News: Super Massive Video Games
Today we pay homage to a phenomenon. One as diffuse and amusing as the internet itself, and as pointless as dog Halloween costumes. I'm speaking, of course, of giant games.
Today we pay homage to a phenomenon. One as diffuse and amusing as the internet itself, and as pointless as dog Halloween costumes. I'm speaking, of course, of giant games.
After getting slammed with a crazy-big earthquake/tsunami, the Japanese nuclear plant Fukushima Daiichi might be on the brink of meltdown. Not as bad as Chernobyl, but maybe as bad as Three Mile Island. Nobody wishes such a disaster on anyone...anywhere in the world. In the US, there are about 100 nuclear facilities, about 8 of which are located near hot beds of seismic activity.
Type: Digital, Landscapes Theme: Incredible Landscapes, "Beyond the Mundane"
Type: Digital, avian Theme: Bird portraits, "The Avian Persona", wild or in captivity
The first images for the hotly anticipated Dragon Age 2 have come out, courtesy of Game Informer. The developer, Bioware, went on record earlier saying that the sequel will have better graphics and art direction than the first one.
In the news this past couple of days, we've heard of about 10 Argentine hooligans being deported back to Argentina before the start of the World Cup. I'm glad for the South African authorities showing that they have a firm grasp of security leading up to Friday's kick-off, and that the inter-agency cooperation between countries was a serious one.
Iowa firefighter Pete Lilja has modded the software of a Canon powershot to record images of Earth, from as high as 85,000 feet!
You may have already heard of Zazzle, an online service that allows you to print on a variety of goods (tees, mugs, posters, etc.). You can design-it-yourself, or choose from Zazzle's library of available designs.
As part of the Samsung Development Conference today, Samsung unveiled that they will expand support for Google's ARCore platform to include the Galaxy S8+ and Galaxy Note 8.
Microsoft's HoloLens project is shaping up to be the forerunner of augmented reality. With jaw-dropping features that would allow you to bring entire football games into your living room and control software with your eyes, there's plenty to be excited about with the upcoming AR headset. Up until now, HoloLens has been seen as potential vaporware, considering that the technology it brings to the table is so futuristic that some folks have thought it wouldn't be possible any time soon. But a r...
The Telegraph presents 2009's most spectacular stunts. This year's roster of adrenaline junkies include the craziest daredevils of their fields: wingsuiting, parkour, motocross, climbing, sky diving, auto racing, and more.
Sputnik, Apollo and the Space Race. If you watched the State of the Union address last night, you probably heard President Barack Obama mention those three things.
If vaccines play absolutely no role in the development of childhood autism, a claim made by many medical authorities today, then why are some of the most popular vaccines commonly administered to children demonstrably causing autism in animal primates? This is the question many people are now asking after a recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh (UP) in Pennsylvania revealed that many of the infant monkeys given standard doses of childhood vaccines as part of the...
Julian Oliver created the Transparency Grenade in January 2012 for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8. It's a transparent device with a "payload" built from an ARM Chip, an Arduino Nano, a mic, and a strong Wi-Fi antenna. It taps into wireless networks and logs emails, webpages, images, and voice to a publicly available online map showing its "detonation" location. Apparently, development for an Android version (sans the pretty plastic shell) is under way thanks to interested donors. See...
Mojang needs just 5,000 more votes for LEGO to review the possibility of making Minecraft LEGOs. Even though Mojang and CUUSOO (LEGOs development branch) have communicated already about the possibility of Minecraft LEGOs, a little support from the community could go a long way.
Getting money to make a AAA game is hard. When anyone is lucky enough to get the funds they need, it usually comes from a giant game publishing company that wants the rights to the game, not to mention complete control. Those publishers have shareholders who demand a high return on their investment, so they avoid risk when choosing game projects to fund.
One of the things that has always bugged me while working with PVC is that it is, as it is presently produced, a poison. Well, OK, it's not, but it contains a lot of poisons. Phthalates are plasticizing agents that are super toxic, and these people are working to phase them out. PVC also, in its present form, contains lead. Certain chemists are learning how to use stabilized zinc and calcium instead. Also, chemists are learning how to synthesize the vinyl chloride monomer from HEMP! That mean...
Most indie game developers will never see a million dollars in their bank accounts, and I certainly doubt that Eul, the anonymous developer responsible for the original version of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), expected to. But now even the fans can earn a little green. Some lucky and talented DotA players are about to win $1,000,000 for playing the unreleased sequel to the free unsupported Warcraft III mod from 2003.
