Monday, April 30, 2007

Wii! Well

Wii and DS boost Nintendo profits

The gloves are off in the battle for the games console marketMassive demand for Nintendo's Wii games machine and soaring sales of its DS console have brought record profits for the Japanese firm.
Its net profits grew 77.2% to 174.3bn yen (£731m; $1.4bn) in the year to 31 March, while sales surged 90%.
Nintendo had been struggling against rivals Sony and Microsoft until its new innovations revitalised its business.
It said it sold 23.56 million handheld DS consoles, and was hoping to sell a similar number this year.
The Kyoto-based firm added it aimed to sell 14 million Wii consoles in 2007/8, up from 5.84 million in the year to March.
Competition
The improvement in profits comes as little surprise given the success of its latest products.
The video game industry is now on a growth path
Nintendo
And its share price has almost doubled in the past year as investors were impressed by its turnaround.
The DS console, which allows users to control play with a stylus, has proved popular with women and older users.
Meanwhile the motion sensitive Wii has proved popular after introducing a new way of playing computer games.
The Wii is competing against Sony's Playstation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360.
"The video game industry is now on a growth path," Nintendo said.
Nintendo games are best known for characters such as Mario, Pokemon and Donkey Kong.

Further Reading

An educational-ish game.. who could of thought it?

Game combats campus culture shock

Freshers' week can be daunting for many students, Mr Maniar saysA computer game has been devised to help overseas students deal with the culture shocks of university life in Britain, like seeing kissing in public.
Players of C-Shock have to complete a series of tasks a foreign student might face on their first day at university.
They include seeing people drinking alcohol and smoking, in a 3D recreation of the University of Portsmouth campus.
One of its devisers, academic Nipan Maniar, said he hoped the game would help students know what to expect.
We thought we could devise a game that they could play on their mobile phone on the way here so they would know what to expect
Nipan Maniar
The senior lecturer in the university's faculty of creative and cultural industries, who is Indian, said he experienced a "massive culture shock" himself when he came to Portsmouth in 2000 to do his MSc.
"It was not just the environment I was in, but the teaching - the relationship with tutors was very informal."
And many students from places like South Asia were often shocked to see women smoking, drinking and being friendly with the opposite sex, he said.

Mouse brain simulated on computer. Whats next?


Mouse brain simulated on computer

It takes a supercomputer to mimic a mouse brainUS researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.
The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.
In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.
Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.
Life signs
Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved.
The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations".
Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres.
Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform".
The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4,096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.

iPlayer


Taken from the Guardian Online Service.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,2068878,00.html

Sign up! Theres free jelly ^^.

The BBC Trust has given final approval for the iPlayer, the corporation's proposed online seven-day catch-up TV service.
After the trust's first application of its new public value test, approval was granted with two further amendments proposed by the trust in addition to BBC management's original plans.
The trust has now said that no more than 15% of the content on the iPlayer can be available for so-called "series stacking", where users can download multiple episodes of a particular TV series.
Only certain types of programming will be offered this way, such as limited-run drama series. But the iPlayer will allow users to stack up previous episodes for the duration of the series, not just seven days after it aired. All other content on the iPlayer will be less than seven days old.
The second change is that after noting what it described as "strong public demand", the trust will audit the BBC's progress in making the iPlayer platform neutral.
BBC management originally proposed that the iPlayer would run only on Microsoft's Windows operating system and the Windows Media Player 10 because it wanted to use Microsoft digital-rights management technology.
Management also told the trust it would be unworkable to make the service available on other operating systems, such as Apple and Linux, within two years.

Wow! Gosh!

My Media film folder is done, its dusted, let the nostalgia begin.

So, whats been going on in the NEW MEDIA WORLD. Well?

The BBC Trust has confimed that it will run the iPlayer online seven day catch-up service.

Miss the latest Eastenders don't fret! iPlayer!

http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,2068878,00.html

Thursday, April 05, 2007

UK Stores Cut PS3 Price

More juicy information:

taken from: http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/778/778589p1.html

YR

WH Smith and Play.com drop console down to £399.99. Xbox 360 gets cut too.

