Next iPhone images leaked and its name confuses most

Chris Smith | Mobile Devices, Tablets & Phones | Jan 25, 2016 6:33 AM CST

Claimed by One More Thing to be a photo of Apple's next iPhone release, this small image is said to showcase exactly what we should expect to see launched in March.

Designed with a 4-inch screen, this model is reported by 9-to-5Mac to also have a weird name attached to its release - set to be called the 'iPhone 5se'. Not only is this name unusual because Apple hasn't released a 'se' phone to date, but also because industry experts expected it to be named the '6c'.

No matter what the name, you can expect this smartphone to come packed with an 8-megapixel camera, a rounded frame and an A8 processor.

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Twitter changes top roles, sources claim

Chris Smith | Internet & Websites | Jan 25, 2016 4:31 AM CST

Undisclosed sources claim that Twitter's engineering head Kevin Wail and its head of media, Katie Stanton, will be departing the social media giant soon, seen reported by The Australian recently.

The information has been leaked "according to people familiar with the matter," with further claims being made that Stanton has already announced her absence internally some time ago. Being a prior chairman, current chief executive Jack Dorsey told Twitter that he'll only take back the CEO role if the entire board of directors was replaced - it seems that he's now a few steps closer to this goal.

While Twitter has declined official comment itself, sources further claim that this major executive shuffle is a bold move by Dorsey to revitalise his company, one of which that has fallen on hard times recently.

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Bethesda releases new screenshots of Doom, showing off some enemies

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jan 25, 2016 3:15 AM CST

Bethesda has released new screenshots of id Software's Doom reboot, which will be released later this year. The new screenshots, we have below for your viewing pleasure.

As for the new screenshots, sure - they look good. But they really don't look great. After watching the gameplay reveal trailer during E3 2015, it felt so watered down and slow to the first-person shooter that really started it all. I want to reserve judgement, but I think we're going to be disappointed with Doom on the PC, as they're having to cater to console gamers and their controllers - versus the fast-paced mouse and keyboard action we're used to on the PC.

There are plenty of more in the full story, with another 13 images to check out.

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Remedy solved performance issues in Quantum Break with DirectX

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jan 25, 2016 1:14 AM CST

With the Game Developers Conference right around the corner, Quantum Break developer Remedy Entertainment will talk about how they were able to get through performance and efficiency issues on the Xbox One.

Remedy used their in-house Northlight engine for Quantum Break, with the developer explaining: "Northlight is Remedy Entertainment's in-house game engine which powers Quantum Break. In this presentation we discuss how various rendering performance and efficiency issues were solved with DirectX, and suggest design guidelines for modern graphics API usage".

We will also learn about the impressive AI used in Quantum Break, with Remedy Entertainment's Head of PR, Thomas Puha, saying that some of the big issues with Quantum Break was the weak AI. At the time, the AI wasn't fully baked, so the gameplay footage we saw wasn't indicative of the final game. He said: "So a lot of the footage you have seen is from summer 2015 for Gamescom. AI really was not done at that point, hence the enemies in the trailers don't seem to give you much fight".

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EA's Frostbite Labs are playing around with VR and AR technologies

With the hoopla surrounding the impending release of the Oculus Rift on March 28, and the HTC Vive the month after, we're not surprised to hear that EA's Frostbite Labs is working on VR and AR content.

The Stockholm-based developer is a group that EA says will help them push the "boundaries of technology and shape the future of gaming". As for the team, EA explains that Frostbite Labs will "begin as a small, multi-disciplined team within EA Studios. Based initially in Stockholm but reaching around the globe, the remit of Frostbite Labs is to explore the undefined or nascent opportunities for new experiences and ways to reach our players. These will be high-potential and possibly high-risk opportunities. Every project will have an intended destination within EA Studios or across Electronic Arts, and key measures to understand the return on each opportunity".

When it comes to the VR and AR content, Frostbite Labs is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, as well as a Senior Game Designer for VR projects. DICE's Technical Director, Johan Andersson, recently tweeted that EA is building a "small VR Frostbite team", and it looks like this is it. Personally, I'm excited to see what Frostbite Labs can cook up in the world's of VR and AR.

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NVIDIA teases its prototype VR headset using Light Field tech at VRLA

While we may have seen the elusive AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 powering the HTC Vive at VRLA, NVIDIA was also there teasing its VR prototype, powered by Light Field technology.

