Latest News - Page 2594

Mozilla has just launched A-Frame, an open-source framework that uses HTML5 instead of WebGL. This means A-Frame is compatible across iPhones, Google Cardboard devices, the Oculus Rift DK2, and Android support "coming soon".

A-Frame will also support the HTC Vive, which is coming out in April 2016 with HTC teasing that together with Valve they have made "a very, very big technological breakthrough" with Vive. Back to A-Frame, with Mozilla's MozVR team saying: "Beginners start with easily understood primitives like cubes, videos, models, and skies. Advanced users can use JavaScript to imperatively create dynamic and interactive scenes or dive into its underlying entity-component system, a design pattern popular in the game industry that favors composition over inheritance".

Yesterday, we reported that HTC and Valve had made "a very, very big technological breakthrough" with the Vive headset, and now a new finger-tracking VR demo has appeared online from the HTC developer event in Beijing.

It looks like an early finger-tracking system, using Perception Neutron finger-tracking gloves from Noitom and a SteamVR controller strapped to the back of the hand. This is obviously not a final design, but it shows an intuitive way of interacting with even simple objects like a bucket and some balls, all using natural finger movements in the VR world.

Even more recently, we wrote about the latest HTC Vive headset and controllers were shown off - looking incredibly awesome.

Amazon's reach is about to get a whole lot bigger, with the company reportedly in talks with Boeing over leasing a fleet of 767s for Amazon's air cargo duties, according to The Seattle Times.

The company wants to not go through the troubles UPS and other carriers did, with Amazon already using trailers on the road to get its goods to their distribution centers. Amazon is reportedly looking at leasing 20 Boeing 767s, and if it does get its hands-on the planes, Amazon will have a better handle on delivery times. Not only that, but Amazon could eventually not need the cargo services from companies like UPS, FedEx, and the USPS. The Seattle Times also notes that Amazon could open up extra space on its jets to other companies, providing a nice income stream, which would have it competing directly against UPS, FedEx, and others.

Rolling off the news that HTC and Valve made "a very, very big technological breakthrough" with their Vive headset recently, but new pictures of the VR HMD have surfaced.

Alongside shots of the new second-gen Vive headset, are a nice tease of the very unique controllers. The new controllers look much smoother, with a far more consumer-focused design and look. On the bottom of the controllers, you'll see four small, silver dots. We don't know what these little dots will be used for, and that excites us - surprise us, HTC/Valve.

We should see the new Vive headset and controllers at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which kicks off on the first week of 2016.

Sony is working on a new battery technology that will see batteries lasting 40% longer on a single charge, and they'll also be up to 30% smaller than current batteries found inside of our devices.

Japanese newspaper Nikkei is behind the latest report, reporting that Sony is creating a power cell made from a sulfur compound, instead of lithium, used in today's batteries. The first commercial Li-on battery was created by Sony, so if the Japanese electronics giant does get its new sulfur-based battery to the market, it would make another first for Sony. But there are problems with sulfur-based batteries, as their capacity decreases with every charge cycle, because of the electrode dissolving into the electrolyte. Nikkei reports that Sony has found a way around these problems by reforming the electrolyte solution to make longer-lasting batteries, hold even more power.

Sony is reportedly verifying the safety of this new battery technology before it kicks off mass production. The company is going to be making sure the new sulfur-based batteries won't explode, or make your new smartphone worthless after a few charges. We shouldn't see Sony's new battery technology inside of devices until 2020.

Ken Levine, the Game Designer behind iconic games like System Shock 2 and BioShock, we have a new small scale open world game, but there's not much we do know about it.

Levine spoke on the OnPoint podcast (if you want to listen to it, it's from 21:20) where he explained: "We started this experiment once we finished Bioshock Infinite. How do you make a narrative game, you know, kind of feel like the games we've made before, but make it replayable and make it extend and make it react to the players? Make it replayable by giving players different ways to approach the problems and letting them really dictate the experience. That is not a simple problem to solve".

"It can mean an open world game, and the thing we're working on is sort of a small scale open world game. The reason ours is an open world game is because if you want to give players the agency to drive the experience, that really fights against the linear nature of the games we've made before, like Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite," added Levine.

Solar power is a great alternative to countless other energies, but cloud can get in the way sometimes - and it's unavoidable, until now.

An international consortium is working on taking solar farms to the skies, above the clouds using stratospheric balloons. These balloons would be much closer to the sun, taking in as much power as possible into its solar cells - without much interference and space used on the ground. Under the direction of French-Japanese scientific research lab, NEXTPV, the main tenet of their concept is that there aren't many clouds floating at an altitude of 3.7 miles (6km). But higher, at 12.4 miles (or 20km) there are not many clouds at all.

Taking away cloud coverage and light diffusions that "occurs in the many close layers of the Earth's atmosphere leads to a higher concentration of sunlight. In turn, this concentrated solar power leads to higher energy yields from photovoltaic solar cells", reports Yahoo. How would these massive solar farms float above the clouds? They would use the excess electricity generated during the day to recombine hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell. This fuel cell would then release power regularly, as required, overnight. The same source of hydrogen isolated through water electrolysis for the fuel cell would keep the entire solar farm balloon in the air.

