Latest News - Page 2987

If there's one bit of technology kit I'm the most excited for, it would be a huge tie between Google Glass, and Oculus' Rift VR headset. News is leaking out now that head of DICE's Frostbite creative team, Frank Vitz, is eager to get his hands on Oculus Rift, and test it out on the powerful graphics engine.

All of this started when an MTBS3D (Meant to be Seen) forum member found an intern job posting by EA's DICE, which was looking for someone to work on next-generation VR technology. The job posting specifically talked about investigating and building support into the Frostbite engine for the Oculus Rift headset. MTBS3D president, Neil Schneider, e-mailed Vitz as he thought he might have something to do with the job posting.

He was right, with Vitz admitting so in an e-mail reply. Vitz gave Schneider permission to post the e-mail exchange on his site with details about what DICE would like to do with the Oculus Rift headset. Vitz also said that he has one of the very first Rift developer kits heading to him later this month, and is aware of at least four kits on order within their internal community. Vitz added that there are multiple titles being worked on that would be great for Rift, but noted that it would be up to each individually team to make sure their project works in stereoscopic 3D, and with Oculus' Rift VR headset.

If you're an education customer, or were looking to buy a new Apple iMac for one of your children in school, then now is the time. Apple has updated the pricing on their education-only 21.5-inch iMac, but have also provided beefier internals to go with it.

The 21.5-inch iMac now starts at $1099 - a slight $100 increase on the old price - but gives you an Intel Core i3 dual-core 3.3GHz processor, HD Graphics 4000, 500GB HDD and 4GB of RAM. There's always the option to bump the storage and RAM up, something I would suggest on any system. 8GB of RAM is cheap and your main drive should always be an SSD these days, the performance increase is worth it.

Education customers can begin ordering these new iMacs, with 5-7 business day shipping times at the moment.

Those looking forward to the coming Valve Steam Box, you won't have to wait too much longer. Speaking with the BBC, Gabe Newell has said that they should be giving out some prototype Steam Boxes within three to four months. "We're working with partners trying to nail down how fast we can make it," Newell said.

As an additional note, he added that a final controller design hasn't been decided. Valve is looking into the possibility of using sensors to measure the gamer's body metrics, such as heart rate, to judge engagement.

The FAA has said that they are investigating a pilot's claim that he saw a drone flying over Brooklyn in New York. The pilot claims to have seen the drone while on final approach to John F Kennedy Airport. Over the radio, he can be heard saying, "We saw a drone, a drone aircraft."

"The FAA is investigating a report...he saw a small, unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft while on final approach to Runway 31 Right. The sighting was approximately four to five miles west of the airport at an altitude of approximately 1,500 feet," FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said in a statement.

Other aircraft in the area was warned of the drone sighting, but two other pilots said that they did not see the drone. The FAA is working on new rules to allow unmanned aircraft to be flown in US airspace. Generally only governments and public entities, such as police departments, are allowed to operate them. Even they must apply for permission first.

Google has released an update to its Google Maps for iPhone app. The new update brings with it several improvements, with the most important one probably being the improved local search. The new version of the app is promising faster local search through new search icons and integration with Google Contacts.

Other minor improvements include the addition of an English language version for Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. As part of this globalization, the app now allows you to select between miles and kilometers in the settings menu. This way you can use the units most familiar to you.

A new report by Fortune says that YouTube is working on a music streaming service that will compete directly with competitors such as Spotify. YouTube has long been a source of music, both legally and illegally, so a streaming service is not too far out of the norm for the site.

The current model relies on advertising revenue generated from showing ads during music videos. A portion of this ad revenue is shared with the label or content owner. A new service would likely continue to rely on these advertisements to offer a free service, though a premium service would likely be offered with an ad-free experience.

Fortune cites sources in both the record industry and Google. YouTube's spokesperson said:

During this week's Microsoft TechForum, Craig Mundie, a senior advisor for Microsoft, said that the company is looking to take the Kinect to new heights including TV's and laptops. "My dream is to get a Kinect into the bezel of something like this", as he pointed to a Surface tablet.

