The 2012 Game Developers Conference is happening now, and French game company Quantic Dream of Heavy Rain fame have released a demo of their new motion capture engine. The short film, Kara, dramatically follows the creation and testing of an android who isn’t what the factory ordered. It stars the voice and digital likeness of Valorie Curry (Twilight, Veronica Mars) as Kara.

Amazingly, Curry’s performance was rendered in real-time on a PlayStation 3 using a new 3D engine Quantic Dream built from scratch. The new engine uses 64 motion capture cameras instead of the 28 used for Heavy Rain.

At the heart of the video though is Quantic’s new motion capture technology, that seeks to record an actor’s entire performance in one go. Even recent titles that touted their motion capture, like LA Noire, still required separate acting sessions: one for body motion and another for facial and voice acting. Having an actor pantomime their facial expressions for actions that they aren’t actually performing isn’t always going to look quite right once it’s matched to a body. [Gizmag]

This motion capture is going to be used in an upcoming PlayStation 3 game. Quantic hasn’t released details of the game but says it’s unrelated to this short film’s plot. On the other hand, Quantic’s previous short film, “The Casting“, led directly to Heavy Rain. But enough gushing about how great technology is; we have robot nudity to gawk at:

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Hey, want to learn the piano without having the deal with one of those bothersome piano things? Well then you’re in luck, because the Japanese have just solved yet another problem no sane person has ever had.

Say hello to the Japanese Wrist-Mounted Finger Piano (catchy name)! As it’s title indicates, you just strap this thing to your wrist, stick your fingers in the doohickies and you can “play the piano” by tapping your fingertips against any hard surface. You can also choose to make the notes sound like a piano, bells or meowing cats because Japan, that’s why.

The glove costs 40-dollars, which doesn’t sound like too much until you check Kijiji and realize there are 500 people within your local area giving away actual real pianos for free. Just sayin’.

via The Red Ferret

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time reading stories about apes doing funny human-like things, and thus have been following this story about the orangutans at the Milwaukee zoo being given an iPad to play with. If for some strange reason you’re not like me, well, the Milwaukee zoo has given their orangutans an iPad and they’ve actually found quite a few apps the apes enjoy. There are currently plans to provide iPads to orangutans all around North America.

This got me thinking — could other zoo animals benefit from getting more tech-savvy? Here’s some animal/gizmo pairings I think would work out…

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Look, we’re all for augmented reality and overlays: we all want a HUD, even if instead of ammo capacity and shields, it’s telling us to buy milk and that we have a text message.

But we don’t want it in glasses. We want it installed in our eyeballs, directly, so somebody can hack it and run an ad for chopsticks in Hindustani 24/7 in the lower left corner of our vision, and other charming achievements. We don’t want a processor rammed into some chunky glasses.

Still, apparently that’s exactly what Google’s giving us at year end. Realistically, though, Google sees this as an “experiment”, not an attempt to actually get people to wear these things. They just want to experiment with wearable computing, and need to roll out a test product.

So basically Google wants us to pay to be guinea pigs. Uh, didn’t all the novels predicting wearable computing think this was a bad thing?

[ via the New York Times ]
image courtesy Pargon on Flickr

A couple weeks ago George Lucas re-released Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace in 3D, earning enough extra cash (over $30 million) for the film to surpass Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the #11 spot in the list of the highest grossing films of all time. We weren’t among that $30+ million in new ticket sales (fool me, you can’t get fooled again). We’ve already discussed today how sucktastic that movie was, so let’s move on to a related Star Wars topic: are gold bikinis appropriate to wear to the DMV? what would it take to build your own Death Star?

Economics students at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania have made some calculations to help answer that question. The first Death Star was said to be 140 km in diameter (almost moon-like you could say). The students assumed it was made of steel (a bit presumptuous, what with all the lightweight, sturdy alloys it could be) and had a similar density to a modern warship.

A 140 km steel ship with a density similar to a modern warship would require 1.08 x 10¹⁵ tonnes of steel. There is plenty of iron ore on Earth to handle such a large amount of steel. In fact, we have enough iron to make about two billion Death Stars, although most of the iron is near the core of the planet, and it isn’t as easy to get to the core as Hilary Swank would have you believe.

The amount of steel needed for one Death Star would cost $852 quadrillion dollars, which is about 13,000 times the entire world’s yearly GDP. In addition, extracting enough steel for one Death Star at Earth’s current extraction rate of 1.3 billion tonnes annually would take 833,315 years. And you just know the design would become obsolete in the 833,314th year or some young upstart would find the small thermal exhaust port right below the main port.

None of this is going to stop us from fundraising, however:

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Okay guys, we may not have our jetpacks yet and poverty and war are still serious worldwide issues, but I’m calling it — the future is here! Why? Because the greatest piece of sci-fi technology every conceived has been made a reality. I’m talking of course about Geordi La Forge’s VISOR.

I always eat my dinner too fast because I want to bask in the majesty of the plate underneath.

Israeli scientists have created a new device that essentially hacks into the visual cortex of a patient with congenital blindness, allowing them to “see” again. Put simply, the VISOR-like device gathers visual data through built-in cameras, and then converts it into sound which patients can, with practice, use to create detailed “soundscapes”. Blind patients have shown the ability to identify complex objects and even read using this system. Next step — see if they can successfully vent a breached warp core while wearing the device.

You can check out a picture of this real-life VISOR after the jump…

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