this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and the main news stories straight after this programme at the top of the hour. this week — we will find out if video games can play the pain away. the visual effects that made bond make that bend. and who is this enterprising young fellow? in the shadow of battersea power station in london,

the future of mankind hangs in the balance. our two heroes are on a desperate mission to save the earth from being wiped out by an asteroid... hang on, you are bashing some boxes around now. what's this? ooh! 0h, 0k, well done! 0h! ..and, quite frankly, they're being hopeless about it. do you want some nitrogen? can i throw it to you? 0k, i've got no feet! yes, throw it to me. all right, look, here we go. can i catch it? got it! 0k, well, what am i actually doing with it now? um, i don't know — hang onto it, i suppose. well, is that why you've given it to me, because you don't know what to do with it? this is a vr escape room in space, where the objects you pick up and drop bounce around in zero g. it really shows how vr can create experiences that would be impossible to achieve

in a real escape room. but itjust looks like any landmass with some sea next to it! yeah, but there's a long wiggly bit! i don't recognise the curve. there's a long wiggly bit over here, right? yeah, although what's funny, of course, is that escape rooms started online, then they moved to the real world and now, they're now becoming this sort of next gen hybrid thing. true. not that it matters as right now, i think we're running out of time! both: argh! lara chuckles. 0h, we didn't manage to save the world. i'm s o rry! yeah, you've all gone the way of the dinosaurs, i'm afraid. apologies. we've known for some time now that video games can help alleviate stress and anxiety and only last year, we looked at a device called the mdoloris, which is usually used by doctors to see whether patients who are sedated are feeling pain or not. yeah, but they've also been conducting other studies using the machine, specifically with kids who have cancer, to find out whether playing video games could do more for them than just being fun. omar mehtab has been

finding out more. ah, nervous. i'm pumped, i'm excited! i'm a little bit nervous. we've arrived at the hospital la paz in madrid and we're here to meet the kids fighting cancer. hello! omar chuckles. why's that? well, it's because i'm about to play some video games with them! this here is my new friend marco. how long have you been in the hospital? laughter. ah, pokemon? yes. i have pokemon as well. i've got my pokemon — can i get my pokemon? can i show him? do you know how to play? go for it, man. check out my pokemon. now, we're notjust here playing games for the sake of it — rather, it's said to reduce the pain that these kids feel. a trial at this hospital has been studying these children,

who often feel pain due to their condition and the adverse effects of chemotherapy. the mdoloris machine. it monitors a person's autonomic nervous system, which unconsciously regulates body processes such as breathing, blood pressure and heart rate so doctors can, at a glance, see the level of distress a patient may be in. the lower the number out of 100, the more they are in. it quantifies pain. we looked at this machine last year, where doctors said it helped assess how much pain someone was actually in, so they can administer the right amount of painkillers so as not to under— or over—dose them, and it was critical in treating covid patients as well. but now, they're using it to try and prove one of the most popular theories around. there have been various studies over the years looking into the relationship between gaming and pain and by using this machine, they can objectively say

when someone is feeling more or less pain. but why are video games having this effect? now, this trial has been peer—reviewed and published in thejournal of medical internal research. they had 20 kids in total, playing video games for an average of 2.3 hours every day, and that was enough to bring about less pain and less need for morphine, showing how effective this non—medical, non—invasive hobby may be. 0k, me personally, i easily get vexed with video games if things don't go my way.

but for these kids, not so much. the theory is that adolescent kids can gain more pleasure from video games than any other age range. i imagine he's in pain... another level! i imagine he's in pain but right now, that does not matter! because he's just fully absorbed and right now, all — this is all he cares about. daniel here, for instance, was one of the first trialists and immediately saw the benefits.