The company was showing off a bulky, but very large display that featured a Kinect built into its bezel at its recently opened "Envisioning Center" along with many more Kinect integrated screens. The Kinect's being shown off were much smaller than the current model, but no one would comment on if they are version 2.0 or not.

Before you can expect to see a Kinect in your ultra-thin smart TV, or even in your laptop or desktop monitor, things will have to get much smaller and some new technology will have to be created. The Kinect sensor does not work in daylight. "It turns out it's infrared so when you go out in the sunlight the sun is a big infrared source that drowns it out," Mundie explains. "There's a whole bunch of problems, not just miniaturization, in designing the sensors so they actually do what you expect them to do in all of the environments."

CeBIT 2013 - We are still three months out from Intel's Haswell line of processors hitting retail shelves, but that is not stopping ASRock from unveiling four new LGA1150 motherboards.

The high-end ASRock Z87 Extreme6 is a standard sized ATX motherboard that is equipped with gold capacitors, can support dual channel DDR3 RAM up to 1600MHz, and features two PCI-Express 3.0 slots. It sports 14 USB ports of which six are USB 3.0, 8 SATA 6Gb ports and DVI, D-Sub, HDMI and Display Port.

The Z87 Pro4-M is a MicroATX board that features 100% solid capacitors, one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, support for AMD CrossfireX, multiple monitor support through built in display connectors, and 12 USB ports (six USB 3.0) The Pro4-M also includes six SATA 6Gb ports.

Opera has released a completely redesigned version of its web browser that runs on Android, and is being billed by the company as "the best browser on Android." Opera says that they started from scratch to bring a fully native web browsing experience to your Android based smartphone.

Opera says that the new browser brings forth a new way to browse the web that is more elegant and efficient. The new Discover feature provides a panel in which you can read popular articles from the web based on your interest. Another new feature is "Speed Dial", a service that is similar to a bookmark folder, but streamlines the process of organizing favorited websites.

Like similar browsers, the search and URL bar are now combined, tabbed browsing is present, and users are able to save websites to their phone for viewing when not connected to a data source. Browsing history has also been simplified making it easy for the end-user to quickly find and revisit previously viewed sites.

There's so many games coming out in these coming weeks, including the just-released Crysis 3. NVIDIA are now out of the gate with new beta drivers, the GeForce 314.14 beta drivers. The new beta drivers include improved performance and compatibility for multiple titles.

This includes Tomb Raider, which is out any minute, SimCity due a few minutes later, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (March 12) and Resident Evil 6 (March 22). If you want to hit up Hawken with hardware-accelerated PhysX effects when it drops later this week, you'll need these new beta drivers. NVIDIA have also said there are multiple performance increases for those of you running GeForce GTX 680 GPUs, and again when they're in SLI - more numbers here:

GeForce GTX 680:

We've been so busy hearing about Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S IV, that iPhone rumors are now getting a back seat - isn't that a big change in the tides? Now we have KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo issuing a new research report, which claims that we should see two new iPhones and iOS 7 launched in June.

The new smartphones would be made available to the public a month later in July. Kuo continues:

You might remember Infinity Ward, the creators of Call of Duty - but that can be rolled into two men - Jason West and Vince Zampella. The two of them left IW on fiery terms and started up Respawn Entertainment.

West has now left the studio, citing family issues which have been on-going since May 2012, according to a source who didn't want to be named. West's partner, Vince, confirmed the news, saying:

According to The New York Times, the Samsung Galaxy S4 will track a user's eyes to enable scrolling on webpages. Their source, a Samsung employee who spoke on a condition of anonymity, says that software will take a precedence over hardware in the upcoming Galaxy S4 device.

Samsung has filed for a trademark of "Samsung Eye Scroll" in the United States back in February. The device will track a user's eyes and use that to determine where to scroll. Imagine finishing reading a paragraph on a webpage. When you're eyes reach the last line, the device will automatically scroll to the next paragraph.

This isn't the first time that Samsung has employed eye tracking. Their current Galaxy S3 device makes use of the feature called Smart Stay to know not to dim the screen when it's being looked at. We'll hopefully see this feature demonstrated at the press event on March 14, though it hasn't been confirmed that it will be making an appearance.

