This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, January 30th, 2026.

We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context and help each other understand.

Today, Google is making it super easy for anyone to create their own subpar recreations of classic video games. Oh, I can't wait to do that myself.

I'm Jason Howell.

I'm Jen Cutter.

Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.

This is a fun big story.

And I'm super curious.

I'm so happy that I'm doing this with you right now, Jen, because you have your kind of

your foot into the gaming world,

and this crosses into that realm in very interesting ways. Google is rolling out Project

Genie. It's a Genie 3-powered world model sandbox. You got to be a Google AI ultra subscriber

in the U.S.

I am, so I'm going to play around with this.

It lets users generate simple interactive 3D worlds from text or image prompts.

So you could use it either way to kick it off to create these short 60 second sessions that users can play inside of Genie 3.

And it's 720P resolution, 24 frames per second.

If you create a world and a character or a roly ball,

which we'll talk about, whatever it is, you can use the WAS and D keys for movement. So that'll move you through the world.

And Google is framing this as a research test bed for discovering new use cases. World models is a

real big topic in AI right now. And so this is one way to explore that. So imagine using the model to,

I don't know, visualize a film scene.

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