Lifeboat Foundation

Visual effects (VFX) can help to make videogames more engaging and immersive for players. However, they are often also designed to support players, for instance, by pointing them to specific locations or highlighting helpful game features.

Researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) have recently carried out a study investigating the ways in which VFX can help videogame players to make sense of the virtual worlds and environments they are navigating. Their paper, pre-published on arXiv and presented at the IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), could guide the future development of both videogames and data visualization tools.

“Our study mostly builds upon our engagement with two distinct communities: the data visualization research and the videogame communities,” Henry Zhou, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “The Computational Media department at UCSC has a mixture of scholars interested in both media artifacts. The paper originated from my colleague Angus G. Forbes’ observation of a general minimalist aesthetic as practicing wisdom in the data visualization research community, especially when it comes to visual effects (VFX) and animation.”

39.9K Likes, 733 Comments. TikTok video from WePC Gaming (@wepcgaming): “MAX graphics settings in Modern Warfare 2!😯 #modernwarfare2 #modernwarfare2campaign #mw2 #gamingontiktok #gaming”. original sound.

The Walt Disney Company encompasses theme parks and some of the world’s best-loved entertainment brands. All of this makes it a perfect fit for the much-hyped metaverse, which promises to blend the real and the virtual to create cutting-edge entertainment experiences.

Put horror movies and games aside for a few minutes to listen to something truly unsettling this Halloween season. The has released audio of what our planet’s magnetic field sounds like. While it protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from solar winds, it turns out that the magnetic field has an unnerving rumble.

You can’t exactly point a microphone at the sky and hear the magnetic field (nor can we see it). Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark collected by the ESA’s three Swarm satellites into sound, representing both the magnetic field and a solar storm.

Continue reading “Listen to the eerie sounds of a solar storm hitting the Earth’s magnetic field” »

If you’ve ever played the claw game at an arcade, you know how hard it is to grab and hold onto objects using robotics grippers. Imagine how much more nerve-wracking that game would be if, instead of plush stuffed animals, you were trying to grab a fragile piece of endangered coral or a priceless artifact from a sunken ship.

Most of today’s robotic grippers rely on embedded sensors, complex feedback loops, or advanced machine learning algorithms, combined with the skill of the operator, to grasp fragile or irregularly shaped objects. But researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated an easier way.

Continue reading “Tentacle robot can gently grasp fragile objects” »

Pictures of the sky can show us cosmic wonders; movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are revealing motion and change across the sky.

Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.

Continue reading “NASA telescope takes 12-year time-lapse movie of entire sky” »

This GB Live News is in partnership with VB Lab funded by Xsolla.

Video games have always been resilient, even in an increasingly volatile geopolitical climate. Long-time game players are fiercely loyal, and enthusiastic new gamers keep pouring into the market, says Chris Hewish, president of Xsolla. In the first half of 2022 alone, more than 651 deals were announced or closed, for a value of $107 billion. But in a fiercely competitive market, clouded by less economic certainy, studios and indie developers are exploring an increasing number of ways to reach the audiences.

“Game companies do need to look at how their business models can function in a macroeconomic climate, heading into a recession,” he added. “Capital is going to become tighter. If you have a business model based upon growth over profitability, it’s going to be harder to find fuel for that growth. Readjusting to focus on profitability is probably one of the biggest things game companies can do right now, if they haven’t already, to weather the storm in a macro sense. But the opportunity with players and the number of people playing and spending, that’s still looking good.”

I have been collaborating with Terasem for many years. Here is my personal interpretation of Terasem.

A dish of living brain cells has learned to play the 1970s arcade game Pong.

About 800,000 cells linked to a computer gradually learned to sense the position of the game’s electronic ball and control a virtual paddle, a team reports in the journal Neuron.

The novel achievement is part of an effort to understand how the brain learns, and how to make computers more intelligent.