The White House has thrown its support behind legalizing cell phone unlocking after a We The People petition achieved the 100,000 signature requirement. The practice of unlocking cellular devices was banned earlier this year after the Library of Congress ruled that it violates the DMCA.

White House Senior Advisor R. David Edelman:

North Korea has accepted The Pirate Bay onto their networks after offering the site virtual asylum. This network switch comes on the heels of the Norwegian Pirate Party being forced to stop routing traffic for The Pirate Bay. "We can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network."

When I run a traceroute, I don't seem to be bounced through North Korea, though TorrentFreak posted an image of their traceroute being sent through North Korea, seen above. The Pirate Bay says that they will work to influence the leader of North Korea to allow citizens to access the site.

NASA's Curiosity rover has been doing burnouts all over Mars' surface for a while now, but it looks like it has hit a snag - the rover will be switching to its backup computer in the coming days after it suffered a corrupted file that caused the primary "A-side" computer to glitch.

This all happened on February 27, with Curiosity not sending its daily dump of data back to Earth - instead, it switched into sleep mode. Mission Control of course had to act, and made the decision to switch the rover over to its backup, suspending their scientific research until the rover is fixed. NASA posted through their Twitter acccount:

Anonymous are constantly getting into the news, with their latest efforts trying to show the world that Bank of America are spying on their customers. With the Bank of America being a, well, bank, this is alarming news. But in the world we live in now, not so much.

The hacking collective reportedly took 14GB of information that belongs to Bank of America, Thomas Reuters, ClearForest, Bloomberg, and TEKSystems. The information taken reportedly has the spying habits of the BoA and other corporations, with spools of data on hundreds of thousands of employees and executives. Anonymous are trying to come out as the good guy here, saying that the information collected is interesting for numerous reasons.

Anonymous push the fact that the data was easy to obtain, with the hackers not requiring any brute force as the server they hacked into was easy to access. The data was reportedly sitting on a ClearForest server in Tel Aviv, with the server being so badly misconfigured that the hackers said it was like an open door, where anyone could've entered. Anonymous also state the most of the information was badly researched and that large parts of it might be incorrect.

In five years time, Dennis Tito's plan of a private flyby of Mars will come to fruition, and as any journey into the dark beyond that is space, there are logistical issues that will have to be planned for its 501-day journey.

One of the most important issues is blocking the crew from deadly radiation, so how would you do this? Well, Tito's idea is to use human waste. Yes, human waste as in your bodily fluids. The Inspiration Mars spacecraft will be built with its walls lined in water-filled bags that would eventually be filled with the crews' waste, protecting them against cosmic rays. The water-filled bags will eventually get replaced with the crews' waste, which will then be dehydrated, purified and prepared as drinking water.

Water-based materials are better at stopping the deadly radiation, so it's a better solution than pure metal. It definitely sounds like an interesting way to solve the issue, but would you want to float through space knowing that your walls are covered in not only your waste, but your crew mates' waste? Delicious. In space, no one can hear you scream, I guess.

The game developer behind Call of Duty have some interesting photos to share with the world, where they show off a small PC with their Infinity Ward logo on the side. To most people this might not seem like much, but are we seeing the first proper builds of Valve's Steam Box?

Infinity Ward is a huge developer, and securing them on-board with an exclusive of any kind is sure to sell millions of Steam Box's at launch. One interesting thing is that they've put an iPhone next to it for a size reference, so we can see the purported Steam Box wouldn't even be that big, what is of more interest is the device underneath it.

This looks like an external hard drive, but I'm dreaming of an upgradeable GPU. Valve could really turn the entire console and gaming industries on their heads by offering us a console with an upgradeable GPU. Anything under 150W could be cooled quite efficiently, and would give consumers a great upgrade path, too. What are your thoughts on these leaked shots?

Mac has finally gotten access to the online multiplayer game League of Legends. The game was originally released for Windows back in 2009 and has grown in popularity ever since. If you already play League of Legends, you can download the open beta for Mac, or you can sign up for an account on their website.

League of Legends is popular among gamers and eSports enthusiasts. There are numerous events streamed live, each viewed by thousands of people. Prizes for the events can run up into the millions, so it's somewhat interesting that it has taken so long to get it onto the Mac platform.