News of the Nintendo Wii U emulator running Mario Kart 8 broke last week with fans excited to see the future of Wii U emulation on the PC. But now there's a tease of a PlayStation 3 emulator, running under DirectX 12.

YouTuber 'John GodGames' has teased the DX12 version of RPVS3 - his PS3 emulator - running After Burner: Climax, Dragon Ball Z Burst Limit and Silent Hill 3. Dragon Ball Z Burst Limit has some broken visuals and noticeable artifacts, but it runs. Now all we need to see running on this is Metal Gear Solid or Uncharted, and the real fun begins - which will most likely result in big lawsuits from companies if this ever goes mainstream.

LG is getting serious about its OLED TV advertisement, securing Hollywood director Ridley Scott - you know, the guy who directed Blade Runner and most recently, The Martin - to direct a new ad during next year's Super Bowl. We definitely understand why, as we fell in love with - and I'm still deeply in love with LG's 65-inch 4K curved OLED TV.

Scott will be in charge of directing LG's OLED spot, which will debut on February 7 during the Super Bowl 50 broadcast. The commercial will "showcase LG's widely acclaimed OLED TV technology and introduce a soon-to-be-announced addition to its OLED TV line" according to LG, and will be produced by Scott's RSA Films company, and helped by Scott's son, Jake.

Scott is also no stranger to Super Bowl notoriety, as he directed the infamous 1984 commercial for Apple and its Macintosh at the time, which is recognized as the best Super Bowl ad of all time.

With all of the movie hoopla going on right now surrounding the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight is getting some good press, and it's spreading across the US with special 70mm screenings of the film - including a longer cut of the movie, with an intermission.

Well, THR is now reporting that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice might get a 70mm release, thanks to the increased availability of 70mm-ready screens - courtesy of The Weinstein Company getting cinemas to prep their screens for The Hateful Eight. Zack Snyder directed part of Batman v Superman in 65mm IMAX, which as Slashfilm reports "makes a 70mm projector the best possible way to see the movie on the big screen".

It's obviously more expensive to show 70mm, but Batman v Superman would be something that's worth it. With Warner Bros. reportedly spending up to $410 million on the movie, making it the most expensive movie ever made, I don't know why they wouldn't go the extra mile (or extra 70mm at least) and show off Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 70mm.

We now know why HTC delayed the Vive until April 2016, the team has been improving things behind the scenes, and today at the Vive Unbound developers forum in Beijing, China, HTC CEO Cher Wang said that two weeks ago, Valve and HTC made "a very, very big technological breakthrough" with the Vive.

This breakthrough led HTC to skip the original Vive headset, and ship the new one - missing the Q1 2016 window. Wang said: "We shouldn't make our users swap their systems later just so we could meet the December shipping date". Wang didn't talk much about the technological breakthrough but did tease that it would be unveiled at CES early next month.

MSI has launched its C236A and C236M motherboards, intended for workstation, entry server, and datacenter use. In other words: they're high-end.

Both boards support Intel's Xeon E3 v5 series CPUs and are aimed squarely at multi-GPU users, specifically Quadro and FirePro. You can see this reflected partly in the spatial design of the boards, which look to nicely accommodate multiple GPUs, as well as the Steel Armor reinforced PCI-e slots which are said to handle even the heaviest cards just fine.

Other features include DDR4 Boost, support for Turbo M.2, Turbo U.2 and SATA Express storage, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C connectors, Military Class 4 components, Audio Boost, Intel Gigabit LAN, and Click BIOS 5.

ASUS's latest motherboard is the E3 Pro Gaming V5. Designed with the LGA1151 socket and C232 Express chipset, it's the first ASUS motherboard compatible with Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors, though it supports 6th-generation Intel Core, Pentium, and Celeron processors as well.

The V5 supports DDR4 (4x DIMMs, up to 64GB DDR4 2133MHz) and quad-GPU setups, and features USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A and reversible USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C (14 ports with data transfer speeds of up to 10Gbit/s) as well an M.2 connection for your SSD. Speaking of storage, up to six SATA drives at 6Gbps are supported.

For cooling, it packs a dedicated water pump header. On the audio front, you get SupremeFX for high-quality audio and a 115dB signal-to-noise ratio. Meanwhile, Intel Gigabit Ethernet technology is said to offer "exceptionally high" TCP and UDP throughput, allowing the CPU to do work harder for the game outside of networking tasks.

Programmers and engineers at Google and the GM-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab, among other institutions, are finding driverless cars are too good at what they do, and it's causing a crash rate double that of cars with human drivers. That is to say, a robot driver that obeys the law to the letter every time doesn't mesh so well with human drivers that don't do the same. For example, a driverless car will go the speed limit on a busy highway whereas everyone else will be going well above it, or be wanting to, thus increasing the probability of a crash. As well, the reflexes of a driverless car are better, which can catch a human off guard.