UK, April 5, 2007 - Two major UK retailers have cut the price of the PlayStation 3 less than two weeks after the launch of the console. WH Smith and Play.com have slashed the price of the machine from £424.99 to £399.99.WH Smith advertised the drop in The Sun newspaper, no doubt to catch the attention of parents looking to get their kids something a bit more special than a chocolate egg this Easter. Whereas, Play.com is offering the console for the same price but is also throwing in an HDMI cable and a copy of Click on Blu-ray.At the time of writing no other retailers have folowed suit, although many are expected to.

And while WH Smith's offer is scheduled to end on April 19, Play.com is offering the console for £399.99 for the forseable future.Additionally, tomorrow - Good Friday - the console price craziness is set to continue, with Play.com telling us that it's planning to offer the Core Xbox 360 for just £149.99 - £50 lower than the RRP - and is dropping the price of the Premium Xbox 360 from £279.99 to £249.99. You'll have to be quick though because the offer only lasts until April 10 and stock is likely to be extremely limited.

Trimersion Virtual Reality

Whilst surfing the wild and carnevourous WorldWideWeb, I came across this enlightening article. http://uk.gear.ign.com/articles/778/778513p1.html so have a quick look... you could learn something.


YR

And for you lazy people..


Trimersion Virtual Reality Review
This consumer virtual reality unit brings VR capabilities to last-gen consoles and the PC.

US, April 4, 2007 - Back in the mid-90s the future of gaming wasn't thought to be high-definition, or online communities, or massively multiplayer. It was freaking virtual reality baby! It would be easy to blame Hollywood for getting everyone worked up for technology that wasn't anywhere near ready, were it not for the fact that both Sega and Nintendo jumped on the bandwagon as fast as they could. While the Sega VR got canned early in its R&D, Nintendo actually went and delivered the Virtual Boy to a decidedly under whelmed public. After this rather dramatic failure, VR faded from the general public consciousness for almost a decade.Today we've actually got the technology that can make VR worthwhile, like solid 3D graphics processing and small, cheap LCDs. As such it's not much of a surprise that a variety of manufacturers had been developing a new generation of consumer VR. Trimersion is one such company.

IGN Gear first got to know Trimersion at E3 2006, with the company's silver bodysuit'ed booth babes drawing an ample crowd. Just short of a year later the company is ready for full release with a unit capable of working with the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC (with VGA to composite adapter, not included). An Xbox 360 dongle is apparently in development.

The Trimersion package consists of three components. The actual head-mounted-display (HMD) is a 1.2 pound unit that sports a pair of roughly 1-inch 320 x 240 resolution LCDs as well as head-tracking movement detection. Stereo headphones are incorporated into the unit, and an adjustable strap allows for a customized fit. The headset makes a wired connection to the gun peripheral, which contains the 4 AA batteries that power the HMD. The gun peripheral replaces the traditional control pad for whatever console is playing the game, and is arrayed with buttons that cover the various bases for each console's gamepad. The third component in the system is a base station that plugs into each console's controller ports (to make the gun peripheral work) and also accepts composite video inputs, which it wireless transmits to the HDM.The most obvious purpose for a VR peripheral in gaming is the FPS genre, and as such we conducted the majority of our testing with Halo 2 on the Xbox.

In our opinion, VR isn't really VR unless there is active head-tracking, and as such we focused our testing upon playing the game with the feature enabled. The Trimersion's head tracking system essentially takes over the role of the right analog stick in FPS titles, which means turning your head moves the aiming reticule and your general view. Actual character movement is handled by one of the forward mounted analog sticks on the gun peripheral.
Ideally a VR system detaches the player's view from where their gun is pointing, which allows for an expanded and immersive view without making the player have to aim with their head. Because the Trimersion is so modular a system and obviously can't retrofit VR-mods into console games, we had to learn how to aim with our faces. The process of doing so revealed some of the Trimersion's greatest weaknesses. Obviously, people's heads can't rotate 360-degrees, but in games where the view and where a character's body is facing are essentially connected, 360-degree spins are generally required. Pulling a 180 to see who's shooting you in the back is not an easy task with the Trimersion, as one can only really turn one's head perhaps 100-degrees. If you turn your head as far as you can and still can't see behind you, there's not much else to do since you'll eventually have to turn your own head straight, at which point you've got your back to the enemy once again. It is possible to spin a quick 180 with a sharp head jerk to the left or right, but it's not very exact, and will leave a user disoriented and scanning for the target. If you've ever wanted to know what it would be like to be a drunken Space Marine, this is it. Another big problem is the fact that the headtracking seems to have a bias towards looking down.

