Latest News - Page 2526

While the world waits in anticipation for the Galaxy S7 reveal from Samsung, the latest rumor is that Samsung will also unveil its new Gear 360 camera, a companion device for the Gear VR.

Samsung's purported Gear 360 camera would be a 360-degree camera that records video with two 180-degree fisheye lenses, making 360-degree content for the Gear VR headset, according to SamMobile. The Gear 360 would reportedly capture 1920x1920 from each camera, producing a much larger 3840x1920 panoramic image, capturing video for later use, but it can also blast the 360-degree video directly to a connected smartphone through the Gear 360 app.

We've heard about the Project Beyond 3D camera, so the Gear 360 could be a smaller, more mainstream evolution of this. We should expect it to be 100% compatible with the upcoming Galaxy S7, as well as the last couple of generations of Samsung's smartphones, too.

Not to be outdone by Alphabet's announcement of 1 billion monthly users of Gmail, Facebook has announced that WhatsApp is now home to 1 billion monthly users, too.

With WhatsApp still charging its $1 annual subscription fee to its users, with over 1 billion users - that's a nice amount of pocket change for WhatsApp each year, just on its annual subscription fee. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his personal Facebook account, where he said: "One billion people now use WhatsApp. Congrats to Jan, Brian and everyone who helped reach this milestone!"

He continued: "WhatsApp's community has more than doubled since joining Facebook. We've added the ability for you to call loved ones far away. We've dropped the subscription fee and made WhatsApp completely free. Next, we're going to work to connect more people around the world and make it easier to communicate with businesses. There are only a few services that connect more than a billion people. This milestone is an important step towards connecting the entire world".

With the closed beta of The Division underway, and extended until tomorrow, The Division's Community Manager has come out saying that the team is aware of the various issues on the PC side of the game.

The Division's Community Manager wrote on The Division forum: "We are aware of the cheating issues in the Closed Beta on PC. The team is fully committed to providing solutions against this and a system will be in place to ensure a fair experience for players when the game is released on March 8".

The latest we've heard on The Division is that there might be an open beta in the near future, which wouldn't surprise us at all.

Canon has just come out and announced its new flagship camera, the EOS-1DX Mark II, which is the company's answer to Nikon's new D5 camera. Canon is aiming its new snapper at professional sports photographers and photojournalists that require a fast-shooting body that's made for demanding conditions.

The new Canon 1D X Mark II features a full-frame 20.2-megapixel sensor, that can shoot up to 14FPS with autofocus and 16FPS without. It features a native ISO range of 100-51,200 with expanded sensitivity of up to 409,600, and it can capture the magical 4K 60FPS. It sports a sharper 1.62 million-dot 3.2-inch screen, a new autofocus system with 61 points (41 cross-type) and a built-in GPS. Not too bad at all, Canon.

Canon will be selling its new 1D X Mark II in April for $5999 for the body-only, with Canon selling a bundle with a 64GB CFast card and reader for $6299. There's also a new Wi-Fi adapter, something Canon will be selling separately, for $600.

The developers of Serious Sam are working on a new game, and thanks to an interview between Reboot magazine and Croteam, we're finding out more about the mysterious fourth part of Serious Sam.

According to Croteam's Damjan Mravunac, the Serious Engine has been upgraded, with Serious Sam 4 being able to take advantage of photogrammetry and motion capture. Serious Sam 4 will be set before the events in Serious Sam 3, with SS4 to include features that no one is expecting, with never-before-seen features, too. Croteam has teased that Serious Sam 4 is going to attempt to pull all of the best parts of the previous games, and throw them up to their extremes.

The developer is aiming to go truly over the top when it comes to the amount of enemies on screen - which is something Serious Sam has always been famous for - as well as pushing Serious Sam 4's open world environments. Not only that, but Croteam wants to move away from the darker and monotonous aesthetics of Serious Sam 3, with the team wanting to make a more realistic-looking game, but keep it easy on the eyes with lots of beautiful color and high-quality graphics.

SUPER. HOT. SUPER. HOT. Yes, finally - SUPERHOT will be released on February 25, according to the SUPERHOT Team.

SUPERHOT will be released through retailers and digital distributors onto the PC, Mac and Linux - look Ma, no consoles! - with the team releasing a new trailer to celebrate its impending launch. Check it out above.

The team released a press release too, which explains: "Blurring the lines between cautious strategy and unbridled mayhem, SUPERHOT is the FPS in which time moves only when you move. No regenerating health bars. No conveniently placed ammo drops. It's just you, outnumbered and outgunned, grabbing the weapons of fallen enemies to shoot, slice, and maneuver through a hurricane of slow-motion bullets".

While VR is set to change everything from gaming to social interactions and entertainment, the actual virtual reality HMD's like the Oculus Rift have pretty much soaked up the limelight. But what about VR peripherals? Logitech is ready to jump into the new platform with a slew of VR-ready accessories.

Although most HMD's like HTC's Vive and PlayStation VR have their own controllers, Logitech wants to create its own unique line of VR peripherals, too. In a recent interview with the Australian Financial Review, Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell discussed his plans for VR: "Just like with the mouse and keyboard, optimizing the experience of the peripherals that go with VR will be an interesting place for us."

