the conclusion at the end of the article about the future of video games doesn't even mention VR. I fee video games are about to get their biggest boom ever with the advent of mainstream VR.
Are you sure ? what I miss the most in video games is the impressionism immersion. VG are getting close and closer to the uncanny valley, and IMO further from what makes a game special.
Interesting design indeed. I tend to prefer games that are like books, leaving your imagination filling the gaps instead of providing overwhelming details.
I think the biggest way in which it could change video games is that many people who don't like video games on a screen seem to like it when it has VR-style visual immersion. I've never tried VR, but from people having tried the Rift it seems like video games become much less abstract and have easier suspension of disbelief.
Too bad this future will be an afterthought now that the Kinect is not included with every system. Most devs will certainly prefer the 8% increase in processing power by disabling kinect in their game as opposed to adding a kinect feature that only some users might be able to enjoy.
The future of kinect is now going to be carried out on PC, can't wait to see what people cook up with the v2.
Kinect + Leap Motion + Oculus + Control VR gloves. This set up could deliver some serious immersion, at least in the aspect of accurately bringing the user's hands into a virtual space.
A buddy of mine is looking to work with the rift + body sensors to develop training / therapy simulations that incorporate biofeedback. They are not a gaming company so if anyone happens to be interested in something like this feel free to get in touch with them at redkiteproject.com
The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere" really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way, instead.
But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box.
This notion of "one OS everywhere" is what we'll get us a Windows 8 smartwatch with 2GB of RAM and a Celeron processor - because who wouldn't want that?!
But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box.
For now. But they also have a perfectly capable $179 streaming box that blows e.g. the Apple TV out of the water performance-wise and has a large number of popular game titles.
The XBox One is apparently popular enough to sell a couple of million devices (roughly in the same ballpark as most other streaming boxes) and packs enough punch to gently go from $400 to the 360's price point.
What I wonder about is what's in it for Microsoft. First of all, the music + movie + some apps market is much larger than the hard core gamer's market. And they make it awfully hard for people to buy into their ecosystem. A $50 streaming box would make that Windows Phone (which cannot stream to Apple TV or Chromecast) much more interesting for a lot of people than having to buy a game console for streaming.
> What I wonder about is what's in it for Microsoft.
I've always thought of video games for Microsoft as a vanity project in the same way family sedan car companies build supercars. It provides a high-performance focal point for development that trickles down useful technologies everywhere else in the manufacturing process.
DirectX, for example, probably wouldn't have ever happened if Microsoft just cared about making office productivity software.
> The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere" really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way, instead.
Isn't that 30% made to take care of the social features, like "sharing a clip of the last frag I just achieved" in a FPS or something like that ? If you want to have these advanced features, you need a number of tasks to run in the background and I would not be surprised by the 30% CPU time.
It's not just the social stuff - from my understanding it's running a modified Hyper-V to capture the core console OS. Presumably this segregates off the ability to do background downloads, implement the encryption for HDMI, and so on and so forth from the XBox gaming portion.
If you believe the rumours Dave Cutler worked on the hypervisor of the Xbox.
I don't know what the breakdown is (what number of cores goers to OS,number of cores for the games), the the Xbox One has a rather low performance 8-core AMD unit; the cores are provisioned amongst the OS and games as needed.
Since the CPU is low performance, the OS could easily eat 50% of its total performance, leaving scant little for games.
It'd be interesting to know the figures for the PS4 - whether the OS has a significant footprint or not when games are running. Is there any source for the PS4 available anywhere?
Sorry everybody, I was thinking of the slide of engines / companies[1]. I am aware Epic makes the Unreal Engine, but wasn't aware that the Zen Garden on Metal demo was intact UE4.
That's the thing, they are never going to out-do GoPro when it comes to marketing. They should just focus on making a technically superior product at a similar or lower price point. There are enough discerning customers out there to make it viable.
Too bad advertising is so important. I thought go-pro was
a narcissistic waste of time, but once I saw the how useful
they were on the production end of the Gold mining show on the Discovery channel; I realized their value. I hope they
continue to improve quality, and lower price points. And
not spend more money on advertising.
GoPro's most effective marketing isn't traditional paid advertising, it's the cool video your friend shot & put on YouTube.
Or if you don't have any cool friends, it's Jeb Corliss' "Grinding the Crack"[1]. Given that many credit the massive success[2] of AWOLNATION's "Sail" (the soundtrack to that clip) to the 26M views that clip has had, I wonder how many GoPro's it sold, too?
Most of their marketing budget must be in the form of event and athlete sponsorships since that's how they get the incredible footage that sells itself. They need to keep maintaining the brand value as similar products come to market to hold market share. This in turn drives sales, profits, and funds innovation and product improvements.
Saved up, took a year off, and just went at it. Having friends that knew Python definitely helped when Stackoverflow couldn't help. Usually that was because I was asking the question/thinking of the problem wrong.
of course it is dangerous. but if you are employed by uber and get hurt "on the job" while carrying out their agenda, they should be responsible for your recovery.
You can look at it as a service connecting bike messengers to people that need deliveries.
A comparable example is Google Play or the Apple store. They take a cut of your pay by connecting you to customers but they don't call you an employee. Where is the uproar there?
When I sell something on eBay I don't have any expectations that I'm an eBay employee. The Google Play and Apple app store are both apt analogies as well. Selling goods or services on a marketplace often comes at a cost per transaction, but it almost never comes with an expectation of employment.
Well, in my country if you work without a contract and the companies fires you without cause, you can sue them in Labor court and the judges will do a test to see if you were de-facto employed: whether you had fixed working hours, a manager that told you specific tasks and evaluated you on them, were paid a fixed salary or a per-task or per-hour rate, and a few others.
In Uber's case, and AFAIK, the drivers don't have any of that. They just have to take a course, and then they can just take any job they want, when they want, without fixed hours or even fixed days per week.
To me, they sound more like freelancers than employees.
This happens all of the time. Large US companies sometimes only hire contractors that have employee status with some other firm to protect themselves.
In the standard test to determine whether an person is an employee, they look at things like who supplies the equipment, who sets the hours, whether it possible for the contractor to have a loss -- most critically in the Uber case, you are more likely to be classified an employee if you do the work that is the purpose of the company.
What that means is that if I clean the offices, I can be a contractor because the purpose of the company might be to make and sell widgets. If I am on the factory floor making the widgets, then the labor dept. frowns on a contractor classification.
These are all just guidelines -- the labor dept or a judge will make the call, but US tax laws incent them to prefer employee status.
(IANAL, but I have served on an employment board, overseeing a US Labor dept regional office)
false equivalency. what is the risk of being injured selling items on ebay, compared to flying through the streets of manhattan during rush hour on your bike? however, they due insure purchases in the case you get ripped off, which is much more likely to happen.
when did social responsibility go out the window? to me, this isn't a profitable business if they have to claim responsibility for the people they are putting in risk to make a buck. yet, they do it anyone and pass the cost on to the tax payer and no on seems to mind.