Anshel Sag of Moor Insights & Strategy provided us with the above images, explaining: "This headset is an NVIDIA headset developed as a research project in conjunction with Stanford University project called the "Lightfield Stereoscope" which allows you to essentially view light field images in the headset and focus on virtually any point in the headset with your own eyes. This headset is clearly important enough to NVIDIA to show off at an event like VRLA and could be used for viewing things like Lytro's Lightfield photos that Lytro created with their light field cameras. This headset can also be used in VR to allow the entire scene to be rendered once and to let your eyes decide where to focus making the VR experience more realistic".

You might remember our story last year, where NVIDIA announced it was collaborating with Stanford University on a VR headset, which should reach us sometime in 2018. Well, checking out the official NVIDIA GeForce Twitter page, the GPU giant tweeted: "A user goes eyes-on with our Light Field Display prototype at @vrlosangeles. #VRLA".

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Original 'Star Wars' 35mm fan preservation released

Ben Gourlay | Celebrities & Entertainment | Jan 24, 2016 6:24 PM CST

While long term 'Star Wars' fans cling to the hope that they might just seen an official re-release of the original films, a group of fans has taken it upon themselves to archive film history.

For the last four years, a fan collective known as Team Negative One have painstakingly scanned a 35mm print of the original 'Star Wars' frame-by frame in 1080p, manually removing flaws and film artefacts and assembling the version of the film that audiences originally saw in 1977. Now their first assemblage is ready and the team have now shared their efforts online.

Coming from a theatrical print which is several generations removed from the original negative owned by Lucasfilm, and thus not as sharp or as clean, their restoration is still pretty astounding and the best way to currently view the film without all the CG crap added by creator George Lucas for the 1977 special edition release - and where Greedo shoots first.

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Snapdragon 830 rumored to hit 10nm, supports 8GB RAM on smartphones

Right now we have some seriously powerful smartphones, with up to 4GB of RAM and 8-core processors - but the next-gen chips are going to be insane. We're looking at 10nm, and up to 8GB of RAM - yeah, 8GB of RAM in a smartphone.

The latest rumor is coming out of China, claiming that Qualcomm's next-gen Snapdragon 830 processor will be manufactured on the 10nm process, which would make it the first system-on-a-chip (SoC) to be made on 10nm. Not only that, but Qualcomm has improved its Kyro cores on the processor for added performance, and lowered power consumption.

Not only will the CPU side of things be faster, but we're expecting to see 8GB of RAM in smartphones sometime in 2017. Qualcomm will reportedly launch its Snapdragon 830 processor next year, where we should see it powering the Galaxy S8 by Samsung, and similar, next-gen handsets.

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Horror classic 'The Exorcist' getting small screen reboot

Ben Gourlay | Celebrities & Entertainment | Jan 24, 2016 5:03 PM CST

The 1973 horror classic 'The Exorcist', based on the book by Peter Blatty went on to spawn two sequels and a more recent prequel, but despite remaining dormant for a decade, it's about to be resurrected to scare the crap out of a new generation.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, 20th Century Fox television has ordered a one hour television pilot based on the original 1971 Blatty novel to be penned by 'Fantastic Four' writer Jeremy Slater, which will act as a test bed to see if it go to a full season order.

There's no word yet on when we'll see 'The Exorcist' on the small screen or indeed if it can hold a candle to the original classic - but the future is certainly quite bright for the long-running series.

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AMD's dual Fiji-powered GPU used with HTC Vive at VRLA event

Anthony Garreffa | Video Cards & GPUs | Jan 24, 2016 4:46 PM CST

The last time we physically saw the dual-GPU version of the Fury X was at the launch event itself in Sydney, Australia - where we had our hands-on that beautiful PCB. But, the Radeon R9 Fury X2 has shown up again, this time at VRLA.

AMD's dual Fiji-powered GPU used with HTC Vive at VRLA event

The VRLA expo was an event for all things virtual reality, held in LA last week. During the event, some of the HTC Vive demos were powered using the Radeon R9 Fury X2. Thanks to Facebook, we noticed Antal Tungler, PR Manager for AMD and all-round cool guy, posted on his Twitter account. He said: "Prototype Tiki from @FalconNW powering #htcvive with dual Fiji @AMDRadeon at the #vrla".

Someone asked Tungler "When you say "Dual Fiji" do you mean 2x Fiji cards, or 2x Fiji GPUs on 1 card? ;)", to which he replied with "One card". So we know that it wasn't 2 x R9 Fury X cards in the machine, but a single, dual-GPU beast. But with Polaris around the corner, I have to ask the question: where does the R9 Fury X2 fit in? It would only have 4GB of HBM1 per GPU, which really isn't enough VRAM considering it will be $1000+. VR headsets are pushing 90FPS, and a high-resolution to boot. I guess we'll see in the coming months, maybe AMD will launch the Fury X2 in between now and the release of Polaris in June/July.

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