Much international travel is hugely restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s not stopping some keen Japanese travellers though, Reuters reports. They are seeing the world with the help of virtual reality.

Inoue, 56, and his wife “flew” as clients of Tokyo entertainment company First Airlines, which is tapping into a growing virtual reality travel market for Japanese holidaymakers grounded by coronavirus restrictions. “I often go overseas on business, but I haven’t been to Italy,” he told Reuters. “My impression was rather good because I got a sense of actually seeing things there.” Grounded travelers sit in first or business class seats in a mock airline cabin where they are served in-flight meals and drinks, with flat panel screens displaying aircraft exterior views including passing clouds. Virtual reality goggles provide immersive tours at destinations including – as well as Italy’s cities of culture – Paris, New York, Rome and Hawaii.

Messaging app Threema announced on Tuesday that it now supports end-to-end encrypted video calls.

In order to ensure full end-to-end encryption of all metadata (including real-time metadata, such as camera orientation), our team had to make corrections to the widely used base technology “WebRTC.” This security improvement will be incorporated into the WebRTC project, meaning that countless other communication services benefit from our patch in the future.

The second part to that is great, about sharing it back to the project. You can find Threema on the App Store here.

The latest version of Android includes a new worldwide earthquake detection system. Meanwhile, in California, Google is United States Geological Survey (USGS) and California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), to provide earthquake alerts, reported Techcrunch. 

The highlight of today’s release is surely Google’s new worldwide earthquake detection system and the new earthquake alerting feature it is launching for California. With this, Google is essentially turning your Android phone into a seismometer to create what the company says is “the world’s largest earthquake detection network.” The company argues that smartphone accelerometers are sensitive enough to measure the P-waves that are the first waves to arrive after an earthquake. Whenever the phone thinks it has detected an earthquake, it will send that info to a central server which then determines whether this was really an earthquake. For now, Google will only use this data to show information when somebody then searches for ‘earthquake’ or a similar keyword. Over time, though, it expects to be able to send out alerts based on these phone-based systems.