The creators of Monument Valley have released their first VR game, and it’s amazing.
Category: entertainment – Page 128
One of the most remarkable things about Monument Valley, the mobile puzzler from Ustwo, was how it managed to lure in people who don’t play games. Its intuitive controls and beautiful, MC Escher-inspired worlds made it the rare blockbuster that almost anyone could play. And now the studio is looking to do the same thing in virtual reality. On October 30th, Ustwo will release Land’s End on Samsung’s Gear VR, an exploration game that maintains many of the same principles of Monument Valley — stunning art, accessible controls — and transports them to a 3D space.
“The thing we wanted to do, is to bring our way of thinking to VR,” explains Peter Pashley, technical director at Ustwo Games. “We find that a lot of people who are making VR experiences are kind of making quite traditional games. I wanted to make sure that our branding was represented in the early days of VR.”
Touchless gestures powered by ultrasound has become a mark of distinction for Elliptic Labs. The company has new “Multi Layer Interaction” technology designed to bring users intuitive device interactions.
Without touching the device, the person’s hand moves towards the smartphone, the screen lights up and information is displayed. As the person continues moving the hand closer, different information is revealed. With users constantly, frequently, eagerly reaching for their devices throughout the day, Elliptic Labs aims to make a difference in its easy and fast way to get information, from playing games to navigating maps, to using social media, to watching videos. A promotional video says the user can interact above, in front, underneath, double-tapping anywhere around the device, easily turning the device on and off as well. There is an SDK kit for applications. How it works: Ultrasound signals sent through the air from speakers integrated in smartphones and tablets bounce against the hand and are recorded by microphones integrated in the devices. As such, the technology recognizes hand gestures and uses them to move objects on the screen, similar to how bats use echolocation to navigate.
The company also talks about range-gating capabilities, saying that their touchless gesturing technology can easily separate foreground from background, for separating finger motion from wrist, and hand motion from movements or reflections from the body. This prevents unwanted and accidental gestures from being recognized. Overall, the company believes that “Ultrasound offers the best combination of high resolution, 180-degree interaction space, and low power consumption compared to camera or other sensing technologies.” They use an ultra-low power audio SoC for ultrasound processing such as Wolfson audio hubs. They have formed partnerships with Murata Manufacturing and Wolfson Microelectronics.
VRFocus reports on Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) explaining the rebranding of its Project Morpheus VR HMD to PlayStation VR.
I’ve waited YEARS for someone to finally bring this to the big or little) screen, and from everything I’ve seen so far, it looks to be one hell of an awesome miniseries. Fantastic cast, too. If you’ve never read the (quite short) novel it’s based in, by Arthur C. Clarke, do so immediately. It premiers on the SyFy channel this December.
You won’t be disappointed.
That said, you also may never be able to look at your kids again without a little bit of involuntary existential trepidation. wink
Check out the teaser for Childhood’s End, starring Charles Dance of Game of Thrones.
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Written by Arthur C. Clarke and hailed as a revolutionary work of science fiction since its publishing in 1953, Childhood’s End follows the peaceful alien invasion of Earth by the mysterious “Overlords,” whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.
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CHILDHOOD’S END Trailer | The Golden Age — Coming In December 2015 | Syfy.
ORIGIN UNKNOWN
Posted in entertainment
https://vimeo.com/135450637?ref=fb-share
Fantastic!
Proof of Concept Teaser for ORIGIN UNKNOWN.
Created by Hasraf ‘HaZ’ Dulull.
Produced by Parkgate Entertainment.
If there’s one thing R2-D2 knows, it’s flying. The astromech droid has provided air support for both Anakin and Luke Skywalker who know a few things about piloting.
However, the blue and white robot’s next flight will be on Earth thanks to the newly themed Boeing 787 Dreamliner made to look like the lovable Star Wars staple. Here’s hoping that the flights are more comfortable than some of R2’s space dog fights or dodgy landings on Dagobah.
Starting on October 18, Japanese carrier ANA will fly the newly minted plane between Tokyo and Vancouver before extending the service to include Munich, Paris, Seattle, Sydney and beyond. The 215-seater plane isn’t just Star Wars-y on the outside, though. In addition to featuring all six Star Wars films on the seat back screens, the cups, headsets, and napkins will also carry the theme on inside.
Drawn to the Future, a major exhibition on visualization technology featuring leading pioneers in architecture and engineering tech, highlights how our experience of our cities and buildings will rapidly change.
Images of the city have always wielded psychological, emotional and political power. Anyone brought up on a diet of Hollywood movies and US TV shows will have had that uncanny experience as a first-time visitor to a US city — a sense of déjà vu, the feeling of being on a movie set, in a story. I took the Blade Runner cityscape so seriously as a student in New York in 1983, that after a late-night showing of the film, I went into a phone box and rang the number dialed by Harrison Ford on the ‘video screen’ (555−7563 in case you’re interested). The decay of Ridley Scott’s dystopian future spilled over into the rodent-rich, un-gentrified, occasionally threatening Lower East Side of the time.
The Drawn to the Future exhibition at The Building Centre in London, showcases the new image technologies used by architects and engineers, games makers and movie concept artists, to visualize future cities.
Corporations aren’t inherently evil, they’re only as greedy as the humans behind them. It’s the same thing with robots. Robots have no emotions—they’re just a pile of metal, screws and circuits—but they will be as mean, selfish, and avaricious as the people programming them.
Wire Cutters is a brilliantly crafted student film directed and animated by Jack Anderson. It tells the story of two robots from rival mining companies that meet by chance in a desolate planet.
A piece I wrote recently about blockchain & AI, and how I see the Lifeboat Foundation as a crucial component in a bright future.
Blockchain technology could lead to an AI truly reminiscent of the human brain, with less of its frailties, and more of its strengths. Just as a brain is not inherently dictated by a single neuron, neither is the technology behind bitcoin. The advantage (and opportunity) in this sense, is the advent of an amalgamation of many nodes bridged together to form an overall, singular function. This very much resembles the human brain (just as billions of neurons and synapses work in unison). If we set our sights on the grander vision of things, humans could accomplish great things if we utilize this technology to create a truly life-like Artificial Intelligence. At the same time, we need to keep in mind the dangers of such an intelligence being built upon a faultless system that has no single point of failure.
Just as any technology has upsides and corresponding downsides, this is no exception. The advantages of this technology are seemingly endless. In the relevant sense, it has the ability to create internet services without the same downfalls exploited in the TV show ‘Mr. Robot,’ where a hacker group named “fsociety” breached numerous data centers and effectively destroyed every piece of data the company held, causing worldwide ramifications across all of society. Because blockchain technology ensures no centralized data storage (by using all network users as nodes to spread information), it can essentially be rendered impossible to take down. Without a single targeted weak point, this means a service that, in the right hands, doesn’t go offline from heavy loads, which speeds up as more people use it, has inherent privacy/security safeguards, and unique features that couldn’t be achieved with conventional technology. In the wrong hands, however, this could be outright devastation. Going forward, we must tread lightly and not forget to keep tabs on this technology, as it could run rampant and destroy society as we know it.
Throughout the ages, society has always experienced mass change; the difference here being the ability for it to wipe us out. Therefore, it arises from a survival imperative that we strive for the former rather than the latter. We can evolve without destroying ourselves, but it won’t be a cakewalk. With our modern-day luxuries, we, as a species think ourselves invincible, while, in reality, we’re just dressed-up monkeys operating shiny doomsday technology. Just as it was a challenge to cross the seas, to invent tools and harness electricity, the grandest stakes posed by the future (and the ones defining our survival) are the most difficult to accomplish.