and it all began when this psp was handed to a patient. and they similarly noticed how affixed the kid was to it. now, they want to take their findings further. so, maybe one day, we'll find playstations, xboxes

and nintendo switches becoming standard in hospitals. until then, maybe i'll also do a bit of gaming when i'm not feeling too great. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week russia blocked instagram for users in russia — that's about 80 million users. germany's cyber watchdog warned against using russian—headquartered kaspersky anti—virus software — though the company told bbc news this warning has been made on political grounds. and intel plans to build a $19 billion semiconductor plant in germany — part of its nearly $90 billion investment in europe. david bennett, the first person in the world to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig, has died two months after the landmark surgery. the precise cause of mr bennett's death is not clear. doctors called him "a brave and noble patient". radio for everyone next, as amid the cascade of audio—only apps,

amazon's released one, too. amp lets users in the us dj their own live radio shows, take live callers and choose to play millions of songs — well, ones that fall under amazon's license agreements. it's still in beta so, professional djs, yourjobs are still relatively safe for now. and finally, a robot cheetah that's learned to run by trial and error. see, running is much harder than walking for robots, which is why this is a big deal. mit's improbable ai lab focused on programming this quick—witted quadruped to adapt to its surroundings using reinforcement learning, resulting in a record—breaking running speed for this specific robot platform. a clawless victory! after a 3—year—long covid—enforced hiatus, south by southwest and its creative crowd are once more converging upon the lone star state.

south by, as it's affectionately known by people in the know, is something intangible, something indefinable — dare i say fluid? at once, it's a film, music, art and technology, well, party, really. it's neat to, in a world that is largely fractured and divided, to see a lot of different cultures coming together, meeting each other, making new connections. so much of what we do here is content, creativity but even more so, inspiration. now in its 35th year, on everyone�*s mind is what's next? unsurprisingly, the big talk this year is all about something beginning with the letter m. how it's going to affect entertainment and storytelling in the future. 0ur relationship with reality is fundamentally changing. and because we have these ways that are augmenting or transporting us and we're — we are actually creating memories that become

a part of who we are, even though they are not real, and that is actually a sort of profound idea when you start to think about that. disney's ilmxlab has been crafting mixed reality experiences to expand its star wars and marvel franchises for years but now, it's focused on bringing the magic to your everyday. people want to be creators, they don't want to just be consumers or participants. audiences are getting more sophisticated and their expectations are increasing and they do want this connected storytelling. they want a sense of persistence, they want a sense that, you know, if they have done one thing, that another experience knows that they have and it's somehow enriched. that, you know, that we're creating dynamic worlds and that they have a role in those worlds. behold, the illustrious palace! vr theatre troupe the ferryman

collective is premiering their latest interactive show, gumball dreams. it's 25 cents and unfortunately, i have no cash on me. it's kind of like a virtual version of secret cinema, but the stage here is made of pixels and the live performers are robots and blue aliens. it's a beautiful way of interacting with actors from wherever you are in the world. we have actors all over the world — we have somebody in thailand, in new york and in la and they — they interact with people from, like, rural areas who've never experienced immersive theatre before, so you don't actually have to leave your house to get to the theatre — you put on a headset instead of driving there. he's got a rubik's cube. he's very happy with that. you can do things in vr that you could never do in real life. you can make a book turn into a house right in front of your eyes or travel through time and space into one room to the next. you know, you can get as much out of it as you put into it. i must stay behind for i have many preparations to make. no! off you go.

don't leave me! south by is also a major film festival, showing 76 world premieres. attracting cheque books, eyeballs, douglas cage, and nicholas cage�*s eyeballs. start—up legion m is capitalising on this with their film scout app, which gauges authentic sentiment from real movie buffs. this is an entirely new way to finance and produce and develop films. if you think about it, fans hold all the power in the entertainment industry because it's our wallets and eyeballs that literally pay for everything, every dollar, everything — the reason that netflix and disney are worth hundreds of billions of dollars because of the fans that are — that are footing the bills. our philosophy is that as much as possible, we want to harness and leverage the wisdom of the crowd so that we can make decisions based on data, as opposed to just gut intuition from a couple of the executives. from apps to flying qr codes made from drones to musical carpets to tokens of the non—fungible variety,

tech is being used across the arts here in countless ways, changing the way stories are told and consumed. and as the curtain falls on south by, the countdown to next year begins. that was nick in texas. now, the film scout app being used at south by southwest has a rather special shareholder behind the scenes. he is a starship captain, an admiral and these days, he's also an actual spaceman. it's william shatner! bill! welcome to click, sir! well, thank you. my goodness, i am so happy to be here. how hard is it to get a film or tv series green—lit and commissioned in hollywood? it is difficult because when anybody says yes, everybody�*s job is in suspension. i wrote a series of books called tekwar from years ago. i directed a pilot film.

