News::Intel's RealSense camera made me the star of 'Fallout 4'

Over the holidays, I've really been putting the hours into Fallout 4 So when Intel and Uraniom said that it'd be demonstrating its RealSense 3D camera to embed people into that vault suit, I knew what I had to do. Uraniom's tech includes machine learning, geometry processing and 3D game engineering to ensure anyone that plants themselves into games (including GTA, FIFA and Skyrim) gets suitably freaked the heck out by the fluid, not-too-out-of-place results. After getting scanned by a HP tablet with RealSense cameras, the data was transferred to a work PC, where one of Uraniom's guys added trackers around my eyes and and mouth. (My fluffy Tintin hair isn't usually well-suited to 3D scanning, but the results this time are still uncanny.) Less than a minute later, I was looking slender and radiation-free in my vault suit and soon I was equipped with a jetpack powersuit and flying around a devastated Boston.

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News::The Oculus Rift made you forget what the first iPhone cost

Yesterday, Oculus VR finally announced the price of its first consumer virtual reality headset: $599, plus shipping. Fans reacted quickly, shocked that the price was twice as much as the original developer kit and furious that the company was charging so much. During Palmer Luckey's evening AMA on Reddit, fans were petitioning the company to remove the Rift's audio tech and packaged Xbox One controller to bring the price down. That's denial, anger and bargaining, guys. Let's skip the fourth stage of grief and jump to the end: acceptance. The Oculus Rift's launch price is completely normal.

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News::Recon's HUD mask transfers your gaming skills to paintball

Recon Instruments and Empire Paintball's paintball mask is fun to wear — and I didn't even get to shoot anyone. The Empire EVS houses Recon's Snow2 heads-up display in bottom-right of the goggles, running on Android, with nine-axis sensors, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS, while the helmet itself looks like a color-saturated Darth Vader pretender -- and I mean that in the best possible way. Slipping into it is easy, and an armband control unit with directional buttons makes navigation through menus (as well as zooming in and out of maps) hard to screw up. The mask itself, coming from paintball equipment maker Empire has UVA/UVB radiation protection and doesn't fog up inside when the action picks up and your breathing gets heavy. The heads-up display (HUD) can also talk with action cams like the GoPro, which you can mount on your paintball gun to peek around corners and, as one Engadget editor calls it: "cheat".

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News::Pirates are finding it harder to crack new PC games

Pirates at the infamous Chinese hacking forum 3DM are complaining that recent PC games are simply too darn hard to crack, according to Torrent Freak. The problem is apparently Denuvo, a copy protection scheme that prevents tampering of the underlying DRM. Two recent games that use the scheme, FIFA 16 and Just Cause 3, have still not been cracked, despite appearing in early December. Based on the current pace of encryption tech, "in two years time I'm afraid there will be no free games to play in the world," said one forlorn pirate.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Torrent Freak

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News::Nintendo is renovating its one-of-a-kind New York store

Nintendo's headquarters may be in Kyoto, Japan, but the spiritual center, where most big US console launches happen, is the Nintendo World store at Rockefeller Plaza, New York. The only official Nintendo store in the world is about to undergo a major renovation and when it's over, it'll also have a new name -- Nintendo NY. The new look will include an updated interior design, new Wii U and 3DS demo units, a 15-foot gaming screen and a large bronze coin at the entrance with the tagline "Where everyone comes to play" (below).

Source: Nintendo

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News::'Metal Gear' mastermind Hideo Kojima will be a Hall-of-Famer

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences will induct Hideo Kojima, father of the Metal Gear franchise, into its Hall of Fame at the 19th DICE Awards on Thursday, February 18th in Las Vegas. To put this honor in perspective, the AIAS is like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the organization behind the Oscars), but for video games. Kojima is the Academy's 21st Hall of Fame inductee, joining Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, Valve Software founder Gabe Newell and Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, among other notable figures.