After a few minutes of use, most users end up with their chins on their chests, even though their character's view may be on the horizon. Fixing the skewed view requires staring at the sky and then slowly bringing one's head back to the horizon. It's something we found ourselves doing every few minutes. In games that incorporate effects like barrel-rise during automatic weapons firing a similar issue occurs, in that one must continually be turning one's head down to compensate for the view being forced upwards by the barrel rise. After a while one physically can't look down any more, at which point one must entirely disengage from combat to look at the sky and straighten things out.

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Info taken from IGN.com - Great Site - Check it out !

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Gaming Console Discussion: With your host : Jon Harvey

Just a quick update, I promise its quick, I have expanded my blog as I feel I have covered Virtual Reality, text -links - images - videos below, I will answer the questions given to us on the sheet soon-ish, I have decided to tackle the greatest most important question quite possibly EVER, what Next Gen Console is best, well on the eve of the PS3 launch in Europe I thought I would give my own personal view on the subject and will also provide images, videos, and text from other game-sites that have more time and money to spend, so watch this blog prosper into a ravishing media jungle.
Finally I am currently awaiting Odeo.com, the site that allows you to Audio Blog, to accept my Sign-Up, I realise that most of you won't want to hear my voice on hear as you hear enough of it at school, just to reassure readers I will only audio blog thoughts of my own, so revision text and links will continue to be addedand updated on the blog, on various topics throughout the rest of the year, peace out and pass the marmalade !
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Thursday, March 08, 2007

General Virtual Reality Links

General virtual reality links

Commercial Resources - links to companies which make virtual reality products Rate this link

HITLab Bibliography Search Rate this link

Low Cost Virtual Reality and its Application to Chemical Engineering - paper from Rate this link

On The Net: Internet Resources in Virtual Reality

sci.virtual-worlds FAQ Rate this link

Sci.virtual-worlds' FTP Site - large VR archive

sci.virtual-worlds Introduction Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What Is Virtual Reality? - A Web-Based Introduction

What is Stereo Vision? Stereopsis? Stereoscopic Vision?

Virtual Reality Definition

(From Wikipedia)

Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, be it a real or imagined one. Most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special stereoscopic displays, but some simulations include additional sensory information, such as sound through speakers or headphones. Some advanced, haptic systems now include tactile information, generally known as force feedback, in medical and gaming applications. Users can interact with a virtual environment or a virtual artifact (VA) either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through multimodal devices such as a wired glove, the Polhemus boom arm, and omnidirectional treadmill. The simulated environment can be similar to the real world, for example, simulations for pilot or combat training, or it can differ significantly from reality, as in VR games. In practice, it is currently very difficult to create a high-fidelity virtual reality experience, due largely to technical limitations on processing power, image resolution and communication bandwidth. However, those limitations are expected to eventually be overcome as processor, imaging and data communication technologies become more powerful and cost-effective over time.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Wacky Video

Whilst scrambling aroun dYouTube I stumbled on this, http://youtube.com/watch?v=u46eaeAfeqw, an incredibly cool video, so yeah WATCH IT and be amazed !!.



Disclaimer: Not much to do with Media, yet uber cool.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Intro

Hello there, its Jon Harvey here contacting you from VR, or for you stupid people Virtual Reality. If you hadn't guessed already this blog is primarily going to be about VR, so check back often as I aim to keep the blog smelling fresh.

However I am also interested in games and wacky new media technologies so this is the place to find information on these topics also.