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One of the more controversial bits of news to come out of yesterday's Xbox One reveal was the discovery that the newly christened console would not be able to play Xbox 360 games. Backwards compatibility has been a sore subject for some gamers but Microsoft's Don Mattrick says the company is looking forward, not back. "If you're backwards compatible," he told The Wall Street Journal, "you're really backwards."

While the news was met with some chagrin, it's not terribly surprising. The Xbox One's architecture -- equipped with a new x86 CPU -- prevents it from being able to run games designed for the 360's eight year old Xenon processor. Additionally, Mattrick claims that players making use of backwards compatibility were a negligible percentage of their consumer base. While Mattrick's words are sure to stick in more than one craw, they reflect the reality of the market. With Nintendo struggling to juggle Wii games on the Wii U and Sony's Playstation 4 abandoning current gen PSN games, it looks like backwards compatibility is a thing of the past.

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Instead of waiting until the end of the year for Google's annual Zeitgeist, you can now find out what's trending in any given month with a new Top Charts feature from Google Trends. Updated monthly and going back to 2004, Top Charts is built on the Knowledge Graph, so it's smart enough to house related keywords under one term for more accurate rankings. For example, searches for "giants baseball" and "sf giants" would go toward pushing "San Francisco Giants" up the ranks in a sports-related chart. Right now there are more than 40 top ten lists with more than 140 time periods available for your perusal. In addition to the charts, the Trends team has also rolled out a new visualization tool for "hot searches" that displays trending topics in a large colorful layout -- as seen below, you can customize it to display up to 25 searches at a time that endlessly shift and refresh, thus consuming our attention for the entire day.

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At today's Thinking Digital conference, the BBC exhibited the first gadget designed through its Perceptive Media Project: the Perceptive Radio, created by Ian Forrester of the corporation's Future Media division. When the BBC announced the project last summer, the response included some head scratching, mostly due to a lack of clarity about what perceptive media entails. The BBC's R&D department defines perceptive media as distinct from personalized or pervasive media in that it intelligently adapts to specific audiences and surroundings. The Perceptive Radio accomplishes this through the use of light, sound and proximity sensors that adjust what the radio plays according to environmental factors like time, location and the listener's distance from the device. At the moment, the list of tricks ready to demo on the Perceptive Radio is short, but the BBC plans to open-source the design soon, allowing tinkerers to fiddle with it to their hearts' content.

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It's surely not the first contraption to bring an iDevice to a weapon, but the Inteliscope does appear to be one of the first to take itself seriously. It's designed to secure an iPhone 4 / 4S / 5 or iPod touch to any firearm with a Picatinny (Mil-STD-1913) or Weaver tactical rail, enabling shooters to peek around corners with no head exposure. Naturally, the mount itself wouldn't be all that attractive without an accompanying app. The software portion of the equation offers up custom crosshairs, a 5x digital zoom, video recording capabilities, ballistics / firearm data, a built-in compass and a shot timer. There's also a flashlight and strobe feature, information about local prevailing winds and a constant check on your location. Folks interested in pre-ordering can do so at the source link for $69.99, with initial shipments expected to head out in June.

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You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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The Oculus team just got bigger by two, with software engineer Tom Forsyth, formerly of Valve, and robotic scientist Dr. Steve LaValle of the University of Illinois both jumping on board. Forsyth previously worked alongside Joe Ludwig and Michael Abrash on Valve's Team Fortress 2, which has a VR mode specifically designed for the developer version of the Rift. Valve's developers were some of the first to get their hands on dev kits, and Forsyth's considerable experience will be put towards the Rift SDK and a few secret R&D projects. LaValle also has some history with Oculus; he's had a hand in developing VR hardware and software with the company since last September. As Oculus' full-time principle scientist, LaValle will be working on things like sensor fusion, magnetic drift correction, and kinematic modeling. Though the Rift is still a long way off from being ready for consumer use, this savvy collection of industry talent could be a sign that big things are afoot for the VR company.

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By now, all the developers who signed up to receive Glass prototypes should have the headgear in hand, so Google's ready to move on to the next phase. Over the next few weeks, the company will begin sending invitations to successful #ifihadglass applicants. Invites will come via Google+, so you'll need to have +Project Glass in your Circles in order to jump to the next step. Unfortunately, the Explorer program is closed, so it's a bit to late to submit an application now. Google's promised to keep you in the loop regarding future opportunities, though. Simply add your info at the source link below to sign up for updates.

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