NEW SKILL: This team take humanoid parkour to the next level! This project involves @zhenkirito123, @Yuanhang__Zhang, @pabbeel, @carlo_sferrazza, @GuanyaShi, and others. Called Perceptive Humanoid Parkour (PHP), it lets a Unitree G1 humanoid (29 DoF, 1.3 m) run long-horizon, vision-based parkour and decide on its own whether to step over, climb onto, vault, or roll off obstacles, using only onboard depth sensing (a 30 Hz camera) plus a discrete 2D velocity command from the operator. It builds the motions by motion matching, a nearest-neighbor search in a 27-dimensional feature space (imported from the video-game industry) that stitches retargeted atomic human clips into long-horizon kinematic trajectories through a shared Locomotion to Skill to Locomotion manifold. It then trains per-motion RL tracking experts (with a privileged height scan) and distills them into one depth-based multi-skill student via DAgger combined with RL. It replaces hand-scripted skill sequencing and operator-triggered skill selection. The onboard depth-only student holds 0.95 to 1.00 success across obstacle heights in simulation, while a naive end-to-end depth policy collapses from 0.95 to 0.07/0.08 at 58 and 76 cm. The upside comes from distilling privileged-height-scan experts and from motion-matching composition, not from training onboard from scratch. The operator sends only a coarse 2D velocity (W/A/D keys), and the robot itself picks which skill to run from the depth image. The training data contains only single-obstacle traversals, so the ability to chain skills across a multi-obstacle course is generalization the policy was never explicitly taught. Transitions are constructed in kinematics, not rediscovered by learning. Every skill enters and exits through a shared locomotion manifold, so no hand-captured skill-to-skill transition clip is needed. Motion matching densifies a sparse library into smooth long-horizon trajectories before any RL. The entire parkour library is only about 66 seconds of mocap, and each skill is just a few seconds. Ablating approach-distance variety ("Extreme Distances") drops the 76 and 94 cm climbs to 0.62 and 0.64, and "Half Density" drops the 76 cm climb to 0.32. Motion matching's job is to manufacture stride-phase and approach variety out of seconds of data. It clears a 1.25 m wall (96 percent of its 1.3 m height) in 3.63 s, and a cat-vault peaks at 3.41 m/s clearing a 0.4 m by 0.5 m obstacle in 0.8 s. A single 30 Hz depth stream drives both traversal and runtime re-planning, shown by displacing obstacles about 0.5 m mid-run.

Destin Daniel Cretton says they looked at parkour GoPro footage as inspiration for Spider-Man's web swinging in ‘SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY’. “We were able to now look at YouTube footage of wingsuiters & parkourers… and analyze what angles make your heart drop, that make you feel like you’re right there with them.” (Source:

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is down to $0.99 on Steam. It is in the Autumn Sale. This is the 2016 reboot, the open-city one, not the original. A full parkour game for a dollar is the kind of sale that does not need a pitch.

JUST IN: FED RATES REMAIN UNCHANGED AT 3.50–3.75% Kevin Warsh just looked America dead in the eyes and said “nah, we’re good” while oil’s doing parkour off Iranian missiles, three regional Fed presidents are screaming for a hike like the building’s on fire, and Trump is somewhere yelling “LOWEST RATES IN THE WORLD” into a gold-plated megaphone. Nine-to-three. Three grown adults voted to raise rates and got overruled so the official statement could still end with the purest corporate-copium sentence ever written: “The Committee will deliver price stability.” Deliver it where? FedEx? Because it’s not showing up here. We’re in a society so advanced that “strong productivity” means robots are writing the earnings calls while the rest of us fight over $6 gas and a 30-year mortgage that now requires a second kidney as down payment. Capital markets are having a full nervous breakdown, the 10-year is climbing like it’s late for a meeting with God, and the Fed’s response is putting on noise-canceling headphones and humming. Geopolitics is just vibes now. A shooting war can jack energy prices, the statement shrugs “supply shocks,” and everyone goes back to arguing about whether the AI boom is going to save us or just make the unemployment charts look prettier while we all starve in climate-controlled server farms. This is peak late-empire comedy. The people who run the money printer are playing chicken with reality, the people who run the country are live-tweeting about GDP targets that exist only in PowerPoints, and the rest of us are refreshing the chart like it’s going to start making sense. We’re not a serious country. We’re a reality show with a central bank. And the central bank just voted to keep the laugh track running

Star Wars Jedi 3 is far into development and should be announced soon, according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier🚀 This Jedi series has a much better gameplay than most attempts at this franchise, and the protagonist is decent, most of the story and side characters are quite forgettable and fit the modern cookie cutter template. Hope the third one can actually be great overall and has more of that platforming and parkour gameplay, where it shines best😎