Rather than jump in right away, however, the renowned PC hardware manufacturer is biding their time and betting on the second or third generation of VR hardware. "We're in the middle of many discussions in that space ... and at some point you can bet we'll jump in," Darrell continued. "But we're years away from viewing that as a serious category. We'd rather come in late and better than come in early and awkwardly."

The Fallout 4 1.3 update we told you about a couple weeks ago is now out of beta, so if you held off or just want the certified version, today's your day.

As before, it adds in HBAO+ (better shadowing at what's said to be less of a performance cost versus other options) and a Workshop Mode, fixes bugs, and improves memory optimization and general stability. And though not specifically listed, we hear performance on both AMD and NVIDIA cards is now much improved.

If you still find shadows hurt performance greatly, this mod may help you (use at your own risk).

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is said to have told "colleagues and outsiders" that his company wants greater control over its Nexus program. Speculation says this means Google will adopt the Apple model, controlling its Nexus line from top to bottom and not relying on partners as much (and not at all publicly). In fact, Google is supposedly going down this road specifically to better compete with Apple at the high-end.

One might hope Google elects to give control of the program over to Pixel, who made the wonderful Chromebook Pixel and Pixel C.

Allegedly, HTC -- possibly still building this year's Nexus -- isn't too happy about the news, as you can imagine.

A site spotted by The Next Web allows you to use Windows 95 in your browser, thanks to the power of Javascript and emulator software Emscripten and DOSBox.

To try it head out, head here and click the 'Start Windows 95' button. Be warned the disk image is 131MB uncompressed, so it will take a few minutes to load on an average connection, and even once loaded, it will probably run slower than you remember for a variety of technical reasons. Once you're in, click the Fullscreen button to gain control of the OS.

Windows 95 launched 20 years ago and was a landmark OS for Microsoft. Support for it ended just a day prior to 2002.

Google has a new ambitious plan to use solar-powered drones to zap high-speed internet from the heavens down to Earth.

According to reports from The Guardian, the secret project is called SkyBender, and is centralized in New Mexico's Gateway to Space terminal. Google's Project SkyBender is using solar-powered Solara 50 UAVs from the Google Titan division to experiment with high-speed millimeter-wave radio transmissions. The drones essentially beam the transmissions from the skies down to one of two targeted transceivers, bestowing wireless internet to a given area.

High-frequency millimeter-wave transmissions may ultimately pave the way for 5G technology; the signals are up to 40 times more efficient and powerful than 4G LTE, and can transmit up to multiple gigabits of data per second. "The huge advantage of millimetre wave is access to new spectrum because the existing cellphone spectrum is overcrowded. It's packed and there's nowhere else to go," said Jacques Rudell, a specialist from the University of Washington.

Drones have become popular and cheap enough that their misuse and subsequent danger -- like when obstructing an air ambulance from landing -- is becoming a problem for Dutch police. Though they are investigating conventional methods to deal with it, they are also electing to train eagles to identify and capture them.

To this end, the "Politie Nederland" are teaming up with Guard From Above, a company that trains raptors. It's entirely possible things will go smoothly, as eagles are formidable birds of prey that already take down drones on their own, as well as handgliders, going so far as to take bites out of them afterward. Small drones seem fine, but larger ones could pose serious harm to the birds, so the impact on claws and a protection system and are being investigated by GFA (we're going to go ahead and assume it'll end up something like this).

WildStar is going to be making a big splash on Steam when it debuts sometime in the first half of 2016. The free-to-play MMORPG is adding a huge new area called Arcterra which will challenge players in seemingly new ways.

The new area is a frozen wasteland that's filled with mysterious ruins that need exploring, highly dangerous creatures that need slaying and a whole host of new challenges for single-players and group adventures. In the new arctic like area you'll have increasingly difficult boss-encounters as you rack-up more and more kills in the area. That is, you'll fight one boss, then two, battling your way up to the finale of 20 boss-like enemies in one encounter. Sounds exciting, no?

Once you defeat 20-person boss encounters you'll get a key, of which enough of those can unlock an exclusive dungeon beneath the quest hub, giving you access for 24 hours. The first faction to find enough keys gets access, however. And that's not all. The main story will continue with the second chapter to the Nexus Saga, the culmination of a very well tuned narrative story. The Vault of Archon will be that end-game, with new bosses, completely new environments and completely voice-acted NPC's.

We might be running out of room on the Earth for server racks and compute power. Or maybe not, but Microsoft still wants to start putting server farms and small clusters of data-centers in the bottom of the ocean. It might even be greener and more cost effective.

Project Natick is precisely the venture that Microsoft is concocting to put our data under the sea. The logic is actually quite sound, however. The idea is that containerized data centers can, if properly equipped, be cooled naturally and even use the energy from currents and waves to power them. It's a novel approach to making data, and the cloud, a more environmental friendly thing. If they don't leak and pollute the ocean of course.