+Tyler Neylon, a programmer and mathematician currently specializing in iOS app development, recently posted a fun project to his Google+ profile: 50 designs with 50 LEGO pieces, a set of 51 photos. Given a small 50-piece Lego set this past Christmas (well, Tyler admits: "...58 [pieces], actually, but many of them are very small, as you can see"), he craftily stretched his imagination to create 50 different models, though the kit included instructions for only 3.
F.A.T. Lab (Free Art and Technology) is a network of artists, engineers, scientists, lawyers, and musicians dedicated to the research and development of new technologies and creative media. They are "committed to supporting open values and the public domain through the use of emerging open licenses, support for open entrepreneurship and the admonishment of secrecy, copyright monopolies and patents."
Angry Birds finally hits LEGOs. It was only a matter of time before some LEGO maniac constructed Angry Birds from those popular little plastic building blocks. Stop motion brickfilms are sure to follow.
Kids! They grow up so fast! While parents have traditionally used growth charts to document their children's development, modern moms and dads have a far better tool: YouTube! The process is a simple one: take a snapshot every day—or nearly every day—and then, after a set interval, condense the photos into a time lapse. The end product? "Stop motion human growth."
If you've got $1.6 million in spare change, imagine this: you could be sleeping on a bonafide hovercraft. Designed by Dutchman Janjaap Ruijssenaars, the Floating Bed is the world's most expensive bed, employing "never weakening permanent magnetism" to hover above the ground.
Amazing trailer. A sequel that's not a sequel, but takes the series to the open skies! From the official website:BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter currently in development at Irrational Games, the studio behind the original BioShock (which sold over 4 million units worldwide). Set in 1912, BioShock Infinite introduces an entirely new narrative and gameplay experience that lifts players out of the familiar confines of Rapture and rockets them to Columbia, an immense city in the sky.F...
Writers room is great for the new young writer who is just looking for some good feedback and guidance. Go to the BBC writers room. They can read your scripts and pieces for you to help you out and give you good feedback. Take a look.
Beauty and The Beast
via AdAge Argentina's Head Coach Diego Maradona declared that if his team won the World Cup, he would streak nude through the streets of Buenos Aires. Well, the trend is catching on.
A November release week in May It used to be that games marked to be blockbusters (expected to sell more than a million in their first month) would always be released during the holiday September to December season. November was always the month companies chose to release their best game. This release model worked fine until the last few years, when too many games were being released in November and companies started to see diminishing returns on their titles because of the release rush.
Augmented Reality, or just AR, is a combination of graphics overlaid onto the real world. Think of it as a cross between Virtual Reality (VR) and Real Reality (RR). Some good examples are Esquire's AR issue, eLearning video & GE's AR.
Tats that Fly! Augmented Reality Skin Art
Tennis Bad Boy's Alternative to Sending Kids to Russia I just saw this article on NYT. John McEnroe has launched a tennis academy to foster young tennis players in the NYC area. His courts on Randall Island are meant as an alternative to the academies like USTA that require players to relocate and basically play the game 24/7.
I'm not sure if who follows World of Warcraft, but recently they went into Alpha testing (for friends & family of the company), which means the release is coming fairly soon.
Kojiro the robot has muscles, tendons and a flexible spine- just like you! Combine Kojiro with the doppelganger bot and you'll have something supremely sci-fi freaky.
Congrats to MuscleNerd, the first to jailbreak the almighty iPad. Via DVICE:
Remember, in the Terminator movies, when Arnold's field of vision is superimposed with all sorts of data? Sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge also described electronic contact lenses, technology that "projects" information right before the eyes.
In an effort to prevent drones from being hacked, DARPA has been developing an "unhackable system," and seems to think they're almost there. The development team "proved" mathematically that their kernel was unhackable, and they hope to use it for more than just drones (power grids, cars, phones, pacemakers, etc.).
Asian Americans comprise 4% of the American population, but account for 25% of the students at top universities.
Hello, I'm Daniel Yelamos and I'm the CM of ARLab, a Spanish-Israel company that develops AR solutions. We've released a couple of SDKs and a few apps based on AR to help people develop this kind of software. Last week we released LinkAR, a social community for developers interested in AR community, I could type and type about all its features, but why don't you watch it for yourselves here?
Okay, so it's a gigantic ad. It still looks amazing. Below, a Tron Legacy skate ramp in Melbourne, Australia, created by interactive agency ENESS:
The resume is an essential tool for getting freelance work assignments. A well written article is not enough when trying to secure a freelance or staff position as a writer. Publishers want to see a resume. It gives the writer an outstanding opportunity to introduce themselves and it gives the editor a general idea of who you are, where you've been, and the work you've completed.