this is bbc news, the headlines: president trump has urged americans to be immunised against measles — despite previously casting doubt on the vaccination. health officials believe the recent rise in people contracting the virus is partly connected to misinformation about the jab. 270 students and staff are in quarantine after cases were confirmed at two universities in california. sri lanka's prime minister has told the bbc that he considered resigning in the wake of the easter sunday bomb attacks. he said he simply "wasn't in the loop" for a briefing on warnings of a possible terrorist plot received two weeks before 250 people were killed. severe flood warnings have been issued in mozambique as cyclone kenneth — the second in as many months — moves further inland. there are fears that hundreds

of thousands of people will need humanitarian aid. it's 3:31 in the morning. in a about a quarter of an hour it's time for newswatch. but first here's click. when was the last time you wrote a letter — actually handwrote one? i know, right? it is all about tippy—tappy typing these days, isn't it. well, omar mehtab has been looking at a way machine learning could help write things for you, in your own script. but is it good enough to fool the human eye?

is my handwriting really that bad? yes. yeah, it is. (laughs). meet hemingway. this little robot is doing something that i hate — writing a letter. but this one is particularly special, because it is doing it in my style of handwriting. this is writing in exactly my style. and the way hemingway here learnt how to write in my style was i sent this piece of paper and with a sample text. this took me 15 minutes to write, hemingway can do it in two. after sending through my written text, the handwriting company scans it and put it through its machine learning algorithm to figure out how i write my letters. so the interesting thing about our tech is we mimic what humans do. humans are completely unique, every time you write a character it is going to be a tiny bit different, and we pick up on those nuances, so our technology will learn how you do

those and will also mimic all the variation you apply to this, and generate more on top of it. it is notjust printing the words on paper, it is applying pressure at certain points where i apply pressure. it is being able to do that. the g, i do a g like that without a curl at the bottom, so does this. just subtle little things, it has got it down to a t. this is wicked, look at that. it's all very impressive, and even if i write underneath the robot's lines, you can see the results are very similar. there are small details like little flicks of the pen that set mine apart. but why would anyone want a handwritten letter nowadays? so it might seem a bit counterintuitive, but the noise — you get so many emails a day, and you barely read half of them. it is about cutting through that noise and adding a personal touch. so we work with big political organisations, they send them out, hotels use it for adding a personal

touch, or maybe even your exams. to see how convincing this robot really is, i have brought in graphologist adam brand to see if he can tell which is which. the bottom one is written by a human being. the top one is mechanical. 0h! laughs. yeah, that is me. was it easy to tell which one was which? it has got the spacing right, it's got the angles right, it has got the form right, but what it is fundamentally missing is the fluency. the little nick there and there. what can you tell from my handwriting about me? there is some lovely things going on here, the sensitivity, the fluency, the need for information, the mental enthusiasm. does it mean that everything you can tell with my handwriting you can tell from theirs? you can tell a lot from theirs, but in terms of actual identification, it lacks soul. is there potential for misuse

as it currently stands? there are security problems, clearly. but it is too easy to pick up the fact that one is mechanical and the other is by a human being. you know, you are the first ever person that has been positive about my handwriting. the handwriting company plans to improve the system so in future you can print your handwritten letters at home, tell your smart home assistant to write something up, and even write with a particular emotion, like light and flowing for happy, and intense pressure for angry. but until then, it is cursed with my cursive. now then, blockbuster film season is fast approaching so we thought we'd look at the amazing effort that went into creating the world of one

of the big children's films of the year, dumbo. this is tim burton's reimagined take on a disney classic where some of the individual frames took 36 hours to render. and now, introducing our world—famous flying elephant! i think initially when i came onboard, my focus was, what's dumbo going to look like, what are the practical considerations as well as the design considerations, how does tim really want to realise him as a character? even though tim wanted something that was completely photo—real, his unusual design wasn't going to sit well within a perfectly real world so we chose not to shoot location, we shot everything on stage, controlled the lighting and the set design, it was very important that we created not only this beautiful downtrodden character for the movie with the sort of unusual proportions but he also lived in a world that was equally designed to suit his character and look as well. dumbo‘s animation is incredibly subtle, it's very contained and most of his emotion is read either through his eyes or a subtlety in the body language