Though all crashes have been minor and none of them the fault of a driverless car, researchers are of course debating what to do about the situation. One possibility: programming the vehicles to behave more like humans and better fit into the "social game" (as Google describes it) that is driving, even if that means making them a little less lawful.

"It's a sticky area," says Brandon Schoettle, co-author of the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute's study. "If you program them to not follow the law, how much do you let them break the law?"

A new hacking group called Phantom Squad promises that Sony's PlayStation Network will be overrun and "brought to its knees" for a full week this Christmas.

Over the past few years, holiday seasons have been prey to hacking collectives aimed at flaunting their power and ruining the gaming season for millions of players every year. First the hackers at Lizard Squad used DDoS attacks to force both Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network offline for weeks at a time during past holidays. Now a new team called Phantom Squad has arisen, claiming that it'll follow in the former collective's reptilian footsteps to spread digital carnage and frustration over this year's yuletide season.

Phantom Squad took responsibility for the recent Xbox LIVE outage, saying the following when the service was finally back up and running: "Lmao OF F***ING COURSE Xbox live is back online. We stopped the attacks." The official Phantom Squad Twitter account was the source of the threats, but its since been suspended by the social media overlords, so now we can only go on past coverage from publications like Eurogamer.

G.SKILL has once again set a new system memory record by announcing the fastest 64GB DDR4 RAM kits on the market today with up to 3200 MHz speeds with tight timings and ultra-dense capacity.

G.SKILL has pushed its new extreme performance 16GB (2x8GB) Trident-Z DDR4 RAM modules from 3000MHz up to a roaring 3200MHz in 64GB (4x 16GB) setups. The flagship Trident Z DDR4 3200MHz CL14 64GB kits feature four 16GB DDR4 RAM modules clocked at 3200MHz for enthusiast-grade ultra-fast performance. G.SKILL's 64GB DDR4 kits are timed at an impressively tight CL14-14-14-35 CAS Latency with 1.35V power draw, merging high-capacity and frequency with low latency.

All of G.SKILL's new Trident Z kits feature the latest Intel XMP2.0 standard and are designed to be complemented with Intel's new 6th Gen Skylake processors and Z170 chipset motherboards. G.SKILL also stole the spotlight by overclocking 16GB DDR4 Trident Z kits to an insane insane 4133MHz.

While The Mercury explains that it has been 3865 says since the last Star Wars cinema showing, we're here to give you a look into some Star Wars fan history, via Gizmodo.

The images in this article showcase Star Wars fans throughout different eras, including sequels and prequels alike, giving us a look at some favorite characters, cosplayers, and hairstyles of the ages. While the internet is a fairly new invention in terms of the history of mankind, some of these poor souls were lining up for days or weeks in order to get tickets for their Star Wars fix.

After a long, bitter battle, the Kojima vs. Konami struggle is finally over, and Metal Gear Solid creator has been freed from the shackles of Konami. While the gaming community has a general understanding of the Kojima-Konami controversy, we'll likely never get the whole story.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Hideo Kojima revealed that he's contractually obligated to not discuss the nitty-gritty details that led to the divorce. Kojima did attempt to break down the distinct cultural barrier surrounding Japanese business politics and shared some key inference on what it was like to work with Konami for nearly 30 years.

"When working in big companies, especially Japanese companies, every little thing has to be approved beforehand, and you need paperwork to do anything," Kojima said, revealing the strict, multi-faceted nature of Japanese business. "Now that I'm independent, I can do what I want with much more speed. I don't need to invest time in unnecessary presentations. I shoulder the risk."

Authorities have located and arrested a 19-year-old located in Pennsylvania recently, accusing this teenager of using 57 total Twitter accounts to recruit and advertise for ISIS.

19-year-old Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz was also found in possession of a stockpile of weapons, with authorities homing in on this man due to various tweets about buying female slaves and killing US soldiers while using Twitter names such as '@MuslinBruh0', reports Gizmodo. Found inside his closet were items such as five loaded magazines (explained to look like belonging to an M4) and a large kitchen knife.

While it has been explained that not all of these 57 accounts were operating at any one time, Twitter was reportedly closing accounts quite regularly, with this teenager continuing to make a new handle in response each time, continuing the spread of ISIS propaganda.

Capcom had our attention when they announced that Street Fighter 5 could include cross-platform play between the PS4 and PC versions of their iconic fighting game, but now there's even more news to get excited over.

Street Fighter 5 will include support for both SteamOS, Valve's Linux-based operating system, and Valve's new Steam Controller. Capcom says that it's "working closely with Valve on" its project with Street Fighter 5 and the Steam Controller. The PC version of the game reaches beta this weekend, where you'll be able to try out the Steam Controller on Street Fighter 5 between December 18 and 20.

As for the game, Street Fighter 5 will be released on February 16, 2016.