And the researchers plan their submersibles to have a five year life-cycle, where they can be retrieved, refitted and upgraded with new hardware. And what if there's a malfunction or problem? Hardware failures happen, it's just a fact of life. So what if there's a HDD that suddenly can't write, and it needs to be replaced and the data restored? Presumably it'll have to be retrieved by boat and attended to, which could cost more money in manpower and equipment than just having a data-center easily accessible by humans.

This year's E3 event is only four months away--oh how time flies when you're having fun!--and Bethesda builds the hype by revealing the dates and times for its showcase briefing.

According to Bethsoft exec Pete Hines, the publisher's pre-E3 2016 showcase will be held on June 12. 2016 at 7:00 PM PST in Los Angeles. We're not sure if Bethsoft's gala will be held off-site again, but the reveal is notably vague when it comes to venue specifics.

So what can we expect from Bethesda at E3? Before you get excited for Elder Scrolls VI, remember that Bethsoft has said that Elder Scrolls VI isn't going to happen for a "very long time". Besides, the devs are busily working on a number of projects, including Dishonored 2, the Doom reboot, new Elder Scrolls Online content, and Fallout 4's upcoming DLC. We'll also likely see Bethesda unveil their plans for Fallout 4 mods on PS4 and Xbox One to top it off.

It's just been confirmed by Wargaming.net that Master of Orion is being developed for Linux as well as Windows. That means it'll join the 1,529 games that work with Steam's new Linux-based gaming-focused OS.

The astute Gaming on Linux noticed that Master of Orion seemed to have showed up on the list of games compatible with SteamOS via SteamDB, and asked the important question, to which the official Master of Orion Twitter account confirmed its development.

Even though we don't quite have a locked in release date, at the very least we know that the game will be immersive and attempt to stay true to the facets of the series that made it unique among the 4X genre. At E3 last year a private demo showed off vision and direction that they're taking, bringing the humor and the incredible control you have over every aspect of your civilization and progression.

Normal silicon circuits that use electricity aren't fast enough for NASA and the future of laser communication. So now NASA is looking to test a true photonic based modem to ensure the fastest, and most reliable, form of communication between space and the ground.

Photonic based computers and chips can provide an incredible amount of bandwidth, which can be crucial when communicating data, like how a modem just needs to pass data through as fast as possible. And they'll be applying this to their new laser communication system, the Laser Communication Relay Demonstration (LCRD).

This is a huge step in researching realistic and usable fast communication methods that can be used in space to travel long distances. This is almost an evolution of NASA's own OPALs, which is another laser communications experiment that's on the ISS. Essentially, the shot a high-powered laser beam at a tiny target on Earth to transmit packets of data. This new solution should be far faster and show that photonics can be an actual viable solution.

Ubisoft's The Division beta has been a pretty hot topic in gaming, with just about everyone trying to get in on the action. It was so popular that Ubisoft's servers started buckling and running out of space, and there was talk that even pre-orderers might not get in. If you didn't get to try it, well, Ubisoft may be holding an open beta test rather soon.

Xbox Italy's Facebook page revealed that an open beta test for The Division will be held from Feb. 16 - 21, which is cutting it short for the game's March release. Interestingly enough, the site outright states that Xbox One owners would get another 24-hour head start in the open beta test, showing how far Ubisoft's timed exclusivity deal goes.

Honestly, this may be super disappointing to gamers who ran out to pre-order the game just to get into the closed beta. Ubisoft made no mention of an upcoming open beta for good reason--no one would pre-buy the game if they knew. It's great to know we'll get more time to play the game before it launches next month, but the whole deal will likely stick in the craw of most players.

Another inadvertent leak from Amazon seems to have revealed the presence of a rather spectacular Porsche specific expansion pack coming for Forza Motorsport 6 sometime in the future.

The expansion is supposed to include a variety of current, past and future Porsche vehicles that can be used in-game. According to the marketing description, there are a total of 20 different vehicles, including the 919 Hybrid. And of course there'll be Porsche-centric achievements that you can look forward to.

Turn 10 Studios and Microsoft haven't quite officially announced this expansion yet, though it won't be surprising if a statement is released shortly. Forza Motorsport 6 wasn't quite the revolutionary upgrade over its predecessor in terms of content, though the graphics, physics and physically modeled weather effects make for a fantastic racing game. When I reviewed it (for another site unfortunately), the thrill of racing in a semi-realistic environment was very satisfying. Adding new cars should help to keep people interested and racing. The full marketing notes are below for the new (unofficial) Porsche expansion.

Ubisoft is claiming that people could potentially confuse Ghost Recon and EA's Ghost Games studio, setting up for a long legal trademark battle of the word "Ghost" in the context of games.

EA has apparently has the trademark for the use of the term "Ghost" in relation to video games, computer software or network and wireless devices. That is, it's been trademarked for one of their studios, Ghost Games. It makes sense to protect their brand identity, though that particular mark is likely to be diluted, and thus invalid, rather quickly considering the common use.

In the trademark application, the first use of the word "Ghost" in association with video games is presented as being in 2013, which is completely false give that Red Storm and Ubisoft published Ghost Recon in 2001. Though they can absolutely argue that to nullify the mark, and it could definitely be argued to be far too common, it'll likely be a long and fruitless battle.