it sold as a series, it lasted a year, and now i'm attempting to go with a very well—known animation house to sell it as an animated series, and it's tough. i've got a game show that's so unique, and i'm trying to sell that. so one thing after another is very difficult. it's almost impossible to sell anything. even with you attached? wow. notjust me, but people. starting from the beginning, you need the money to make the movie. now, that's where legion m comes in, because their basis is let's ask people who contribute money to making the film. they will own a minute part

of it, based on their small contributions. what i believe everybody wants is to contribute a little tiny sum of money. they then have a little tiny partnership in the movie, and they also can express their opinion of the movie. and the movie is being made by supreme professionals, being guided by the opinion of this large group of people whojoin in on film scout, legion m — those apps. i guess you can listen to the opinion of the people who are contributing, but i guess you also don't have to follow their opinion if you know better. is it always a good idea to follow the opinion of everyone? but that's the premise. the premise is we don't know better. who knows better?

if 1,000 people say that's funny and you think that's not funny, you have to think that must be funny, because 1,000 people thought it was funny. 10,000 or 100,000 people say no, what we're interested in is x. interesting — you have to bend. i think it must be unusual for someone who has been in the business as long as you to still be that open to public opinion. i would have thought that most people would kind of think they know it all by the time they... that's where you gentrify. that's where you become so rigid you think, i know it all. and then you're dead, because you don't know it all. that's the final evolution for me. you finally go — i know how to do it. no, you don't. then you come to the either sad or glad fact that i really don't know anything, and you become open not only

to laughter or tears but open to the leaves on the trees. i mean, now you become almost — you know, show business then becomes almost spiritual, in a way. i have met a number of astronauts through this programme who have said they saw earth from there and it changed them, and ijust wondered whether you have had the same experience. i was filled with grief because i saw how vulnerable all of this is — and not only saw it. we look around us at things that are falling apart in nature because of man. we are destroying this incredibly beautiful... this earth is filled with — everything about earth is beautiful, and it's evolved over 5 billion years. it's taken 5 billion years of, "oh, this is not working, i'll go on to this." you can even think about nature

doing a display the way people are trying to sell entertaining vehicles. so nature is saying, "alright, let's see. maybe this will go." and the supreme nature doesn't buy it — no, that's not going to work. so nature is filled with things that are not working, and you think, "nature does it, that works," in the showbiz of nature. and it's all beautiful because it's all evolved. and we are bloody destroying it, and itjust filled me with such grief. it took me so long to be able to handle it, and that's where i'm at. william shatner — what a legend. i know. do you know the best thing about that interview? what? he turned up early and he talked for longer than he promised. who wouldn't want to hang out with you? now to an iconic movie.

over the last few weeks we have been looking at some of the films nominated for best visual effects at this year's oscars, and this week it is the turn ofjames bond. did you know that no time to die is the first bond to be nominated for the best visual effects category in 43 years? moonraker was the last — 1979. yes, of course. here is some of the amazing work that went into the film. now your enemy is my enemy. his name is safin. what does he want? revenge. me. the bond films have a rich heritage of shooting all of their extraordinary action for real, and this film was absolutely no different. there were visual effects in it, but they were not up front and centre. so for instance, in the lake sequence, the production actually went to norway and they filmed on a real

frozen lake in norway. but as with any production, when you shoot throughout the day, the footage looks different from shot to shot. there was kind of one or maybe two shots where everyone was happy with the lighting conditions. we had a task to try and match the lighting across all of the shots, and in order to do that, we simulated the cg world where the lighting was exactly the same, and then we used a number of techniques to copy and mimic what we were seeing in the computer. we still used the photography and built on top of it, rather than replacing it whole hog, but we used the simulation to tell us what that should look like. the director was very keen to give as much of the stuff that he shot as he could. that included the people, that included the buildings — the trees, even. but the trees didn't have snow on them, so each tree had to be — particular for the close—up trees, they had to be modelled