so you are seeing quite a lot of work to sort of find the look and while we were filming, we were do everything we can to make sure we get as much in camera as possible and the suit is provided for the kids to stroke but to make that interaction work, we added cgi hay on top of him so they are brushing his hands, it's something to knock off and when we first meet dumbo and he tumbles out of the train carriage, we had a starting point from a stunt performer rolling down the ramp but ultimately we had to create a large volume of hay for him to interact with and slide off his head and body. similarly, water interaction, we did a combination of generating a lot of computer—generated foam and water elements to sit over our dumbo and a number of practical elements against foam elements, luck,

which we could then add ——against black which we could then add to in the final process. welcome to the medici family circus where anything is possible! notjust dumbo but the adult elephant in the show, they all require an extensive rigging process so the animation team, they firstly have a really good skeletal structure that they can move the joints around and allow them to move as naturally as possible, but there are also all the muscles on top of the skeleton and the skin, which all has to interact. one of the key things i wanted to make sure we did was to really capture the subtlety of motion you get in elephant skin which is incredibly loose and stretchy, the way it expands, it creates all thse different patterns of wrinkles and some of the details really im porta nt to ca ptu re

and we ended up having to embark on a whole new way of creating a sort of skin simulation for want of a better word. right wing. check. left wing. check. prepare for take—off! fa ntastic stuff. now then, i've come to east london were i'm about to make my own great escape. hi, welcome to otherworld. would you like to come with me? looking nothing at all like an episode of black mirror, this is a virtual reality arcade with a difference. step in one of the 14 pods, put on the guard, and you will be step in one of the 14 pods,

put on the garb, and you will be transported to otherworld. i find myself on an island where i am free to wander about. i'm sliding down the slide. i like the way that you walk in this game. you squeeze your triggers and then you just do a walking motion with your hands. being in your own private pod means the environment is controllable and as you wander into different climates, a rumble pad under your feet and heat lamps and fans which subtly change the temperature make this a multisensory experience. you can feel the heat on the back of my head now because i'm facing away from the sun. i do like that. put simply, otherworld is a way to play many different vr games all in one place. from frantic shoot—em—ups to more serene experiences. but instead of choosing them from a menu, here, you wander the islands, just as you wander around themepark looking for different rides.

the idea is that you don't just walk around this landscape, you find these pods and inside each one is a vr game so i'm going into one called space pirate trainer. there are 16 games currently available and in the future, the otherworld team will allow you to convert points won in—game into real—world tokens to spend on the bar. and although i think my performance is definitely something that belongs behind closed doors, it's also possible share your experience with your friends and other pods. i want to know what they're doing and that other pod! now, otherworld is not finished and it's not locked down. it's in continual development and the slightly less glamorous workshop just around the corner. we are always going

to bring improvements or fixing things, and it's this very fluid development we have an active sandbox literally around the corner of customers going in and using it all day. with £1 million worth of investment so far, otherworld certainly looks the part but as one of the first vr arcades in the uk, it's probably too early to tell if it can keep enough people coming through its doors to keep things afloat. did for the shortcut of click this week from other world. the full version is on iplayer and we are on social media. thanks for watching, see you soon and if you need me, i'll be in my pod.

she all the hello and welcome to newswatch with me, samira ahmed. the extinction rebellion protests in london over the past couple of weeks have put climate change

on the agenda of bbc news, but should it be at the top of that agenda more frequently? and if the president of the united states uses bad language, is the news at ten entitled to broadcast his words in full? for much of the past fortnight, climate change protesters have made their presence felt in locations across london. last wednesday, tom symonds caught up with some of them on waterloo bridge. this is normally one of the busiest bridges across the thames. extinction rebellion, a new direct—action protest group, hoped to take control of this — and other key london locations — for up to two weeks. but today, police moved in and made more arrests. by the time the protest had finished this thursday, more than 1,000 people

had been arrested. 0pinions about the bbc‘s coverage of the demonstrations was divided, with ken sturt asking... but other viewers last week had the opposite perspective. here is stephen sterling and, first, mel st pier. it's a pity that during a recent break in reporting the brexit chaos, the bbc did not divert more of its tv resources to covering the significant protests going on around the world, in particular near london, concerning the far more important problem facing us — climate change. was it because the bbc, like donald trump, does not think climate change is significant enough to bother about? i was surprised to see the minimal coverage of the first day of the extinction rebellion's climate change protest on monday's bbc news at ten. thousands of people blocked london's streets, but this was ignored in the headlines. and later in the programme, i think it got less than 30 seconds coverage, leaving people rather poorly informed.