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News::I quite literally ran around a virtual arena and loved it

We've been watching the development of Virtuix's Omni VR treadmill since 2013. The company debuted a fully-functional production model at CES 2016 and I was lucky enough to take the $700 device for a test drive -- or rather test run.

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News::'Psychonauts 2' is really, actually, totally happening

You made Psychonauts 2 happen. The $3.3 million Fig campaign's been fully funded and now perhaps the hardest work for developer Double Fine Productions is ahead of it: finishing the game. In the video below, studio founder Tim Schafer says that the campaign will run through next Tuesday, though. "Every [additional] dollar we make goes into making the game better, giving us more time to polish and making the game great," he says. "We don't just want to make Psychonauts 2, we want to make an amazing Psychonauts 2."

Source: Double Fine Productions (YouTube), Fig

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News::'Her Story,' 'Undertale' and more headline IGF 2016 finalists

Innovative games Her Story, Superhot, Mini Metro, Darkest Dungeon, Undertale, and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes are up for the grand prize at the 2016 Independent Games Festival Awards. The IGF holds its 18th consecutive Awards show on Wednesday, March 16th in San Francisco, during the annual Game Developers Conference. These six games are up for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, which nets the winner $30,000. All told, the Awards offer $50,000 for victorious indie developers across a range of categories.

Source: IGF

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News::Heads-up displays come to paintball goggles

Recon Instruments, the Canadian wearables outfit purchased by Intel last year, has released a heads-up display for paintball enthusiasts. Much in the same way Recon partnered with Oakley to produce its Airwave sports goggles, the firm has teamed up with Empire Paintball to create the Empire EVS. The device uses the game guts as the Airwave — a technology known as Snow2 — albeit in a new mask that's designed to withstand the rigors of paint-based conflict.

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News::With a kids' wearable, I became a human 'Pac-man'

Gesture-based gaming ain't new, but using it to steer Pac-man around a maze is. Moff band, a Japanese gesture toy for kids, has teamed up with Namco-Bandai to bring gesture controls to smart device-based versions of Pac-man. Because it can. It's part of what Moff calls "gamified fitness technology" (you really have to wave your arms around to move the protagonist), but it's also silly and often a little erratic. In Moff's defense, a Bluetooth-connected controller will have troubles in a hectic show floor demo. Watch me embarrass myself for your entertainment after the break. I'm saying it was definitely a reception issue.

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News::The Oculus Rift costs $599 and ships in March

Pre-orders are now open for the first Oculus Rift consumer virtual reality headset and the company finally revealed the all-important price: $599 (€699 in Europe and £499 in the UK). Oculus CEO Palmer Luckey knows that the long-term success or failure of the Rift depends a lot on that number, but he appears to have calculated well. The initial ship date was marked as March 28th, but started showing as April soon after, so it appears that the early run sold out after just 15 minutes. While $599 is a considerable chunk of change for most consumers, early adopters appear to have jumped on it, thanks no doubt to the years-long launch buildup.

Source: Oculus

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News::Teslasuit does full-body haptic feedback for VR

Smartphone-powered headsets like Google Cardboard and Samsung's Gear VR have been worthy stop-gaps for introducing the medium of modern virtual reality. But this year, more resource-intensive VR experiences, games especially, will finally make it into consumers' homes. Pre-orders for the final Oculus Rift opened today, and competitors like Playstation VR and HTC's Vive aren't too far behind. For start-up Tesla Studios, though, pulling on a headset and grabbing a controller just doesn't seem immersive enough. That's why it's developing the Teslasuit, a full-body haptic feedback ensemble for putting you well and truly in the game.

Source: Kickstarter, Tesla Studios

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News::Square Enix closes its 'Shinra' cloud gaming business

Square Enix's mysterious cloud-based gaming business, Shinra Technologies, is no more. We saw little from the secretive project, which was founded in 2014 and headed by former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada. Shinra, named after the corporation in Final Fantasy VII, was promising a platform that developers could draw on to make their games more technically impressive. So instead of being limited by the player's hardware -- a PS4, PC or similar -- studios could leverage the cloud to create better explosions, water effects or densely populated worlds.