in c6! to look exactly like the trees that were there. we put snow on them digitally and then lifted the digital snow off and put them on top of the real trees that were in the plate. we had an amazing special effects team that really did — and a stunt team that really did jump land rovers through the air, and when we needed to replace things like that for lighting or for filling in the background, we kept exactly that stunt. so on a james bond film, no—one really wants to resort to c6! stunts and things like that, so they really do capture everything on camera. but when they, for timing

reasons, take a chunk out of the middle of a chase, suddenly the continuity of where those vehicles are and where they need to be sort of goes out the window. that's when we do come in. we find a plate that maybe has got the toyota in it, which is bond's car, but it doesn't have the land rovers there, it had a motorbike. so we erased the motorbike and put the land rovers in. that is the kind of work that we're doing. it's not very flashy work to put in the grass that was completely chewed up by the stunt team and to replace that, but it does need to look really accurate. and the attention to detail that our environment team had to go to to model the tufts of the grass that matched the scottish highlands, where they were shooting — unless we go to those sort of lengths, you don't end up believing it and it all feels like a bit of a fudge, and we're not interested in fudging it in 2022.

not that long to go now until the oscars, and the question everyone is asking is can dune do there what it did at the baftas recently? what is your prediction? i'm team spider—man. interesting. that's it for us for this week. as usual, you can keep up with the team on social media. find us on instagram, facebook and twitter @bbcclick. thanks for watching. we'll see you soon. bye— bye. hello there. at this time of year, warm days are often followed by decidedly chilly nights. and tuesday was certainly a warm day, with temperatures in northwest wales getting close to 21 degrees, the warmest day of the year so far. plenty of other places not too far behind.

but as soon as the sun went down, the temperatures followed. it has been turning quite chilly out there. high pressure still close by on wednesday. it stays mostly dry, but with those clear skies overhead, quite a chilly start to the morning, with temperatures down around freezing, below freezing in a few places. one or two early fog patches around as well. they should tend to lift and clear by the middle part of the morning. and then it is another beautiful spring day, with lengthy spells of sunshine. the vast majority will stay dry. there's just a small chance of one or two showers popping up in northeast scotland and maybe across eastern counties of england. not as breezy as it was on tuesday across western areas and every bit as warm. top temperatures between 16 and 20, maybe 21 degrees. but as we head through wednesday night, again, the sun goes down, the orange colours drain away from the map, replaced by blues and greens, with temperatures again dropping down to around freezing. those are the values for the towns and the cities. out in the countryside,

i think there will be a touch of frost, and again potentially some fog patches on thursday morning. now, england and wales will once again have a mostly sunny day, with just the odd rogue shower. for scotland and northern ireland, expect more cloud creeping in from the northwest, with some spots of light rain and drizzle. top temperatures through thursday between 16 and 19 degrees in most places. now, for friday, again, the further north you are, there will be a bit more in the way of cloud. some rain for the northern isles. further south, more in the way of sunshine, a bit more of a breeze through the english channel at this stage, and temperatures maybe down just a fraction but still getting up to between 15 and 19 degrees. and then we head into weekend, and some of that cloud in the north associated with a weak frontal system will try to work a little further southwards, but high pressure continues to hold firm, so despite that extra cloud and the greater chance of a bit of fog, it is going to stay fine and dry with some spells of sunshine. into next week, though, we develop a northerly wind. it'll start to feel quite a lot colder and there could even be some wintry showers.

hello, this is bbc news, i'm rich preston. our top stories: as the un calls for an end to hostilities, we report on the battle for a key town in the south of ukraine where russian forces are being pushed back. this war is only a few weeks old and the russians will almost certainly be back with more soldiers and a lot more firepower. fleeing the besieged city of mariupol — survivors tell of children starving to death. a prominent kremlin critic gets anotherjail sentence — the us says it's part of the crackdown on dissent to hide the war in ukraine. and a welcome for william and kate injamaica, but they could face protests

over the british monarchy�*s past links with slavery.