. Okay, well there’s nothing inherently difficult about doing that, all you need are 3D printers such as the Creality K1C or Uniformation GKTwo that
we used to craft some really cool stuff.
Melting plastic and curing resin is cool and all, but what’s cooler? Lasers that’s what. Laser-cutting devices have really come down in price, and while they may never get to be quite as popular as a 3D printer as they are a bit more niche, that also gives us the perfect opportunity to make some stuff that literally none of your gaming friends will ever have.
It also opens up the possibility of selling these objects as well, but that is a story for another day.
The Two Trees TTS20 Pro
Two Trees TTS-20 Pro 20W Laser Engraver Machine is our laser weapon of choice for this feature as it packs a powerful punch, can cut just about any standard material you throw at it, and is super easy to set up and get going with – a fundamental part of everything we have used in this series so far.
It may be a laser and a little more difficult to just crack on with, but the results you can get from the TTS-20 are remarkably good.
Much like using a Slicer program to prepare your 3D printed designs, laser cutters require software that can take your designs and plot out the path of the laser and how much power you need to either cut, engrave, or simply decorate the material you want to use.
We aren’t talking about Death Star levels of laser here, just enough to cut a perfect representation in a piece of wood or acrylic. Speaking of cutting acrylic, we will be using this super little machine in a future upcoming feature where we will be making some very cool addons for our sim cockpit – watch out for that one.
Here we will be using a program called LightBurn. While the majority of 3D Printer slicer software packages are free, LightBurn has a cost of £59. It does come with a 30-day free trial however to allow you to check it does everything you need it to – it will. There are free options out there, but none have the ease of use or as many features of LightBurn so we are sticking with that – just remember to factor in that potential cost when you decide to try this out.
Setting up the TTS20 Pro
In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between laser-cutters and 3D printers. They use a similar kind of code, a lot of the same parts such as stepper motors and extrusion railes and they have that same DIY feel about them that 3D printers had until recently when Bambu Labs, QidiTech, and Creality started to produce more consumer-facing products.
Laser cutters are in that position at the moment where they are great for hobbyists and designers, but if your parents bought one you know you would be getting regular phone calls for help.
Thankfully, taking the machine out of the box it becomes apparent that you won’t need to perform much construction work here. The frame comes ready assembled and you just need to mount the control box and laser head. Having made sure your cabling is all neat and tidy you are then ready to connect the USB to your PC and add it as a new laser in LightBurn.
One of the great things about the Pro is that it comes with both Air Assist (a small compressor that blows away laser debris) and a Honeycomb, both of which normally cost extra. The Honeycomb is the workbed where you place your material and secure it on your table, saving your furniture from the laser.
It is a decent size of 419mm x 419mm (we set it a mm or two shorter in LightBurn just to be on the safe side) – this is a larger work area than many 3D printers to give you an example of size here.
The TTS-20 Pro connects immediately to LightBurn and after running some strength tests on to balsa wood it felt like time to get cutting some of the things we wanted to make. What was apparent from the off is that the 20W laser provided here is both quick and powerful and was likely to make short work of our upcoming jobs. Let’s get cracking.
Making games room objects with the TTS-20 Pro

First up we wanted to put our drinks on so we could stop worrying about sloshing coffee over our desk mat.
We wanted to go for a suitable retro feel and found these laser-cut floppy disk coasters on Thingiverse which look great. We imported the SVG into LightBurn and sent the job to the TTS-20 and set it to work in earnest for the first time.
The result was amazing, far better than we expected with minimum tweaking and we soon had a set of six brand-new gaming coasters that would be the envy of all our retro-gaming friends.
The TTS-20 Pro effortlessly etched the design on the wood we used and cut it out perfectly. We could also have used acrylic here for a more realistic look.
The other thing we tried is definitely on trend but we wanted to see how the machine would deal with acrylic, plus we wanted a Fallout keyring!
We uploaded this Vaultboy design to LightBurn and minutes later he was in our hands.
You could of course scale this up and backlight it for a cool LED project for your games room wall.

Laser cutting with the TTS-20 Pro
Be under no illusions, this is a good machine for doing what we want it to do. It is not too big to be cumbersome and takes remarkably little setting up to get good results in a way that you simply cannot with a 3D printer.
We will be using it again as mentioned to help up make a sim cockpit in the future and etching flight panels once we get a bit more used to it.
You always need to be mindful that lasers can be dangerous and you should never look at them while they work. While there is a guard in place, just use common sense. The other thing to note is that like any laser cutter, smoke and fumes will ber produced, none of which you want in your lungs so great ventilation and and a mask are required at all times.
Yes, LightBurn is another piece of software to learn, but it works hand in hand with this great little laser cutter and you will soon be crafting game room items you never thought possible.
If you are interested in picking up a TTS-20 Pro you can check out Two Trees website where, at the time of writing, they are currently on sale.
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