A few developers were involved in an early prototype accelerator program; independent game studio Camouflaj, which worked on the mobile-optimized stealth game Republique, Human Head, the team behind Prey, and Hardsuit Labs, which created the free-to-play shooter Blacklight: Retribution. The results, if any, are unknown at the moment.

Square Enix will take an "extraordinary loss" of 2.2 billion yen (about $16.8 million) by closing down Shinra Technologies, which has offices in Montreal, New York and Tokyo. The Japanese gaming giant said the decision was made after it failed to raise new capital from outside investors. Whatever Shinra Technologies was working on, it seems unlikely that we'll see it in a video game now. It does, however, mean that Square Enix can maintain its focus on other projects -- namely Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearts 3 and the Final Fantasy VII Remake.

Source: Square Enix

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News::'Pokemon' meets 'Rick and Morty' in an Adult Swim mobile game

The news arrived quietly in a Tweet -- there's a new, free mobile game coming from Adult Swim. But this isn't just any game. It's a Rick and Morty adventure game that appears to be styled after Pokemon. Yes, this could be fairly incredible for fans of outlandish, time-bending, raunchy, animated comedy. Pocket Mortys (not Pocket Monsters) is due to hit iOS and Android on January 14th.

Source: @adultswimgames

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News::MSI's flagship gaming laptop gets an eye-tracking upgrade

If you're looking for a big, powerful gaming laptop, the MSI's GT72 Dominator has always been a solid choice -- but it's never been really interesting. The Dominator is known for a strong build, powerful internals, good speakers and a superb keyboard, but it never offered anything unexpected. Now it does. Later this month, MSI will be updating the Dominator with a fancy new gimmick: an integrated eye-tracking camera.

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News::Razer's 'Stargazer' webcam is built for streaming

Razer announced a new feature-laden webcam geared specifically for gamers and streamers, rather than business conference calls, on Monday. Dubbed the Stargazer, this webcam is built on Intel's RealSense SR300 imaging sensors and offers 720p resolution at 60fps which matches the frame rate of modern video games. It can also handle 1080p at 30 fps if you do want to use it for conventional video conferences. What's more, the camera boasts an automatic noise cancelling dual array mic so your PewDiePie impressions aren't drowned out by ambient sounds.

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News::Some 'Shenmue III' backers won't get their rewards after all

After breaking records with their Shenmue 3 Kickstarter campaign, the developers at Ys Net are taking an... interesting stance toward fans of the project. You see, as a result of the wildly successful crowdfunding campaign for another entry in the cult classic franchise, not everyone who wanted to get in on the action was able to before it ended. So Ys opened up a "slacker backer" period where folks could pledge their support (and dollars) via Paypal, adding to the $6 million already promised to the developers from Kickstarter backers. All good, right?

Via: Polygon

Source: Kickstarter

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News::The Rival 700 is a modular gaming mouse with an LCD screen

There are a lot of PC gaming peripherals out there -- so many, in fact, that it can be hard to tell them apart. What makes one keyboard better than another? What's the real difference between two gaming mice? Well, SteelSeries has an answer to one of those questions: its latest computer mouse, the Rival 700, has something no other pointer on the market has: a built-in LCD screen.

Source: SteelSeries

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News::Oculus Rift pre-orders get you in line for Touch controllers

Did all of the recent Oculus news make your heart skip a beat? Well here's another bit to make your blood pump go pitter-patter: Should you pre-order the consumer edition of the Rift VR headset, you've automatically got a spot in line when the company starts accepting purchase-reservations for its awesome Touch motion controllers later this year. The news comes by way of a tweet from Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey:

Via: Road to VR

Source: Palmer Luckey (Twitter)

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